to well welcome to uh IP I'm Nick Pierce I'm the director here um and I'm very pleased today to introduce you to Dominic Cummings Dominic uh is probably um the only special advisor I can think of in recent memory who sort of anybody outside White Hall knows it that's because he has very interesting and controversial views and he's not afraid of expressing them uh he's here today to talk to us about the reform of White Hall and Westminster what needs to change in the Civil Service and in our politics um and so we look forward to what I'm sure will be very interesting and provocative remarks I'll then ask Dominic some questions and then later on there'll be an opportunity for some debate so Dominic over to you thank you I'm I'm I'm happily unemployed very happily employed at the moment so um I've got lots of time for question and answers later on if people I can I can um keep answering questions as long as people um would would like me to afterwards um so over the next six months or so everyone's going to be focused on the election but one of my basic points is I don't think really matters what happens in the election that it won't really change some very important fundamentals whoever whether it's Cameron or Miller Band who get in we're going to have someone with very similar education very similar experience very similar intellectual Outlook neither them know how to prioritize neither of them can build a a serious team um they're both in surrounded by these dysfunctional teams all day every day they don't know how to get anything done they've never had experience in an organization watching anyone who really knows how to get anything done in an a real alfha organization that's well managed they don't understand why whiteall around around them doesn't work and the and whichever one wins we're going to have someone who looks at things I think with quite a narrow short-term party advantage and obsessed with just trying to get through the next um new cycle or a few days ahead um that's certainly how number 10 operates and looking at at the um MD Ban's operation now I think um doesn't make much difference which of them get in so I think we need to do things differently but I want to put how I think we should do things differently in a in a broader context of just Westminster and white all so I'll talk briefly about some fundamental aspects of how the world works why some aspects of human Endeavors work better than others compare that with White Hall and Westminster and why and talk about what the the core of why that systems don't work have a think about the scale of the problems that these failing systems have to cope with and then talk about um what what I think we we should do to change it so uh the first the the first um section on this some fundamental aspects of of of how the world works it's a very simple point but very important one I think about sheer complexity on Friday if David Cameron wants to get together all the people wants to get together 60 people and blame them for why the byelection went wrong he wants to line them all up in a row and go after one after one tell them it's your fault it's your fault there there's roughly speaking the number of different ways in which you could arrange those 60 people it's approximately 10 to the power 80 that's about the number of in the in the universe so you see quickly that even a very simple problem like that like how to line up 60 people in a row explodes to astronomical complexity how does the world cope with this well if you look around at um social networks physical networks mental networks they consist of the they consist of complicated nonlinear and independent systems in these networks properties emerge from the interaction of lots of different agents you can't tell what's going to happen just by looking at a single agent so for example if you look at ant colonies you have lots of interacting ants and from this you have emerging behaviors like farming slavery and war that you can never predict from a single an if you look at the immune system the immune system operates with lots of interacting cells and they produce the emergent properties of the immune system the defense system interacting VI molecular signals if you look at brains you see individual neurons interacting via synapses and these produce emerging properties that we think of as thoughts and what are the common features of these well the extreme complexity means that prediction is extremely difficult over even over tiny time scales effective action is very hard even loose control is very hard failure is ubiquit local failure is ubiquitous it means this scale of complexity means you can't have centralized control there's no master ant there's no master neuron there's no master immune cell the system has to learn from decentralized experimentation from trial and error and from probabilistic experimentation so adaptation is vital and the fourth thing you see in these networks is um some very interesting two interesting qualities that come out of them of networks including the three that I've discussed to what's known as scale-free Network simple way to imagine what these are picture your continental United States in a flight map of of all the different flights and you'll see certain hubs like Atlanta La New York and whatnot and this Hub and spoke Network you see throughout the world you see it in brains you see it on the internet you see it in Market structures um you you see it in Terrorist networks and these sort of networks have two two characteristics one is they're resilient to random failure so you can knock out individual things randomly and the system will keep working but they're very vulnerable to knocking out hubs if you knock out crucial hubs then you see cascad start sorry Start cascading through the system errors start cascading through the system now some parts of human life have Co have evolved systems to cope with this very well science and markets have both developed institutional mechanisms that allow us to cope with this complexity in markets you see a similar sort of system you see individual humans individual firms interacting VI price all sorts of Global emergent properties like the immune system you see local decision- making probabilistic experimentation reinforced success and call failure in science since Newton you've seen the development of the whole scientific method with peer review scientists having to make data open however prestigious and Powerful they are H so you have market and science you have systems that have evolved which try and cope with this level of complexity and make make people correct errors which in lots of ways we're not programmed by Evolution to do very well when we're faced with with these sort of problems now it doesn't work perfectly you got a clear hierarchy so one end you've got maths and physics you've seen recently the comet we can send things zillions of miles away with extreme Precision land the systems we understand extremely well the far end of that I would say probably you've got things like sociology and education research which are very very far away from the in which maths and physics work um the reasons for that are interesting we can explore that in in questions answers if you if people would like so now we compare those things that work with politics and what do we see we see extremely bad prediction amid complexity and there's groundwork empirical information on this particularly work by a guy called Philip tetlock who tracked expert decision- making over decades and what he found unsurprisingly is that um these experts are almost random there are a few people that do there's a tiny number of people who do better than everyone else but most people it's like chimps throwing DS at the board secondly the more likely these people are to be on TV the more likely they are to be wrong and third is very important third people don't really learn very much they don't learn from their mistakes because unlike in markets and science where there's feedback all the time your company goes bust the peer review system says your experiments isn't the same kind of feed feedback in the political world so people aren't punished for for failures so it's obviously important that expert opinion out to be largely rubbish now secondly most in political institutions control what they do badly they do a bad job of it why is that first of all goals it's much easier to Define goals in markets make a profit or find a particle Within These physical parameters than it is in politics it's much harder to formulate clear goals secondly the nature of the people so political bureaucracies tend to select for narcissists and for certain kinds of bureaucratic mentality and look around Parliament who what are the kind of people that get ahead there tend to be people who are glib who enjoy public speaking enjoy networking lots of judgments are made on the basis of speeches and jokes you watch a group of MPS often used to see they're all just sitting there watching their phones waiting for a chance to interrupt they like talking they don't really like listening these these ins tend to fill up with people like lawyers who are obsessed with process and PR people and the kind of people who are often energized by social networking whereas a lot of people who actually get things done in the world are often repelled by social networking they're externally oriented they're not interested in climbing the greasy pole so if you look around it how many of our best mathematicians the our best research scientists and the best entrepreneurs who actually build successful organizations in the world are represented at the top of decision- making in Westminster and whiteall the answer is approximately zero we then take that pool of people and we select ministers from them and then we promote them on the basis of launching gimmicks to the lobby and whether or not they help the party and harm the enemy party so we then select people so we've got a bad pool of people to begin with and then we select from those from that pool people in a not very uh sensible way and then we educate and train them badly so first of all uh in one way quantitative skills for a simple example to understand financial markets you need to know what normal dist financial markets and the financial crisis in 200 in 78 you need to know what normal distribution is but almost none of the people who come through into leading roles in politics are ever trained to do to know what normal distribution is and in fact you can go all the way through maths a level and further math a level now without ever learning what what it is so you have people in charge who have no technical understanding of very basic actually not very basic extremely subtle but in some sense basic concepts uh such as Randomness but it's much worse than that if you just look at basic probability the world statistical Society recently did a survey found that only 40% of MPS could correctly answer the question what's the probability of getting two heads from flipping a fair fair coin twice but three quarters of the MPS said that they got the right answer part of so there's a narrow problem and a broad problem the narrow problem is PPE and economics training um I'm constantly astonished at how people who've gone through economics degrees in PPE have very little understanding of the intellectual history of their field and very little understanding of how physical scientists regard predictions how you actually make robust predictions in the in the world and therefore unsurprisingly these people don't understand the dodginess of the predictions which they're constantly making and um in economics they are courage to think that that they've been trained by this process to make very important decisions but they don't they don't know the very basics of how organizations work they think they've been taught to run the country but a lot of them can't even run their own Diaries it's a broader problem than just PPE PPE in general Westminster and whiteall are dominated by Arts graduates with very poor quantitative skills little to no understanding of important scientific and techn technological issues and little or no experience of successful organizations or responsibility for big organizations and to think of the scale mismatch most MPS have never been responsible for managing even a 100 people they suddenly put in charge of managing sometimes 10,000 people or or more they've never managed a budget of a million quid and suddenly they're managing budget budgets the DFE of say 70 billion quid about billion about a billion quid quid a week look at poor Cameron Cameron bounces from PPE to special advisor to be in charge of the conservative party to being prime minister he's never been part of an organization an organization that's run well or anything approaching anything that requires making decisions on the scale that suddenly he he's involved in and there's no training systems in whitall that can begin to co to to cope with this so then you take this poor Minister and and you think okay well what are the tools that they've got so think who the you know the big CEOs that we think of of the last few years people like Bill Gates Steve Jobs Mark Zuckerberg these kind of characters all these people can hire fire promote and train their teams but no Minister has the power to do any of this in their government department so you have often the wrong people with bad Education and Training for the for for for the systems that they're supposed to cope with no experience of the scale of the system that they're suddenly in charge of and they have to do all of this without any of the very basic tools that someone like Bill Gates would say instantly well how on Earth can you are you supposed to be respons principle and and manage the system so it's unsurprising that lots of these things go go go wrong on top of that they're not allowed to have any help because one the civil service is extremely effective uh tries very hard and is largely I would say 99% effective of keeping special advisers and other people out of the business about appointments um and and those crucial crucial decisions that brings us on to to civil service and and and HR systems the people who are promoted tend to be people who protect the system and don't walk the boat a lot of young people who care work hard uh are often disillusioned quite quickly and leave and the ones who play the system and focus on personal goals not the public interest often tend to be the ones who are who who are um who are promoted it promotes people who focus on being important not getting important things done and it ruthlessly weeds out people who are denters who are Mavericks who have a different point of view um so if you have an entire institutional structure that selects against the skills of entrepreneurs and successful scientists don't be surprised when the people in charge can't solve problems like entrepreneurs and scientists in organizations that work very well in the world you see people that care they try hard in large parts of the Civil Service the whole HR System encourages the opposite almost nobody's ever fired but more important than that everything pushes against a culture of responsibility and excellence is not is absolutely normal it's not something to be avoided Time After Time After Time I would be in the department and we'd be leading the news and you look at the TV screen here saying Gove latest Gove disaster Gove botches X and you look through the glass screen and you'd see the official responsible for it in the lift pottering home at 3:30 in the afternoon doesn't care why not because failure is normal it's not something to be avoided and the HR System reinforces that why did we ban announcements on Mondays because you can't assemble assemble a team reliably on a Friday between flexi hours compressed hours and a culture which says it's perfectly acceptable just to go on holiday the day before an announcement you've been working on for the last six months it's very hard to get the people who are responsible for something in the same room so we just had to ban announcements on a Monday because otherwise you knew that everything would fall apart why does all and you also on top of that so you also have a broader problem which is how how how it is to assemble good teams people are constantly being moved M have no control over it one day you have an there's one expert on special educational needs funding and then bam suddenly they're often they're in charge of the physics GCSE curriculum it's a completely crazy system over which ministers have have absolutely no control now you also have a whole set of misaligned in incentives in markets and science you have incentives to push people in certain directions which are overall healthy and towards correcting errors in White Hall you have uh you have you tend to have unclear goals and then you have distorting targets that are focused on methods not on goals and this encourages huge micromanagement it means that perverse incentives create all kinds of distortions in the system and then to cope with that decisions are sucked all the time upwards to the supposed why wise Chief at the top of the hierarchy who's supposed to sort to sort this out this out the exact opposite of what happens in healthy organizations and then of course it's much easier to fiddle the targets than it is to admit that you've made made mistakes in them partly because the whole system is so opaque an extremist you end up having peasants melting down plows for scrap metal in order to hit steel targets as happened in Ma's Great Leap Forward but on a smaller SC scale you see um this sort of problem happening in white all all the time it's also the case that officials are not incentivized to ask who in the world's already solved this problem and how can we apply this here A Very you think is a very simple question but that doesn't really happen in whiteall it's very parochial there's very very poor institutional memory libraries are off have being destroyed so Library the DFE was destroyed the library in the foreign office was destroyed recordkeeping is often abysmal so it ends so whiteall ends up being parochial not just about the outside world the rest of the world but also even about its own past very few people are incentivized to cut regulation incentive push people to create more there's very very little incentive on anyone actually ever to get rid of any any regulation there's very little incentive to save any money treasury does not care about saving money the treasury cares about its power over the whiteall system and the dodgy account account system mean that they can hide a huge amount of financial bu bungling and the pay system also doesn't incentivize good behavior there's massive massive over Pavement in the public sector and actually in the private sector and I think the left don't face it in the public sector and the right won't face it in the the private sector but the whole system is full of people on 70 to 140 Grand a year who should who are not worth anything like that money and you could hire much you could hire bright 25-year-old to do a better job faster and cheaper so what does the Civil Service incentivize it fundamentally incentivizes an obsessional process staying friends with spe with special interests and Empire Building I probably put preh hand up in in the room if you've seen the movie um The Social Network okay so there's a scene in there where Zuckerberg goes to paloalto to try and get his first financing and there a scene where you see the legendary venture capitalist Peter teal in the room he only says one sentence and fact in real life he never said that sentence but you'll remember the scene where he's in Pet's office and the guy turns and says who's Edward Sav well that guy just wrote a book recently where he did a series of lectures to Stanford uh graduates and wrote a book about it and in in his book he wrote this in the most dysfunctional organizations signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for advancement than actually doing work if this describes your company quit now now that describes the vast majority of activity in whiteall it's signaling and its process Obsession it's not Obsession on quality it's not Obsession on good Services it's not Obsession on trying to get some on trying to get useful things done if you look at what how private officers operate and they spotted at at least a couple of people here in private offices they'll know exactly what I mean the vast majority of their time is spent on process and it's extreme you'll have situations in which uh in which in which you have got some system some disaster that's leading the news people have died because of blah but the real focus of the system is why will we not copu in on that email that's where the system drives everyone to actually obsess on who's cced on the email not that system's fallen over and all these people haven't got to school or or the hospitals collapsed or or or whatever it might be you also have misaligned time scales so lots of these problems involve time scales over over many years which obviously doesn't fit well with career advancement and and the way that parliaments work we're always told capitalism is extremely short term but if you look at how Silicon Valley operates the founders of these companies are incentivized to think about more than 10 years from now because that's when most of the profits these companies will make most profits from the successful startup in Silicon Valley come after after after a decade so they're actually thinking about that in Downing Street you're lucky if they're thinking 10 days ahead so you have very very big problems of uh uh regarding time time scales um uh and finally some basic issues about skills um a lot of people doing policy are not suited for doing policy the quality of project management uh in large part large parts of white oil is is awful project management is not on the spad code but uh uh that took more of my time than than anything else just trying to drive projects through the system because the system itself is not set up to do that well all sorts of very basic skills uh have gone the journey so even just basic correspondence is very hard to get right when we started off more than nine out of 10 letters were sent back because of basic spelling mistakes and unfortunately it was roughly speaking it changed from about 2012 onwards but it was roughly true at the start to assume that every budget you look at will be wrong every contract process will will go wrong and every procurement will will blow up in your face and legal advice will probably be wrong so if you can't procure things in your own building properly what are the odds that you're going to procure things effectively for 20,000 schools the odds are very small and that's why you see constantly whenever you see the same cycle of inquiry over and over again why did this go wrong and the answers are always the same so and so signed a Duff contract but then so and so moved and then the person in charge says well it's not my fault because I wasn't there then I've taken over this process and the cycle constantly repeats if you want to see faces shocked in whiteall then when something goes wrong suggest to them we want to pursue the people responsible to their new job in a new department and the reaction is along the lines of oh my god do we couldn't do that if we did that where would it all end which just about sums it up so finally you have so you have all of these individual problems but then lots of them sort of smash together you have problems with the EU EU procurement rules things like that you have problems with European convention on human rights you have a problem with how internal legal advice is incentivized inside the system you have Civil Service HR and you have judicial review and all of these problems interact in very nightmarish ways that make it very difficult to solve things so you're constantly faced with things that go wrong that all of those different elements will feed into the problem um and almost none of them do the does the ministers actually have any any really Direct direct control over so I'll just very briefly talk about so you have this huge system in in in white oil uh in my opinion it's largely dysfunctional for the various reasons that that I've suggested and it's all programmed to go wrong there's no way it can work there's no reason to expect that it's suddenly going to change tomorrow how can it it the whole wiring of it means that you're going to keep seeing the same kind of problem over and over again so you look at what you look at the sort of things this this system is going to have to face in Britain you've got huge debts we've got massive wide un variation of performance in public services got huge dependence on financial sector which is appallingly regulated and programmed to blow up periodically if you look around the world we've got familiar issue about a couple of billion Asians joining the economy but you've also got a couple of billion people about to be born who're going to be moving into cities it's going to be it seems more C is being built in the next 30 Years than the entire building in the whole of human history put put together these people are going to be mobile which we already experiencing some of the effects of that this is going to have huge disruption to existing markets and businesses huge demands on pension and health systems and huge demands on energy and and and other resources at the same time you have uh some extremely disruptive Technologies hitting from genetic engineer in to artificial intelligence which I which I won't go into but overall you have it seems to me a very powerful mismatch on the one hand you have the scale and complexity of these problems that are hitting the world on the other hand you have this institutional system uh and people who are supposed to cope with it and there's just absolutely no way that these two thing this combination is not going to produce um crises and and frequent spectacular failures so what do we do about it it seems to me that that um fairly obvious that neither of the political parties none the two main political parties now really have a clue what to do the left won't face the scale of a debt it won't face the problems of large bureaucracies and all the things that I've just talked about uh and and it doesn't often have often doesn't have a very good understanding of the amazing ability of markets to solve problems um and the right also has an awful lot of of blank spots it won't face the scale of inequality um problems with financial markets bloated pay in the private sector uh lots of issues like that the way the rich cheating taxes all of those sorts of things it doesn't want to talk about um it doesn't understand how why people are resistant to the spread of markets um and lots of people seem to think well can we not just go back to the old world get out of the EU and put up the B borders and uh go back to a world pre-1914 in which you have mutually Anton IC nation states competing with their National self-interest that's quite a good World um doesn't seem to me like a very good world seems to me that if you combine the technological uh if you combine the pre-14 world of competing nation states all pursuing their own interests with the technological developments then we're absolutely um doomed um so what what what what do I think needs to be done about it first of all I would argue that um we need it we we need to think very carefully about our national goal Dean nerson the US Secretary of State famously said after World War II that Britain had lost its Empire but hadn't found a role and that uh remains true uh we're Grumpy in the EU but won't leave we're rude about it and like and the whole process has become uh embarrassing I don't think the answer is either the spe special relationship or return to pre-1914 uh or the EU what I would suggest is that our role should focus on making ourselves the leading country in the world for education and science Pericles described Athens as the school of Greece and we could be the school of the world we've already got many advantages we've got bu universities we've got some of the best schools in the world this would provide an organizing principle for a new policy agenda and it would focus resources it would give us a central role in building new international institutions that we need it would require and enable fundamental changes to how the con tion and Westminster and white all all work and it's a noble goal that reflects the best in human nature and therefore I think it could transcend a lot of differences and get a lot of support from um from people of of very different politics so that's the first thing a goal a national goal of making ourselves the leading country for education and science secondly more specifically I think that um there are all sorts of things that need to change inside the education system but one in particular is for leading politicians and officials we need what um the the guy who discovered the Quark the physicist Murray Gman called an educ an addic in education something that integrates Knowledge from maths and science on the one hand from the humanities and social sciences on the other hand and training in effective action the current systems as I discussed um I I think don't work um and we need new ones we need new degrees uh instead of replacing things like PPE um there are various experiments and interesting developments happening with this already techlock the guy who I mentioned earlier who did all this work on Expert judgment and why it's terrible is doing a fascinating thing in America now working actually with um the US intelligence agency but I think most of the work is in the public domain called the good judgment project which involves systematic attempt to try and train people in different cognitive methods that will improve judgments and lots of It's relatively simple stuff um and it's it's had dramatic results much more dramatic results than people everth thought was possible um and I think that that's very very encouraging so that's item two um third in terms of Institutions at the moment our institutions are not focusing expert attention on the important problems the most obvious example is in the financial markets we have the cleverest people in the world educated at vast expense by the taxpayer in maths and physics and then we funnel them into into high frequency algorithmic trading systems which is where a massive number of them now are getting sucked into absolutely crazy Mi mismatch between the importance of the problem for Humanity and the nature of the people that we're pushing into into it so we need to change how institutions work so they're actually incentivizing the cleverest people the most able problem solvers to look at the problems which we which we know are the most important um and I'll finish just by talking talking briefly about some specific changes to to to whiteall the first is sort of mass refocusing so when Steve Jobs came back into Apple when it was nearly bankrupt in the mid90s first thing he did was Bin a massive amount of what they were doing he came in and said right you've you've got 30 different computers there's going to be four computers we're not doing printers we're not doing this we're not doing that we're not doing the other all closed immediately and he shut it down and had ruthless simplification and ruthless focus and uh that's the sort of process that needs to happen in white it's totally disincentivized now uh inside the system um secondly we need to think about we're going to reorient whiteall to think about how to incentivize goals not micromanage methods so if you look at what's what's arguably the most successful bit of bureaucracy in the Western World in the last 40 years is Dappa defense Advan research project agency which built the internet and still Fighters and what not some interesting features about how it works it's totally outside all normal Washington rules of procurement Char etc etc and it doesn't have its own Labs what it has is it has goals and it hires people in specific labs to do specific things and then it very ruthlessly curs after a few years and says failure stop success reinforce so we know that there are ways in which we can change how bureaucracies work to have much higher performance than than than they currently have um third very simple thing uh is we just need to massively reduce the number of people in the system when we said it in the DFE we're going to reduce it everyone said oh my God the whole system will fall apart but in fact getting rid of thousands of people in in the DFE system in improve performance considerably and I'm absolutely convinced that if you cut the DFE by another half or even more ideally it could it would also improve and I think that's true across across white all fourth um end the whole this whole Human Resources system that currently makes it impossible to hire fire and train people intelligently the whole system needs to be bined um Fifth and the the concept of the permanent the permanent civil service in general I think it's an idea uh for the for the history books in particular I would get rid of the idea of permanent secretaries at the moment permanent secretary has a role that's a combination of a chief policy officer it's Chief policy adviser a department CEO and a fixer and it's a crazy combination you're asking people to have the skills of Michael quinland the famous official the ministry of Defense to draft policy combined with the skills of Bill Gates combined with a mellian character to make everything just smooth out of the edges all day every day is things just about Teeter off the off the brink it's crazy to expect that we're going to find all these people that can combine all of the all of these three things it's Mis defining the role so what you should have here is a chief policy officer for the department and I think it would be good to have a very very very small team that fulfills that role preserves institutional memory has proper libraries runs proper records but this Chief policy advisor who I think should be a very prestigious role and a well-paid role should have no responsibility for management and implementation they're a policy advisor only um and move all the idea of a CEO or COO of the organization to to to a completely different position um next the unglamorous process of rebuilding core skills from correspondence to spreadsheets white TOS give MPS and officials are constantly giving the rest of the world advice on skills gaps and what they should do about it it needs to start looking at his own skills gaps um next I think number 10 should the whole cabinet office structure in the number 10 structure is completely broken anyone who has to deal with it knows that the system is absolutely dysfunctional and that has to change very very significantly um next open things up very radically you see in the Science World now Mass collaborations have changing all sorts of things um from things like polymath where you now have mathematicians solving problems collaborative collaboratively um or the folded program uh on Playstation there's all sorts of things which are changing the world in in science and tools that are being developed those tools and those methods should be imported into into um into whiteall um next C greater cognitive diversity the Prime Minister should be able to appoint whoever he wants as a minister and there's a very simple mechanism I think for doing this you whack them in the House of Lords and then you give Lords rights of audience in the House of Commons and you strengthen the select committee process and uh I would and I understand having talked to some old time as and House of Lords that you could maybe do this very very quickly so that would be on my to-do list if um if I ever managed to successfully get control of number 10 one of the first things I would do would be some orders in Council whz through at 2: a.m. that I gave the prime minister the right to to to to do this um so the one hand bring in people from wherever and make the ministers wh them in the House of Lords which would help as well with the division with um and have legisl far more just as a legislature um and uh bringing the other aspect that needs to be embedded much more carefully is scientific advises and the whole business of evidence-based policy that needs to be put at the heart of how secretaries of State operate rather than an add-on or like in the EU something which you can just simply abolish if um if if you don't like it you got to shrink the cabinet I've almost finished don't worry shrink the cabinet uh the idea of a cabinet of over 30 people is complete fast should be maximum of probably six or seven people break the power of the treasury the treasury uh as I said before doesn't care about about saving money the government account system is based on funny money um the spending review process does does not work at all and I think the next spending review if they try and do another spending review with the current conventional process given the numbers that they face is going to be absolute um nightmare for for whoever whoever tries to do it um and finally Warren Buffett proposed something very interesting in the in the corporate world which I think we should think about he talking about the problem whereby egom egomaniac CEOs pursue takeovers of businesses because they get massive kickbacks from it personally and he said it appears to me there's only one way to get to get a rational balanced discussion director should hire a second advisor to make the case against the proposed acquisition with fee contingent on the deal not going through this seems to me to be an extremely cunning idea and something like that institution proper red teams in whiteall that are institutionalized that can't be easily cheated because CIA famously closed down its red team on on um on wmd in Iraq so these things are very hard to do in politics but I think we need to think about um changes to the system like that so that's it in in summary my answer to to to to to the problems is the the national goal is not special relationship and it's not the EU it's making Britain the leader for education and science we need to reorient White Hall in order to achieve this we need very different Education and Training for senior politicians and civil servants need to bin some institutions create others but make them more like the immune system like than like traditional hierarchies we to break the concept of the permanent civil service and open things up to genuine problem solvers and people will say it's impossible to do this but people told me that lots of things are impossible people said you'll never beat Blair on the Euro people said you'll never get more than the fraction of your crazy plans through the DFE things are possible and particularly possible when crisis H Mone created the whole EU pretty much on the basis of what you call Beneficial crisis and because of the nature of the world and where things are going um I think we're going be seeing lots of beneficial crises shortly which will enable us to change things uh along the lines that I've suggested if you want to thank you very much many thanks in in indeed do that was um incredibly interesting um I to start with if I may with a um with a question really which is about how this change would happen I mean you you you opened your remarks by saying whether Ed Mand or David Cameron becomes prime minister in May you know nothing will change and you ended with a very radical agenda for you know a set of big changes and I suppose the question back to you then is you know where does politics come into this you know what are the mechanisms by which the sorts of things you're advocating for could could actually happen well that is a very tricky question um I'm not as I said I'm not I'm not enormously hopeful um with with the current people but the British system is so flexible and I think the scale of the crisis is so big that that some sort of change is going to happen I personally think it's that it's possible that both leaders will be gone within the next 18 months if all three leaders will be gone in the next 18 months they're all visibly failing none of them can make any progress none of them know what to do everyone in everyone outside a very closed world knows the system is knackered so you've got very very powerful conditions four things to to to change it only needs um I don't think part system is so centralized in England I think we way actually much harder to change in America because of the very deliberate checks ADV bances built in hard wide and consistent by the founding fathers but I think here the system is so flexible and so so oddly centralized that if a group of people did take over one of the main parties well there's two office mechanisms one is a group people will take over a party and very r change what they're doing I think because the system system is the way it is you could actually change an awful lot very quickly um and the second is outside competition now obviously part of the offal circle is that outside competition is very hard it's very hard for new people to break in um but it's not impossible and one of the effects possibly of ukip and the greens coming up is going to be to force everyone in Westminster to to to to to reevaluate so will things change in the next in the next year no I'm not very hopeful but I think within the next five years um I think just the scale of of all of these pressures is such that that that um they'll have Something's Gonna have to give let me just ask you a followup question um when you worked for Michael go you you spoke about your experiences in the DFE um many people whether you agree with what he did or not many people would say that um he distinguished himself as a minister in this government by having an agenda and Prosecuting an agenda um what is it that about Michael Gove or the things that you you know decided to do in why why was he the minister that he was in education it's a complicated question I get it starts to expose personally he's an adopted kid genuinely cared about it whether you agree with what he did or didn't do there's no doubt that he thought every day with the flick of the coin my life my own personal my Michael Dove's life could have been completely different I could have gone to par to didn't value education didn't send me to a good school what on Earth could have happened to me he thought about that about his own life I think and and that made him think very hard about the system overall so he so I think that's relatively unusual probably in Westminster he was extremely highly motivated secondly he was prepared his view was that he he was happier he was much more interested in having an impact in doing what he could to improve School than he wasn't having a successful political career so his approach was I don't mind if at the end of this in four or five years time I'm gone and that's the end of me if we've achieved what a considerable amount of what we want to achieve then the thing will be worth it and thirdly we built we built a team who had the same attitude one of us wanted to be MPS one of us were interested in making friends and Downing Street or anywhere else um and I think that that gave us a lot of freedom just put our foot down and do what was possible because iaj was what's the worst that can happen the wor can happen is we get fired so what we don't care about that so why not why not try very very interesting I think you certainly scored on that last point about not not needing or wanting to make friends uh with uh uh other politicians I mean other bits of whiteall but um I want to now um uh open up to some questions from the floor I think we have a microphone or over microphone um if you could say who you are that would be great um I think we need a bit of mic down here this isn't can can you hear yeah actually mess if you go to the bank yeah oh it is working okay so say who you are and where you're from and then um uh put your questions so gentleman here first yeah um just just ask you uh just say who you are first sorry wrong letter I'm from the open University um just ask you sorry that's it okay thank you very much indeed um about procure you said something about procurement uh and I think that's such an important issue because there's so much of it going on can you say a bit more about what the problems are and the other thing I wanted to ask get the other one in very quickly is is what you're saying many policies that are developed by politicians are actually experiments but they're presented as the solutions rather than actual experiments and that's the way we should actually look at them that's what I'm sure you say that second bit again the second bit is whether a lot of the policies that PE that politicians are Pres presenting to us and saying this is the answer we have the answer that they're actually no more than experiments because of the whole complexity of the system that you were talking about at the beginning but i' particularly like to hear what you've got to say about procurement and the problems there um okay on the procurement front there there's a combin there's a combination of things so on the one hand you have National systems devised in whiteall which are very complicated and don't work very well you also have the fact that that uh on almost all the important things the rules are actually EU controlled not National so you have whiteo systems don't work very well on top of that you have EU systems that that are very complicated you have all the traditional problems with how the Civil Service gold plates things you have another problem which is huge risk aversion and legal advice so so you have very complex system a national very complex system B EU legal advice about both which will probably be wrong um you have civil servants who are incentivized not to take risks so it's a black mark if if say you get an infraction letter from the European commission um and you have all of the standard problems with how White Hall struggles to introduce um EU legislation and then you have judicial review problems on top of that so you'll often have um and know we I had I I had um involving actually one of the people in this room but I won't say who uh a procurement process in which they were spat out as the winners of the procurement process and then we were given legal advice that said if you carry on and give them the project um you'll be judicial reviewed and you'll lose if you stop and redo it you'll be judicially reviewed and lose if you pause you'll be judicially reviewed and lose whatever you do you're going to be jailed and you're going to lose um and that's the kind of Minefield that that you're um that you're stuck with and that happens very very um routinely and then when you dig into it you find the people that signed it have usually gone well first of all they weren't experts in the process in the first place so you got non-experts with very technical issues then they've gone off to take another job somewhere else so the person now in charge of it says well it wasn't me know I don't really know why this was done obviously it's stupid but you can't blame me for so you have all these things you have HR judicial review legal advice going wrong National EU you have all these different things interacting um and in ways which no one really has the authority to break out of the Secretary of State can't say and the most that we did really to break out of this problem was to just go and hire topn lawyers almost the only budget if not the only budget we increased in the DFE was the lawyer budget because it was much easier to go and just hire the absolute Top Notch specialist on some branch of EU law get a decision like that but also from someone who could say we could task and say our goal is to achieve X give us legal advice that we can use in an argument with the European commission and the rest of whiteall that will enable us to do X ah right here's your legal advice this is why X is arguably legal right thanks very much off we go this is why we're going to go ahead and do that and that was a very important tool without that an awful lot of things that we wanted to do would have been blown up on the Launchpad because someone would have said some people did say all the time that's illegal they very simple things um sorry I'm straing off point so I'll I'll I'll shut up there um your point about experiments I don't C understand what you mean if you mean are they sort of accidentally experimenting you don't really understand what they're doing then yes that's true in in in in in various ways um I think it would be better probably if people were more explicit about experiments when they're doing it and said we don't know what the answer to this is therefore we're going to experiment and if it works and here's a robust way of evaluating it we'll press on and if we don't do it then we'll immediately been it and the people involved in the project will will stop being involved and stop being paid that's how Dara works why Dara is such a success it doesn't just it doesn't create these institutions that then have a bureaucratic life of their own which just keep saying oh we just keep funding us forever then they become permanent parts of the system okay so um I'm G I'll take a few if I may just to so white at the back then Julian and then gentleman at the front so three questions yeah thanks really interesting talk Dominic Daniel keman from Kings College London um so I was Keen sort of Observer of your sort of time in DFE in my old role and one of the things that I thought was really interesting was when Michael started to kind of get real traction was when he got the right people appointed to lead certain reviews people that you could trust to get on certain reviews you say certain reviews of the key sort of Pol you know the key policy Frameworks where you actually needed to make changes you need to make the case for it so people like allice and wolf for example with vocational education getting the right people appointed to from from that external world is really important but the other thing that I think Michael did that was really interesting is his non-executive directors for the Department board and some of the other so that Ned sort of role within whiteall the challenge that provided to the department but also more informally the way that he was able to leverage expertise from certain head teachers to come in and challenge that conventional thinking was really good why do you think that doesn't happen more widely in whiteall and what do you think are the sort of the waste to unblocking it because I look at most of the other Ned um sort of structures in whiteall departments and you don't have that sort of same caliber of of people as sort of the John nashes that were coming in the Theodor agus is not so attractive um to get people coming in and be part of White Hall departments it tends to be people as well often at the very end of their career who often played it safe yeah okay thanks very much and then Julian McCrae here and jul McCrae from The Institute for government um I came into one about 10 years into my career um so there were various things you were throwing out there which were really reminiscent and the obsession with CC lists which is very bizarre when I got there and I became totally um minded of when you were in um I'm just really interested in two of the sort of changes that you picked out um one was around Treasury and the spending review I think most people who look at this know that you cannot run that spending review process in the same way again including I think some people in treasury um but they're really struggling to articulate or what actually should we do how can we run it given the real constraints of politics that play into spending reviews um so just be interested in your thoughts of well what's what's the solution to that the second one um a lot of the quality at least in the policymaking side and Chris worold the DF pack has is leading a lot of work across the civil service at the moment to try to increase the quality of policymaking one I just interested in what your thoughts were about what Chris is doing is that the right direction is it kind of missing the point um what do you think about that okay thank you jul and then gentleman here at the front here George Jones I agree very much with what I think your main theme that British government is over centralized uh that the center can't deal with the complexity and you need to decentralize to Hubs two points you said that we all know that the cabinet office number 10 link is dysfunctional but I'm afraid we don't all know because that's one of the the hidden areas so I wonder if you could spell out what are the dysfunctional aspects of that relationship and secondly if you're so much in favor of hubs decentralized hubs why did Mr Gove and you at DFE undermine elected local government which did offer the possib ility of being a decentralized hub in our system okay thank you very much okay um so the first question yesterday importance of bringing people in like like Allison and also the Neds other people have said to me that the way that our Neds worked was no one else really has done the same thing I don't know if that's if that's true or not but certainly they were extremely important I think I think probably the main aspects of it are just very simple really they they're very they were determined people and high quality people but also we made clear to the department that we expected senior officials to work closely with them and we gave them specific things to do so in lot in many ways our Neds were almost like more other Junior ministers they were obviously not called that but in but lots of ways they they are particularly Theo the in theem system um and I think it was past the transition in the Department of Education so obviously everyone knows we had a very difficult time to begin with and muls of problems but as things changed and and Senior People changed and the relationship relationships changed internally then um the new permy Chris worold and others knew that we wanted them to work with these guys but they also realized that these guys could help them you know if you got someone like John Nash who's made a awful lot of money or with certain skills then I think Chris and other senior officials realized well instead of fighting this which is the normal white all way why don't we do deals and why don't we cooperate because maybe we could all come out ahead and also Go's team isn't really giving us an option they're telling us that we've got to do that so you know there's carrot and stick involved but I think probably the carrot in the end was more to begin with the stick was more important but in the second half um I think the character just the obvious dynamics of it and I think if you ask Chris worold you'd say annoying in various ways but also helpful in in in in various ways too um why does why just Pro you ask why doesn't that more simply because of the things I described the bureaucracy is programmed to resist to expel Outsiders um it doesn't want Outsiders coming in saying why you doing things like this and you could do things much better doing it like that it's the nature of fundamental nature of bureaucracies so I don't think there's anything really mysterious about that um the ifg guy you asked me about the spending review and how how it could be done better well again I think it partly goes back to incentives if you think about the system now um so take quite a crude example go is is in politics terms a much closer friend of the Prime Minister than most people are in that Minister and prime minister's position but the whole structure of whiteall puts him in a position where he is encouraged to treat the spending review process as a hostile entity he's encouraged not to tell number 10 and the treasury the truth about what the real numbers are and so what you have is a kind of odd dance the the the opaque account accountancy system means that the treasury knows that all the Departments have got money scrolled down the back of the sofa and they're right they do all have money scrolled back down the back of the sofa and it's not only squirrel down the back of the sofa hidden away from the center it's also hidden away from their own ministers so there's two different levels of hiding going on so the officials are not necessarily incentivized to tell the ministers where all the cash is and the ministers are not incentivized to tell the treasury where it is because if you tell the treasury where it is then might just say oh well well we'll have some of it even if it's stupid you know so so that's so that's one big problem but also there's no people aren't encouraged to think of this as any kind of collective exercise there's no Collective priority setting it's particularly bad with Cameron there because there are no priorities under Cameron whatsoever which which which makes hard but because of that there's no sense of what are we actually really focused on here okay we're going to make sacrifices here in order to protect this and reinforce that you know that a lot of decisions are just being made completely AR arbitrarily and that encourages the people out in the Departments to keep lying and cheating because why would you why if you've got this bizarre process seems to make decisions effectively randomly why on Earth would you often tell the truth about where money is so the only way of changing that fundamentally is change the nature of C of ministerial responsibility and to to change the whole culture about how these decisions are made as long as you keep this comp comptitive system in which you make a bid and then the treasury examines it and then comes in to find out if you're lying and you try and lie even more you can't escape I don't think it's the this process on top of that there's also a skills issue so the treasury as I said before isn't really interested in saving money as far as I could ever tell it's interested in control a lot of people there also don't have the skills needed to cut budgets effectively they've never worked in businesses way so you got a cut cost by 30% in a year for a lot of the people in the treasury cutting cost by 3% of a year it's oh my God how going can't do that everything will fall apart in a way which would seem very bizarre in private sector so I think again skills are just a crucial aspect of it um I think if you put in someone if you put in a team like our Neds like John Nash Theo and Paul Marshall and put them in involved in this in spending review then I think you'd have a very different kind of kind of spending review indeed um why doesn't number 10 work my Lord um that's the simple answer is to read my blog and that will explain all of the reasons why number 10 doesn't work it's a mix number 10 encap office you men the two together yes um it's a it's a mix of personalities uh people skills and structure so the nature of the nature of the Cameron team simply is chaos it's all they know it's all they've ever it's all they've ever known they operate in a bubble which is at most 10 days planning and is usually about 48 hours or 72 hours ahead that's it there is no long-term priority there is no long-term plan so you have the central people operating with that kind of culture and they don't think anything can change they just think that's politics they're completely astonished if anyone says what on Earth you doing you could do this differently they have no idea what you're talking about fundamental people who are the Prime Minister advisers Ed lell and Craig Oliver both of them are totally and utterly useless it's not their fault they're just in the wrong job they've been put in the wrong job it's not their fault the fault lies with with Cameron for having put them there so if you have the Prime Minister who doesn't really who has no sense of priorities can't manage we out with paper bag and then there's two chief chief advisers of people who've never R anything themselves don't know what they're doing Craig Oliver running around with this ridiculous Grid in which he's worrying about Twitter and the News cycle for the next you know for the next three hours of course it's going to be a f of course you're going to see what you see all day it can't be anything else and then you have the cabinet office system internally which also doesn't work and which doesn't connect properly to the number 10 system so you have totally dysfunctional number 10 system system the dysfunctional cabinet office system and the connections between them are complete chaos hence you have the Prime Minister bumbling out of EU press conferences making up his own media grid on the hoof saying stop this announcement tomorrow morning do this we're not going to pay this bill oh we are GNA have to pay this is the that is how that is normal it's not abnormal and a big part of the reason why people can't understand what's happening in politics is they keep looking at thinking this must be some aberration somewhere there must be some quiet calm Center like in a James Bond movie where you open the door and that's where the ninjas are who actually know what they're doing there are no ninjas there is no door what you see is all you get from that from those of people so it's partly people it's party skills and it's party structure local government local government well my argument on that would be that if if a government entity is going to run something then it'd be better for there to be local government than than State than central government but there's a fundamental problem with that in England which you'll know I'm sure a thousand times better than me which is the which is problem of how money is devel you have a system which local government is nominally responsible for various things but it's not responsible for any of the cash and that's a fatal disaster it's why so many problems happen it's why no one really has a clue who's genuinely responsible for what um in a rational world you would try and solve this problem in my in my world you'd have massive Central tax cuts and much more taxation pushed down locally and local government responsible for far more things but there's very little appetite for that in the conservative party and I think little upite really in the labor party uh as well there's just a vicious circle in which people think to get anything done you've got a centralize it and try and force it through from the middle which I think in the long run can't work but that's what all parties seem seem to think the reason why I don't feel guilty about what we did is because what we were trying to do is Empower parents directly and and in our ideal system in which you move to a national funding formula and a kind of pseudo voucher system effectively in which people can control right I'm going to go here you get my 5K but your crap I'm moving you now get my 5K then you have an system of accountability and responsibility in the school system which does not rely on politicians making intelligent judgments and that's what I thought a very important goal of what we were trying to do is we wanted to make the education system school system uh as independent of the quality of decisions made in whiteall and W possibly could we had no tensions in that I'm was much more of a much more in that more in that direction than Michael was and we had disagreement about certain things and and how to do that but overall that was our approach I think I I'll take one more round of questions I know that people one so gentleman here and then gentlem you suggested that one of the things you sorry alist Smith University of Sask sorry another academic um you suggested one of the things that could be done with a civil service system is split the role of permanent secretaries and have a have Chief policy officer role away from the chief managing officer or chief executive officer we've had a small experiment in that direction with the split of job between the cabinet secretary and the head of the Civil Service and it doesn't seem to have been a huge success okay behind Mark foden I work in a consultancy to do with it reform in government um there's a great deal of enthusiasm from using digital Technologies to change the way government works what Prospect for Success okay any more any more any more questions yeah uh yeah gentleman here just interested that you were talking about cutting down the number of people in the department which is fine until things go wrong if you haven't got people in the department who should be doing uh those those activities which they then criticized for not doing quite frequently okay um and then let's just we can speak one more in sure lady here yeah thank you Helen Gardner do you still want to open a free school okay let me try and get the so the F first question was about the permanent secretary is that right yeah um yeah so what what I what I what I'm proposing is you say um here's a CEO or COO of the Department of Education and here's a chief policy advisor doesn't mean that secret is has to do what this guy says to all um but there would be a permanent role with some Senior People serious people around them to to to give policy advice um but the COO role could be whoever if Michael wanted to put John Nash in a CO then you could just do that um I think there are all sorts of reasons why that would work better I don't think your analogy with um the experiment with Jeremy Haywood is a very good analogy for some for for various reasons um first of all in that everyone knows that Joy Hayward is in charge of everything so there's a formal division of responsibility supposedly but it's all it's not real jery Haywood is more important than anyone else in the cabinet apart from Cameron and Osborne and arguably more important than Osborne he sits right next to the Prime Minister hasn't completely by the balls and Cameron doesn't do anything without Haywood's permission so when they made that division it's not I don't think it's real division because everyone knows that Heywood is is is really in charge of these he's not just some isolated oh he's just a policy advisor to the Prime Minister but he doesn't really have any institutional power anymore that power resides with X no that power does not reside with x x what Hew would tells them to do and you can see what's happened there with the whole coo business which they talked about all the Coos this new coo figure who's his boss Heywood it's not the prime minister so it's not so the problem that you're describing kind of makes my point um the question about digital from a technical perspective yes obviously there's all sorts of ways in which it could happen but I think practically you would hit a lot of these issues that that that that I just talked about now I could be wrong about this because in my time there to begin with it was abysmal trying to get anything done like that but in the last year or so I would say something start to change and in the last three months I had some very interesting conversations with people from the center that suggested that some quite big things might change um and um Nick mentioned earlier on we when we just met that uh he's heard about some things that could change so my feeling for this could be very out ofd technologically obviously there's massive things that could change but you'd have to deal with these connected problems that I discussed of procurement systems the EU HR legal advice and that whole mishmash of of of problems if you can't deal with so sorry I haven't explain this very well in a nutshell of course there's loads you could do but you but the technological problems are not the real are not the problems it's the core issues that I think I discussed um you asked about calling people who would do who would do things well depends whether or not you actually think that should should be done first of all you could do so take for example the free schools team it's now got hundreds of people in it um if you if you if you're actually going to reorganize that department properly and have proper HR System you could do it for with I reckon the most a third of the people are currently involved and maybe something like a seventh or an eighth of the people involved it doesn't need all of those people and if you had a much smaller team that was actually properly managed and with a serious HR System then also a whole load of the problems that currently exist wouldn't exist in the first place so just be a much smoother uh and simple system lots of other things there's a prior question should the department be doing that at all sorry that was part question should be doing yeah and that's a very you know in the end that's in the end that's a political question in various ways I would I'll give you one example s says says quite says quite a lot when we started all sorts of things were completely blowing up around us couldn't get anything done on xwi said that were all vital and all I got in my first two months um pretty much was it was memos on why we had to do this that and the other on careers careers careers careers you've got to create a new career service we want to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on careers no end to careers endless memories on careers okay we're not doing careers this department can't even write its own letters accurately there's no way on the last career service was a complete disaster we're having to make loads of cuts we just shut down the last career service because it was such a disaster we're not starting a new one it's not on our priority list we're not doing it the memos keep coming stop sending me memos on careers memos keep going in the end have to walk in with the senior official to Michael and say tell this guy never to write another memo about careers and we're shutting the whole careers division down this department and everyone's going to start working on it Michael says that's what we're going to do months pass finally well the career numbers have gone down so we ended up by kind of crazy determination we ended up cutting the career service cutting cutting cutting cutting the number of people doing it but we could never quite kill it and every time we got close to killing it bloody Cameron or CLE would come along and say oh I've got to do a speech at the CBI tomorrow and I can't think what to do I want to say something about careers and then of course the ah yes well we've got all these lovely memos on careers here we are before you know the memories on careers have got the number 10 and some clown of number 10's already briefed it to the Telegraph and we're now creating some new careers thing so it's very very hard to to stop the the these sort Dynamics and actually stopping things completely um which is vital if you're really going to change change how whall works is incredibly hard it's incredibly hard actually to close something down and say we're not doing it and Michael is the only Minister I had conversation about this and I ended up pinning all the mins I said which one of we're sto in doing careers which one of you is going to go on TV and say this department does do careers anymore well well I don't want to no I don't want to either Michael around said I'll do it he was the only minister in the Department of Education or in number 10 or CL or any of them who was actually prepared to go on TV and say the Department of Education should not be in the business of careers schools should sort out careers for themselves we've closed the team we've saved the taxpayer this many millions of pounds and if you don't like it vote for someone else but of course he wasn't allowed to do that because Cameron said oh c hates that we've got to we've got to do some gimmicks on Career so you can't close it down and that's just one tiny area of the department that I think roughly was probably employing a few dozen people when we started maybe 30 or 40 people working on careers and I think well I was told we got it down to three people there probably a dozen again I don't know someone who could told me but don't say so it's just extreme so it's extremely it's extremely hard and it goes back to the point secretes of state are not really in control I mean we only did that we only got a cut at all because of the force of changing relationships inside the department we have no official power to close the careers department or even to color it by one person we only did it because we said to the per secretary we're not doing this stop it now and we've got to make all these Cuts it's crazy to spend all this money on these things but we actually need this money and these people redeployed elsewhere because of the spending review and because of all sorts of other pressures press on us um question preschool no I've decided I'm not a good person to through school as CL would said man's got know limitations I would be very I think I would be a bad person to uh to to set up a school I've helped a few schools get going and I think that's probably where my um where my help is best used I'm very happy to answer more questions if people have got them okay let's let's take one more then yeah yeah could I just ask a subsequent question um this complexity think interests me what response do you get talking to senior folks around white about complexity and problems that it's causing do people understand it on an intellectual level or do they resist it or what I'd say by far the most interesting thing responses I've had I've had um have been from Fields medalists and Nobel Prize winners and whatnot sending me random emails saying very interesting about blah blah blah what you think about this why does politics not understand so I think in the science and maths world for them this sort of stuff is completely second nature intellectually I mean it's their world they created it so it's not surprising but in whiteall it's like an alien language pretty much no one really is if you've gone through even if you're a very high performing person like say Cameron in a traditional sense you've gone through eer you've gone to a good school you've then gone on and done some kind of humanities course or PPE that doesn't expose you really to any of this thinking so unless you're an intellectually curious person which Cameron spectacularly is not then there's no reason why you would be exposed to this sort of to this sort of thing there's one guy I've noticed a guy called Andrew halane at the bank of England who talks about this sort of thing and right and and just give some extremely interesting um lectures uh I slightly worry about him and I wonder if anyone in whiteall take takes what he say seriously I hope they do but he's almost the only senior person I've seen who is involved with what with that sort of intellectual agenda and is talking about it in a in a a public way I think that's very good that he's there at the bank of England and I hope that senior people there listen to him but but someone else here will know much better than me whether he has any real clout is anybody pursuing this I mean presumably you are trying to explain that this complexity thing exists and there's a different way of responding to it mean my experience is when I've got half an hour to talk to someone about intellectually at least they will understand it I can't help thinking if some effort is put into explaining this stuff folks might be a bit of prog it's not it's not fixed in afternoon there's a few there's a few things that that that that I'm thinking about um I'm I'm going to try and and talk to well I'm going to try and talk to to some universities about creating new courses so as I said in my talk we need alternatives to PPE and one of the obvious things they that will be part of that would be would be um teaching the basics of that subject I'm also talking to some physicists who are interested in running some training courses u in Westminster for MPS um to try and teach them some of these things and basic pability and how um how the tools used in in physics in particular can be applied to all kinds of complex problems if you look another I mean one of the one of the projects I'm most proud of actually that we did in 2012 um I went to see a guy called Tim G at cambri University University who's Professor there a Fields medalist one of the cleverest people in the world and I was talking to him about various things and he said what I want to do is create a course 16 to 18 maths course for for level maths a sort math for presidents type type course and I thought that's a brilliant idea and talk to Michael about it we ended up bunging I think about half a million quid to Mii to work with GA to develop that course and it's now real there there are modules of the course there's teacher training going on it's going to start in schools in September 2015 well it's been trial now but although that's 16 to 18 Math course which I hope will have a big effect on if you go and read his BL if you Google his blog a lot of the problems in it are things that you could use in a training course for MPS so I think there' be a lot of like a math the most popular course in Berkeley is often voted the the Pres the physics for presidents course there's a brilliant book on it which I would advise anyone to to to buy um and I think there's a huge scope potentially for developing um like that no no one has to be able to go and do Advanced calculus that's not the sort of thing that that I'm talking about um but having basic conceptual understanding of these things and understanding when science when maths and physics in particular might be able to help you uh and when they can't when you're on your own even just knowing that would be um would be a great advance but when you have people now who've got no concept of what Randomness means or what probability is you can't as that statistical survey showed just do the most basic questions and they're voting and deciding on crucial questions of risk involving billions or tens of billions of pounds you're obviously going to have a lot of things go wrong so know the the the risk reward of trying to get some things like the ga course into mps's brains I think is is is massive great okay well domic thank you very much indeed I mean that was really really stimulating and I first came across Dom's work when reading his essay went published first I think via the guardian and if you haven't read it you know I mean anybody with a modicum of curiosity not to find it really interesting I I do encourage you to to read it and and do I would encourage you to set up an aican free school I think you take us for it um it would be very interesting and I hope you can come back and talk to us again actually about this Central National Mission you talked about about making Britain the world leader in education science because I think that's a very interesting and important uh idea and we should explore it further but can I ask you to thank Dominic in the usual way thank you thank you very much for coming bye-bye for