Remembrance of Policies Past

So many politicians forget that if you don’t engage citizens in assessing and responding to public issues, and treat them as mere supplicants, mistrust and mistakes will follow. 

When I was made Head of Civil Renewal under the Labour Government back in 2003, a key challenge was to find out why despite the substantial investment and support the government had given to public services across the board, people’s confidence in many of those services was still lagging behind.

For example, fear of crime remained high in many areas where crime rates had actually fallen; there was frustration with how ‘little’ was being done in areas which were undergoing substantial regeneration; there was scepticism about health improvement when provisions were becoming better than ever; and overall, people felt they had barely any control over public decisions that affected their lives.

It turned out the clue was in the last item on that list – the lack of efficacy. When people sense that they have no real influence over decisions that are made for them, they cannot help but wonder if those decisions truly reflect their concerns. And this doubt is exacerbated by decisions which turn out to be flawed precisely because they had been made without involving people who had relevant views to contribute.

The remedy, we concluded, was to develop more extensive community engagement. What that meant was NOT tokenistic consultation exercises with dry questionnaires or drab public meetings. What we promoted, under the banner of ‘Together We Can’, was a wide range of approaches that helped people learn and deliberate about the issues in question, enabled them to question and reflect on the evidence and options, offered them a chance to express their preferences having heard what others had to say, and provided them with feedback so that further adjustment could be made in the light of preliminary steps being taken.

In areas where such approaches were taken forward with proper support and experienced facilitators, the evidence was clear – trust in public bodies’ actions went up, satisfaction with outcomes rose, relationships between state agencies and the public improved, cost effectiveness increased with fewer mistakes being made, and objectives set with citizens’ input more readily achieved.

One would think that progressive politicians returning to power would build on this and ensure that citizens are deliberatively involved in developing the policies needed to deal with the problems piled up by years of misrule. But what we have seen so far is virtual amnesia on the community involvement front. Policies are announced with no citizen engagement, and their unpopularity is cited as their necessity. This is not the way to build democratic support or confidence. 

Difficult decisions can be reached, so long as the people affected by them have a fair chance to participate, learn, and influence them constructively. What might otherwise be unpopular could be revised as something also tough, but owned by communities.

Politicians who think the only way to deal with difficult problems is to keep the public away from deliberating about them, are likely to be keeping themselves away from the public who will see them as remote and uncaring. They should remember the lessons we learnt from ‘Together We Can’. Otherwise, isolated they’ll lose.

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A general guide to the resources relating to Together We Can is available at: https://hbtam.blogspot.com/2019/07/together-we-can-resource-guide.html

More specific materials can be found in relation to: Civic Pioneers (on local authority support for developing effective engagement practices), Take Part (on active learning for citizen participation), Guide Neighbourhoods, (on facilitating exchange of ideas across neighbourhoods for influencing public bodies), and Together We Can (on policies developed by different government departments).