Progress was pleased this month to kick off a round of musical thinktank chairs, welcoming former transport secretary and education minister Andrew Adonis as our new chair alongside new vice-chairs Jenny Chapman MP, Julie Elliott MP, Dan Jarvis MP, Alison McGovern MP, and Toby Perkins MP. Our former chair, shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg MP, becomes honorary president, replacing former health secretary Alan Milburn who joins the new Progress advisory board.
Elsewhere in the thinktank world, top pay is all the rage. No, the thinktankers have not set about awarding themselves fat remuneration packets. Instead, from Compass’ High Pay Commission, to IPPR’s Pay and Performance project, they are riding the wave of outrage at spiralling pay deals and asking: What is to be done? The tanks may be less ‘rage against the machine’ than your understandably outraged voter, being evidently much more academic about the whole issue. But with business chiefs still appearing to call the shots, enjoying pay rises of 49 per cent on average in 2011, it is not only leftie thinktanks who are in on the act as well: Cameroon thinktank Policy Exchange recently hosted an event on executive pay.
Meanwhile, Progress’ deputy director Richard Angell first advocated a fair pay kitemark on these pages, and he recently pitched the idea at the Fabian Society’s new year conference. Companies could achieve bronze, silver and gold kitemarks according to whether they pay the living wage, have worker representation on the remuneration committee, and meet the John Lewis top-to-bottom pay ratio. Could this be the ‘voluntarist approach’ that senior Ed Miliband adviser Stewart Wood expressed a preference for in an interview with Progress in December?
Other big topics of late have included Demos’ Commission on Assisted Dying, which concluded parliament ‘should consider a new safeguarded framework to permit terminally ill people … to end their own life with a doctor’s assistance’. Demos recently appointed former Prospect magazine editor David Goodhart as its new director, while the tank’s chair Philip Collins admits to being swayed this way and that on the issue of assisted dying, himself concluding in the Times that some sort of legal fudge may be the best of both worlds.
Collins is contributing to the book reviews on page 26 of this month’s Progress, while on the same page IPPR director Nick Pearce reviews the history of the once-trailblazing Adam Smith Institute, finding that the ASI has died something of a death and that, if it is not to be put out of its misery, it should take a long hard look at appraising its own less-than-glorious history since the fall of Margaret Thatcher.
From the end of life to early years, IPPR’s new report on childcare echoes Progress vice-chair Liz Kendall MP’s call in the The Purple Book for universal childcare. It argues that ‘High-quality early years provision delivers a net financial return to the Treasury as well as delivering better outcomes for children, families and society’ and so should be made ‘a strategic priority for public service and welfare reform in the UK’. The main political parties have not fully addressed the looming ‘care crunch’ for those looking after both children and elderly relatives, but it must only be a matter of time before they do, and time is on no one’s side.
The King’s Fund health thinktank views bringing together NHS and social care services as imperative: ‘Improving integrated care should be seen as a “must-do” priority to ensure it receives the attention needed,’ it stated in a recent report. Whether ‘integration’ or ‘competition’ should be promoted within the NHS has been one of the many battles over the government’s reforms, which have focused on structures rather than quality. Aside from the many dangers in the government’s plans, the coalition is missing a trick politically: people are concerned about the quality of care much more than whether it is GPs or others doing the commissioning. This is something that Labour should seize on, thus demonstrating that it is the only forward-looking party planning for all our futures.