In the heady days of the Truss premiership last October, a group of 70 people from all over the United Kingdom gathered at the Friends’ Meeting House in Manchester. Among their number were a clutch of senior civil servants, senior local government officers and academics from leading universities. The event had been organised by the charity Engage Britain, working in partnership with the Institute for Community Studies and TPXImpact.
Most of those in the room were part of Engage Britain’s Grassroots Advisory Network, a collection of community activists and leaders from across the country, invited to co-design new community-powered policy responses to poverty and the coming cost-of-living crisis. There had been no Ministerial commission at the start of the process and no submissions were prepared by the end. Whether anything will change in the real world as a result remains a moot point.
Yet the fact that senior officials and academics chose to give up their time to participate speaks to a new openness in the policymaking process. The hunt is on for a new policymaking paradigm: one that responds to the challenge of levelling up and taking back control, that respects the wisdom of those with lived experience. ‘Participation and engagement’ may be a core component of the Policy Profession’s Strategy pillar but the reality of public engagement is often messier and more multi-faceted than the theory, and certainly goes beyond traditional approaches to transparency and consultation.
This new approach is at the heart of Engage Britain, which was set up in 2019 by Julian McCrae, former deputy director of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, with a remit to bring people together to tackle some of the country’s biggest challenges. Responding to a growing sense that politics is out of touch with the public, Julian and his team are looking for new ways to respond to some of the biggest problems the country faces: how to fund healthcare properly, how to build enough housing for everyone, how best to approach immigration.
This is a view shared by the Institute for Community Studies, also set up in 2019 as a new kind of evidence centre that seeks to put people at the heart of decisions about the things that matter most to them. A good example its work comes from a 2021 report on regeneration policy. The quantitative part of its analysis revealed that 20 years of government programmes in the most left-behind areas had made no measurable difference to relative spatial deprivation. But the real sting came from its work with local residents, best captured in the words of one respondent (also used in the report’s title): “Why don’t they ask us what will work instead of telling us what we need?”
It doesn’t have to be this way. Local authorities were blown away by the community response to the pandemic, with mutual aid groups up and down the country working hand in glove with statutory partners to deliver assistance where it was most needed. Yet, barely a year after Covid restrictions were lifted, those same voluntary and community groups complain they are being swamped by paperwork, forced to fill in endless forms to prove they provide best value. A bureaucratic, transactional mentality that ignores the deep relationships built between local people and their local democratic representatives.That is what those 70 people in Manchester were trying to address last October. Policy co-design is not some panacea that will solve overnight the many social and economic challenges facing the country. And indeed, many policy questions are best dealt with by central government acting unilaterally on behalf of all communities. But policymaking at every level – from the national down to the hyperlocal – will always risk falling short of public expectation if the very people intended to benefit are excluded from the process.
This blog first appeared on the (password protected) Policy Profession website in February 2023.