Thinking about the Queen's speech. One thing I remember being struck by when I started work in No 10 back in the late 2000s is just how much the bottleneck of parliamentary time slows down policymaking. (1/n)

You have space for 20-25 bills a year and that simple capacity constraint is one of the main things that determines policymaking. (2/n)

It's a particular issue for topics deemed lower priority and that always finish 26th on the list. e.g. I remember various bills (marine standards? access to coastal paths?) that just got shelved year after year. (3/n)

It's a basic point but a big deal when we're living through such rapid change. It makes me think of a letter Sir Robert Peel wrote to William Gladstone in July 1846, in which he complained about ‘the immense multiplication of detail in public business’. (4/n)

At the time the govt was drowning in the implications of the industrial revolution, and it became clear that the state's policymaking machinery was simply unfit for the changes underway. Well, there basically wasn't any true policymaking machinery. (5/n)

This is part of a wider debate, but it feels increasingly clear that the same is true again now - i.e. one aspect of the state that is least fit for a digital age is the process by which we develop and pass legislation. (6/n)

Even if you put the pageantry aside (gold thrones and the cost of living crisis?), the process itself is still the one we designed back then, for an industrial age. (7/n)

e.g. There's the linearity of policy-making - a largely sequential set of steps in which the baton is handed from policy research, decision, consultation, legislation, to implementation - with no real iteration. (8/n)

And then there's the stunning slowness of the thing, with the end-to-end process often taking years, by which time the plans are already outdated. (9/n)

One consequence is that we push ever more govt business to arms-length bodies like regulators. Which sort of works but is a bit uncomfortable in terms of democratic accountability. (10/n)

I also think this will get more uncomfortable because one thing that happens in a technological revolution is that we face deep policy questions that are more than technocratic - they're questions of political economy or ethics, which we can't delegate to regulators. (11/n)

Anyway, unintended thread. The point is: one of the biggest policy challenges we face is the outmodedness of the policy-making process itself. (/End)