A re-appraisal or a U-turn

Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. As Ed Miliband is finding, appearing to be doing very little is a sure way of being accused of lacking leadership. The important part of a politician’s job spec is to engage in frenetic activity.
Coalition ministers have certainly been putting this into practice. The last few months have seen a dizzying succession of policy announcements, White Papers and Whitehall restructuring. The Tory conference fringe last month was a hotbed of packed workshops and eager ministerial speakers as the policy pointy-heads feverishly mapped out their plans for the New Age.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that in this bedlam of activity policy has sometimes been made on the hoof or without sufficient thought to the law of unintended consequences (LUC). Last week’s ‘leak’ of plans to fund schools through a new quango caused such an uproar ministers had to backtrack. Over at the CLG, changes to social housing tenancies have quietly contained a get-out clause in case the policy leads to LUC. The abolition of the Audit Commission is going to have huge ramifications for the council audit function.
And ministers are now taking another look at the way council grant cuts have been front-loaded into the first year, hinting that when the settlement appears in a fortnight there could well be flexibilities to spread the pain. Under the Spending Review plans, the gentlest year for cuts is in 2013/14 at 0.8% – nothing to do with county elections of course – compared with a tough 8.4% (and the rest) next year.
There are of course councils who believe it is better to get the pain over and done with rather than drag it out. But it is also clear that swingeing cuts will be on the cards with services slashed, libraries closed, street lights turned off etc and ministers can see themselves on the receiving end of public opprobrium.
Some may call this rethink it a U-turn, others a sensible reappraisal of a complex brief. It is certainly better to make changes before rather than after new policies have been enshrined in law. But hyperactive ministers may also want to ensure that in their eagerness to be pro-active they do not store up problems for themselves in the future when the chickens come home to roost.