How can government ensure it learns effectively from the past in making public finance decisions?
Governments often tackle similar issues again and again \u2013 from day-to-day matters to major challenges such as natural disasters, public health threats or global financial or security crises. So it is vital that governments learn from experience about what works \u2013 and what doesn\u2019t \u2013 to improve the functioning of government. But extensive churn in ministers \u2013 and the civil servants who support them \u2013 means that institutional memory can be lost.\n\nIn the mid-2010s, the Treasury was grappling with how to maintain and improve public service performance as budgets were squeezed. Senior officials in the department identified the need for a review of historic evidence to ensure they understood what the experience of previous decades showed about how to manage public spending effectively The Nuffield Foundation funded a project involving the Institute of Fiscal Studies (Paul Johnson, Rowena Crawford and Ben Zaranko) and a team based at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford (Christopher Hood, Iain McLean, Maia King and Barbara Piotrowska). The task of the IFS team was to assess what happened to UK spending over 1993\u20132015 from the available statistics, while the Blavatnik team explored the more qualitative aspects of public spending control over the same period from a mixture of published sources, interviews and archival material \u2013 now published in book form (The Way the Money Goes: The Fiscal Constitution and Public Spending in the UK). \n\nDrawing on that work, this event will reflect on the value \u2013 but also the challenges \u2013 of historical research on government and explore what can be learnt from past experience in the planning and control of public spending.\n\nTo discuss these questions and more, we were joined by a panel of experts: \n\nSir Charles Bean, Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and former member of the Budget Responsibility Committee at the Office for Budget Responsibility (2017\u201321) \nMark Franks, Director of Welfare at the Nuffield Foundation \nCatherine Haddon, Programme Director at the Institute for Government \nProfessor Christopher Hood, Visiting Professor at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University \nConrad Smewing, Director General, Public Spending at HM Treasury \n\nThe event was chaired by Dr Gemma Tetlow, Chief Economist at the Institute for Government.