Many of the Blavatnik School’s alumni worldwide have taken the leap to pursue elected office. Charlie Hicks, however, from the Master of Public Policy class of 2022 had already faced down this challenge before even applying for the course, and has been completing his studies while representing the Cowley Division in Oxfordshire County Council as a Labour Councillor. So what brought him to the Blavatnik School of Government?
“In my first year of being a councillor it became clear to me that to do the job of a local politician well you’ve really got to understand how the machine of government works. It’s not simple. I use the analogy of government as a machine built over time, with different people adding different modules here and there. There are lots of levers and buttons but very few are labelled and sometimes the labels have been switched around by others. Quite often if you pull a lever, you have no idea what the consequences will be. And there’s no instruction manual.”
Progressive local politics to support the just transition
An Oxford native, Charlie has spent most of his life in the city and studied neuroscience at Oxford University as an undergraduate. His knowledge of the city and interest in issues at the intersection of housing, transport and climate change led Charlie to start campaigning for healthy streets and sustainable transport in Oxford.
Working with other campaign groups, he set up a pop-up shop in central Oxford to reimagine what the city could look like with less traffic and transformed streets and solicited feedback from residents. The participatory process received a huge number of responses from the local community, but the Council’s leadership at the time opted not to pass the proposed plans.
“It became clear to me that if we were going to make changes, the politics needed to change.”
In addition to the work Charlie did with residents on opening up spaces in the city, he was involved in the Cowley Division’s pilot of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) in May 2021. The pilot and subsequent rollout of the policy across the neighbourhood generated significant backlash, and Charlie was part of the team out on the streets listening to residents’ feedback and concerns.
“That process started my journey on the policy side about what works to reduce car use, plus how do you do it fairly, how do you deliver it politically, and how do you ensure good communications around policy changes. Through campaigning and meeting people involved with this issue I was put forward to stand as the Labour candidate for Cowley.”
Studying public policy to tackle complex local challenges
Charlie was elected to the Council that same year, and soon began to see the value of pursuing a postgraduate course that would prepare him to wrestle with the complex challenges that policymakers and elected officers face on a daily basis. Through his contacts in local politics, he heard about the Blavatnik School’s Political Leadership Scholarship and felt he met the criteria required to submit a competitive application.
Receiving the scholarship has allowed Charlie to spend the past year exploring the role of different disciplines such as economics, philosophy, political science and law in the policymaking process. This, in turn, has given him the knowledge and confidence to engage more impactfully in the functions that councillors can do within the Council to make things happen in a legitimate way.
“There has been an almost constant feedback loop back and forward between bringing my experience and learnings from the Council to the MPP, then bringing what I have learned on the MPP back to my work in the Council. It’s been hard work to do both at the same time, but it's been really valuable at the same time.”
Since starting the course, Charlie has also applied his newfound knowledge to new responsibilities at the Council. As deputy leader of the Labour group in the Council, Charlie takes a leading role in shaping and pushing for the party’s policy agenda. More recently, he was named the Council’s Champion for Future Generations, a role designed to ensure that policies being created meet the needs of the current generation without sacrificing the wellbeing and potential of future generations.
Up next for Charlie is the MPP Summer Project, which he is spending at a London think tank working on a policy brief. Focusing on housing, the paper will consider options to address the housing crisis without building new houses that are only accessible by car.
“There is another way to model urban development, but it requires having public transport, walking, cycling and fitting the rest of daily life around housing – there should be local access to local services. It's a whole different approach to how you design cities.”
July 2023.