The Guardian‘s Shiv Malik reports that the Government’s Behavioural Insight Team – the so-called “nudge unit” – is in hot water over its unauthorised use of a bogus “psychometric test” designed to boost the self-esteem of jobseekers. Malik writes:
The Behavioural Insight team… has been accused by the Ohio-based VIA Institute on Character of bad practice after civil servants used VIA’s personality tests in pilot experiments in Essex despite being refused permission to do so.
The £520,000-a-year Cabinet Office unit run by Dr David Halpern was told by VIA – whose members devised the personality test – to stop using the questionnaire because it had failed its scientific validation.
The Government’s mistake was apparently in using a shorter version of the questionnaire than the 120- and 240-question ones which VIA had tested. So not only were they misleading jobseekers over what, exactly, the tests were doing – they were also using an intervention which had no evidence backing it up.
It will be interesting to see how – or whether – this affects the privatisation of the nudge unit. The government has announced plans to turn the team into a public service mutual, which would involve at least 25 per cent of the shares being held by the staff, and the rest split between government and a private sector partner. As Ed Mayo, of Co-Operatives UK, writes of that spin-off:
There is no vote for staff in this version of mutualisation, so they can perhaps be pressed into something they don’t buy into. It is not really a new model but rather good old privatisation – although with the potential for the taxpayer to benefit if the business does well.
Above all, it is not, or at least not yet, a genuine mutual business. Nor is it a co-operative. And don’t even mention the wonderful John Lewis, which is tediously and often inappropriately trotted out as an ideal for all services.
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And if the government is hoping to benefit from this privatisation, it’s best if it doesn’t happen in a climate where the unit’s unprofessionalism and lack of evidence-based rigour has just been exposed for all to see.
Which makes this particularly awkward timing.
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