Most civil servants know all too well the joys and frustrations of being tasked with making the policies that can resolve whatever issues make up the departmental priority list.
So often, there are no easy solutions to tough challenges and most recommendations are a compromise between the outcome that is desired and the resources at your disposal.
In our current fiscal environment, hard choices are going to have to be made and taking the public on this journey will not be easy. Especially when many of the policy challenges we face will require personal sacrifice, whether that’s paying more tax or lifestyle changes to meet net-zero commitments.
One answer to these complex and potentially divisive policy challenges is to engage the public in the decisions that need to be made. While there is often space made within policymaking for insights around public opinion, in the current climate there is a great opportunity to draw the public in further; asking them to bring to bear their collective considered judgement to help policymakers navigate trade-offs and, ultimately, deliver more effective policies that create better outcomes for more people.
Demos, in collaboration with participation charity Involve, has made this case in a recent publication, the Citizens’ White Paper, which sets out why, when and how the government could embed public participation in national policymaking.
As part of our research, we interviewed ex and current senior civil servants. They described the problems with the way policymaking is done now:
- The "Whitehall bubble" is too removed from the everyday experiences of citizens
- Policymakers – at every level – feel disempowered to try new things
- Policymaking is often informed only by the "usual suspects" who shout the loudest or don’t offer rigorous enough challenge
- Political turbulence isn’t conducive to long-term policymaking
These problems aren’t new. Likewise, there are tried and tested ways to help overcome them, to be found in participatory policymaking: a suite of tools and approaches, and a mindset, which is already in use across local government in the UK and in national and local government across the world. Some examples include the Paris Citizens’ Assembly, which co-developed a bill that has recently been signed into law; the Scottish Government’s commitment to develop participative democracy; and Newham’s permanent Citizens’ Assembly, which engages residents in decision making in the borough). By harnessing the collective intelligence of a wide range of citizens who are affected by an issue or trying to tackle it on the ground, the policies developed will directly address people’s needs. Policies won’t fail at first contact with reality, helping to avoid the fiscal cost of policy failure. And by enabling the public to work through difficult issues and reach agreements about ways forward, policymakers can develop policies that people can get behind.
At a time when faith in our democratic processes is at a dangerously low ebb – with research for the Citizens' White Paper finding 76% of people don't trust politicians to make decisions for the good of the country – not only can involving the public in a meaningful way improve policymaking, it is also an excellent way of restoring trust in our political institutions.
"Policymaking is often informed only by the "usual suspects" who shout the loudest or don’t offer rigorous enough challenge"
Participatory approaches aren’t a silver bullet – and they aren’t appropriate for every policy question. But there are a range of methods, such as citizens’ panels or citizens’ juries and deliberative or co-design workshops, that can be used to help answer thorny policy questions. Examples include addressing the trade-offs between prison capacity and sentencing priorities, considering social care funding options that are acceptable to people, or deliberating on House of Lords reform.
In the Citizens’ White Paper, we set out nine practical, costed recommendations for how to embed participation across government. Some are public-facing actions that will send a signal to the public that the government wants to build a different relationship between citizen and state, like creating a flagship Citizens’ Panel to feed into each of the new Mission Boards. Others are civil service-facing actions about building up the skills, capacity and culture of the civil service to put citizens at the heart of everyday policymaking.
These recommendations include:
- Creating a central hub of participatory policymaking expertise in government. Policymakers told us that a lack of know-how about participatory methods puts them off trying it. We propose setting up a central hub to provide expertise and support for policy teams, drawing on and ramping up existing expertise, such as in Policy Lab. This will accelerate the diffusion of skills across government and build up networks of policymakers with experience in participatory policymaking, improving how day-to-day policymaking is done.
- Setting up a cross-government standing citizens’ pool for Mission Boards and departments to draw on. Another barrier that civil servants identified is not knowing how to convene members of the public to involve them in policymaking. To mitigate this, we propose creating a large-scale pool of 2,500 randomly selected but demographically representative citizens, from which to draw smaller panels of citizens to feed into each of the five mission boards, as well as for departments to draw on for participatory policymaking work. Centralising recruitment and management of the panel will save resources and time when policy teams want to involve citizens in policymaking.
- Levers to encourage participatory policymaking across government. We set out a package of levers to normalise participatory policymaking and build a culture of participation across government. These include training and support; building departmental participation units; developing senior civil service champions; new policymaking guidance via a "citizen participation assessment", where like producing an equalities impact assessment, teams will have to say how they have involved the public in a proportionate way in their advice to ministers.
- Creating and implementing a Duty to Consider Participation. This duty would require bill teams to give consideration to participation via a citizen participation assessment. This should be set out in guidance by the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee of the cabinet, which will hold bill teams to account for demonstrating how they have involved the public, or explain why they have not, before the bill can be introduced in parliament.
Across government there are civil servants already using participatory methods. Engagement and participation is already part of the policy profession's training standards, and since 2023, the Participatory Methods Forum has been convening civil servants across government to support and enable a systematic, evidence-based approach to participatory methods that adds value to policymaking and improves delivery. But it is, as yet, a minority approach.
In the Citizens’ White Paper, we argue that there is a vital need to mainstream participatory policymaking to develop policies that work better by involving people who would be impacted by the policy decision. It is an evolution of policymaking as simple and as profound as the shift to evidence based policymaking in the 2000s, making it fit to deal with the 21st century challenges ahead.
Miriam Levin is director of participatory programmes at the cross-party think tank Demos
Sarah Castell is chief executive of the participation charity Involve