Residents living near Heathrow should be given free flights to the Caribbean to persuade them of the benefits of a third runway, according to a senior adviser to the government.
David Halpern, the head of the behavioural insights team, or “nudge unit”, said that fresh thinking was needed to win over the local population when it came to big infrastructure projects to stop the costly planning battles that precede most of them.
Psychologically, the human mind is primed to fear the worst when change is imminent, he said. The mind fills with the bad, which drives out the good. Incentives can help to break into that mechanism, he believes. Smart incentives that need not cost much could help people to realise that there may be an upside for them.
“If you ask someone if they want more housing in their area, they will almost always say no. If you ask them would they like their children to have new housing so they can stay in the local area, they will say yes. These planning issues need to be framed differently,” he said.
“When it comes to a big project like Heathrow, we need to think about how to help local people feel more positively about expansion. Heathrow airport should be offering local residents who will be affected by the noise of more planes flying over their homes by giving them vouchers for travelling. It would change the way a resident feels about the plane going overhead. It might make them think, ‘There goes my holiday to Barbados’.”
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Mr Halpern was speaking to The Times to mark the publication of his book Inside the Nudge Unit, which charts how the behavioural insights team came into being in the early days of the coalition government in 2010 and how it has started to change policy making.
Among its early successes were increased tax collection after changes were made to the wording on tax demands, cutting dropout rates at further education colleges with a Sunday evening text to students, and higher levels of police recruitment from ethnic minorities after tinkering with the online application process.
Failures include helping pregnant women to stop smoking with offers of assistance on pregnancy tests.
Mr Halpern, who sets his watch three minutes fast to fool himself that he is running late, has no fear of failure. It is central to the unit’s approach. If you try new ways of doing something, some will fly and some will flop. After early scepticism, government departments are now falling over themselves to work with behaviour experts on his staff and the unit is being copied all over the world.
“We are trying to be realistic about what drives behaviour. A lot of decisions in government are based on an unrealistic model [that people are rational]. If you can understand how humans make decisions you can make policy more effective.”
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Hassle, and removing it, is central to nudging people in the right direction. Why are oranges often the only fruit left in the bowl? They are a hassle to peel. Similarly, few people have taken advantage of subsidised loft insulation to cut their energy bills because it is too much hassle to clear the loft. The solution? Send details of local loft clearings companies with the literature. It worked where further discounts failed.
Mr Halpern knew the risks involved in challenging the old ways of doing things in a civil service weary of new ideas. He had been a member of the “blue skies” strategy unit set up by Tony Blair that sank without trace.
The Big Society was launched at about the same time as the Nudge Unit and within months became a joke. So why has the Nudge Unit flourished?
“We didn’t make a song and dance about [the nudge unit],” he said. “The quiet beginning gave us the space to do the heavy lifting. It is very much about an empirical approach, testing things out to see what works. So much of the work was about small, seemingly insignificant, changes about choices and what is more effective.”
Staff beavered away for 18 months before it even went public within Whitehall, presenting a few early findings to key permanent secretaries. They were stunned that such small, cheap interventions could help to solve problems that departments had been wrestling with for years, such as how to get people to switch energy suppliers to get a better deal. Answer: print a message highlighting the potential savings on the outside of the winter fuel envelope. How to get more people to pay their tax on time? Tell them: “Most people pay their tax on time”.