Demos and Involve have written a recipe for participatory policymaking in the UK — now it’s time to bake the cake

We are curating a thought leadership series about opportunities for participatory and deliberative processes in a shifting political landscape following the 2024 general election. 

This will inevitably be a time of change — and we want to take this chance to think about some of the key issues, tensions and arguments that surround deliberative and participatory democracy in the UK and beyond.

📖 Read our second blog, titled: ‘Demos and Involve have written a recipe for participatory policymaking in the UK — now it’s time to bake the cake’ by our CEO, Sarah Castell below.

It’s time to help the new government make policy in a new way, using participation. This will create policy that is effective, but also goes beyond “deliverism” to make a more tangible and emotional connection of trust with the people of this country. 

This week, Involve and Demos launched their joint Citizens White Paper. It calls on the government to embark on an era of public participation in policy making, to deliver on the Prime Minister’s promise to restore trust in politics.

What’s in the paper? A step by step programme of solid deliberative and participatory processes, such as panels, Citizens’ Assemblies, and Citizens’ Conversations for service co-design. We describe how to build resource and capacity in the civil service, and how participation can be applied to the issues of the day through the government’s Missions and in places that really matter to the public — such as house building, migration, the long term funding of the NHS and social care.

It’s a practical, costed blueprint on the nuts and bolts of public participation.

Looking at the opportunity of participation for a new government, there were many things Demos and Involve could have chosen to discuss. We could have described how being involved in participatory processes changes people, or as my co-author Polly Curtis writes in the Guardian, highlighted the huge opportunity of civic tech for mass participation.

Instead, we created a sober, well evidenced roadmap.

You won’t find in this paper a breathless excitement about how great participation is. There are many other places to show the excitement — how empowering people find it when they have a say in how their area is policed, how to design benefits, or how we should look after our trees.

Or, just have a look below at a video by Hackney Council around our work together for their first ever Citizens' Climate Jury and watch it first hand. 👇

Above video from Hackney Council's X platform.

Instead we wanted to summarise the tools that have been in development over the last thirty years, and which are in everyday use in democracies all around the world, (for example very recently in the Paris permanent Citizens Assembly, which this month designed and put into law a Bill).

We don’t claim that these tools are invented by us, though as practitioners we have refined them, and know in our bones how they work on the ground. They are not new, but the era of them being used as standard is new.  And this is the biggest opportunity available to take for this Parliament.

So how to make this opportunity real? Bringing these tools into everyday democracy will require a shift in mindset among our senior politicians and civil servants. While the substance of the shift is different, the change in mindset required is a bit like the move towards evidence based policy at the turn of the century, as set out in the Modernising Government white paper of 1999.  

The new government’s central challenge is in moving beyond “deliverism”.  Making effective, value for money and demonstrably successful policy is vital. However, thinkers are pointing out that we now need more than competent delivery to combat the rise of populism and win back trust.

This Parliament will be all about demonstrating service, delivery, value for money and competence, but this alone won’t rebuild trust, unless married to a deeper and more emotionally nourishing connection with the people.  

In deliberative processes, this connection is found. 

When we bring people together to develop policy, people decide what tradeoffs to make, but crucially, talk about their values and experiences and share why these matter.  The experience of participation itself builds trust, as people work to create something everyone can live with. The public don’t sit back and judge the decision makers, as they may do outside the room, in our more adversarial public realm. They sit forward, take on the challenges and appreciate the difficult choices that must be made. They contribute enthusiasm and thoughtfulness. Decision makers are able to be more open, sharing the real tradeoffs and trusting the public to come up with ideas that will work. 

So policy made with the public at the heart can create both more effective delivery, higher competence and greater trust — which is why we think participation can make a real contribution to meeting the new government’s central challenge. 

As a sector, it’s a critical moment. It’s now time for us to share the quality of what it feels like to do public participation, and how it can improve the felt experience of governing, and being governed. We want to make sure that those who have not yet experienced it, can learn how it tastes.

This will need a concerted effort, across our sector, to invite decision makers in, wherever we can, to see it working in practice, to help government take up the recommendations of the Citizens White Paper and make participation their everyday business.

Let’s turn the recipe into a cake. 🎂

>> This is part of our 10 Opportunities for the first 100 Days series.