We need more participation in policymaking, we certainly don’t need less

I started writing a comment in response to today’s essay by James O’Malley but it quickly became outsized so I’ve turned it into a blog post instead.

The source for that essay is a new whitepaper from Demos that offers up a roadmap for embedding greater public participation in national policy making. James isn’t a great fan of it and in making the URL for his essay “James vs Demos” he’s clearly writing from a place of provocation. But he’s not alone. It also drew the ire of several commentators on Twitter. What’s strange is that I think in different times all of them would have probably been at the vanguard of enthusiasm for greater openness and engagement from government, not less.

But I can sympathise with their point of view. Some of that is concern that such efforts simply create an open buffet for cranks and extremists to push their agendas because they’re the ones who show up. But overall I sense a tired frustration that the country is just really bad at delivering the things we need. And that the feeling is that the sclerosis in this aspect of modern Britain comes from inviting external voices into the process which delay and obfuscate from what needs to be done because they hold too much sway.

A good example of that could be that some of the ballooning costs of HS2 that ultimately led to its cancellation for the country as a whole coming from efforts to satisfy the concerns of certain local communities and residents. While on the flip side to that, the new government has rapidly pressed ahead with a number of energy initiatives with national (if not international) outcomes in mind that had been being held up by local objections.

But focusing on these issues is to absolve those who govern for their deficiency in leadership. We can say that in either case it’s been a face off between individuals and communities (bad) and government decisiveness (good). But that’s such a bad place for us to end up when it comes to thinking about the sort of society we want to live in and the sort of public discourse we want to engage with.

I’m far from a Citizens’ Assembly maximalist and I do believe that the bigger issue is the character and behaviour of our elected politicians in general but I think more participation along those sort of lines can play a part in restoring a healthier public discourse and a more engaged British public. The evidence from around the world and collected by the OECD is quite compelling on that front.

Just how bad is trust in the UK anyway?

In James’ piece he cited evidence from the British Social Attitudes survey. In their most recent edition they concluded that trust in politics was currently at its lowest point since it was first measured by the survey in 1986.

The status quo when it comes to trust is bad. It’s easy to think about the state of the country and feel a pervasive atmosphere of trustlessness. And to draw the link from those low levels of trust to why we can’t have grown up and mature conversations about all sorts of contentious things.

And that’s why thinktanks like Demos or DemocracyNext are beating the drum for rethinking the nature of participation.

The disintegration of trust is particularly severe in the UK compared to its global peers. According to the recent OECD Drivers of Trust Survey, 26.7% of Britons have high or moderate trust in their national government. That’s 29th out of the 30 surveyed countries. Only 19% of us have moderate to high trust in our media. And that drops to 12% when it comes to political parties.

These are all outliers. When it comes to the media and our political parties the OECD average is twice what we’re reporting and in the highest countries their levels are three times what ours are. The UK’s are the lowest of all.

So, how do you build or protect trust?

This was a central question to our work at the OECD on digital government and data. For example, in thinking about how you create the sort of data-driven public sector that we agree is A Good Thing, we spent a third of our framework focusing on doing so in a way that is mindful of public trust. But to what extent do wider levels of trust make it impossible to do that anyway? The crisis of trust more broadly needs to be high up on the priorities for any government and especially the new one in the UK.

So if governments have to rebuild that trust it’s just as well that some of my former colleagues at that ‘outsourced brain’ of ours in Paris have taken a step back to grapple with this question. Because we aren’t the only country in the world. And other countries have a huge amount to teach us about what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to driving trust in society.

When I wrote about the impact of digital government on well-being I concluded government needed to be responsive, protective, and trustworthy. I’ll defer to my former colleagues who took that further in the OECD’s framework for trust in public institutions and said that ultimately everything is about trust, and that trust boils down to competency and values.

Competency

From a competency point of view it boils down to two things: the responsiveness and reliability of government. And that sounds right – a government which reliably does what it says it will do and that does what it does in response to the needs and issues facing society is definitely going to be a trustworthy government.

So James, and the other critics of adding layers of public engagement, are absolutely right to argue that delivery is a big factor in building that trust. Thinking about the UK alone the most ‘successful’ delivery people can point to is a Brexit that satisfies absolutely nobody and has wasted almost a decade at this point. And you could take your pick when it comes to the least successful outcomes but I don’t think you can look past the unravelling of HS2.

But what do responsiveness and reliability mean in practice?

Responsiveness

Responsiveness is what we might think of as the bread and butter of government. It’s the day to day of our experience in our interactions with government. So that means a focus on outcomes and making sure that public services function effectively and meet citizen needs.

That requires government to be really good at operating across the different levels of government both to understand needs and to respond to them. National government and local government being at loggerheads, which was absolutely what was happening in London over ULEZ (a stunningly successful policy BTW), is not going to build trust or make it easier to deliver.

It also involves investing in people so that the civil service is of a high calibre and competent. It was incredibly counter productive for trust that the last government to spend so much energy in constantly decrying the civil service.

You get better at doing this by listening to feedback and adapting services to evolving needs. You can’t be a responsive government if you shut down opportunities like those which Demos is calling for.

Reliability

Reliability is the hidden art of government because it’s about whether or not government is proactive and ready for what the world throws at it. This is where government is anticipating citizen needs and reducing uncertainty. It’s, for example, whether a government has a plan for responding to a pandemic.

This is where the big picture, long-term vision and strategy of governing well comes to the fore. If you want to minimise uncertainty then you get this by having ministers in briefs for the life of a Parliament and by committing to agendas that draw on the breadth of what’s known about society (or researched on their needs) and get on with it.

In this way government has to be decisive and proactive to plan and manage risk. Giving that sense of stability and security is especially important when it comes to facing down natural and human-caused threats. The flip-flopping of the previous government when it came to environmental commitments was clearly not a set of activities that would make anyone trust anything.

So in these cases government and its expertise should get on and do? Is it these questions where extra layers of participation only hinder because some things are too important and far reaching to be handled through the lens of public opinion? I absolutely have sympathy with that point of view. So long as government is listening to the voices and taking the decisions that I want them to take.

Which brings us back to the central conundrum here. Which is that being a competent government isn’t actually enough.

Values

It’s highly questionable whether a truly technocratic approach to anything could succeed if it happened in a vacuum of principle and morals. Certainly, the UK’s trust malaise is undoubtedly down to ineffective delivery but more fundamentally the general atmosphere of trust has been torched by the behaviour of those we elect to serve.

So what does the OECD says is important when it comes to the values of government? And this is where we come back to the reason why I’m here picking a battle with James on behalf of Demos. Because this other part of building and protecting trust is a question of openness, integrity and fairness.

Openness

Openness is about providing open and accessible information so that people understand what government is doing. It’s about consulting, listening and responding to those who get involved and that’s where participation and engagement comes to the fore. And it’s about making sure there are equal opportunities for people to be part of and participate in the activity of representative democracy.

GOV.UK and the greater focus on service design has been incredible for unifying and reimagining the way that people can access and consume services. We should acknowledge that about the only thing that the Trust Survey was positive about was information being easy to find (79% against an average of 67%) and satisfaction with services (74% against an average of 66%). But even in the pocket of government that was a champion for working in the open the blogging has dropped off, the Performance Platform is shuttered, and the presentation of policy content remains as unsatisfying as it was in 2015.

But while consultations exist and opportunities for lobbying are baked into a lot of our processes it isn’t actually working to help people believe in the quality of how we’re governed. Back to the survey and it tells us that 27% of people believe government would change policy in response to a majority of public opinion (the average is 37%), 22% of people believe government uses input from citizens’ consultation (the average is 32%) and 20% believe the political systems allows people to have a say (the average is 30%).

Integrity

Integrity doesn’t really need much discussion. When governments demonstrate ethical values, principles and social norms then their behaviour becomes something people can believe in.

When decisions are shown to be taken ethically and public resources are used to promote public over private interests then we will be more confident in everything else government does. And there do need to be good accountability mechanisms between public institutions at all levels of governance. And this leaves me with mixed feelings about Rachel Reeves’ plan to appoint a “COVID corruption tsar”. Undoubtedly the smell of corruption attached itself to things that happened during the pandemic but this feels performatively about surfacing bad things about the past government about which very little can actually be done rather than focusing on the future and setting the pattern for what’s ahead. I will be delighted if she finds that £2.6bn she thinks she can but I’d much rather have seen her kick things off by advocating for reinstating the Audit Commission.

And integrity comes from a neutral civil service with values and standards of conduct that uphold and prioritise the public interest. The civil service famously ‘serves the government of the day’ but it’s been positive to hear noises from the new government that they take the impartiality of the civil service seriously. But impartiality isn’t the civil service unquestioningly responding “how high?” when a minister demands they “jump”. Their ultimate responsibility is to the public interest and that means confidently objecting if the minister is asking them to jump us all into an abyss.

Fairness

One of the reasons why I am a (limited) enthusiast for Citizens Assemblies and efforts to create more inclusive and participatory forms of government in the UK is that I think we generally lack spaces in our daily lives that encourage us to find out about different experiences and perspectives. It is so easy to assume that our understanding of the world is the only understanding of the world.

It’s one of the things that I cherish so much about being part of a church community. For sure we’re all there because we believe the same thing but we’re drawn from such varied backgrounds that we probably wouldn’t have opportunities to hang out together if we didn’t.

And I think when we belong to diverse communities it helps to knock the edges of our certainty about what fairness looks like. The OECD says that fairness is integral to trust because living conditions should improve for everyone but it’s hard to understand any of those things in the abstract. It’s been incredibly humbling to spend time over the last year helping out with English classes for those in the asylum and refugee communities because I hadn’t given much thought to just how much goes into the experience of feeling ‘at home’. Fairness through the insight into other people’s lives looks a lot different to fairness judged against my own opinions.

Things are slightly more positive for the UK here. We might recognise many different societal ills and have awareness of injustice and unfairness baked into society but when it comes to the functioning of government we have good expectations. 48% of respondents to the trust survey felt that public employees treat everyone consistently, regardless of background or identity and 58% believe that their application for benefits would be treated fairly. Both of which are above average but neither of which are particularly close the leading countries.

Is the problem with the public, or our politicians?

We can’t finish on that on that mediocre point because there’s another datapoint in the survey which undermines any sense of complacency when it comes to fairness specifically, trust in general, and points to the need for more participation rather than less. And that is the extent to which people think it is likely for the national parliament to fairly balance the interests of different groups.

In other words, how well does Britain think MPs in its delegated institution of Parliament (as distinct from government) do when it comes to considering all the angles of a problem and finding the best outcome?

It’s abysmal.

Out of the 30 countries the UK delivers the absolute worst with 59% of people believing it unlikely that Parliament can fairly balance the interests of different groups. Only 20% believe it does. The averages of 41% and 36% are hardly stellar and even in Switzerland (CHE in the chart), the exemplar for direct democracy, the figures are 25% and 53% indicating that everybody has work to do.

For me this highlights a critical flaw in the OECD’s trust survey. The report covers a lot of ground and is a fantastically rich document but it shies away from calling out the behaviour of elected politicians. Because its hands are diplomatically tied it doesn’t really engage with why levels of trust in political parties are as low as they are. But the numbers tell that story.

And for the UK that is a big factor, but it’s only one of several when it comes to the scale of the job for this government in restoring the trust of British society. And they have to start with it. Public trust is a black hole at the heart of the UK’s public discourse that will absorb pretty much everything and anything.

So it’s into that context which Demos and others are saying we need to try something radical and something different.

They’re not wrong.