UK’s devolved governments can learn from each other on welfare reform

Good morning. One frustrating aspect of the debates over the UK government’s approach to welfare and to special educational needs is that there has been little focus on the fact other parts of the UK have legislated and approached the issue differently.

One hoped for “devolution dividend” was that the UK’s four governments would learn from one another. That, in practice, hasn’t really happened. Some thoughts on this specific instance and why that hasn’t happened more broadly.

Less learning

One big part of the case for reforming the UK’s welfare system is that we spend about as much as a share of GDP on it as we did in 2007, before a series of changes, yet poverty is higher. (An excellent FT piece on that here, and also on the topic on Ben Geiger’s Substack here.) That is also part of the case for reforming how funding is allocated for children with special educational needs in England, where, again, costs are higher but outcomes are no better.

But one reason why the government is seeking to make changes now is to get out of a financial hole, and the two aims are not as perfect a marriage as you might expect. Why? Because measures the OBR believed would reduce costs these past 14 years haven’t.

Although the government has announced some of its planned changes to welfare over the weekend, I want to wait and write about them all in the round rather than in a piecemeal fashion. For now, I want to focus on a neglected fact in all this, which is that there is a pre-existing off-the-shelf alternative model right here in the UK: Scotland!

Education has been devolved in Scotland and Wales since 1999 (and mostly it must be said academic outcomes are better in England) and welfare has been devolved in Scotland since 2016 (though the rollout is happening only gradually).

But the reason this matters for our purposes is that in 2014, England adopted a new approach to Send that neither Wales nor Scotland did, and has overseen an increase in spending that neither Wales nor Scotland did. A child who entered school that year is taking their first key exams in Scotland and their GCSEs in England this year. Is that child doing better, or worse, or about the same in Scotland or England? It’s a question that is difficult to answer, because the Scottish government’s own data collection is geared, unsurprisingly, to measuring its own aims and gauging how it can do better on its own terms.

This poses all sorts of difficulties and challenges when it comes to answering questions such as “which one of these approaches is actually working?”

Scotland, a more rural country than England, uses different and more fine-grained measures of rurality, understandably. England has western Europe’s biggest megacity, London, in one corner of it, which distorts its statistics in all sorts of ways. (One thing to remember, for example, is that the modal policing statistic in England is actually a statistic about London.)

These differences are part of why there is less learning between the devolved governments, because it is just more difficult than it needs to be to make easy comparisons. One exception to that is tax policy, because although taxation is devolved, HMRC is a pooled resource that receives different instructions from devolved governments, rather than a separate entity.

In addition, there is no history or tradition of one government commissioning research from another, though there is no reason why this could not change.

The UK government is not as well-informed about our labour market as it should be thanks to shortcomings in data collection. But one solution to that might be to make it easier for all of the UK’s governments to understand how a policy has worked outside it.

Now try this

I saw Wynton Marsalis at the Barbican twice this weekend: on Saturday for the European premiere of The Jungle, his symphony inspired by New York, and on Sunday to hear The Democracy! Suite, a jazz suite about, well, you can guess.

Both were excellent — I preferred the fourth symphony, in part because I prefer classical music to jazz when push comes to shove, but also because I thought Antonio Pappano’s conducting really kicked the symphony up to a higher level — he really let each movement breathe in a way that I don’t think Nicholas Buc quite managed in the recording (Richard Fairman’s review of that recording is here).

Top stories today

• Broken benefits | Keir Starmer has vowed to slash spending on Britain’s “broken” and “indefensible” health-related welfare system, which is costing the government £65bn a year and is on track to hit £100bn by 2030.

• Taxing probe | HM Revenue & Customs has stepped up its efforts to track down unpaid capital gains tax, with the number of completed investigations more than trebling in the last tax year, according to new data

• Ofcom crackdown | Social media groups, search engines and messaging apps will next week be told to bring in strict measures to remove illegal material quickly and reduce the risk of such content, under new rules from the UK media watchdog.