The problem with ten-year thinking
This week, I was asked to speak at the Resolve Poverty conference on what better local anti-poverty policy could look like in ten years’ time, drawing on local government reorganisation, the Child Poverty Strategy, and the consequences of doing nothing differently.
So I started imagining 2036 and I realised something uncomfortable.
If the next ten years are anything like the last ten, then almost anything could happen.
In the past decade, the UK has had six Prime Ministers, Brexit, a global pandemic, the rise of AI, war in Europe, and the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation. And, somehow, two Trumps.
Planning ten years ahead suddenly feels less like strategy and more like guesswork.
So I started thinking about cathedrals.
What cathedral builders understood about time
The key to achieving any vision is understanding the role that time plays.
And very few groups understood this better than cathedral builders.
Take York Minster (pictured). This breath-taking building, built to inspire religious awe, took around 250 years to build.
Nine generations of people working towards a single, shared vision.
The people who laid the foundations knew they would never see the finished building. And yet they built anyway.
Cathedrals are the ultimate long-term project. Not perfect, not without controversy, but undeniably the product of sustained, collective ambition over time.
If we are serious about tackling poverty, we need to think in the same way.
We need to build policy cathedrals.
At a time when we need cathedrals, we are pitching tents
So why aren’t we building policy cathedrals?
Because we are structurally conditioned not to.
Over the last decade, and beyond, local government has survived on single-year financial settlements. Funding is often announced at the last minute, with guidance that follows too late, and expectations to design, deliver, and report back within months.
Alongside narrow funding windows, expectations for results are just as rapid with the biggest short-term culprit being the Household Support Fund. Short term funding for short term problems is not how we improve lives.
This conditioned short-termism means we are now at the point where we celebrate three years of Crisis and Resilience Fund certainty as if it were transformational.
In that environment, long-term thinking isn’t rewarded. It’s penalised.
What we get instead is rapid delivery, short-term outputs, and very little space for systemic redesign.
We are not building cathedrals.
We are pitching tents.
Poverty operates over time. Policy doesn’t.
Poverty is not a single event. It is a timeline.
Its effects accumulate slowly. A childhood in poverty shapes health, education, confidence, opportunity, and earnings across decades. The damage compounds year by year, often invisibly, until it becomes unavoidable.
In that sense, poverty resembles what Rob Nixon described as slow violence. Harm that unfolds gradually, quietly, and over long periods of time.
This isn’t a controversial point. The government’s own child poverty strategy recognises that poverty accumulates over decades.
And yet, in the same breath, it commits to delivering change within a single parliament and measuring progress annually.
Only this week we’ve heard political criticism that the government is “running out of time” to fix these issues less than two years into office.
But poverty is not on a two-year timeline.
What is running out is political time. The time to demonstrate visible progress to voters before the next election.
And that distinction matters.
Because it reveals a fundamental misalignment between how poverty works and how policy is expected to respond.
Wealth understands time.
There is another side to this.
Wealth capitalises on long-term investment strategies with multi-generational returns over decades or even centuries. Wealth passes assets down through generations. Wealth understands the value of land not just today, but over time.
When your immediate needs are met, you can afford to think long term. You can step out of the tent.
Poverty doesn’t offer that luxury. And local government in particular cannot deliver long term improvement while today’s needs are mission critical.
Because organisations feel the same effects and develop the same behaviours as households trapped in short-term crisis management. When you are managing day-to-day survival, time collapses into the present; decisions are short term because they have to be. The system then judges those decisions as failures of behaviour, rather than constraints of circumstance. And we don’t learn and build on each programme.
Cathedrals require institutional memory across generations, and yet we are asking our contemporary institutions to learn, while systematically removing their ability to retain memory.
This is no way to build a cathedral.
The mismatch at the heart of policy
This is the core problem.
We are trying to solve a long-term problem with short-term tools.
As Peter Hall’s work suggests, meaningful policy change depends on social learning over time. Systems test ideas, absorb feedback, and gradually shift their assumptions.
But that process requires stability. It requires time.
What we have instead is a system that constantly resets itself. Short funding cycles, rapid delivery expectations, and immediate evaluation mean policies are rarely in place long enough for learning to embed.
This isn’t a system that evolves.
It’s a system that repeats.
However, better policy doesn’t mean choosing between immediate support and long-term reform. It means doing both, deliberately. Because while planning for cathedrals, we do still need tents.
We need short-term responses that meet immediate need, medium-term reforms that strengthen local systems, and long-term commitments that endure beyond political cycles.
Policy has to operate at multiple speeds at once.
Thinking like cathedral builders
This requires a shift in how we define success.
It means accepting that meaningful reductions in poverty may take longer than a programme, longer than a funding cycle, sometimes longer than our own careers.
And building anyway.
So when we design policy locally, we should ask a different question.
Not just: what does this deliver this year?
But: where does this fit in the cathedral?
Is this laying foundations? Strengthening the structure? Adding detail that only makes sense because of what came before?
Because without that framing, we risk mistaking activity for progress.
The real challenge is not technical. It is cultural.
Better policy might mean we have to stop thinking like short-term fund managers.
And start thinking like cathedral builders.