Working on a speech to give to the Federation of Small Businesses:

A portrait of the Chancellor:

Leading the daily 4pm political meeting in No 10 with Gabby Bertin, the prime minister's press secretary and Ameet Gill, the PM's head of strategic communications:

A phone call with the Danish finance minister, Bjarne Corydon:

Holding a meeting with financial secretary to the Treasury Mark Hoban in No 11:

Reading papers in his office:

Making a point at the 4pm No 10 meeting:

Joking with an aide:

Listening to a guest at a Federation of Small Businesses reception:

Breakfast meeting report: Feeding the flames

Interview with Bob Forsyth, partner at Ernst & Young

The facts and figures

Future movers, future shakers - interviews with Nicko Williamson and Fraser Smeaton

Right on the mark - interview with Mark Prisk, minister for enterprise and small business

What were the main barriers you faced starting up your business?
Finance, mainly. I was 22 when I was raising the £200,000 of seed capital I needed to start Climatecars. Friends and family were the only place I could raise this sort of money, considering my age and track record (or lack thereof) – banks were not interested. I managed to raise the money, but got turned down by numerous people who thought I was mildly insane.

Also, people and experience. I had to find people to help me get the business off the ground, but I found that lots of people were incredibly generous with their time.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to start up their own business from scratch?
Build a good team, make sure you know your product and sector, conduct thorough research, ensure you raise enough cash to fund it (assume all your projections are wrong and you’ll need double the amount of money you thought) and, above all, work incredibly hard. When you’re doing a start-up, life gets put on hold – it’s all consuming, incredibly hard work and stressful.

What did you find most helpful during your start-up?
My team of advisers and mentors. I approached London Business School and through them met two incredibly bright ex-MBA students who I managed to persuade to join my board (they are still on it today), plus numerous other advisers.

What’s the biggest thing government can do to make things easier for entrepreneurs like you?
They need to continue to reward entrepreneurs for success and protect investors who are willing to take the chance on maverick entrepreneurs. In this vein, I like the idea of extending enterprise investment schemes and venture capital trusts. More can be done to reward genuine risk capital.
I also believe the government can do more to market the funding available to entrepreneurs. A good idea would be a central funding portal, partly funded by the government and partly by business angel networks, venture capitalists etc, and backed up by a good team of people who can a) meet with entrepreneurs to discuss their business and consult on where to raise funds plus make intros; and b) provide information online in an easily accessible form with how to fund your business.

Fraser Smeaton of Morphsuits

What were the main barriers you faced when starting up your business?
There’s a difference between getting started and growing the business. With that second point, there were several problems, but actually getting started was easy. Once you get going there are so many things you don’t know about, and there’s no one place to find the answers to those things: grants from universities, grants from government bodies, training. Secondly, once you start growing, and find you have a very big idea like we did, you need money to grow, and getting at that money is very difficult. We’re not in the Silicon Valley start-up world, where people know how to find venture capital, so most turn to the banks, and if we hadn’t been well-connected, and able to speak to senior people, we wouldn’t have got the money. Even when we did get the money, we had to pay a higher price for it.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to start up their own business?
Once you have got an idea and you know it’s good, talk to as many people as possible. Don’t worry about people stealing your idea. There are so many people who worry about that and miss out on so much advice from people who’d be glad to give it for free. The risk of anybody nicking it is massively outweighed by the fact that they don’t get the benefit of all this advice. We have so many anecdotes about how we bored people at dinner parties with our problems shipping things from China, where someone goes: ‘Have you heard of a firm called Seko? They are a shipping agent’. And we go: ‘What’s a shipping agent?’ Now they do all our shipping and we don’t have to worry about it. Keep talking to people, and then they’re the ones who’ll put you in touch with people who can solve your problems.

Did you find there were any formal processes or routes you could take to do that, or was it more a case of playing it by ear?
There are formal processes but they’re far too disparate, and you wouldn’t know where to go. People give you hints about where to get a grant, but you’re busy running your business. And if you have to spend your time scouring Google and filling out forms, then you’re not concentrating on your business.

What would make it so much easier is if there was a place that was well-marketed and well-run, provided by the government, that was the one-stop shop for all the advice and grants you may need. That way we could distinguish between small businesses that need just a tiny bit of help to better a newsagent or a taxi firm, and businesses that have the potential to be something that could make a real difference to the country. And when we spot those people we should be unashamed about throwing resources at them.

This article is from the March issue of Total Politics

This is Chloe Smith's first interview since the ‘hoo-hah’ surrounding her appointment as economic secretary to the Treasury late last year. It quickly becomes obvious that she's an intensely private person who does not particularly enjoy talking about herself.

She is surprisingly good fun, quick-witted and brimming with smiles and laughter.  But her public image is rather more serious and robotic. As our interview progresses I understand why; there are two Chloes – and the joyous side of her character can't be contained by the more serious professional one. 

Smith can still surprise. Within a minute of our chat beginning she has volunteered that she loves arts and crafts, being "a bit of an amateur sketcher".

"I love drawing, I absolutely love arts, I sketch a bit myself… life drawings," she volunteers. Taken by surprise, I blurt out: "What, naked people?". She quickly shoots back, "Yes. Not me... usually."

It's clearly something she enjoys, although she's not a member of a club or class. Still, certainly not something you would have predicted from the youngest government minister. 

Perhaps we should, though. Her parents met at art school, her mother became a textiles teacher and her father a furniture designer and craftsman. Smith grew up with her brother in a happy house surrounded by her father’s handmade furniture.   Her earliest memory is of wandering along a country lane picking blackberries. Her happy, settled upbringing allowed Smith to excel academically at state school in Norfolk, where she moved when aged three.

But more recently media stories have been less cheerful. Some have described it as character assassination, while others believe it is simply the rough and tumble of politics at the top table. For a small number in the Conservative Parliamentary Party, inexperienced but super-loyal Smith’s swift elevation to the Treasury has been hard to swallow. Smith responds to the criticism by being very careful not to upset her colleagues or to respond to the criticism. She was touched by the letters and emails of support she received on her promotion. She's aware that she has a lot to learn from those with great experience, and is happy to listen and learn, but in return, she says: “You’ve got to judge me on what I do. I can’t help what I look like or what age I am any more than anyone else can. Clearly, I’m young, and that always gives me something to prove. That’s what I’ve set out to do.”

Before she entered the rough and tumble of politics Smith spent time at Deloittes as a management consultant. And although she worked for about a year as part of Francis Maude’s implementation team, getting the Conservative Party ready for government, being thrust into the hurly-burly of a by-election was a bit of a shock when it came.

“It was one of those rather strange moments when the by-election was announced. I was sitting in an office, and Sky TV was on. A colleague came around the corner and said, ‘Have you seen this? This is the constituency where you're the candidate, isn’t it?’ I took one look, took a sort of a gulp and just got stuck in.” 

The by-result in Norwich North suggests she did indeed get 'stuck in', although during the campaign, as is often the case with by-elections nowadays, unscrupulous political opponents put about rumours which were completely untrue.

Whilst Smith is understandably reticent about giving away too much about her private life, the jobs – MP, whip or economic secretary – are another matter. She loves them all with a sense of pride, and a genuine sense of excitement.

It can't have been easy for a 29-year-old to jump into such an important job, and privately she must have had considerable doubts about it when it was offered. She’d been in a lengthy school governors' meeting in her constituency, and on leaving had discovered a barrage of messages to call Downing Street. Calling from the car park, Smith then had to sit waiting with her thoughts for some time before the PM called back. 

If she had doubts then, they have since dissolved in her enthusiasm to get things done: "I got offered the job on the Friday and went in on the Sunday for the first time.  I was keen to get on with it – that's my hallmark. I wanted to get my head round everything, and decided that my approach of getting stuck in was the right one. I tried not to be overly daunted." 

When I ask her about the qualities needed to be a Treasury minister, she replies, "You absolutely don’t need to be a chartered accountant,” and roars with laughter.  She's referring to the reported conversation with the PM when he offered her the job. The story goes that after Cameron told Smith he'd like to offer her the post, she replied: "It’s a little daunting." The PM responded: "Not daunting, surely, for someone who was a chartered accountant?" She responded, "Actually, prime minister, I wasn’t an accountant. I was a management consultant in an accountancy firm."

When I ask her about her new brief, the words tumble out: "It's quite a role, but I'm really enjoying the job. The list of things I'm responsible for is stupidly long – sorry, I mean particularly long," she says with an enormous grin.  "So far I've been dealing with Danny Alexander on a lot of things, such as the responsibility the Treasury has for child poverty and welfare. But, equally, there's been a lot of work alongside David Gauke, the exchequer secretary, on the Finance Bill." 

 Her ultimate boss in the Treasury is George Osborne and she likes the way he operates. "We meet regularly, and he's extremely clear about where he sees the country going, how to get the country back to prosperity, how to improve things.  He's also extremely clear to work for in terms of priorities for the team." I talk to Smith as the latest GDP figures show a drop and there is no sign of a change in strategy. "There is no Plan B, certainly not," she says firmly, "we know Plan A is working."

No-one should be surprised by this show of loyalty. But there is little intellectual underpinning to Smith’s Conservatism; her views are based on personal experience. Rural Norfolk was not full of opportunities, and the young Chloe quickly learned that you had to be self-reliant and go out and make your opportunities.

When I ask her whether she has read any political books, her response is surprising: “I have, but by choice I would probably read fiction to relax. I’m a pragmatist – I would say I’m a centrist but a little to the left in the Conservative Party.” I ask her to explain further: “I’m very much a liberal on social things, but equally liberal in terms of money. I want to see people free to go off and find their own opportunities and succeed.”

Her voting record is 100 per cent loyal, and she doesn’t believe in creating artificial ideological divisions that she believes don’t really exist. “The government is going in the right direction, which means it gains my support and, crucially, that I'm proud to be both in government and a local MP. By supporting this government in the best interests of this country, I believe I'm also representing the best interests of my constituents and all those who voted Conservative,” she says with conviction. 

Smith’s view of politics, her party, being an MP is modern and different – some would say it's a new sort of politics, less about doctrines and ideologies, and more about getting involved in communities, being an ambassador for politics and making step-by-step improvements that change lives. “Politics,” says Smith, “is about doing things in your community. It begins when two people stand together, because it’s about how you interact with others and how you work with local people. You’re in it to try and change things and make them happen.”

In many respects, it's pure ‘Cameroon’. It was, after all, David Cameron who attracted her to run for Parliament, although it was Gillian Shepherd who encouraged Smith to think of politics. They met while Smith was trying to set up a youth forum in Norfolk, and Shepherd was her local MP. Smith regards her as a mentor and “a very inspiring woman who continues to give me very sound advice on lots of things.”   

A newspaper article quoted an acquaintance of Smith saying; "Without meaning to be bitchy, even as a teenager she seemed middle-aged and incredibly ambitious. She knew what she wanted and knew how to get it."

Smith retorts this is “pure fiction”.

When Cameron became leader, Smith became comfortable with the idea of becoming an MP. She felt his drive for modernisation of the Conservative Party and commitment to getting more women MPs were critical to her putting her name forward. “Being an MP was not a burning desire,” she says. “I had loosely thought about it, but, God, no, I wasn’t a political anorak. At University, I didn’t 'do' a great deal of politics – a couple of bits here and there, but I was drinking and dancing with the best of them and enjoyed it very much.”

Smith bridles at the view that her life has been limited by her career or ambition. “Yeah, I’ve achieved quite a lot, at an early age, that I’m very proud to be doing. But it’s only the split working site [between the Treasury and her constituency] and the hours that constrain a perfectly normal social life. I go down the pub, I go out dancing when I can squeeze in the time for that, and I have a wide range of friends.”

Stresses from the working week are normally taken out the badminton court in Norwich on a Friday night, where she has been known to turn the air blue (it was also known to happen occasionally while she was in the Whips’ Office).

Smith says she is not concerned about the coming years in government. Her attitude is to deal with what comes. She expands on her creed with a quote from The Sun that she apparently saw while getting fish and chips on New Year’s Eve. Another Chloe, “from Leeds or somewhere”, was on Page 3.  Smith explains: “The news in brief said: 'Chloe could not believe Tesco put Easter eggs on sale the week before Christmas. She said, ‘They should take a leaf out of celebrated physicist Albert Einstein’s book; it was he who observed, 'I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.’”

It's a story that brings me neatly back to the subject of nudity and life drawing. I’m told that it's fold of flesh rather than rippling muscles that make drawing models interesting. Smith agrees, and explains that the pose can also be interesting, but in an art class you are really looking for curves and folds of flesh. So which celebrity would Chloe Smith like to draw? “Rafael Nadal would make an interesting model,” she says. I venture that it might be for his interesting folds of flesh? “No–" She grins. "–that would be a question of plain muscle.”

Rob Wilson is the Conservative MP for Reading East

This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

In the days after Christmas 2011, Nick Hurd, the minister for civil society, dispensed with traditional festive relaxation and took to the Daily Telegraph to encourage more people to give to charity and warned against the UK becoming “an island of self-interest”. He added that, while the country has a strong record of charitable giving, there is still room for improvement. “UK households actually spend as much on cheese as they do on charity – less than £1.50 per household a week,” he noted. “The poor give a greater proportion of their income than the rich. Just eight per cent of the population do 49 per cent of the giving.”  This was seen by some as finger-wagging by a rich man, but Hurd at least puts his money where his mouth is, giving one per cent of his income to the Charities Aid Foundation.

As an alumnus of both Eton and Oxford, Hurd has faced the same difficulties as the prime minister in positioning himself as in touch with current economic woes. He was even a member of the bibulous Bullingdon Club. Speaking to the Evening Standard last summer, he brushed this aside, saying: “It is just a very long time ago and it doesn’t seem relevant to what I’m doing now.”

Also ‘a long time ago’ was Hurd’s 18-year career in business, which took him to Brazil for four years to represent a British investment bank. But he returned to Britain to establish the Small Business Network, which advised the Conservative Party on policy. He then took the well-trodden route to Parliament, becoming chief of staff to Tim Yeo, who was environment and transport secretary at the time.

Hurd was elected as the MP for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner in 2005. It was perhaps unsurprising – Hurd is the son of former foreign secretary Lord Hurd and is the fourth generation of Hurds to sit in the Commons. As if that wasn’t enough, he married Lady Clare Kerr in 2010, the daughter of Conservative political heavyweight Michael Ancram.  

Beginning his parliamentary career tackling environmental matters, he was immediately appointed to the environmental audit select committee and chaired the climate change group as part of the Quality of Life Policy Commission. In 2007, Hurd introduced the Sustainable Communities Act. This received widespread support and he told Parliament at the time: “When it comes to shaping the future of the communities we live in, we must accept local people know best.”

Hurd spent 15 months as shadow charities minister between 2008-10, before being appointed to his current role. Speaking to Total Politics last year, Hurd outlined that the big society is “rooted in a strong sense of political philosophy – about wanting to give people greater freedom and encouraging a greater sense of social responsibility and less dependence on the state”.

The civil society brief has been a tough sell. Considering losses in local services, it would seem that Hurd is in a unique position to cultivate community-led projects. But how can he take a brief that seems largely theoretical and provide help to needy organisations? At last year’s Guardian Social Enterprise Summit, Hurd recognised the scale of the task, explaining: “There’s a huge job to do to connect social enterprises to traditional capital.”

But change may be underway. Hurd has been at the forefront of promoting Big Society Capital, which aims to act as a wholesale lender to social finance providers. The scheme is expected to launch this spring. It intends to be financed by high street banks and an apparent £400m that lies in dormant British bank accounts.

Whatever the future success of these proposals, at least one cannot accuse Hurd of being regressive when it comes to encouraging civil engagement. At last year’s Conservative Party conference, he risked criticism from the baby-boomer generation by informing the audience he “would like to save more people from the golf club” and “harness the skills and energy” of Britain’s ageing population.

Hurd now faces the challenges of creating more sustainable funding streams and ploughing on with the big society and its fragile image. If he can achieve this, he might look forward to some of the staying power of Hurd Sr.

The view inside Westminster

Experienced Conservative MPs wondered if Hurd would follow in his father’s footsteps and be an ‘old-style wet’. That is not quite accurate, although Hurd has been given Cameron’s most paternalistic policy, the big society, as his ministerial responsibility. Despite this role, colleagues note he is not part of the close circle around the prime minister and “as a whole can be a bit of a loner” in the words of a government colleague. He is, however, viewed as “a clever, capable” minister.

This article appeared in the February issue of Total Politics

There has been plenty of recent discussion on the woes of the Conservative 2010 intake who have yet to be promoted into the government’s ranks. They are, of course, not the only ones dealing with frustrated ambitions in their party. Outside government, there are the older intakes now being forced to come to terms with their talents being permanently ignored by David Cameron. And inside government, there are the Conservative shadow cabinet members who missed out on the chance to sit around the large table in No10. Theresa Villiers, minister of state for transport, is one, relegated to a ministerial rather than a cabinet position when the coalition government was formed in 2010. She admits she “was disappointed”, but is mindful of “a lot of talented colleagues who were also displaced, some of whom haven’t ended up with any kind of role in government at all”. Villiers continues to sound hopeful, however, despite now serving under her second secretary of state after Justine Greening (who was in the same 2005 intake) was promoted from a ministerial role at the Treasury. “It seems to me that resilience and sticking power is a key quality in politics,” she says. “You never know what’s coming round the corner. It’s very important to be resilient, to stick in the job and do whatever job you’re given absolutely to the best of your abilities.”

Her transport role is a demanding, wide-ranging job, which, she says, is “keeping me busy”. Her remit includes rail policy, aviation and the Olympics. Talking to Total Politics in her Horseferry Road office, Villiers comes across as someone who does not relax easily. Our initial interview time was moved back a week. Explaining why, the transport minister, sounding like a student, jokes she had “an essay crisis” to get many of the documents prepared for the rail franchising decisions to be made in early 2012. These decisions – she calls them “my baby” – are now sitting on Villier’s small desk in bulging ringbinders, and she admits the work has left her feeling “a little bit tired”. Her office doesn’t appear to have much in the way of decoration, barring small sofas in the far corner, which we sit on – she jokes that these had to be dusted before my arrival because she hardly uses them. It is easy to imagine her burning the midnight oil in here, on the top floor of the Department for Transport, working laboriously on dry policy documents. There are certainly few distractions in the room.

Sitting down on the under-used sofas, with the Home Office visible through the window behind her, Villiers explains how the new rail franchises will last longer – most for 15 years – than the current deals. She claims they are “a good balance”, which “will be better for passengers, for taxpayers and the overall efficiency of the railways”. The details will be released in spring 2012, and while the franchises include longer-term issues of competency and efficiency of the train operating companies, there are political hot potatoes for her department to face right now.

“It’s confirmed that delivering something like this is always really, really difficult,” says Villiers about the now-confirmed HS2 railway line, which will run between London and Birmingham. The hugely controversial project could see Welsh secretary Cheryl Gillan resign from the cabinet, although the Chesham and Amersham MP has been assuaged by extra tunnelling for the line. It has also caused huge concern from backbench shire Conservative MPs in the Tory heartlands of Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, South Northamptonshire and Staffordshire.

HS2 is a massive infrastructure project. The current estimated costing is £32bn, and Villiers calls it “one of the biggest decisions in relation to our transport network since the motorways in the 1950s”. No pressure there, then, for Villiers and Greening.

As shadow transport secretary, it was Villiers who announced her party’s HS2 policy in 2008, and she remains “very enthusiastic” about the benefits that HS2 will bring. Villiers has a message for backbenchers worried about the environmental impact of the new railway. She says: “HS1 [the line running from London to the Channel Tunnel] demonstrated that you can build these lines in a way that does actually mitigate and minimise the local impact. Inevitably, before something is built, people are really anxious about its impact but, very often, it proves to be far less damaging than they expect.”

She adds: “I’m absolutely confident that the reality [will only] be a tiny fraction as bad as people fear.” Interestingly, Villiers highlights another weapon in the government’s arsenal for use against colleagues stubbornly set against HS2, who might be thinking of rebelling against the Hybrid Bill for the railway in 2013. “What’s really important,” she says, “is maintaining the cross-party consensus, because if you have that, there are ways in which you can deliver, for example, the legislation in a more efficient, faster way.”

Aside from its environmental impact, one argument used against HS2 is that, far from boosting growth in the north, it will further tilt economic activity in England towards London. “That goes against all analysis,” retorts Villiers, adding: “It tends to be the regional economies, rather than the centre, which benefit more. The TGV network has helped Paris, but it’s helped people in places like Lyon and Lille more.”

The transport minister argues that “cities round the world fight tooth and nail to get themselves on the high speed networks” because “when you get a less economically-prosperous area linked with a more prosperous area, those improved transport links tend to have great economic benefits for the area that’s less prosperous”.

Again using the northern French city of Lille as an example, Villiers continues: “Because Lille is on the TGV network, it has one of the biggest office complexes now in the entire world. I just don’t see that it makes economic sense to think that improving transport connections to a place damages its economy. I have way more confidence in the north of England than ‘Stop HS2’ seem to. The north of England will thrive as a result of the opportunities given by HS2.”

She also decries the argument centring on reduced journey times between London and Birmingham and beyond. Villiers believes a point is being missed. “The west coast line is going to be full within 10 to 12 years. It is simply not going to be able to cope with the amount of traffic that the economy is generating. HS2 is not about journey times, though reduced journey times are important. It’s about capacity. We desperately need more capacity to meet the needs of our economy. So, leaving things as they are, sitting back and hoping for the best, will certainly be bad for the northern financial infrastructure because it will make it more difficult for people to get around.”

The new rail franchises will, according to Villiers, provide “greater certainty and help, therefore, to generate more private sector involvement in the railways”. They fit in with a larger government plan to improve levels of passenger satisfaction in both railways and aviation. The customer experience is an important priority for the coalition, and for the railways, that means introducing requirements into the franchises to, in Villiers’ words, “hold them to account on those demanding targets in terms of what passengers want, how they feel about things like stations and trains”. But the government will also back off on certain current requirements, such as “how many cycle parking spaces they might need to have”. Villiers claims that the previous Labour government “was taking more direct control over the railways than in the days before privatisation”, and that control will be loosened to allow more flexibility for the train operating companies.

The transport minister knows, too, that the cost of the rail industry needs to come down. Taxpayer subsidies are far higher now than in the days of British Rail and fares have also shot up. Villiers says she understands public concerns about rail fares and points to a key period between 2014–19 when the government will “certainly be pushing for major progress, but we’re working right now on measures to start delivering those cost savings”.

The government is hugely in favour of expanding the rail industry, with commitments such as new railway lines and electrification. Villiers says George Osborne “has recognised that continuing to invest in the transport system is one of the best ways to grow us out of our current economic difficulties”, but it is less clear what the government’s attitude is to aviation. The draft Civil Aviation Bill will be the Department for Transport’s major legislative reform for 2012. That is described as putting “the passenger at the heart of airport operations”. This might be heartening for those fed up with lengthy passport queues, but questions remain as to whether this government is pro or anti-aviation. Transport secretary Justine Greening is the MP for Putney, a constituency under the Heathrow flightpath. Having taken her seat from Labour in 2005, she will not be willing to change policy and consider a third runway. With Boris Island remaining a pipe dream for the London Mayor at the moment, and London’s airports running at close to full capacity, there appears to be a question waiting to be answered: what is the government’s strategy for aviation?

I ask Villiers to sum it up in a maximum of two sentences. She replies: “We’ve got a detailed process underway to develop a framework that enables aviation to grow and support overall economic growth, but which also addresses its local environmental impact and plays its part in addressing climate change. You asked for a sentence… it was a long sentence.”

It was, but doesn’t it reveal that the government is engaged in a holding pattern – like the planes circling over London, waiting for Heathrow’s two runways to clear – until it works out a long-term strategy? Villiers lists a number of points. These include setting up a taskforce with “industry stakeholders” to make airports in the south east better and making the best use of already existing capacity. She claims that “while Heathrow is very full, there are ways we can improve it as an airport and enhance it as an international gateway that are independent of a third runway. A third runway is not on the agenda.” Instead, her focus is on new operating practices at Heathrow, designed to improve reliability, reduce delays and lessen unscheduled night flights. As with HS2, Villiers reaches for the comfort zone of a cross-party consensus and points out that Labour agrees with her.

The reaction of some in the business world to this has been dismay. They see investment draining away to European rivals who have hub airports boasting more than two runways. “The industry knows where we stand on that,” says Villiers firmly. “As far as I’m concerned, the issue is settled.”
Villiers is a London politician. Previously MEP for the capital between 1999–2005, she represents the Chipping Barnet constituency, a key north London suburban area in the ‘doughnut’ that elected Boris Johnson to the mayoralty in 2008. As the minister with responsibility for Olympics transport, she has seen the mayor – the subject of much recent speculation regarding his prime ministerial ambitions – close up, and has been impressed by his negotiating style. She says: “He’s very determined, very persistent. As in all other aspects of his life, the fact that’s he’s engaging and charming probably helps in negotiation as well.

“Boris had lengthy discussions during the spending review with the chancellor – I could tell you a thing about those negotiations [Villiers won’t go into details] – but he secured the funding for those tube upgrades.” She believes the way to see off Ken Livingstone − “a nightmare for the suburbs” − will be to persuade Conservative supporters to come out to vote in the May elections.

“We were war-gaming the Olympics only recently,” says Villiers in a response to a question about testing the transport system’s reliability ahead of the event later this year. “It was an exercise called Black Chariot. It is literally a drill for scenarios that goes from Cobra level right through to Network Rail and the train operators.” Disappointingly, it was not Boris, a Classicist, who named the exercise, but the transport infrastructure is “broadly in place” for the Olympics. Villiers defends the controversial ‘Games lanes’, which will appear on London’s roads as “essential for getting the officials to the Games on time”. She adds, “We won’t want to end up like Atlanta [in 1996], where people who might have trained for 20 years missed their events because they were stuck in a traffic jam.”

She concedes that the transport system in London will come under “significant pressure”, so the challenge is to “get people thinking about choosing a different route or working from home if possible”. She uses Sydney as an example of how it is possible to alter day-to-day routines for those two weeks.

The three areas of rail, aviation and the Olympics are providing plenty of work – and Villiers is a self-confessed workaholic – but the treadmill life of a minister can still feel unceasing. “No matter how enthusiastic one is, no matter how much of a workaholic, the volume of stuff to get through, correspondence and decisions, is pretty massive. I enjoy the job, and am happy to devote pretty much all my working waking hours to it, but it’s certainly demanding, there’s no doubt about that.”

The transport minister is hoping that her appetite for work will get her noticed, or maybe even win her a medal or two.

This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

This year marks the 10th birthday of Policy Exchange – a home for the Conservative modernisation project. With an income of over £2m a year and considerable influence on the government, I wanted to find out what the think tank’s director, Neil O’Brien, thought of David Cameron’s performance as prime minister, the upcoming policy battles in 2012 and his own ambitions. He is, after all, only in his early 30s.

BD: Former No 10 policy wonk James O’Shaughnessy’s article in The Times recently mirrored Michael Gove’s language on education. He talked about “a huge battle in an already long war”. With O’Shaughnessy coming back to Policy Exchange, is that how it has to be? A big battle against the existing schools’ attitude?
NO’B: There are an enormous number of people in the system who don’t want things to change. The Melissa Benns of this world don’t have any positive solution. They just want to carry on. They really do believe in the bog-standard comp.

In Michael Gove have you got a politician who you can use as a driving force, or do you resign yourself to having ‘great ideas’ that may never happen at all because people want to keep the status quo?
So much of what we’re doing now turns on trying to convince officials as well as politicians. To that end, it’s very useful that a lot of our recent senior hires have a lot of civil service experience. They’ve got networks – you can ring up people and say, ‘What is going on with x?’ There’s a real vice with UK think tanks. There’s been this belief that the role of a think tank is to sit on the sidelines and complain about politicians not being brave enough rather than understand the constraints that are on them. That is where we are a bit different.  

How often do you go to No 10?
Intermittently to see particular people.

What does intermittently mean?
I go and see specific people about specific stuff but it’s not… I’m not sure it’s a very good proxy for whether your ideas are having impact. Think tankers who go around boasting about how often they meet people is a bit ‘fingers on the blackboard’. But our stuff definitely gets listened to and generally we’re perceived as reasonably serious and able to intervene in debates in a meaningful way. A lot of think tank output gets pushed aside by officials who just think, ‘Here’s some 21-year-old scribbling away about what George Osborne should do in the next Budget. Give me a break. Why should I listen to this?’ And it doesn’t get beyond ‘let’s cut tax and regulation’ or ‘let’s spend more’. And it’s just like, ‘Thanks for those brilliant suggestions. That’s really useful for government.’

How optimistic are you about economic growth in 2012?
One of the things that worries me is how little sense people have of the size of the deficit. Our polling shows one in seven people understand the difference between the debt and the deficit. We’ve been quite lucky in this recession and this is a puzzle that economists have written about quite a lot. The rise in unemployment in the early 1980s was quite big in relation to the recession. In the early 1990s the recession took about two per cent off GDP. This recession has taken between six and seven per cent off GDP for a much longer period, a much bigger punch to the economy, and yet seemingly unemployment hasn’t risen as much as people thought it might.

There’s basically a lot of suppressed unemployment out there so it’s harder than it looks to get it down. Also, the picture of unemployment is misunderstood in a lot of ways. People should remember the total number of people on out-of-work benefits is the same as it was in 2004.
When Britain was in this incredibly hubristic phase, going around lecturing the rest of Europe on being more like us, we thought we had full employment – or that is what the government was implying and the media would have had you believe. But actually you had about five million people on unemployment benefits all the way through the debt-fuelled years. I would say my main political obsession, and this has been true throughout the last decade, is unemployment because it is the root of all social evil. It screws up everything else you can think of, every other kind of health or well-being indicator. The suicide rate is 10 times higher for people who are unemployed.

Governments always become intellectually exhausted. For a think tank, is it a case of trying to rush in and be as influential as possible as quickly as possible?
This is an unbelievably good time to be doing think tanking because you’ve got a new government that still has a lot of energy. They come in, they implement their first idea that they had in opposition and then they look around for new ideas. And the lack of money is like a gun in the back. They have to think about doing things in a new way.

If you think back 10 years to the people who were doing modernisation and indeed some of the people involved in Policy Exchange, there was this sense that, particularly on the centre-right, there was a bit of a drought of ideas. There was a need to change the conversation, to get interested in lots of issues that had been left just for the left to discuss. The right had become very narrow and just focused on tax cuts, Europe, migration rather than housing, adoption and all these other questions. So that was a particular phase of modernisation.

My reflection 10 years on is that the Tory part of the coalition have done quite a good job, of moving themselves to the centre. Cameron inherited the party in a real mess. He’s done quite a good job of detoxifying them, making them more liberal. This is all very good stuff. I thought it was a very good idea to apologise for Section 28.

Where do they still have to go? The next big challenge for them is probably to go after a more working-class kind of voter. The midlands and the north is where the next election will be decided. The Tories are nowhere in Scotland, and it’s that centre of the country and centre of the electorate where they need to be doing better. We’re doing some opinion research at the moment. Politicians have a weird sort of language – people talk a lot about ‘the strivers’ or ‘aspirational voters’ or ‘squeezed middle’…

So you don’t think the ‘squeezed middle’ theme has traction? Because some people think that Ed Miliband hasn’t pushed it enough.
There are two problems with it. Firstly, the economic data this is based on is a misunderstanding of what has actually happened to income distribution. Secondly, and this is a problem for a politician, I don’t think it works. From the research I’m doing, people don’t identify, particularly swing voters, as being in the ‘squeezed middle’. People in the squeezed middle are not people who like Ed Miliband. So if I were him, I would bin it and use a different phrase. But there’s more to it than just the headline. We have a tremendous anti-politics feeling now in the UK. You can see in focus groups, people just hating politicians in a way they wouldn’t have done in the 1970s. So there is a communication challenge for politicians there as well as a straightforward policy challenge. But there are a lot of opportunities to do this stuff and to have the right policy but also win arguments about fairness at the same time.

Are you happy with the tag that Policy Exchange is the Conservatives’ favourite think tank? Is that accurate?
We speak to all three political parties and we want to be fair to all those people. We do go and see the Labour people. But, as you can probably detect from what I said before, there are some people in the party who have very sensible ideas about where they want to go, and other people have got very daft ideas both in policy terms and in political terms. Mixed emotions overall really, because I do want us to be able to work with everybody, but if the government listens – great.

What about the funding? You have a large number of donors who have been involved with the Conservative Party.
We have a lot of donors who have nothing to do with politics as well. Most of the people involved won’t have a political leaning. But then there are those from different political persuasions who give us dosh.

Just so it’s clear, most of your donors aren’t politically party-based?
Absolutely not. God no.

Is there a percentage that is?
I couldn’t give you a percentage. Our largest donors are quite often people who have given a lot directly into charity activities. There is a guy who has given an incredible amount to people in the care system, young unemployed people and young people in the criminal justice system. He has funded a lot of direct charitable things and people get frustrated that actually a lot turns on what the government’s policy is. So they get involved in policy and Policy Exchange. That’s quite a typical trajectory for people getting involved with us. And quite a bit of money these days comes from trusts and grant-giving foundations as well.

What role does the board of trustees play? You have people like Danny Finkelstein and Rachel Whetstone who are very plugged into the Cameron set, and Simon Wolfson is very influential too. What is your relationship with them?
They are good. They don’t exercise a strong direction of what we in the office will do… They give incredible amounts of their time to help us meet people, give us people who give us information, people who can help fund things. They are very good as a sounding board as well because you have a lot of political expertise around the table and a lot of different points of view. They help us build our network of people out there. We always say that you are never more than two or three jumps away from being able to talk to anyone. One of our trustees will know someone who knows someone.

So in ten years, Policy Exchange has become a bona fide member of the establishment?
[Laughs] Totally stumped…

Do you not see yourself as a member of the political establishment?
‘Establishment’ conjures up all these brilliant images of old buffers in gentlemen’s clubs.

I disagree, it used to...
You have to be very careful because Westminster is an echo chamber… When you think about what Nick Clegg’s real passions are, one of them is clearly social mobility which is a good passion. Good on him. It’s one of the things I’ve heard him speak most passionately about. The actual two words, ‘social mobility’, are not the right words though because nobody in the real world would ever use them. This is a trivial example but what is being said can be a bit ‘echo chambery’ and everyone uses this weird language that doesn’t really connect in the real world.

Do you want to become an MP?
In lots of ways my job is more fun because we have a decent-sized staff of serious experts. We have huge freedom of what to think. You don’t have to toe a party line. So at the moment, I’m very content where I am. I know lots of people who are MPs but I’m not convinced I would enjoy that more than this.

There has been some discussion about whether David Cameron has focused enough on policy issues. Would the government benefit from a PM who was comfortable with detailed policy?
I don’t know about that. I don’t get to see him very much. But my impression of him is of a very quick guy, not someone you need to tell twice. Very smart.

You could say he is decisive and that covers for a lack of intellectual interest in something.
That diagnosis is probably wrong. One thing that has become more apparent after the election is that the pressure on the centre is just incredible. The lighthouse goes round and round, focusing on all the issues that keep coming up and it doesn’t stick on them for very long. The idea that we have presidential government in this country, as people said about Tony Blair, is absolute crap. The centre is an absolutely tiny group of people with all the world’s problems washing up at their door. They made a mistake when this government came in with this SpAd cap to try to get by with a small Downing Street. No 10 was weak even under Blair and certainly didn’t need to be any smaller.

They have started to get a stronger centre, particularly after things like the health reform problems they had. A small centre can only tell you what’s going on. As a PM, you don’t have a very detailed sense of what the real challenges are in different departments. The more you can have someone who really knows the mind of the PM for each of those different departments, you can make little course corrections if ministers aren’t doing what you want them to do.

Do you think the health reforms can be rescued?
They have stabilised the situation. Health has not been in the news for a while and there has been a drip, drip of positive news about health.

That’s the PR side. What about the actual reforms?
There are choices about what kind of healthcare reform you want. Lots of them are not necessarily particularly compatible. GP commissioning is one type of reform. We are broadly in favour, but to make it work, you need to get it down to the smallest possible scale so it looks more like fund holding did rather than just recreating primary care trusts all over again. You want the smart people on the frontline to do the rationing more efficiently for you. And you only get that when you have smaller units. So that’s one type of health reform. A different and incompatible one is to do integrated care so you join up primary and secondary care and hospitals. That’s got clear benefits. It’s a very easy reform to explain and it helps get people out of hospital, which is very expensive, faster.

There are 101 other things you can talk about on health. There is a choice for the government coming up about 'What is our story going to be about NHS reform?' Do they just want to stick where they are and make a success of GP commissioning? Who knows how all that stuff about the role of Monitor will play out now they have the mandate to promote both competition and corporation? Tricky brief that one. One thing that everyone in Westminster started saying after the health argument – it’s a classic hindsight – ‘They could have done so much of this without doing any primary legislation. They could have just quietly got on with it’… They need to decide as well as to what reform they want whether they want to quietly get on with it or whether they want to have a clear argument and say, ‘This is what we’re doing and why.’

If we talk about believability and authenticity, how do you know what the real world wants? You were director of Policy Exchange at just 29, previously director of Open Europe…
When I was growing up in Huddersfield I went to a school that was a totally average-performing comprehensive. And the average school in Britain is not fucking good enough, basically. Things I do now bring me into contact with a lot of these kinds of questions at more of a ground level. I’m a chair of governors for a primary school. So when teachers say, ‘Oh my god, all this crap and bureaucracy falls on us from the centre’, they are completely correct because I see that all the time.

How do you make sure you stay open-minded?
Just being conscious of the problem is a big step toward remedying it. I am struck, if you think about how things have changed since the Thatcher era, how few of those changes are really reflected in discussion about policy. There is just this vast untapped resource intellectually. So all those developments in neuroscience, economics or group psychology – this vast intellectual stock-pile of stuff that has been built up over the last 30 years – has not found its way to public policy at all.

Quick fire

Hobby outside politics?
Trudging around hills in the north or visiting Scottish islands. They are interesting if you are a wonk because there are no police and no crime and you can just leave your door open and everything works.

Action or romance films?
Romance every time. Period drama.

Do you like karaoke?
I would do it in a small setting. I did not take part at our Christmas party...

How much did your haircut cost?
About £9.90

Did you tip the extra 10p?
No, I’m from Yorkshire, my parents are Scottish. Of course I don’t tip.

A fact about you that our readers won’t know?
I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party briefly when I was 17. I tried to sell the paper at school but people didn’t want to buy it.

This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

In November, the Office for Budget Reponsibility put paid to the chancellor’s Plan A: clear the deficit with time to have a little splurge just before the next election. Britain will increase its borrowing until 2017, the independent forecasters say. George Osborne’s Plan B is not a change in the direction or speed of travel, as Ed Balls is demanding: it’s about changing the way the public thinks, and has been quietly running in the shadow of Plan A. From a nation that thinks in terms of spending, rather than saving.

The announcement of a new hospital or school getting built is still much easier for the public to visualise than the personal benefit that might come from the cancelling of an increase in the employer contribution towards national insurance or even the rise in the tax threshold.

Recent polls have put Labour in the lead over the Tories in popularity, but behind them when it comes to dealing with the economy. If the public can be convinced that dealing with the economy is the most important objective, the Tories could win the next election even without being the most popular party.

There is a three-pronged approach to the Tories’ tax plan, and it can be summed up in three words: transparency, business and poverty.

The first problem is that many taxes are well hidden. During 13 years as chancellor and prime minister, Gordon Brown was good at disguising taxes while highlighting spending, according to former banker and employee of the chancellor, Devizes MP Claire Perry.

“The last government was very good at hiding tax-rate increases through manipulative means,” she says. “One of the worst things we were going to inherit was putting up the employer contribution to national insurance – this tax on jobs – it is crazy.”

Brown was so good at it that it took the best part of a year before the public or media noticed that he had cut the 10p tax right before everyone’s eyes in his final budget as chancellor in 2007.

If people do not realise they’re paying tax, they do not resent paying it. Who knows how much tax they pay when they fill up their car or buy a pint of beer? Some people may know that fuel duty and VAT make up around half the cost of petrol, but how many are thinking of the income tax and NI they have already paid as well? Once these are included, a basic-rate taxpayer is paying £139 to fill a 60-litre Ford Mondeo with £30 worth of petrol – a top-rate taxpayer pays £197. A basic-rate taxpayer pays £5.24 for £2-worth of lager in a pub, while a top-rate taxpayer pays £7.43. Most people don’t think like this – “It’s too depressing” was one reason in a straw poll – but the Tories want them to. “Transparency is a lodestar of the government,” says the chancellor’s former chief-of-staff and economic adviser Matthew Hancock, who now sits on the public accounts committee.
The Office of Tax Simplification was set up in July 2010, just weeks after the coalition came into office. Its first major announcement in 2011 was that it wanted income tax and NI to merge, with the result that the basic rate would rise from 20 per cent to 32 per cent.

Conservative Party deputy chairman and member of the Treasury select committee Michael Fallon says: “We need to get people to think more about the taxes that they pay.

“The government’s looking hard now at the tax and NI systems so that the two can be calculated on the same basis. It will make it easier for businesses. It is a preliminary step to actually merging them. But what it does, of course, is help people realise that NI is a tax. It’s about making tax more transparent. And once tax is transparent, it’s possible for people to encourage their politicians to get it down.”

Perry wants to see a pie chart on people’s tax receipts, telling them where their taxes are being spent. “I want,” she says, “to see a greater link between taxes and spending. When you get your tax return, it should say: ‘Thank you very much for your taxes. You will be interested to know that for every £1 you pay in taxes, 30p is going on the NHS, 20p is going on defence…’ The more transparent you can make that link between taxes and spending, the more people understand that you cannot have something for nothing. We’re treating the British people like fools at the moment. The British tax code is the longest in the world. It’s a massive impediment to growth.”

Another large tax that we all pay is VAT. Again, it’s hidden. When we go to the supermarket and something says it costs £10, that’s what it costs at the till. In the US – a country where the centre ground sits to the right of Britain – it’s different. Everything is marked up ‘pre-tax’ so that shoppers are forced to have to think about the tax they pay on every item they buy. Only after their shopping is rung up in the till is the tax added, and the shopper then has to fish around in their pockets for the government’s take.

Perry spent 10 years in the US, first studying at Harvard University before working for the Bank of America. “I hadn’t heard the phrase ‘tax dollar’ before I went to business school in the States,” she says. “People have this personal identification with taxation and an instinctive antipathy towards it.”

Would Hancock like Britain to adopt the US style of calculating VAT at the till?

“I certainly wouldn’t be against that,” he says. “Showing people how much they’re spending on tax is all to the fore. People are very interested in that now.”

The coalition is counting on a massive rise in private sector jobs to make up for the 710,000 predicted public sector job cuts. It plans to do this by making Britain the “best place in Europe to start, finance and grow business”, according to George Osborne.

“Business taxes should be where we tackle first,” says Hancock. Corporation tax is being reduced from 28 per cent in 2010 to 24 per cent by the end of this Parliament. Fallon wants to see this go even further. “I’d like us to give Ireland a run for its money,” he said. Ireland slashed its corporation tax in 1998 from 32 per cent to 12.5 per cent, a move that has seen a number of British businesses move to Ireland.  

Perry is an admirer of Ireland, despite its property-led collapse in 2010.

“The Irish economy, having gone through a 20 per cent reduction in GDP, is now starting to recover because of a very good corporate rate,” she explains.

“They have made a deliberate attempt to target corporations. They had a huge shock and dealt with it very well, and are starting to come out of it. They have a business-led recovery rather than a public spending-led recovery; if you have to borrow to fund it, it’s not sustainable.”

Perry is a believer in tax receipts increasing as rates go down. She adds: “There’s something about moving to a lower tax corporate environment, where the value of taxes goes down but the volume goes up hugely because you’ve stimulated growth.

“Is there a way to go even further on corporate tax reductions to reward companies for jobs and growth generation? Because we have to grow. Anything we can do to encourage people to put their money at risk and invest in the British economy is a good thing.”

The Tories are also very aware of how well the ‘nasty party’ image can stick, which is why so much energy is being channelled towards helping the lowest-paid workers through the tax system.

The key Liberal Democrat policy of raising the personal allowance to £10,000, which was adopted by the coalition, is one that chimes well with Tories. The government claims it will take 880,000 people out of income tax altogether, and around 23 million basic-rate taxpayers will gain by £170 per year on average. The tax threshold is rising each year, from £6,475 in 2010 to £8,105 next year.

“When it is affordable, I want to see the threshold increased past the £10,000 mark,” says Perry, “so that when fiscal conditions recover, you ratchet the lower thresholds up. That’s a very progressive way of delivering lower taxation to individuals.”

Fallon believes that the government needs to work harder to drive home the message that taxes are being cut even while the deficit is being paid down.

“What gets forgotten is that we’re cutting taxes – we’ve cut taxes for the lowest-paid, and we want to do more, and we’re cutting taxes for business.

“Corporation tax is being cut every year. Council tax has been frozen, which is, in fact, a tax cut,” he says. “The most important areas in which we’re easing the tax burden are for the low-paid and small businesses.”

Hancock agrees: “We need to make the case more strongly about raising the threshold at which people start paying tax. We are reducing the tax on the lowest-paid and the burden on people who do just a few hours’ work,” he says.

“There’s a difference between promising unfunded tax cuts and actually putting more money into people’s pockets.”  

For those hoping to see the top rate of tax removed before the next election, Hancock says it is “crucial that it is temporary”, but Perry adds that it is “politically unpalatable” to cut it while the “public sector is on a pay freeze”.

Evidence suggests people are already starting to think harder about the taxes that they pay. While the party’s membership has declined since the general election, membership of the grassroots group The TaxPayers’ Alliance has shot up by 30 per cent, from around 50,000 to 65,000, helped, according to spokeswoman Emma Boon, by the coalition raising VAT to 20 per cent.

“It certainly helped focus people’s minds on the taxes that they pay,” she says.

With Europe showing up the divides within the party, low taxes are a uniting force for Tories.

“All Tories believe in a low tax economy,” Fallon stresses. It is yet to be seen if the public are with them.

John Higginson is political editor of Metro

This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

So you want to set up a new school? There is a lot of work involved: here are a few of the points that have to be covered before the first pupils set foot through the door of your brand-new educational facility. Here's a bit of checklist:

Application form Months of detailed work outlining vision and plans on curriculum, school day, behaviour, attendance, special needs, data tracking, achievement, admissions policy.

Business plan Number crunching: staff, equipment, insurance and much more.

Capacity to deliver How many people will devote large chunks of time to making this happen?

Site for the school There’s no money for new-builds, so you need to scout the area for disused buildings ripe for refurbishment. In inner cities, this is often very time-consuming.

Children Why should parents sign up to a new school when there’s no site and no teachers? Big local advertising campaign is required, open days and numerous meetings with parents.

Start-up costs Protracted negotiations with the Department for Education. Every penny scrutinised.

Office No government funding. Beg from a local organisation.

Admissions Work with the council, but difficult to measure proximity to school gate before you’ve got a site!

Governors to recruit Search for those with enough time and expertise to devote to a new school – for free.

Project managers Someone good with checklists, timelines, Excel spreadsheets and dealing with bureaucracy.

Great teachers The most important of all decisions.

State of mind Anxious.

And that’s only about a third of the list.

It’s easier than it once was to set up a school, but not that easy. Given the right safeguards on accountability and governance, and that the projects have genuine innovation, few should oppose the setting up of free schools. They have the potential to add dynamism to the education system. But politicians should not think that it’s only free schools or academies that are willing or able to innovate. I’ve worked in three schools, all of them comprehensives, none of them academies, and all provided fresh ideas.

There’s only one good reason for putting yourself through the ordeal of starting a new school: wanting to do something different and innovative to make sure students achieve the very best.  

The twin motives for setting up School 21, a 4-18 mixed school in Stratford, East London, are to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor, and to provide an education that prepares students for the 21st century.

It’s the vision that keeps you going, the excitement of implementing the ideas we’ve gathered from our experience and best practice around the world.

School 21 believes in small, all-through schools, so that the transition for pupils at 11 years of age is minimised and literacy and skills can be tackled earlier. The debate that’s lasted 100 years between the progressives, who want education to focus on the whole child, and the traditionalists, who believe in mastering the basics, should be consigned to history. It’s a sterile, unhelpful polarisation that prevents us creating an education system that will help all children thrive in the modern world.

Reading, writing and speaking to an incredibly high standard is non-negotiable. We care about grammar, punctuation and handwriting. To some, this may make us traditionalists. If every child comes out at 18 with these three things mastered, then we will have achieved a huge amount. We’ve just read 200 CVs and cover letters and interviewed 25 candidates for an administrative post, and you see immediately the gulf between those who write fluently and those for whom sentence construction is a mystery, those who have the self-confidence to speak concisely, and those who are inarticulate.

But in others areas, such as how we teach, we’ve got to modernise, moving on from the one-teacher-talking-at-30-children model that often prevents students taking control of their own learning. We need one-to-one coaching for every child, project-based learning where students can get to grips with real-world scenarios that combine knowledge and skills. We want to introduce Harkness tables, where groups of 12 students debate issues in the round.

What matters is that students leave school with the qualities and techniques they can apply in their lives: initiative, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking.

We believe that new knowledge and new technology have the power to transform our schools. New insights into positive psychology, neuroscience, motivation and wellbeing should be influencing not just what we teach, but how we teach. Surely it’s possible to create a school that combines the best of traditional style – rigour in the basics, politeness and good behaviour – with a new 21st-century curriculum and pedagogy, to shape a generation of students ready to take on the world.

You don’t need free schools to achieve this, but at best a new school, despite all the difficulties, can provide fresh thinking.

This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

It’s great to be back in the world of education. It is nearly a decade since I became a junior minister in the then Department for Education and Skills. A lot has changed since then, not least the fact that five secretaries of state have been and gone, and the department’s name has changed – twice.

Many of the changes Labour introduced achieved great results. Academic research for the Financial Times showed that our reforms raised standards and narrowed educational divides. It demonstrates the value of investing in early years programmes like Sure Start, attracting the best and brightest to teaching including via Teach First and an academy programme with a focus on improving schools in deprived neighbourhoods.

We should be honest though about where we sometimes fell short. The temptation to chop and change the curriculum is one that besets politicians of all colours. That is why I have offered to work with the government to find a cross-party consensus about changes to the national curriculum. We need to put these issues above partisan politics, so our young people get the right preparation for the world of work and we maintain our international competitiveness.

The most important determinants of a school’s success are the quality of leadership and teaching. These matter far more than the governance structure of the school. In my first three months in this job I have been reminded of this when visiting inspiring schools like Cuckoo Hall Primary Academy in Enfield and Perry Beeches, a brilliant comprehensive in Birmingham.

If Labour wins in 2015, we will be faced with a radically different schools landscape with more fragmentation and a wider range of types of school.
At the moment, all new schools are accountable only to central government, not local communities and parents. As Sir Michael Wilshaw, the new head of Ofsted, has said, some academies will fail. We need a local mechanism to support schools – I am looking at options including local schools commissioners.

At the same time, ministers are taking power from parents, removing the right of local parents to oppose the expansion of grammar schools, creating fears of a new educational divide introduced by the back door. Free schools are created by central government with scant regard for local needs and concerns.

Labour will respond to this democratic deficit by getting parents, pupils, teachers, councillors and governors involved in our policy review to develop reforms that work for all.

We will need to be creative in how we best raise standards and develop innovation in a time of austerity. The Department for Education got a raw deal in the last spending round. Money to repair buildings and build new schools was slashed by 57 per cent, and we’re seeing the biggest cuts to education since the 1950s. This affects the performance of children in the classroom. Parents will rightly be angry if in a few years’ time their kids are going to school in portakabins – just like when the Tories were last in power.

In today’s society, parents demand the best for their children. So it’s not enough just to focus improvement on the worst performing schools. We need to raise standards in schools that simply muddle along.

The danger is that the government is reducing the chance for parents to scrutinise ‘coasting’ schools. The Education Act ends routine inspection for schools rated as outstanding, despite the fact they can quickly slip back to being only good or satisfactory. This measure will deprive parents of up to date information and could undermine the reputation that these schools have carefully built up as their rating might be seen as out of date.

All children need a fair chance – it is scandalous that in today’s world you are four times more likely to attend an inadequate school if you come from a deprived background. Instead of focusing just on pet projects, the government has a responsibility to support high standards in all 24,000 of our schools. Labour will focus on the quality of teaching in the classroom, not just on what is written on the sign outside a school.

Crucially, a laser-like focus on the 3Rs is needed. Not just because it improves the chances of getting a job, but because a core grasp of English and maths improves your ability to play a positive and active role in society.

So as Labour develops its plans for 2015, my priority is to focus on raising standards for all. This means learning from the evidence of what works both here and abroad and placing high quality teaching at the heart of policy.

Stephen Twigg is the Labour MP for Liverpool West Derby and shadow education secretary

This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

Nick Gibb is listing all the different schools he’s been to. There’s the state primary in Essex, the one in Canada, a state junior school in Northamptonshire, an independent junior school in Bedford, a grammar school, a formerly-grammar comprehensive in Leeds and “quite a weak” comprehensive in Wakefield.

Since this is the minister for schools talking, you’d assume that this was a list of the fact-finding trips or ministerial visits he’s been on recently. And you’d be wrong – this is his own educational background he’s talking about. It’s so unusually diverse that it almost seems as if he’s been doing research for this job since childhood.

“I did see it all,” he admits. “I was at school between 1965 and 1978, which was the period when all the reforms that came out of the Wilson government, the Crosland reforms, were implemented, so I did see at first-hand the changes to the education system. I don’t think they were necessarily good ones for Britain, or good for social mobility, so I’ve learned quite a lot from that.”

A common criticism of the coalition government, and particularly its Conservative ministers, is that they are too well-off, too well-connected and too well-educated to understand the concerns of the vast majority of British people. But here, right at the heart of the Department for Education, is a Conservative minister who didn’t go to Eton, Westminster or Oxford, and he wants to draw on his own varied education to improve learning for everyone else.

“Education is the key to social mobility,” he says. “The only way you can go from a poor background to becoming very successful is by becoming a Premier League football player, by winning the Lottery or doing well in education. There is no other route.

“Most people won’t get the opportunity for two of those, so, for the vast majority, education is the only route to social mobility. And poor education can be a route to downward social travel, so we need to make sure that every child has the best possible education.”

It is to this end that Gibb and his secretary of state, Michael Gove, have forged ahead with an ambitious expansion of Labour’s academies programme. Indeed, the week before I meet Gibb at his department, Gove made the announcement that they will now be extending the programme to primary schools, too.

Creating academies, whether primary or secondary, new or converted from existing schools, is all about autonomy, Gibb explains. “We think that autonomy, professional autonomy, is the key to raising standards. You see all the evidence in those academies that have been in existence for a while, which have been in a poor place in terms of standards. They are seeing a rise in standards at twice the pace of the rest of the school system – a 5.3 per cent rise in a couple of years, compared to a 2.6 per cent rise in the same two years.”

He adds that, for headteachers, “it’s about being in charge of your own ship”, and goes on to emphasise the motivating power of staff being responsible for their own decisions. In his recent speech announcing the new primary academies, Gove laid heavy emphasis on “international evidence” from the OECD and others that seems to show that in countries where there is greater autonomy and competition in the education system, students are performing better.

Autonomy is a stick as well as a carrot, though. Gibb points out that, as well as giving schools their independence, the department is also increasing their accountability. He explains: “If their judgement proves to be wrong in terms of what works, then the accountability measures and processes will expose that.” Some of these ‘stick’ measures are obvious – “parents won’t chose the school, Ofsted will report negatively” – but others are new innovations, Gibb claims, such as complete transparency with school performance data, so that “the information that’s not necessarily picked up by newspapers is there for parents to look at if they wish, or for academics to look at and analyse”. He also cites the introduction of a new column into the performance tables that will track the results achieved by children receiving free school meals.

The purpose of this, it seems, is to be able to focus on the children themselves rather than the context in which they are learning. Gibb says: “It means we can ask, ‘Why is this school achieving 75 per cent getting five good GCSEs, and this [other] school is getting 40 per cent for those types of children?’ They can’t say, ‘Well, it’s because we have a high proportion of free-school-meal children’, because we’re only looking at that.”
Gibb and his department don’t intend to stand or fall by such measurements, though. For years, the headlines on GCSE results day have hailed ever-increasing pass rates, while opinion columns decry the ‘dumbing down’ of the exams and the gap in attainment between rich and poor. According to Gibb, this is going to stop.

He doesn’t mind, he says, if the headline figures decline. “That isn’t a problem for us,” he insists, because he trusts that, if it happens, it will be because “we have increased the rigour and integrity of the exams through the curriculum review and through our reforms of the exam system”.
“I’m not interested in spin,” he states. “It would be a problem if it reflected poorer standards, but if we were sure that standards were rising, things would be moving in the right direction. But if because we’re increasing the integrity of the exams and the curriculum [the headline figures decline], we’re not going to spin our way out of that.”

This evidence-based approach seems very closely tied to his education brief, but at times he is willing to broaden it out to other things. For instance, he’s sceptical about the existence of a Conservative ideology: “In a way, the Conservative ideology is a reaction to ideologies of the left. I’ve always thought that. Why do I believe in what I believe as a Conservative? Because it’s a reaction to socialism, and the things I believe in are the things that work.”

There is a quiet self-confidence about Gibb that is quite a contrast when set against Gove’s ebullient, provocative style. A departmental insider suggests that, for this reason, it might be time for Gibb to have a more visible role in implementing the coalition’s education reforms, “rather than Gove, who goes around shouting that people should keep their hands off”.

Perhaps the overhaul of the national curriculum will prove to be the project that raises Gibb’s public profile. Previously in two phases (English, maths, science and PE, followed by all the other curriculum subjects), it has now been merged into one, “with a view to teaching it in schools from September 2014”. A consultation is underway, an expert panel has been appointed and a call for evidence has produced nearly 6,000 responses. Gibb wants this curriculum to be as ambitious as those he’s observed overseas, and to last “for a decade or more”. It seems, so far as he’s concerned, it’s all hands on deck to get it done.

Gove’s “hands off” remark was part of an attack on those he termed the “enemies of promise”. These are the opponents – or “ideologues who are happy with failure” – of the government’s academies programme. According to the education secretary, it stems from “the bigoted, backward, bankrupt ideology of a left-wing establishment that perpetuates division and denies opportunity”.

The schools minister shares this sentiment with his boss, but finds a more positive, less inflammatory way of putting it. He jokes: “It’s what Tony Blair would call the ‘forces of Conservatism’ although I don’t like that phrase, being a Conservative myself. It’s resistance to the evidence.

“There are people who are very ideologically opposed – it tends to be from the left – and they’re letting down those who they purport to want to help. All the evidence suggests that successful academies like Mossbourne [an academy in Hackney, London, formerly a failing school] are giving people from very poor backgrounds opportunities they wouldn’t have had if Michael Wilshaw had not led that school in the way he did. I don’t understand why they would oppose an approach to education that is delivering a more equal outcome for our society.”

Time and time again, Gibb brings the discussion back to the evidence. Speaking about what he feels constitutes a “good education”, he says: “Those views aren’t based on ideology, they’re based on what works.”

If, come the next general election, these reforms can be shown to have worked, Gibb’s reasoned approach to policy-making could be richly rewarded. In pragmatism and evidence, rather than in ideology and rhetoric, seem to be where this education minister is most comfortable.