Translating Public Policy Into Action
Evidence-based policy is central to much contemporary governmental thinking. But how the different phases of policy delivery can best engage ‘real people’ is not always clear. This is true whether the intended policy concerns health, the knowledge economy, or even global sustainability. There is still much to be done in understanding human agency and interaction in policy development and delivery.
In many aspects of public policy, from health through life-long learning and the economy to global sustainability, it is not simply the science or knowledge base which is important. Of equal, or sometimes greater, importance is an understanding of how to apply the established evidence which informs policy.
Phases in public policy development
There are, or should be, a number of phases in developing public policy.
The first phase is to derive as much consensus as possible about the necessary evidence base (both scientific and contextual) and the second is to consider how this ‘translates’ – an exercise which is currently being taken forward overtly by the government in relation to scientific knowledge, industry and business.
Securing public agreement or at least encouraging constructive and informed public debate is another phase which must run alongside these first two phases.
This ‘third’ phase is at risk when the established modes of policy development continue.
Public debate
The government has now gone some way to seek proper public debate on issues around science, technology, health and so forth. It is not as yet clear however that the corollary of this emphasis has been absorbed by the wider knowledge-related industries or even by some whose task is to deliver policy for real.
We all know that fundamental research and the intricacies of, say, applied medical knowledge are critical for the future. What is less well understood is that there remain huge gaps in our understandings of how such knowledge becomes operational in the real world.
People are what makes things happen. How they do so, in the contexts of such enormous challenges as global warming, the diseases of contemporary societies and the rapidly changing communities we all live in, has yet to be made clear.
Making things happen depends on people
Despite all our problems, many of us in the western world live in the best conditions human beings have ever known. Ensuring this continues and is shared even more widely is very largely a task for policy makers informed by a social rather than natural scientific knowledge base.
Fundamental science certainly needs to remain at the centre of knowledge creation; but, whether in health, industry or the environment, it must be matched by an equally well researched knowledge of the social world, if there is to be any real hope of public policies to sustain all our futures.
King’s Cross: Community And Colossal Opportunity Combined
The renewal of King’s Cross – St Pancras and all that surrounds it is long overdue, but it looks to be a spectaclar project worth the wait. The final moves to achieve success in terms of the local community will however require those who should, to put their heads above the parapet so that everything comes together to make the best possible result. This project will ‘work’ for everyone as long as people really try to collaborate to get it right.
Having travelled on the bus past King’s Cross – St. Pancras on very many occasions, I can only say my heart lifted when, at last, evidence of its renaissance began to materialise.
Community links and challenges
It’s surely a unique and exciting challenge to put together a project as enormous and impactful as this. The project hits many buttons – strategic place, infrastructure, heritage, economic benefit; we could go on… King’s Cross is in anyone’s books a very spectacular and special piece of real estate.
Of course there’s still a possibility that King’s Cross will somehow miss on that vital community connection; but only if people on all sides of the equation let it. This is where civic and corporate leadership have such a critical part to play, right from day one.
Different from, say, Canary Wharf?
Given the common emphasis on transport hubs, there have been comparisons, but Canary Wharf is different. Just for a start, Canary Wharf is not at the heart of what’s to become the most important international ‘green’ hub connecting the UK and mainland Europe, and for another thing the Wharf is a glass and concrete creation with not too much reference to a long and glorious heritage.
King’s Cross is a genuine opportunity to build on a very high profile USP with enormous promise for all stakeholders.
Doubters and objectors
There are always people who oppose what’s happening. The financial and other costs of the debate with them may well be high, but in the end everyone has to be heard for progress to be made in a well-founded way. The line must be drawn somewhere, but the views of those with reservations are valuable because they help to pinpoint potential hazards further down that line.
But it’s up to everyone to make sure that in the end King’s Cross really works. This is a programme with serious commonality of interest between developers, the wider economic infrastructure and real people on whom the project impacts day by day.
Delivering success
Having seen examples elsewhere of exiting programmes based with various degrees of success in challenging locations, I’d say everyone, but everyone, involved has to ask, what more might I need to be doing to make King’s Cross fulfil its whole potential?
Of all the ‘Rules of Regeneration’, the first rule here must be: listen, seek to understand and where possible accommodate all stakeholders. And the second rule is, always remember someone has to be brave and take the lead, accountably and visibly.
Realistically forward-facing
This is not a time for pursuing plans regardless or for heads-in-the-sand-style denial of problems; but nor, most certainly, is it a time for standing back. King’s Cross is an <opportunity which comes only very rarely…. Here we have a genuinely future-facing adventure which everyone in town can share and actually see taking shape.
I watch from my bus as things come together week by week and I wish all involved the very best.
A version of this article was published on the New Start blog of 8 November 2007.
The Science Council Lecture On Government Science Policy
Summary: The Science Council’s first Sir Gareth Roberts Science Policy Lecture on 6th November 2007 was an excellent opportunity to learn the views of Ian Pearson MP, Minister of State for Science and Innovation.
Much of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Science (DIUS) Minister’s speech concerned science and society, and the enormous challenges that scientists and the wider community must now confront.
The complete version of this article is posted on Hilary’s professional website, here.
Orchestral Salaries In The UK
Professional orchestra musicians’ employment and pay is a mystery to most people. Do players have ‘real’ jobs, too? is a common question. And is it all very glamorous? The latest survey of orchestral pay in the UK gives some answers – not much glamour, not too much pay, and little time for anything else. But for many players the commitment remains.
The Musicians’ Union has recently published their second annual report on Orchestral Pay in the U.K. Leaving aside the self-governing London orchestras, the BBC Symphony and other BBC orchestras, English National Opera (ENO) orchestra and the Royal Opera House (ROH) orchestra (all of which, with London weightings, do somewhat – though only comparatively – better), the M.U. report, as we shall see from the details below, makes pretty dismal reading.
Who are the musicians?
Almost every established player in the major regional orchestras is a permanent staff member (London is different). These ‘chairs’ are coveted positions amongst performers, who are usually graduates from the most prestigious music colleges and / or the top music conservatoires.
Musicians supply their own instruments and equipment for work, the initial costs of which can amount to more than an annual salary.
The ‘regional’ orchestras
Orchestras outside London surveyed by the M.U. in August 2007 were: the regional BBC orchestras, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the City of Birmingham Orchestra (CBSO), Manchester’s Halle Orchestra, the Opera North Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (RLPO), the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), Scottish Opera, the Ulster Orchestra and Welsh National Opera (WNO).
The fortunes of these orchestras fluctuate quite widely over the years, especially since the standardised regional orchestras contract for the BSO, CBSO, Halle, RLPO and RSNO was abandoned. All are dependent on civic support as well as national. [See The Association of British Orchestras for general information about these orchestras.]
Orchestral salary scales
Orchestras generally divide their players up into ‘Section Principals’ and ‘Principals’ (who sit at the front of their instrumental section) and ‘Tutti’ (formerly called ‘Rank & File’!). The M.U. estimates there are approximately 600 fully professional string players employed by British orchestras – which means about one in every 100,000 of the UK population has this occupation.
With a few exceptions, string players (violins, violas, cellos, basses) are the only Tutti musicians, and they make up the larger part of most orchestras.
Who gets paid what?
Concentrating on the regional orchestras, we see a variation of minimum salary in August 2007 as follows:
Section Principals: BBC Regional ~ hourly playing rate of £24.22 (£32,118 p.a.) through to CBSO ~ £33.09 (£45,205 p.a.).
Principals: RLPO ~ £21.44 (£28,298 p.a.) through to CBSO ~ £28.49 (£33,159 p.a.).
Tutti: RLPO ~ £18.20 (£24,024 p.a.) through to CBSO ~ £22.43 (£27,348 p.a.).
In some cases there are increments and / or long service awards which take experienced players above these levels, but these additional sums, usually only a very few thousand per annum, rarely raise salaries significantly above the starting point. Likewise, some, but not all, orchestras pay musicians an additional fee for recordings, media relays etc. [Some details of comparable orchestral salaries in the USA are available here.]
Comparison with other UK salaries
To set these figures in context:
* The average wage in 2007 for all full-time workers across the UK is £29,999 p.a.; or £27,630 specifically for Liverpool.
* The average salary of professionals in IT, an occupation which perhaps begins to approach comparable levels of skill to orchestral musicians (though there are many fewer performers) is £37,000 p.a.
* For graduates overall, an average additional £10,000 p.a. has accrued to their income after ten years’ service; this annual income will then continue to increase for another ten or twenty years.
Back of an envelope calculations using these comparative data perhaps suggest that over a lifetime orchestral musicians will receive approximately half the income of other professionals at comparative levels of skill.
Annual orchestral performing and other work arrangements
The regional orchestras vary in the number of annual playing ‘on stage’ hours they demand from their musicians. Of the orchestras above (not including the BBC orchestras, at 1,326 hours each, and ENO (874 hours) or ROH (860 hours)) the fewest performing hours are required of musicians in the opera orchestras (1,128 each) and the most by the RLPO (1,320).
How these hours are distributed is laid down in detailed contracts. For health reasons, such as risk of hearing loss and repetitive strain injury, players rarely play on the platform for over 6 hours per day. (They may well practise for more than that.) Scheduled ‘unsocial ‘hours – Sundays, Bank Holidays, and very early or late – and other erratic scheduling, with the attendant risks to wellbeing and mental health – are normally paid at the same rate as other hours.
Stress at work is seen as part of the job. There are also travelling hours etc which may add some 30-40% in time commitment – even though much time away from home is still ‘free’ in every sense of the word; neither paid nor, obviously, available for, say, teaching or other alternative opportunities for income.
Not a professional wage?
Most people who attend classical concerts see well-dressed and self-evidently skilled musicians and assume from this that orchestral incomes will be to some extent commensurate with appearances.
The truth is different. Many musicians, even at this level and with years of experience, barely scrape a living, often working almost every day for weeks to make ends meet. Relatively few within the profession achieve comfortable incomes and the view that orchestral playing is not a ‘real’ profession, with eventual progression and hope of greater reward, is widespread amongst foot soldiers at least – large numbers of whom, a previous M.U. survey has revealed, also incur occupationally induced ill-health or injury.
Artistic development
Sadly, players’ negative perceptions are reinforced by an absence of continuing professional development in their core skill, i.e. instrumental performance.
Players can often work for decades without receiving support as artists, or to maintain and develop their instrumental technique, let alone the money to pay very costly professional coaching fees. Artistic human resource investment is not high on (or simply missing altogether from) the priority list for most orchestra budgets.
Skills and experience lost
U.K. orchestras are becoming younger in age profile. The salary figures above offer an insight into why experience is frequently lost, as players leave mid-career for other ways to support their families or preferred lifestyle.
Youth and vigour are wonderful to behold; but knowledge, insight and long-term commitment would in a more ideal world also be valued.
Music not money
Fortunately, for many musicians and their audiences the imperative towards the extraordinary inner world of classical music continues to bring them together even against the rationale of external economics.
But it would be risky to permit the future for UK orchestras to depend on this inner imperative.
Read more articles in Music, Musicians & Orchestras
Life In A Professional Orchestra: A Sustainable Career?
The Healthy Orchestra Challenge
Musicians in Many Guises
Where’s The Classical Music In The Summer? An Idea…
British Orchestras On The Brink…..Again
Women’s No Pay Day
Today (30 October) is UNISON and the Fawcett Society’s ‘Women’s No Pay Day’ – i.e. the date in the U.K. year when, compared with men’s average wage for a given job, women doing it cease to be paid. But there are many people, men and women alike, who are determined that things will change, and change much more quickly than to date.
This is what the Fawcett Society has to say about women’s pay in the UK:
Facts on the inequality gaps
There has been a revolution in some aspects of women’s lives over the past 30 years.
And yet, social and economic justice remains a distant dream for women in the UK, which is why Fawcett’s work is needed as much as ever.
Women working full-time are paid on average 17% less an hour than men (or 38% less if they work part-time)
Women make up less than 20% of MPs and ethnic minority women make up just 0.3% of MPs.
96% of executive directors of the UK’s top 100 companies are men.
Sign the petition to Gordon Brown
As Fawcett says, it only takes a few seconds to support the Women’s No Pay Day campaign. By signing a petition on the Number 10 website everyone who values equality can ask the Prime Minister to take stronger action on the pay gap .
Click here to sign the Equal Pay Petition to Gordon Brown, asking the Prime Minister to ‘admit that current pay laws are not working and bring in stronger measures’.
Lighter Evenings, Energy And Health
‘Incremental’ is the mode of choice when we talk about the massive changes required for the sustainability of ourselves and our planet. People find it hard to make large or sudden changes, so we try to do them bit by bit. Seen like this, the benefits of daylight ‘saving’, keeping lighter evenings, become increasingly compelling.
The big health news of the past week or two has been obesity… how it’s becoming an epidemic and how difficult it will be to reverse the demands which people being overweight put on the health services and on the exchequer.
Then we are told that we must conserve energy in every way possible. Carbon expenditure must, urgently, be reduced, climate change is happening even more quickly than we had thought.
Looking for solutions
In these contexts it is surprising that the sensible advice about behaviour adaption – go gently, to take people with you – has not yet been applied to the benefits of ‘daylight saving’.
We know that lighter evenings offer more encouragement for people to take exercise; we know that the extra light also reduces fuel demands. (Jim Fiore estimated recently that in the US context ‘only’ 0.25% savings would be achieved – but that’s a massive amount of oil which could be conserved with no effort by anyone.)
Joined up thinking
The clocks go back on Sunday, tomorrow, 28 October, at 2 a.m. From then on until next March (British Summer Times begins on 30 March, with the new US Daylight Saving Time starting on 9 March) we shall have afternoon murk.
Scottish farmers may be happy with these murky afternoons, and they are of course welcome to any arrangement the Scottish Parliament wants to make. For the rest of us, a bit of (evening) light needs to be shed on the subject of incremental health and energy improvements.
The full debate about BST is in the section of this website entitled
BST: British Summer Time & ‘Daylight Saving’ (The Clocks Go Back & Forward)…..
See also:
Making The Most Of Daylight Saving: Research On British Summer Time
Save Our Daylight: Victor Keegan’s Pledge Petition
The Clocks Go Forward…And Back… And Forward…
British Summer Time Draws To A Close
Time Is Energy (And ‘Clocks Forward’ Daylight Uses Less)
The Clocks Go Forward … But Why, Back Again?
Join the discussion of this article which follows the book E-store…
The New Harvest Festival
This is the time of year when churches urban and rural across the nation urge us to attend their services for Harvest Festival. For many of us however this annual celebration is now marked more secularly, observed at one remove, via our newspapers, rather than physically in our communities. Media celebration of seasonal food is the order of the day.
The Guardian, like other similar publications, is hot on seasonal food. A story in that newspaper today gives a flavour of that theme: ‘Green’ shopping possible on a budget, watchdog says.
What then follows is that irresistible combination of knocking the supermarkets (fair enough if they’re not up to scratch), going rustic with references to in-season fruit and veg. (why not, it really is good for you), and angst about affordability and carbon footprint (fair enough again).
Contemporary perspectives
So here is the contemporary version of We plough the fields and scatter…
Way back over the centuries people have known about crop rotation and storage and the seasons, and have celebrated all this with Harvest Festivals of one sort or another. Now we know about food miles, sustainability and ethical buying.
Appreciating our sustenance
This is the better informed (or at least more techno) version of the wisdom of the ages, translated for those of us who hope for the future but have no bedrock of faith on which to base an annual thanksgiving.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter how we demarcate the changing seasons and the beneficence they offer. What does matter is that at least we notice.
Presidential Schema For The Post-Science Century
‘The next president of the United States of America will control a $150 billion annual research budget, 200,000 scientists, and 38 major research institutions and all their related labs. This president will shape human endeavors in space, bioethics debates, and the energy landscape of the 21st century.’ So says Chris Mooney in his seriously impressive review of the options – options in reality about human beings, not ‘just’ about knowledge – awaiting electors of the next President of the USA.
Chris Mooney, in his recent Seed Magazine blog piece entitled Dr President, examines the options for American science and suggests what needs to happen now.
America’s relationship with reality
During the past seven years of the Bush administration, Mooney tells us, America has been subject to ‘what can only be called antiscientific governance’. Scientists, he says, have been ‘ignored, threatened, suppressed, and censored across agencies, across areas of expertise, and across issues…
‘Under George W. Bush—the man who pronounced climate science “incomplete,” who misled the nation in his first major address about the availability of embryonic stem cells for research, who claimed that Iraq was collaborating with Al Qaida—America’s relationship with reality itself has reached a nadir.’
What’s next?
Chris Mooney is right. The status of science is in crisis, at least as far as States-side politics is concerned – and also in terms of what people in many parts of the world, even many sophisticated knowledge economy parts, understand about what science is and does.
‘To better grapple with emerging science controversies’, Mooney proposes that the in-coming president ‘reconstitute something akin to Eisenhower’s President’s Science Advisory Committee, but with a strong emphasis on forecasting the looming problems of tomorrow. …The conversations wouldn’t shy away from controversial or speculative topics. They would be designed, at least in part, to spark discussion in the media, on the Sunday-morning talk shows, and also at the kitchen table.’
Engagement beyond the science
This paper on antiscience, and its resolution through widespread debate and respect for scrutiny of the evidence base, offers many rich seams for us all to explore. But I think it also offers a new perspective on what I might call the ‘Post-Science Century’ which is before us.
The term ‘post-science’ means much more to me than simply the arid ‘total value’ anaylsis deriving from Milton Friedman et al. Instead, it focuses attention on the socio-political impacts and synergies of science and technology (one of a multitude of examples might be IT and the developing world) rather than on measures of money.
No longer can it be said that ‘knowing the science’ is enough – and Mooney is clear on this. We need to understand the future of climatalogical, environmental, genomic, military and many other applications of developing knowledge.
From tested knowledge to the human condition
In seeking to grasp what all these enormous issues, with their huge budgets, mean for each of us, we move from formal and tested knowledge to insights concerning the nature of human experience.
Perhaps it’s an irony of the twentyfirst century that the human condition itself will force us to think about science, rather than any new-found urge to look dispassionately at evidence bases and how to test them. This is what should drive the Science Advisory Council of the next President of the USA.
It’s not what we know, but why we all need to know it, that will spur this critical agenda.
Liverpool: Governance, Growth And Going (Somewhere)
Abrupt curtailment of the 2007 Mathew Street Festival, silly ideas about removing fish so the docks become a concert arena, questions about preparations for the Big Year…. Liverpool 2008 is a drama unto itself. The leading arts venues have devised a good cultural programme for European Capital of Culture Year, but concerns about what else must be done remain.
Dreaming Realist 