Behaviour Change: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, I welcome this report and the discussion with esteemed colleagues. Outside colleagues are also quite impressed with this. I am sorry that I did not give evidence. I was asked whether I did not hear about it—I am not asleep all the time—but I wonder whether all Members of the House of Lords receive e-mails requesting evidence. I have never had an e-mail requesting that I give evidence to the committee.

Many branches of central and local government will use this report from the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on how policies can be more effective in considering and influencing how people can change their behaviour. I commend the committee for taking a broad scientific look at this approach to developing and implementing policy. As always, a new catchphrase can usefully draw attention to old ideas, as we saw with tipping points and now see with nudge. Innovative decisions always show that quite small changes to governmental commercial practice can have quite large effects. Sometimes they can be predicted; sometimes they can be beneficial; sometimes they can have unintended adverse consequences.

The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, commented, as did outside colleagues, that this report has all sorts of worthy things in it, but there is a slight lack of an intellectual theme. Curiously, for the modern day, it does not particularly emphasise how data are an integral part of this whole approach, nor the use of modern telecommunications, the internet and so on.

From a scientific point of view, behavioural change can be considered as one component of the system dynamics approach to policy-making, to which behavioural scientists have contributed greatly, as have natural scientists, mathematicians and so on. For example, Sir Alan Wilson—a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society, and a former vice-chancellor of Leeds University—showed how system approaches could work for commercial purposes and many others.

The methodology referred to here—as is so common in Whitehall—is evidence-based decision-making, which is just one component of system analysis. The noble Lord, Lord May, might touch on this. From the first studies of models and statistics of complex systems, including societies, species and countries, such as the one in the 1930s by Lewis Richardson on conflict using statistics and modelling, it was clear that behaviour can change quite suddenly. An example is when some threshold is reached or barrier is formed, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, pointed out, or a particular disturbance is introduced.

To give a parliamentary analogy, I have an Icelandic friend who tells me about the Icelandic Parliament: it is the earliest in the world, founded in 1000. A bored parliamentarian used to throw gold coins in the air. He was blind and getting bored in the debate so everybody got out their sword and had a tremendous sword fight on the floor of their House of Commons. He enjoyed that. The trouble is that now they do not know where he stored all his gold coins—that is still a problem for Iceland. That example is not totally dissimilar to changing expenses rules in this House, but that is another point.

To come back to systems thinking, many of the recommended policies here involve people in networks,— for example, WeightWatchers. Networks, as we can see, lead to beneficial effects or problematical ones, as we saw last night with the secret Conservative vote, which is a new network that suddenly appeared on the scene. Therefore, networks are an important part of this process.

I wanted to emphasise that the European Commission is sponsoring several projects around Europe about the use of system thinking and system dynamics as a general framework for governments and organisations. I hope that we will have more connection in that way.

I want to make four points and to illustrate them from my own experiences as a scientist acting variously as a city councillor, an environmental consultant and an executive. The first is how to find good ideas for economical ways to encourage behaviour change for the purposes of policy-making and implementation. This is also particularly valuable in developing countries, as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, pointed out, where local innovation can be very effective and indeed extremely ingenious methods are often found. DfID should be part of the discussion taking this forward.

The next point concerns obtaining effective data and the communication of data to the public, and from the public, to help policy through behavioural change, which is not much emphasised in the report. With modern electronic methods you can give information and receive it back and the many possibilities of social media are only just beginning to be used. The other important point that is touched on in the report on page 49 is the use of pilot schemes to explain in a sort of vivid, practical way how behaviour change can work, particularly in local areas, and then to demonstrate the effectiveness of unfamiliar ideas. Local pilot schemes often enable people to understand the wider implications of policy. We should make a greater connection between local pilot schemes for energy saving and the global importance of climate change.

Here is another story. In Cambridge in 1971 we had double-decker buses in tiny medieval streets. They knocked bits off the buildings as they went down the road and were responsible for incredible levels of pollution. What could be done? As a scientist I suggested we first measured the air pollution in these narrow streets and publicised it. That got people interested and then, being a scientist, I said there would be arguments about it and that we should have an experiment. The city council closed the street for a month and then, following the instructions of this report, we did a survey. The survey was done by students and we had a Stalinist result of 99% in favour and so the process went ahead. The other point made by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, was that culture changes slowly. It took the taxi drivers in Cambridge 20 years before they decided that pedestrianisation with preferential arrangements was a good idea. That was a top-down initiative, but surveying was essential.

Over the past 40 years, many small initiatives in local communities in Britain have transformed family life, particularly on housing estates—which are, after all, probably where most people live. My wife is a landscape architect. One curious thing is that by the choice of planting schemes—having prickly bushes in some areas and green grass in others—you can guide or move people. That can transform the behaviour level and behaviour patterns on housing estates, as can the use of roads and dead ends. That is remarkable. You can go to many areas of Britain where you see quite different social behaviour as a result of those small, extremely inexpensive and economical methods.

The other important point is that many of those small changes can now be tested electronically. You can ask people on the internet. There was a good example in the east end of London, reported in a book that I edited on London’s environment, which noble Lords can find in the House of Lords Library. Increasingly, communication of information in a timely and local way changes behaviour and is a vital part of public policy. London leads the world—other countries are following—in providing detailed forecasts of air pollution sent to individuals. For example, adverts on the No. 73 bus say that if people are having breathing difficulties and want information about air pollution, they should ring this number to obtain it. That is an example of using sophisticated data, coming from satellites, models and fine linear data. It enables people to use their drugs appropriately and change their exercises. Some of those ideas have also been tried in the United States.

Now that approach is being extended to local temperatures. Another important example is the question of heatwaves in cities; that is not a problem for us this summer but, in 2003, 20,000 people died in France. Mortality varied from one kilometre to another depending on the exact temperature in an area of Paris. It is therefore important to be able to inform people about the temperature but also to find ways in which you can control it. The Lord Mayor of Westminster, who is a green Tory—I admire her greenness—explained to me how, on very hot days in the street where she lives, she draws her curtains so that, when she comes back in the evening, her house is cool. Most people do not draw their curtains and they remain very hot. That is an example where the nudging process can have a considerable effect. Now that such people all have air conditioning, it is a question of whether you turn your air conditioning on. That is an example where energy behaviour could be changed.

Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, mentioned transport, which is covered by the report. I have had very unsatisfactory communications with the Department for Transport on the question of nudging of information. The UK Government are much less ready than those in France or Germany to use information on roads to change behaviour. On French motorways, the electronic notices inform drivers that excessive speed is not only dangerous but leads to greater carbon emissions. In Germany, notices on motorways near housing inform drivers about noise. The DfT refuses absolutely to put environmental data on our screens. Indeed, it does the reverse: it encourages drivers to go at 70 miles an hour. It says, “If you go at 70 miles an hour, you will get to Bristol in 25 minutes”, or some damn thing. Excuse me, that is unparliamentary language. That is a case of negative behavioural change produced by government. I hope that that can be changed.

My conclusion from those examples and those in the report is that there could be a more systematic approach to optimal behaviour change: first, by studying through models and experience how different nudges and types and levels may be effective—or ineffective, if not dangerous; secondly, by evaluating the data provided and the feedback of information; and, thirdly, by assessing what kind of pilot schemes are necessary and how best to design them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

The Minister has talked a lot about evidence and performance but there are people in Whitehall who say: “What has data got to do with policy?”. Data and information are very important. We receive very little information from government. They want to give us a good form but does not the Minister think that the programme of examples that I tried to give him of telling people much more about the information will help to make decisions? That is largely absent from the government response?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I take the noble Lord’s point that perhaps the government response should have taken more care with the question of data. There is another debate to be had—I encourage all Members of the Committee to participate in it more actively—about government data collection, government data sharing and access to government data which relates to the census and questions of privacy. We all need to engage in that debate because government is now collecting a great deal more data, as are private actors. Government behaves with much more caution about the use of that data than Tesco or Marks and Spencer. As with obesity, there are important questions as to how far we lower privacy issues in government in order to gain benefits in public health and elsewhere.

I mentioned the White Paper Test, Learn, Adapt, which has been recommended by Ben Goldacre and Tim Harford. That suggests to me that there are those in the media who recognise the importance of government data and at least think we are attempting to move in the right direction.

The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, talked about corporate power and how to confront it. That is also part of a much larger issue. We are left with business and the media setting a large amount of what becomes the social norm. The power of advertising—and advertising is absolutely about covert nudging as opposed to overt messaging—is an issue that again we cannot answer here. It is fundamental to our debate about the balance between government, society and market, in which that we all need to engage. I look forward to the noble Lord’s next written contribution on that fundamental issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, talked about the international dimensions of behavioural influence and cultural change and whether we should be following US research. There is a fair amount of independent research in this area. The German Marshall Fund does some very good research, which I follow. There are some mildly puzzling outcomes. From the surveys that I have seen, the most pro-Western public in the entire Middle East is the urban population of Iran. Whether or not that suggests that the behavioural impact you should be having is to impose sanctions on the regime, it raises some very large questions about what policies and interventions you pursue and what you get back in return. I will feed that back in.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, raised a number of questions about transport, which I have touched on. Government studies have shown that cost, time and reliability are clearly very important factors. There is some evidence for providing better, simple information. The new signs at bus stops which tell you when the next bus will arrive increase the number of people who wait for the bus. That is another nudge if you like. Information helps.

David Halpern, the head of the Behavioural Insights Team, is very interested in the built environment and how far it impacts upon behaviour. That is a really difficult, long-term issue, the sort of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was talking about. Redesigning public spaces and how you design footpaths and cycle ways help with this, but part of the answer to improving the urban environment and encouraging people to walk rather than use cars is persuading them to live more closely together and not to wish to live 10 to 20 miles from where they work.

Another area in which the provision of information would help—and here government has a great deal further to go—is on the concreting of front gardens, which over the past 20 or 30 years has contributed very substantially to the problems of urban flooding. The provision of information about the utility of digging up your front garden again and providing green spaces through which the water can drain is clearly something that government can do without enforcing it.

I love the term “cognitive polyphasia”. We are all stuck with that. As someone who, when in opposition, campaigned for the pedestrianisation of further squares in London and, in particular, of Parliament Square, I am conscious that there are a number of people who think that it is very good to have pedestrianisation so long as they can still get their limousine to take them to St Margaret’s for weddings and do not have to spend two to three minutes longer in their taxi from Smith Square. Individuals often resist things that in the long run will be to their advantage.

This is a broad initiative of government—I stress of government because it is not a partisan move from this Government. We all want to find ways in which the range of government interventions—from information through to pressures and financial disincentives to tighter regulation and, in some cases, prohibition and penalties, as in seat belts and some areas of health—will help to change behaviour. That is not something that the Government can do alone. We have to work with publics whose attitudes are often highly contradictory and whose willingness to accept evidence when presented as mediated through the media is sometimes relatively limited.

What I hope that the Committee is persuaded of, into which the report provided a useful insight, is that this is one of the many tools available for government which helps government to be more self-conscious. The Behavioural Insights Team is in the Cabinet Office to provide a resource across government and its many departments to encourage them to use more of those interventions to affect behaviour. On that basis, I give way to both noble Lords.