Behaviour Change: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the Committee for giving me the opportunity to read further and in more depth about this fascinating subject. I have met the team on many occasions; I know its director and admire a good deal of his work, much of which I have read.

I start by declaring an interest. I am a social scientist and I have spent my career between universities and think tanks arguing with others of my own discipline about how they needed to pay attention to their relationship with government. I remember as a young academic going to a meeting in Chatham House—it must have been 30 years ago—in which the chief inspector of the Diplomatic Service was asked to address the question of the relationship between the study of international relations and government. He began his speech with the wonderful statement, “I am not quite sure what the discipline of international relations—if indeed there be such a thing as a discipline of international relations—might contribute to the practical business of diplomacy”. Happily, in terms of government attitudes to social science, we have moved on some way from there and most, but not all, academic social scientists have become a little more open to having a constructive two-way relationship with government.

We see here an attempt to build on academic insights and government efforts to widen the use of evidence in policy-making by the establishment of the Behavioural Insights Team. As several noble Lords have said, this is not new—there is a reference in the report to the NICE report of 2007—but is something that Governments have been doing in practice in the past. What Thaler and Sunstein did, as did many social scientists, was to make more explicit what people were doing implicitly, make us think about it more systematically and, therefore, use it more systematically.

I am glad that the academic community is working with government and I note that the British Academy held a seminar with the Behavioural Insights Team last month on how we might take this further. We are now into the whole question of the relationship between science, broadly defined, and government and how evidence gathered by government-sponsored research in policy-making can be used.

There are a number of obstacles to this. I have taken part in debates on several occasions in the past year about how far you can allow the Government to use the data they collect across different departments for other purposes. On organ donation, for example, there have been some very delicate discussions on how far you can use evidence collected by the DVLA for Department of Health purposes. Happily, the Government have now secured a protocol for sharing the relevant data between the different agencies of government. We look forward to publishing our findings in this area, which we routinely do in each of our major work areas, as soon as we are able decisively to establish the impact of each of a number of changes that have been made to questions about organ donation on the DVLA site.

We also recognise that social science is softer than a number of other sciences. The problems of experimentation and evidence collection are often a good deal more complicated, and on obesity, the timescale over which one will establish that interventions have worked has to be measured in decades rather than in months. So there is a range of problems in assessing the utility of the evidence even when one has collected it.

There are a number of other obstacles. We have the most highly educated electorate we have ever had but it is often very resistant to evidence, as we see in the debate on climate change and in the resistance of the car-owing public to everything told to them about the greater benefits of walking and about why paying more for your petrol is good for you. It is not something that the public are particularly keen on. Road pricing is, of course, a highly desirable development. I well recollect that the previous Government left it to Ken Livingstone—and then pretty well hung him out to dry—to try road pricing in London, and only when it succeeded did they at least take it on. Local government elsewhere has been hesitant about imposing road pricing in cities because it is not popular.

Much of what we want to do in regulation is not popular, so part of what the new unit is doing is to expand on what the Nuffield Council on Bioethics calls the “ladder of intervention”. If there is an ideology for this Government—and I am not at all sure that I recognise a single ideological position for any Government, whether this Government, the previous Government or their predecessors—it is that you should look at the ladder of interventions, see how far voluntary measures can take you and only then move up to the harder end of the spectrum, regulation—the hardest end being prohibition—and financial disincentives when your voluntary interventions do not work. So limited government, working with social and economic actors as far as possible and recognising that all of those share responsibility, is the position from which we come.

As the noble Lord, Lord May, said, the idea of government seeking to influence behaviour is inherently controversial. Two generations ago, there were other moral leaders in society who helped to set the social norms. Part of what has happened in our society is that as the traditional moral leaders outside government have lost influence, so advertising, the media and the corporate sector have come to set social norms rather more strongly. That raises the difficult question of how far government should be attempting to prescribe and enforce behaviour. That is the area we are in. It is a fundamental issue about the role of government and how far it should be an active interventionist and an enforcer. I recognise that in the health area most of all—smoking, obesity and so on—there is a very strong lobby for enforcement among the professionals and a very strong resistance among the public to that.

The ladder of interventions and a range of policy tools are what this is all about. We are not saying that we do not want regulations; we are saying that where possible we want to investigate what works. In the debate, I was asked, I think by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, whether there are any examples of behaviour being changed by non-regulatory interventions alone. There is the example of HMRC letters that were redesigned to say “most people pay their taxes”, which improved the extent to which people made their returns. We are having a debate in another context about electoral registration in which it is being urged on the Government that if you put at the top of each letter, “You must fill in this form. £250 fine”—I will not go into the fine—it will radically improve the number of people who fill in the form. This is a debate we are about to have in another sector but we all recognise that the way you design forms and convey messages has a positive or negative impact on behaviour.

Loft insulation is another instance in which you discover that, if you ask people why they have or have not gone along with the policy, there are interesting obstacles on the way. If you volunteer to empty their loft they are much more likely to say, “Fine, now you can insulate it”.

The Behavioural Insight Team is now looking at energy tariffs and mobile phone tariffs because it is clear that most people simply give up long before they have begun to investigate which tariff is best for them. It intends to work with industry and to talk about how simplification of tariffs might make choices easier.

I defend the attempts by the Government to limit how actively they intervene and the number of prohibitions we impose on society. That is a debate that we have all had to have, in the previous Government and in this one. We are talking about the range of intervention.

I was asked a large number of questions about obesity and the traffic light issue. As noble Lords will know, that is partly a question of what can be done compulsorily at EU level. If the EU has not passed a regulation that everyone must have traffic light interventions, we have to work voluntarily with the supermarkets. The Government are talking to supermarket companies and others, and some have responded differently from others. As a believer in limited government, we had to demand that companies behave responsibly. That is part of the dialogue that we must have. One way in which we change social norms nowadays is by having Commons committees which pull the heads of banks and companies up before them and ask them what are their social norms and acceptable behaviour. Not all of that has to be done by government prohibition.

I was also asked how the Behavioural Insights Team is itself monitored. It has an academic advisory council which monitors how it behaves. It was set up for a two-year period and is now coming up to its two-year review. It was entirely appropriate that it should be set up for a limited period—we do not necessarily want something that goes on forever—although I think that it is likely to be extended. On the question of the use of evidence, I hope that some Members of the Committee may have read the recent publication, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials.

[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.

[Lord Krebs]

Will the Minister respond specifically to my question about the 11 countries that have introduced taxes on foods that specifically contribute to obesity—high sugar, high fat foods? Might the Government follow the lead of other countries in tackling the obesity crisis by that measure?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Reay]

The Minister said that the measures we want to take for public health are not popular and that is one reason why we do not have to do that. A lot of regulatory measures that have been taken have been popular by the time they are taken. You may have to work to get that popularity, as others have suggested. You have to give the public information as to why things are being done.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

This is turning into more of a seminar than a debate. I felt when I was getting my briefing from the Behavioural Insights Team that I was attending a seminar rather than receiving a briefing. Let me attempt to answer the question on sugar, salt and so on. That is certainly an issue that the Government are considering. We have not yet come to any conclusion. Having a public debate on the options helps to considerably further the debate, so I encourage all those interested to pursue the issue and aid the Government in making our recommendations.

On the question of school meals, we are all aware, again, that we need a mixture of interventions. We need Jamie Oliver out there campaigning. We need schools that are experimenting, often against initial parental opposition. We can all remember the parents who came to bring chips for their children because the school was giving them this nasty healthy food. There, we are slowly moving things around

One final point and then I will have to sit down because I am well over 20 minutes. When I first joined the House of Lords, if I went into the Lords restaurant at breakfast time I saw many of our security staff eating enormous English breakfasts. I was in there the other day and I saw our security staff eating light breakfasts. In small ways, attitudes are changing and some of the message is beginning to get through. The full English breakfast is still provided in the River Restaurant but fewer of our security staff are taking it. That is an interesting example of where social norms are evolving in one way or another, but all of us in our position as social scientists or scientists, as well as politicians, need to address the question of how we shape the public debate and public attitudes in a range of different areas. Government has a role in that but not everything which government does should be done through taxation or prohibition. Where government can encourage and inform, it should do so first before it moves up the ladder of intervention.

[Baroness Neuberger]

I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. There have been some memorable phrases. I am particularly interested in behaviour change for bankers and interventions will clearly be programmed as a result of today’s debate. I was slightly disappointed with the Minister’s response, particularly given that he is a social scientist. He did not answer the question put to him about when, if ever, a chief social scientific adviser will be appointed within government. I hope that he will deal with and answer that point.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I apologise. I should have answered it but so many points were made in the debate that it was extremely difficult to cover all of them. This question is being discussed within government and will shortly be decided on. It is not a dead question; it is a live one.

[Baroness Neuberger]

I thank the Minister very much indeed. We are much encouraged to hear that and I hope that we will continue to be brief on that subject. Will he perhaps take back the question on traffic light labelling of food, which was asked again and again, particularly as evidence came from some corporations that they were doing something about this? It is something that could be pursued through a business network and the Government could lean harder on that. We would still like a serious response on advertising on foods harmful to children. I hope that the noble Lord will write to me and other Members of the Committee. I thank everybody who spoke and the Minister for his response. I beg to move.