3. The drive to professionalise policy making 28
2010: The Policy Skills Framework
One of the main tasks of the Policy Profession has been to set out the skills that constitute good policy making. After development work by Government Skills,
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1. First, a basic structure of how the policy process proceeds: the Policy Skills Framework was
launched in 2010. The Skills framework has two main elements.
• understanding the context; • developing the options;
• getting to a decision; • making it happen;
2. Second, ‘three cross-cutting themes which need to be considered to deliver successful policy’:
1. the importance of sound evidence as a basis for policy development; 2. working in a political context; and
3. focusing on delivery from the outset.
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The Framework thus argues that successful policy is produced when evidence, politics and delivery all come together Figure 5.
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Figure 5 - Policy skills framework
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Capita Resourcing, Policy Profession in Central Government Skills Needs Analysis, 2009; available at: http:www.civilservice.gov.ukAssetsTNA-policy-Jul09_tcm6-37343.pdf
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http:www.civilservice.gov.ukmy-civil-servicenetworksprofessionalpolicy-professionpolicy-skills- framework.aspx
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Taken from http:www.civilservice.gov.ukmy-civil-servicenetworksprofessionalpolicy-professionpolicy- skills-framework.aspx
3. The drive to professionalise policy making 29
Making sense of the attempts to improve policy making
Recent attempts to improve policy making have varied in scale and focus, and have frequently overlapped or seemed to merge with one another. Yet it is possible to identify four major
strands underpinning this activity:
1. Process: the actions recommended to produce policy e.g. the ROAMEF cycle; 2. Qualities: the way in which these actions should be carried out e.g. Modernising
Government’s recommendation that policy should be innovative and forward- looking;
3. Structures: the institutional arrangements to support better policy making e.g. the creation of strategy units in departments; and
4. Politics: the way in which political aims and desires contribute to policy making e.g. the recent Policy Skills Framework.
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We believe that, for each of these four aspects, most past reforms have failed to address the realities of policy making. The new Policy Skills Framework is a major step in the right direction
because it acknowledges for the first time the centrality of politics; but, at the time of writing, it is too new to have had a significant impact, and is still directed at civil servants alone. The next
chapter gives an overview of our case.
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Harold Lasswell famously defined politics as “who gets what, when, and how”; see Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How, 1936. We argue that these four aspects represent the ‘what, how, who, and why’ of
the policy process.
4. The gap between theory and practice 30
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