John Moss: If you’re serious about becoming an MP, the Policy Review is your audition | Conservative Home

John Moss is a former parliamentary candidate, a councillor and Chairman of Sir Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency association. He works for College Green Group helping people who want to become MPs, Mayors and Councillors through the assessment and selection stages, and with their election campaigns.

If you want to be an MP, you should want to do something with that honour. Right now you have the opportunity to showcase this to the Party before you get to the nitty gritty of a parliamentary assessment or constituency selection – the Party’s Policy Review. And, if anyone thinks this is unimportant, I can’t imagine the interview stage of the assessment not including the question: “Tell us about the submission you made to the Policy Review.”

It is clear the Conservative Party is serious about engaging its members and others in its review of the Party’s policies. This is similar to the process run by David Cameron as Leader of the Opposition between 2006 and 2008. As part of that process, I worked on the Cities Task Force, led by Lord Heseltine and I remember his introduction to the group members setting out how he believed we should approach our review. It had four elements:

• Identify and describe the problem you are seeking to solve
• Explain the drivers of that problem, show how they lead to a bad outcome, or prevent a good one
• Use your imagination and paint a picture of what a better outcome would look like
• Identify the changes to legislation, regulation, structure or administration which are required to deliver that better outcome

My background is in urban regeneration. I had worked for British Rail’s property development arm, London Docklands Development Corporation, and at the time of the policy review I was running a property development business called Complex Development Projects. Our focus was on projects in partnership with councils, or which needed grant support to make them work. We half-jokingly used to say we did what it said on the tin; the projects which were seen as too difficult by mainstream developers when times were good, and unlikely to be profitable when times were less good.

My focus within the review was on the role played by the Regional Development Agencies in supporting the delivery of the sort of projects we specialised in. We had become increasingly frustrated by the way the RDAs sought to control development and we were even gazumped on a site in Walsall by Advantage West Midlands, which they proceeded to sit on for years while they tried to acquire land around it – whereas we would have got on and built something.

The problem was that the RDAs were given ever larger budgets and encouraged by ministers to be more ‘strategic’. What that actually meant was an increasingly bloated bureaucracy and lots of grand plans, but actually very little on the ground delivery.

That was the sort of structural problem the review aimed to identify and I showed that of the combined budget for the RDAs of over £2.4bn, (in 2004/5) and a very significant proportion of that was spent on staff and studies, not actual delivery. My recommendation to the review was that RDAs should be scrapped and their budgets redistributed to local councils.

The headline policy from the review, however, was Lord Heseltine’s big idea of having more elected mayors. The RDAs were scrapped as part of George Osborne’s first round of austerity measures. Mayors were policy too, but they took, and are taking, a little longer.

I have set this out to illustrate how proposals might be well considered and they might grab headlines, like Lord Heseltine’s plan for many more Mayors, but focusing on what is stopping good outcomes and clearing those out of the way can have a significant impact, quickly, where grander plans might take longer to come to fruition. Mayors do now cover a significant percentage of the population of England, and Labour is pushing on with that policy, albeit with some controversy, but I don’t believe anyone misses the RDAs.

So, when the Conservatives say they are in the ‘problem identification’ phase, that doesn’t mean solutions cannot be proposed. But the detailed work on identifying problems, and more importantly the drivers of them, will be crucial to developing a coherent argument – and making a submission which gets noticed and potentially developed into a manifesto commitment.

Illustrate the problem you identify with real-life examples. The development site referred to above remained undeveloped even as the RDAs were disbanded. That kind of imagery is powerful. If the impact of a poor policy is on individuals or businesses who will go on the record about it, use it.

When analysing drivers, think about sources. I used the published accounts of the RDAs to collate information on how their funding was spent and I used Freedom of Information Act requests to find more detail. But I had several months to pull this together. The Party has asked for submissions to be made to the policy review by the 31st of August.

Google is your friend and there is a huge amount of information now available on the Government’s web pages. AI can potentially help you find published accounts, annual reports, corporate strategies and even specific project reports and summarise them for you – but check the sources and the details it presents to you. Source documents should be cited. As should other research by think tanks and academics, especially if you are directly drawing on their work in support of your arguments.

Once you have built a coherent argument that poor outcomes flow from poor legislation, regulation, administration or practice, paint that better picture. At this stage this does not perhaps need to be fully formed, but show your knowledge of the subject and, if possible, use examples from the past or other countries which illustrate the better outcomes that could be achieved. Finally, suggest how those drivers might be changed to allow that to happen.

You will need to collate all this into a coherent summary, probably backed up by a more detailed paper. But don’t finish your masterpiece and hit send with a huge sigh of relief. Get someone to review it and take advantage of having a fresh pair of eyes looking over your work before it is submitted.

Then turn your attention to the application form for the parliamentary assessment!