In 2019, the Heywood Foundation launched its first fellowship in memory of the late cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood, giving a senior civil servant the opportunity to explore issues relating to public service and policy outside of their day job. Jenny Bates, then a director general in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, became the fourth official to take on the Heywood Fellowship last September.
The aim of Bates’s fellowship, which is spent at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, is to “consider the changing global economic order and seek to develop a refreshed approach – or longer-term strategy – for the UK”.
Her project seeks to “diagnose, understand and take account of that shifting global context and the UK’s position and to develop an approach that can both respond to the needs and aspirations of the people of the UK and endure through inevitable uncertainty”.
Here she tells CSW about the work her team is doing, her goals and the ways she’s learned from previous Heywood fellows.
Tell us about your fellowship – what are you working on?
We’re looking at how the world is changing, particularly how globalisation is changing and how the global economy is shifting quite radically. My hook at the moment is [Canadian prime minister] Mark Carney’s speech at Davos – he talked about the system facing a rupture, not a transition. That is the context we’re facing; the era of globalisation that we’ve been in is fundamentally shifting. I’m trying to work out how the UK navigates that: what do we need to do to be successful economically in that changing world? That’s the really short version.
“The spirit of the Heywood Fellowship is open policymaking, so publishing those papers is like thinking out loud”
Why this subject?
As a government, we’ve done a lot of really good thinking on how the world is changing from the national security, foreign policy side, such as the integrated review, the integrated review refresh and the national security strategy. I’m positing that we have done less collective thinking deeply on the economic side, so I’m trying to fill a gap. I say that as someone who’s spent 25 years doing international economic policy – I’m slightly talking to myself.
What will success look like at the end of this project?
There are three parts: the first is I think we need a refreshed strategic framework and a new set of what I call policy tramlines – guiding principles or a strategy for what we’re trying to do.
The second thing is specific policies. It’s not enough just to have a framework; we know in policymaking that it’s helpful to be really specific about what that would mean – say, what would that mean in trade? What would that mean in finance? – so we hope to provide some illustrative, useful and perhaps innovative thoughts in the policy space.
The third thing is capability: if we were to pursue that approach, would we need different capabilities or skills in the civil service? Do we need to be organised differently?
How long have you been thinking about this topic?
I had the framework for what the project should do before I came to Oxford. It’s fair to say that colleagues in government are thinking about this, so I’ve not got it from nowhere. As the DG on economics and global issues in the Foreign Office, I had started a piece of work internally on it and there is still work going on internally. The fellowship gives me the time and space to focus only on this, whereas in government, I would have been doing it with a little bit of my time alongside loads of other things.
Where have you got to now with the project?
There are six steps: define the system; talk about how it’s changing; scenarios for the future; objectives; new strategies; capability. We’ve got as far as step four. We’ve done the diagnosing stage and we’ve published two documents: the framing anchor paper and a set of scenarios for the future.
We’ve used scenarios techniques to do that, thinking about how the world might look different and how things might change. We’ve proposed some objectives for the UK that we think are enduring, then we’ve put out some initial thoughts on what a different set of UK policies might look like – the policy tramlines or alternative options. They’re a bit like Lego bricks: things you could put together as a strategy. The next phase is to turn all of that into a strategy and test that strategy.
The spirit of the Heywood Fellowship is open policymaking, so publishing those papers is like thinking out loud. We don’t want to just come up with a strategy and then tell everybody what it is; we want people’s input as we’re doing it. We’ve shared the building blocks, but we want a conversation about the building blocks.
How do you go about getting that input?
We are ruthlessly stealing from-slash-learning from the previous fellow, Lucy Smith, who set out a playbook on how to do national strategy development, which we are using alongside a lot of her techniques. She’s got this concept of a “flotilla”: if you have a national strategy, it’s not just about the national government; it’s all of the other actors in the system, and we are considering what that means for our work.
For international economic policy, business is a hugely important part of that flotilla because they do the activity, the trading and investing. It also includes other bits of the policymaking system like regulators and arm’s-length bodies; the Bank of England, the Competition and Markets Authority, the British Business Bank. And we need to involve other parts of the UK like the devolved administrations and sub-national governments. We’ve just had a launch event about our objectives and strategies, where we had representatives of those groups.
During our scenario analysis, we did workshops with the business community, academia, historians and policymakers, and we’ve thought about the wider public as well. There’s a lot of polling on what British people think about issues that are relevant to our work. Nobody says to them, “What do you think of the global economic order?” but there’s lots of information on what they think about trade and climate and Britain’s role in the world. And we’re hoping to do something more in the deliberative engagement space in the next phase.
Working with historians has been really helpful as well. You sometimes hear people say things like, “We’re an open, free-trading nation”. That’s not really true across all or even much of our history. We’ve always been broadly trying to achieve a similar goal – pursuing prosperity – but we’ve really changed how we’ve gone about doing it. That helps you free up a bit from current frames, and there might be some lessons from that.
How has that engagement shaped your thinking so far?
One area where we’re trying to think differently is with the business community. The relationship between the government and business in the UK is a bit more distant than in some other countries. Businesses are telling us: “We’re either having very brief conversations at very senior level between CEOs and ministers; or we’re having very technical conversations about the latest consultation on a piece of legislation, or what clause we want in a trade agreement.” But there’s not a middle, strategic [conversation happening].
Some of the scenarios that we propose are quite challenging in terms of the economic headwinds that we’re facing or the complexity of dealing with countries that are behaving in unhelpful ways. So we are wondering whether we need a different way for business and government to work together to navigate that. For example, do we need a bit more of a “Team GB” approach, and what would that look like?
Then something that comes through in the public opinion data is that British people see our engagement with the world through quite a strong economic lens, as a way of becoming and continuing to be prosperous. That’s interesting because it gives us a sense of what the objective should be.
“We have had huge amounts of positive engagement with government. Lots of people keep saying: ‘So glad you’re thinking about this’”
What are some of the lessons to come out of those conversations?
One is that when the rules and the international system get too rigid, there’s not enough scope for countries to adjust or flex – then you tend to get real breaks in it. The obvious example is the gold standard: countries went on, then they came off, then went back on and it eventually collapsed. It didn’t provide the flexibility they needed so the system collapsed under its own weight. It worked for a while and then didn’t.
You’re seeing echoes of that in some areas of the trading system now and the rules system around the World Trade Organization. One big debate is that some countries want more flexibility – they’re saying: “Bits of this don’t work for us any more”. It’s a really difficult thing to negotiate because countries have different interests, but if you can’t find ways to accommodate some of that shifting need and interest, you tend to get a rupture.
So there’s something about: yes, rules and structures are useful, but we have to think about how you can evolve and adapt them. Otherwise, history shows you might lose more than you were aiming for by thinking the idea is to hold on to everything.
Who else is on your team for the project?
I have a team member from the Department for Business and Trade, Martin, who has spent the last few years doing trade negotiations for the UK – he was helping lead the work on negotiating with the US after the tariffs were imposed. I have Catherine, who has a lot of experience doing economic diplomacy in the Foreign Office. I’m also bringing in another team member from the Treasury. The fellowship is very policy focused – we’re not just thinking great intellectual thoughts, we’re trying to do the “so what?” for the UK – and those are the three departments that matter most for my project.
While the fellowship is a great opportunity for me, it’s also a unique opportunity for the team members from those departments. It’s a chance to step out of government for a bit and take that experience back with them into their next job.
Then there is an academic fellow funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Michael. That helps us connect into academia and he brings an understanding of the academic world. He knows some of the interesting professors to talk to and he can give us techniques for doing things that we wouldn’t use otherwise.
Do you think this experience will change your approach to your day job at all?
I don’t think it’s necessarily going to radically change what I do – I started my career as an economist, I was a director of analysis – but it has really underlined for me that you need to make space to do that kind of analytical work. This is incredibly valuable. We have had huge amounts of really positive engagement with government. Lots of people keep saying to me: “So glad you’re thinking about this.” We can’t just have the Heywood fellowship doing that, right? We need more of government finding the time and the space to do that strategic, options development work. I would want to try and make sure with anything I was doing, I created room for that.
I’m also getting a chance to use some techniques that I have wondered about. The scenarios technique has been really useful and we’ve also been working with AI. I’d always looked at large language models, but the thing about the generic LLMs is that their data source is everything that’s written in English – I worry about that, because you’re relying a lot on the algorithm.
But you can create your own dataset and run it through an LLM, so then you’re in charge of what goes in. This is super useful – this is what we’ve been doing with some of the polling and when we’ve been looking at what mayors, devolved governments and business communities have written about what they think the UK’s international strategy should look like.
How will you ensure your work gets used, rather than published and forgotten?
It starts before you start the project – so getting buy-in from the core ministries before I even went to do the fellowship. The three departments I mentioned are kind of sponsoring the fellowship, so they agree this is a question that needs looking at.
The second thing I’ve done is set up an advisory group with senior representatives from those departments to help challenge us, so they are coming with us on the journey.
Third, in the workshops and the more detailed work we’re doing, we’re involving not just the DGs, but the analytical teams, the policy teams in the departments. We’re inviting them to Oxford and getting their insight and engagement.
The last piece is having something relevant and useful to say at the end that engages policymakers – a framework and policy ideas – so they can see how that is relevant to what they’re trying to do. This is not likely to be a report where I’m saying: “One specific bit of government needs to do this.” It’s more: “Is there a collective sense that people understand the new sense of direction and some specific ideas?”
It goes back to our measures of success: it’s a process and a journey for the civil service as well [as for me]. It’s not going to be one of these things where it’s like, either they’ve passed this bit of legislation or they haven’t. The signs of success will be: in a couple of years’ time, do I see people using the language of the framework? Do I see policies beginning to emerge that are consistent with that?
To read the papers Jenny Bates has published during her fellowship, visit heywoodfoundation.com/publications