Whatever happened to expertise in policymaking?

Among the more amusing moments working on a newsdesk are those that occur when a breaking story is greeted not with murmurs of shock, gasps of anger or peals of laughter, but with two raised eyebrows and the question: “Err, what?”

That was my reaction upon hearing of growing pressure on the prime minister to sack her newly appointed housing tsar, the academic Roger Scruton, following concern about potentially sexist and racist remarks he had made in the past.

What caused my own brows to lift skyward here was not the suggestion that Scruton’s views on date rape made him unsuitable for this particular public office – as my colleague Kuba Shand-Baptiste argued only this week, it’s quite right that public bodies including government are held to the highest standards on the messages their figureheads send out – but the idea that he had been the right appointment to that job in the first place.

Scruton’s record in academia is well known, and as a thinker he deserves some modicum of respect. He has long courted controversy for his highly conservative perspective, however, and so perhaps in a divided Britain such as ours Theresa May or her ministers might have thought to caution against him on that matter alone.

But what basis was there for thinking that his position as public philosopher qualified him to advise on the crucial matter of the UK housing crisis?

Housing is the single biggest social issue for a whole generation of young people trapped in costly, short-term private rented accommodation. The appointment of someone with no professional experience of how the social and private housing markets work shows scant regard for that.

There are more than a handful of individuals in Britain today – some well known in public life, such as the policy adviser Matthew Taylor or the designer Wayne Hemingway; others working under the radar in a professional capacity, such as Kate Henderson, recently appointed as head of the National Housing Federation and previously a planning expert who spoke openly about the need for beautiful buildings and public spaces – who could have offered genuine advice, and acted as a figurehead for the government’s “Building Better, Building Beautiful commission”.

So the big question this raises is not whether we should tolerate views that could be characterised as racist, sexist or homophobic (for clarity: of course we should not), but why the government is choosing celebrity academics over experienced professionals to advise it on the matters most urgent to the electorate.

Yours,

Hannah Fearn

Comment editor