Bobby Dean: Keeping the Policy Window Open

Matthew Wright was the moderator for the ‘Effecting Policy’ in the afternoon at the UK River Summit. Bobby Dean, was the Liberal Democrat councilor for the local area, Carlshalton and Wallington, and a lover of the River Wandle. The General Election was announced the day after the UK River Summit and Bobby is now the MP, having won the seat. Bobby talks about policy windows and at the moment we have an open policy window with river health although he warns that policy windows also close.

Read Bobby’s talk for some practical suggestions on how we need strong unified voices and how to keep the pressure on your MP and the new government.

Bobby Dean (Transcription):

“The last panel was with a load of politicians and one has snuck onto this one, so I'm sorry about that. I'm actually gonna build on the points that you were just making, because I think it's great that we've been talking about lots of specific policy proposals today, but it's the system change that I think we need in all political thinking that is gonna get us somewhere in reality. I'll first of all talk about kind of the micro stuff and about how you can actually affect policy by influencing politicians. And I think, Dani (Surfers Against Sewage), you outlined quite a lot of the ways that I think are most effective. Something that we talk about in politics sometimes is the idea of this policy window. Well, we're in the middle of one right now for this topic, right, which is that it's opened up. The public are demanding something must happen. They're not quite sure what they should grasp onto yet as to what that thing should be. They don't like what they see. Let me warn you, policy windows close.

So, there needs to be a strong united voice from this sector as to what you want out of it, and make that demand of government between now and the general election, and crucially, after. Because there could be this feeling after the election, whoever that government might be, which is that, we will probably have a change of government, right? Whatever that government looks like, we better give them a chance to get on with things.

Don't give them a chance to get on with things, don't let them breathe, keep this policy window open, make sure they know that you want them to take action on this. And the ways in which you do that are the ways that you are outlining. You know, I mean, who here has written to their MP about this issue, or one of their political candidates? And have you got a friend to do the same? Keep your hand up. And then you just need to keep doing that because the inbox does matter. I know that there's all sorts of campaigns out there at the moment that encourage you to write to MPs, you might think that the weight of that has gone, but the volume really, really does make a difference because if you've got 600 emails in a week and 200 of them about the local river, then that politician knows what to do about what they should be prioritizing that week. So, don't give up on those very, very basic engagement methods and some of the ones that you describe as well. So to move beyond that to the more systems change stuff, the last panel debate talked a little bit about the sort of merits or otherwise of nationalisation. I think we're in clear agreement that the privatisation has been a complete and utter failure.

It has not delivered on what it's promised and the sort of free market maniacs who promised that the invisible hand in the market will fix everything were wrong and they've been proved wrong resoundingly so. But the question is what we do next. I'm of the opinion, but I'm open minded about it and I'm open to hear the case from others, that the calls for re-nationalisation are actually convenient to the water companies. That's an argument I think they find is quite easy to knock down because there's lots of arguments out there against nationalisation, you can raise the spectre of the cost and whoever proposes nationalisation is going to have to spend an awful lot of political capital on ramming it through. Political capital that is in short supply at the moment particularly if you get a new Labour government or Labour-led government or whatever that government be with an in-tray this big you know you're talking about an awful lot of things that they've got to tackle and are they going to spend all their energy on re-nationalising the water industry, I'm not sure.

What the Liberal Democrats are putting forward is an alternative idea which is reforming and transforming the water companies into public benefit companies. What that does is it actually writes into law a different type of company. At the moment you're either run by the public sector or you're a limited company and if you're a limited company then you can have subjected to, I don't know, let's say a private equity firm from Australia decides to take on one of our water companies, load it up with debt, disappear and leave the problems somewhere else. That's something that could happen and leaves everybody else to clean up the mess. But you could create a different type of company, one that recognises that you're dealing with something that is more precious than selling a beer can or a sandwich, but actually you're dealing with a public commodity, you're dealing with a public utility and have different rules in place as to how they're run. Now what's the legal system like for limited companies where they get to prioritise the shareholder? Do you think that's appropriate at all for the running of a water company? It's not.

We should be able to prioritise other things, including the environment, but also other societal impacts too, and you can write that into the legislation of how those companies are run. You can do other things too, which include getting the right representation on the board, so it's not just people on the boards that have one sole focus, but people like yourselves, environmental groups should be on there, people from community representation, community representatives should be on there too. And also you can structure the way in which they make profit. So if they do generate profit, you can decide to do one or two things. You could say that we can mutually mutualise the company and all of those profits must be reinvested. Or you could perhaps cap the profits and say right well anything over and above 5% doesn't get to be dished out to shareholders but gets reinvested back into the system. And the advantage of that is that you would still be able to raise capital from private markets. Okay, you're not going to get huge speculators, you're probably not going to get that private equity firm from Australia interested in you anymore. We can all shed a tear for that, but you will get people who are interested in safer investments. And the reason why that's crucial is because otherwise what's going to happen is all of that investment is going to have to come from us. It's either through our bills or through our tax bill. And if we're still able to raise capital, because we need huge amounts of capital to invest in infrastructure, if we want to invest in infrastructure at the scale that we're required, I think we should be still trying to leverage money from the private sector, but just completely change the legal structure of these companies so that we can regulate them. Because just having a regulator with better intentions is not going to be enough, but writing to the law the way in which they are structured is a way that we can do it.

If you're still not convinced by that, I just want to cast your mind forward to the very first budget of the new government, when they've got demands from the NHS to rebuild hospitals that are falling apart, and they've got staff demands from nurses, and they've got schools that are asking parents to pay for books. And even right now, while this issue is as hot as it is, how far up the spending agenda of the next government is going to be invested in sewage infrastructure? That's my biggest worry about completely renationalising it. And now imagine in 10 years' time when the policy window might have closed and how dangerous that situation looks then for the future of infrastructure investment.

I think we really need to think about how we break out of this 30 year long false dichotomy of either having things in public ownership or having this sort of full fat neoliberal version of privatization. There's got to be another way through it that means that we can get the best of all outcomes.

Thank you.”