In the introductory article of the Daily Telegraph’s recent stimulating series ‘Rebuilding Britain’, Philip Johnston rightly says that better planning would help us in Britain no end. He comments that the British - though not uniquely - are bad at formal planning. It is not as if there are no bodies carrying out strategic thinking… the problem is that “…politicians either aren’t listening or are reluctant to do anything that requires looking beyond the short-term for fear of frightening the voters.”

In my last blog, I focused on how the leading global powers will have to find a way to handle the major challenges ahead and urged that we needed to see how best to work with America as our primary strategic partner in doing so. What is the impact that this likely external environment over the next decade will have on our approach to domestic issues?

Many issues were covered in the following articles to this excellent trailer, covering questions of UK governance, society, and industry. But others for some reason were less well covered.

The issue of welfare reform was fully discussed but given the demographic trends foreseeable, it would have been good to have more discussion of the urgent need for pension reform - Europe’s population is set to decline after 2035, and the ratio of active to inactive workers set to change from 100:50 to 100:80 (see Transatlantic Week conclusion summary here) - there is a real need to act now. The subject is now being picked up by the new Secretary for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith. He has suggested the state pension should be ‘indexed’ to increasing life expectancy, a reform first introduced in Denmark, and suggested in this blog late last year (see here).

On energy policy, Johnston noted that a decision was “…only taken in the past two years to proceed with a new generation of nuclear reactors without which the lights would go out by the end of the decade”. But there was no follow-up article dealing with this issue in further depth. With some estimates predicting that the European Union will import almost 70 % of its energy needs by 2030 while at the same time facing much intensified competition for energy resources from emerging powers such as China and India, this is another key issue which requires strategic thinking and long-term planning…clearly this has not been the case to date.

Lastly, there was surprisingly no mention throughout this series about the digital agenda and the vital importance of information technology (IT). Although he says Singapore has “…transformed itself from a high unemployment, low production economy going nowhere to one of the world’s strongest economies”, there was no mention of the urgent need for e-skills in the UK in order to best take advantage of the major changes underway in the digital economy. When one considers that Microsoft has estimated that within five years across the EU over 95% of future jobs will require IT skills and that over 30% of the population still don’t have them, it is clear that we have a long way to go.

Coming back to Philip Johnston’s introduction to the series, he called for more to be done on long term thinking. He said we have “…nothing in this country like the National Intelligence Council, an arm of the US government specifically charged with taking a long-term view and advising on how to prepare for the future. The NIC does not pretend to possess a crystal ball or to be able to predict the future. Rather it offers ‘a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss.’”

Not only do we need a broader debate on the likely impact of foreseeable long term trends on our domestic policy agenda, we also need to urgently assess how the UK and/or the EU could introduce a strategic assessment system to sharpen up future perspectives for policy makers. Is anyone listening?

Rebuilding Britain