The Conservative Party’s new policy framework, The Right Way, promises to learn from past failures and make government more accountable. But its proposals explain how power would be exercised more clearly than how mistakes would be detected and corrected. Clear safeguards and procedures for acting on evidence would help close that gap, says Vendan Ananda Kumararajah

A policy document tells us what its authors intend to do. It also shows how they expect to govern: what they will accept as evidence, who may decide, how failure will be recognised and what happens when their assumptions prove wrong. These questions can be examined before a single promise is tested in office.

The Conservatives’ The Right Way, published at the party’s Birmingham conference in October, is a good test case. It is explicitly not a manifesto. Its foreword promises to explain how the party would decide differently when circumstances change. That is a claim about the machinery of governing, so it can be assessed.

I examined the document using the A3 Governance Dashboard, developed from my A3 Model, with large language model assistance operating strictly within its defined logic and rules. The assessment asks how the proposed system connects purpose, action, feedback, correction and authority, rather than whether Conservative policies are desirable.

A3 examines three elements together: Aram, ethical coherence between stated purposes and the rules that serve them; Aanavam, the distortions an institution generates, including through its own incentives; and Adhikaram, legitimate agency, with authority treated as earned, conditional and revocable. Its central test is whether experience changes what an institution accepts as knowledge, the rules it applies and the authority it grants. A document can specify how that would happen. It cannot show that it will.

The Right Way is strong on diagnosis and on stating the principles of a self-correcting government. It is weaker at turning those principles into mechanisms with owners, triggers and consequences. Where the document becomes concrete, it mostly strengthens the authority to decide and to remove. Where it concerns finding out that a decision was wrong, it stays general.

Its first strength is candour about the party’s own contribution to failure. The foreword acknowledges promises to lower immigration without a delivery strategy, legislating for Net Zero before having an economically feasible route and leaving the EU without the accompanying economic plan.

It also diagnoses how government corrupts its own evidence. Once a policy has been promised, “the incentive is to build a case for it rather than reopen the question of whether it should happen at all”. Appraisal can justify a decision already taken instead of informing it. The document recognises optimism bias and pressure for convenient forecasts. These are accurate descriptions of the failure of feedback.

The second strength is a set of decision rules that can be checked. Before regulating, ministers should state what would happen without the new law, what improvement it should produce and why existing law, information or competition would not do better. Regulation should be assessed alongside the laws it joins. Parliament should rank regulators’ objectives and explain how conflicts are resolved.

Subsidies require a stated public benefit, clarity on taxpayer exposure and when support will end. The Golden Economic Rule requires at least half of every pound saved to reduce the deficit. Energy policy faces three tests: global emissions, deliverability and security of supply. These rules link purpose to criteria, which is what Aram looks for. A future audit could test compliance.

The third strength is aligning authority with responsibility. Whoever has discretion should, wherever possible, control the necessary resources and face the consequences. Commitments must carry their capability: “If sentencing policy requires more prison places, then cells must be part of the policy.” The document also says good policy identifies critical assumptions and gives ministers indicators of impending failure and a response if they fail.

The first weakness is that it does not consistently apply this correction principle to its own proposals. Removing legal barriers and doubling resources is expected to increase annual immigration removals from 34,000 to around 150,000. The proposal would be funded by closing asylum hotels and savings across the asylum system.

The immigration chapter does not attach indicators, review points or fallbacks to that forecast if removals fall short or savings fail to appear. It promises improved data and modelling but does not supply those safeguards. Possible withdrawal from the Refugee Convention would be monitored if judges obstructed the plan, without specifying who monitors, how obstruction is assessed or what triggers withdrawal. The principle and its application point in different directions.

The second weakness is that the document sets out powers to dismiss ministers and officials more clearly than the standards and safeguards governing their use. It says the Prime Minister must be prepared to remove failing ministers, while ministers must have authority to remove officials who refuse lawful instructions or persistently fail to deliver. Although it calls for clear objectives and regular scrutiny of delivery, it does not specify the evidence or process for deciding when dismissal is justified.

It says ministers must give proper weight to impartial advice and officials should be free to challenge assumptions and raise legal concerns, citing the Ministerial and Civil Service Codes. Those protections are important but the framework does not specify how its removal proposals would distinguish persistent non-delivery from a well-founded warning, or the evidence and process governing that judgement. Under Adhikaram, authority to sanction is made concrete while important conditions keeping it legitimate remain implicit. Ministers could find dismissing the messenger safer than revising the forecast.

The third weakness concerns preserving the corrective functions of institutions removed or replaced. Abolishing the Sentencing Council would make the Lord Chancellor accountable for sentencing policy. This concerns oversight of policy rather than appeals against individual sentences.

The immigration proposals go further. They would abolish the Immigration Tribunal, bring decisions within the Home Office and provide a short internal appeal. Judicial review would be restricted to narrowly defined grounds of acting without statutory authority, while legal aid for immigration would be abolished. The Home Secretary could grant discretionary leave in exceptional cases of manifest injustice or grave danger, but those decisions would not be reviewable by courts.

The rationale is consistent: political decisions belong to elected politicians answerable to Parliament and voters. That is a legitimate position, and it follows from the document’s own principle of clear responsibility. But electoral accountability does not itself provide individual redress while parliamentary scrutiny serves a different function from an independent appeal. The immigration proposals make authority more visible but less conditional at the level of the single decision, and they leave the decision-maker controlling most of the evidence about its own performance. Regular publication about exceptional discretionary leave is proposed, but the information and frequency are unspecified.

The Financial Ombudsman Service would be replaced by an adjudicator applying clear law. Here the document expressly says consumers and small businesses need free, accessible redress. The question is how the replacement would deliver that commitment while preserving corrective capacity. These proposals require different scrutiny because their corrective functions differ.

The fourth weakness is a narrow feedback channel. The Conservative Economic Unit works with businesses, investors and entrepreneurs. The document says this has already shaped policy on bank ring-fencing and capital requirements. This is evidence that input changed decisions, though the evidence is the party’s own account. It does not disclose what was heard, what was rejected or why, or describe an equivalent channel for those bearing the costs of deregulation. Selective evidence is a classic source of distortion in A3.

The fifth weakness is that institutional learning is promised without specifying how experience would revise governing arrangements. The document draws lessons from the 2022 mini-budget and police recruitment and calls for regular scrutiny of delivery. It does not turn those commitments into a defined process for revising its own governing rules. Its conclusion calls this ‘only Part One’, leaving room to address the gap.

The Right Way deserves credit for recognising past failures and stating rules that could be audited. Its gaps can be closed without changing its political direction. Attach indicators, review dates and fallbacks to major forecasts, starting with removals and savings. Define the standard, evidence and process behind removal powers, and give frank advice a protected channel. For each external check removed, explain how individual error will be detected and corrected and what will be published. Open the Economic Unit’s evidence, including what it rejected, to scrutiny.

None of this measures performance. An omission from a prospective framework identifies a question to resolve rather than demonstrating failure in office. But it gives voters, journalists and civil servants something specific to track: who responds when a forecast is missed, on what evidence an official is removed and what changes after an error is found. 

The same test applies to Labour, Reform, the Liberal Democrats or any board approving a strategy. The Right Way asks to be judged on what it achieves, not what it intended. A3 adds a second measure: whether experience will change how power is exercised.

Vendan Ananda Kumararajah is an internationally recognised transformation architect and systems thinker. The originator of the A3 Model—a new-order cybernetic framework uniting ethics, distortion awareness, and agency in AI and governance—he bridges ancient Tamil philosophy with contemporary systems science. A Member of the Chartered Management Institute and author of Navigating Complexity and System Challenges: Foundations for the A3 Model (2025), Vendan is redefining how intelligence, governance, and ethics interconnect in an age of autonomous technologies.

READ MORE: Rethink AI governance or risk an uncontrolled intelligence explosion. As AI begins helping to develop and evaluate its own successors, flawed assumptions and biases could multiply with each generation, fuelling an ‘intelligence explosion’ in which increasingly capable systems become harder to govern. To avoid this, stronger independent evaluation and oversight are essential, argues Vendan Ananda Kumararajah.

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_{Main Image: Kemi Badenoch speaking at the Argentina–UK Summit in November 2025. Credit: Fhanks (CC BY-SA 4.0).}