Purposeful Policies - Purposeful Enterprise

Purposeful Policies - Purposeful Enterprise

Britain stands at a crossroads. We can continue to process failure, tackle symptoms, and profiteer from destructive/extractive practices. Or we can build a Purposeful Britain, focused on social justice, opportunity, and environmental responsibility, and together co-create step change improvements in motivation, engagement, trust, and meaningful growth. We choose the latter.

Purposeful Britain includes Purposeful Governance, Purposeful Policies, and Purposeful Practices - all embedded in the DNA of our economy, our organisations, and institutions, our public services and government. Purposeful Governance confronts a world full of challenges and opens up a world of possibility. It sees enterprise as the engine room of the nation and of Britain's future prosperity. It does not see a zero sum game and instead sees a world of purposeful, sustainable growth - meaningful, productive growth that also improves the wellbeing of people, place, and planet.

Here are a few simple and powerful examples of Purposeful Governance and Purposeful Policies being applied to enterprise, economics, and government.

Principles and Policies that reward real value-creation over short-term extraction.

Policies should positively incentivise/reward value-adding enterprises that add real/productive value to the economy over those that do not, and worse still, those negatively extracting from the economy and creating significant damage to communities and the environment. Policies should also promote collaboration, co-operation, and positive forms of competition. Policies must also strengthen regulation and laws to tackle tax evasion, anti-competitive behaviours (e.g. price fixing, cartels, predatory pricing), regulatory capture, and put a stop to 'Rip-Off Britain'.

Purposeful Governance in Public Services, Institutions, and Government.

Purposeful Governance embeds values and purpose into the DNA of an operation and to step change levels of motivation and employee engagement. It exposes the root causes of problems and eliminates them - boosting efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, wellbeing, and innovation, and superpowers meaningful sustainable growth. This policy will create a platform of world-class public services supporting individuals, communities and organisations, and provide cost effective world-class outcomes at less than half the cost. Purposeful Governance builds trust between leaders and the workforce and will be applied across the civil service and to all essential services under state control, including the NHS, education, social services, international trade, defence, security, the home office, and public transportation (including the railways).

Purposeful Governance applied to business critical services.

Essential services and critical national infrastruture not under state control will be incentivised/regulated to apply Purposeful Governance and embed values and purpose into the DNA of their operations and long-term investment - to create step change increases in levels of employee engagement and embed world-class management practices. This includes essential services such as water, energy supply, electricity generation, housing, intrastructure, and roads, and outsourced services including adult social care and children's services, to disincentivise extractive practices and profiteering from failure. Enterprises applying Purposeful Governance would be incentivised to do so by incentives funding through government savings (e.g. reduced cost of failure/negative externalities) and partly by those not applying Purposeful Governance and producing significant negative externalities.

Purposeful Governance applied to enterprise.

Enterprises will be incentivised to apply Purposeful Governance and embed values/purpose into the DNA of their operation to step change evels of employee engagement and to drive step-change improvements in productivity, innovation and growth. Enterprises applying Purposeful Governance will be incentivised to do so, partly paid for by those not applying Purposeful Governance and also producing significant negative externalities which government currently have to increase taxes to fix (e.g. waste, pollution, ill-health, stress related illnesses). When enterprises are purposeful they help to stop problems from occurring, rather creating more problems or profiteering from processing them. Purposeful Enterprises collectively solve wasteful problems at source, are incentivised to do so, and in a Purposeful World the concept of 'polluter pays' is expanded further to mimimise more negative externalities (e.g. ill-health/stress related to management practices).

Water back into public hands.

Water companies have profiteered from dumping raw sewage into our rivers and seas, killing wildlife, destroying eco-systems, and endangering life. Their shareholders have extracted profits, have failed to invest adequately in their infrastructure, and saddled their companies with debt, exposing at that is bad about extractive forms of capitalism. The true nature and liabilities of these companies now to exposed, and as they declare insolvency, need to be taken back into public hands and with minimum cost to the tax-payer. Once this is done Purposeful Governance can then be applied so they provide a world-class service at world class cost, without polluting our environment.

Electricity and Energy - powering and sustainable and purposeful future.

An effective, affordable, sustainable, secure, and resilient electricity/energy supply is essential for enterprise to compete effectively in global markets. Clean, green, and competitive electricity generation (and distribution) are essential, yet in the UK the price of electricity is artificially/dysfunctionally pegged to the price of fossil fuels (gas) through marginal pricing. This anti-competitive practice artificially inflates electricity prices and creates huge price volatility due to geo-political tensions (e.g. war), global market speculation, and corporate profiteering, when the price of harnessing power from wind and sun is both stable and low (and continues to decrease). This artificial peg should be immmediately removed so the market can provide the cost effective clean electricity value adding enterprises need to sustainably flourish in global markets. Excessive and extractive profiteering must also to be direrctly addressed by government and regulators, and producers, distributors, and retailers should collectively be incentivised/regulated to ensure adoption of Purposeful Governance and world-class management practices. Community ownership should also be encouraged and energy independence and security needs to be assured.

National investment in digital infrastructure.

Digital infrastructure is now vital for enterprises to flourish and purposeful policies will need to ensure the development of this as a critical national infrastructure. This is increasingly the case with the growing influence of social media, misinformation/disinformation, cyber-attacks, and the application of AI and robotics in enterprise. We must not be reliant on other nations in these areas and must ensure we have home grown capability (alongside international alliances) in these areas. Tax and regulation should address extractive practices (e.g. by increasing digital service taxes) and the revenues generated used to build national capabilities and home grown enterprise. Likewise this national infrastructure increasingly needs to be owned by the nation and its citizens, future proofing the wellbeing of citizens in an increasingly digital/AI world.

Purposeful policies applied to remove bureacracy and layer upon layer of failed policy.

Policy failures and ineffective policies result more and more policy - layers and layers of ineffective policies that do not work and result in bureaucratic stagnation. Purposeful Policies will be introduced that are both simple and effective. Built using world class policy design, and systems thinking to reduce the risk of unintended consequences, they will be designed to tackle root causes of problems, to prevent problems and to avoid/remove any cost of failure. Good policy means less policy, and incentives will be used to drive good practice and the avoidance of negative externalities that need to be fixed. Regulation will support this when needed, and only when needed. Reducing unnecessary policies and micro-management of enterprise will create a vibrant environment for purposeful enterprise to flourish and in a sustainable way.

Purposeful policies to reduce negative externalities, extraction, and non-value adding activity.

Purposeful policies to need to be applied to properly account for the cost of any negative externalities, including the creation of unnecessary waste, unsustainable resource extraction, and stress-related illness created by poor management practices. Policies also need to address asset accumulation, hoarding, corporate capture and rent extraction (e.g. related to land, property, and other assets), and properly address huge profits being made from usary, gambling, and money for nothing schemes (e.g. by increasing taxes on gambling, trading, preditory lending and usary). Housing should no longer be seen as an asset class to profit from and council housing should once again become widespread - providing good quality affordable homes for hard-working people to live and bring up their family. In a similar vain banks should once again prioritise supporting value-adding businesses (with bank managers returning closer to the coal-face again) instead of prioritising lending to property speculators, asset/derivative traders, and investing in personalised wealth management services.

There's obviously much more in terms of principles, policies, and practice, and the above provides just a little insight into what a Purposeful Government would do to create a vibrant, sustainable and thriving environment for enterprise, communities, and nation to flourish.

A shorter summary can be found here.

David Clift

Purposeful Ambassador®

Founder, Good Turns Foundation

Founder, The Purposeful Policy Forum & The Purposeful Governance Forum

Co-developer of Purposeful Britain and a Purposeful World

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