Think Tanks
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Putting people back into policymaking
To many people, democracy means a choice every few years between two or three middle-aged, well-paid white men who claim to represent their views, but in reality wouldn’t dream of giving them a say in the policy-making process. Decisions, it would seem, are best left to elected officials and civil servants in Whitehall – people who apparently understand our needs better than we do.
But last week I saw a different and altogether better form of democracy in action, at the start of a new project we are running alongside the Cabinet Office and Sciencewise. The project is looking at how well-being evidence can be democratically incorporated into policymaking, and it kicked off with two public dialogue sessions on policies to tackle loneliness.
The sessions brought 25 people together in two different locations across the country to have in-depth conversations about how to reduce loneliness in the communities in which we live. As well as discussing the subject in broad terms the idea was to encourage participants to hone in on concrete policy proposals to be taken forward to the Cabinet Office. The sessions revealed an intelligence and breadth of thinking which, looking at opinion surveys and the average day’s headlines in the tabloids, you might be forgiven for thinking doesn’t exist.
Some of the participants had deep personal experience of loneliness, others didn’t. Together they were able to explore the drivers of it – both societal and personal – and begin to develop ideas to tackle it. Some of the ideas they came up with are already being piloted, or have been put forward by NGOs or campaigners. Others were brand new and could well provide a fresh angle to explore in an area where little is yet known about what is effective, and where we are badly in need of new solutions. Over the next few months we’ll run similar processes on community rights and how to increase the pay of low earners.
For me it made clear how arrogant it is to assume that the best policy is designed by ‘experts’. The value of the ideas the public came up with was not just that more heads are generally better than fewer: all the ideas they came up with were solidly grounded in their actual experiences – and though they may not have been experts in legislation, funding or research, they were experts in their own real needs. In much of policy making, this is the expertise that matters and which, too often, is missing.
Perhaps most amazing on the day, was people’s willingness to open up in a room full of complete strangers. Within three hours, people had talked about their experiences of loneliness, bereavements and suicide attempts. They’d questioned their own pride and the responsibility of those who experience difficult situations to pull themselves up. That’s brave.
Together it gives me hope that opening up policy and politics to involve members of the public can lead to a dramatic transformation - one which improves policy, democracy, and peoples’ perceptions of both.
