Rewiring the State for public voice

The Cabinet Statement on Rewiring the State was released at the end of July, with a strong emphasis on devolution. It’s striking how it takes the phrase “Rewiring the State” in a very different direction to the technology-focused themes of the similarly named Science, Innovation and Technology Committee’s report on delivering digital government, the Global Government Forum’s report on government transformation, or Darren Jones’ speech on delivering a new digital state.

(One could even say the Statement neglects the importance of technology, with the only slight mention being “a strengthened focus on timely and accurate place-based data from the Office for National Statistics and other bodies that will support outcomes-based decision making in places”. For a thoughtful piece on how data and digital services can be deployed in devolved and distributed systems, I recommend James Plunkett and Richard Pope’s work on (NHS) Operating Patterns.)

The part that I was particularly interested in was this:

We agreed to replace the current model of consultation by default with new and modern forms of public participation. This includes considering where performative statutory duties to consult can be revoked and how we can more actively bring the public into the policy-making process instead. This recognises that local leaders are better equipped to link public opinion and civil society to policy making.

I am really pleased to see this commitment to actively engage the public in participatory policy-making processes. After all, ensuring communities have a powerful voice in the decisions (about data and AI) that affect them is our mission at Connected by Data. It’s a particularly welcome shift because of the increasing use of AI by both those responding to consultations and those processing those responses. It is easy to see current consultation processes devolving into thousands of AI-generated responses being summarised by AI tools in ways that may miss nuance, overlook expertise, stereotype submissions, and flatten disagreement. More importantly, I know from working with disenfranchised communities that consultations where responses are “read” by AI feel uncaring and diminish trust. We can and should do better.

However, I also know that public participation can be just as performative as statutory consultations; I am concerned about deliverability across public bodies including local government; and I’m worried about how public voice will be combined with specialist expertise from civil society and academia. Let’s get into it.

Why engage?

It’s vital to take a step back and think about what we want to achieve through engagement, consultation, and participatory processes. To me, there are three reasons why we should want to see public bodies engaging with affected communities around the decisions they are making, whether these are about policy in DfE, planning in local government, or the operations of GP surgeries:

1. To inform planning and decision making by highlighting evidence, perspectives, and values that should be considered by decision makers.
2. To improve democratic legitimacy and trust by ensuring that public bodies are and are perceived to be responsive and accountable to the people they serve.
3. To build connection and power within communities affected by proposed changes, to reduce divisiveness and so that they can effectively advocate for their interests.

I’ll note here that some people see consultation as an unnecessary burden – something that blocks progress more than aids it. They would argue that trust is built through delivery. They might go so far as to say that the third of what I consider goals – building connection and power within communities – is an anti-goal because it enables and encourages small groups of energised people (NIMBYs) to effectively block things (most importantly, building homes, data centres and other infrastructure) that we need more of.

I would argue that trust based solely on delivery is vulnerable, because it is in the nature of our complex world that delivery often does go wrong, and that trust built through working together, including working through differences and finding compromises, is a stronger foundation to build on. In fact, I believe that tighter relationships between communities and public bodies enables faster correction when things do go wrong, acting as a safety net that enables organisations to be less risk-averse. In addition, I would say, in a democracy, people power needs to be at least as strong as corporate power, and the only way that’s achievable is through solidarity and collective action. I agree that the public sector should be faster at reaching decisions and acting on them, but removing the need to consult is not the only way to reach that goal.

So one thing to keep an eye on is whether the “performative statutory duties to consult” that are revoked are replaced by statutory duties for more meaningful involvement and collaboration. Having no statutory duties to consult, involve or collaborate with stakeholders outside the public sector will lead to a situation where the only people heard by governments are well-funded lobbyists, usually for big businesses.

Who gets to have a say?

When people engage in consultations or participatory processes, they draw on three things:

1. Their own lived experience, as well as that of their friends, relations and social circle.
2. Expertise gained through research and study.
3. Their attitudes and values – what they believe is right, fair and just.

All three of these are important. Different approaches to consultation and participation tend to be good at accessing some but not others.

To give an example, I was on the Oversight Group for the People’s Panel on Digital ID. Having observed it, I know there were people there who had professional expertise (for example in data protection or supporting people experiencing domestic violence) as well as relevant lived experience (for example who were young, old, disabled, trans or digitally excluded). One of the great things about the panel was seeing these different perspectives come into conversation with each other. As with other forms of civic participation (such as juries), people obviously also really valued connecting with people who were very different from them around a shared endeavour. It was a form of engagement that, as James Frith, who was Minister for Digital ID at the time, described as “problem solving, not point scoring”.

But there were undoubtedly areas of both expertise and lived experience that weren’t strongly represented within the digital ID people’s panel itself, and this was a big panel of 120 people – a typical small public participation exercise (involving less than 30 people) is very unlikely to include this range of perspectives directly.

I don’t think the digital ID consultation process was perfect, but it rightly also had two other strands alongside the people’s panel, which brought in different perspectives:

1. A traditional formal consultation to access expertise and perspectives from a wide range of stakeholders, including business interests.
2. A set of targeted engagements with smaller communities that might be particularly affected (in the case of digital ID, I believe this included homeless people and the digitally excluded, though nothing has been made public about who was engaged with in this way).

Public dialogues and deliberative approaches are not enough to access the full range of views that public bodies need to consider. Other forms of consultation, involvement and collaboration are needed to access both professional expertise and the voices of smaller and under-represented groups. It’s also important to bring these voices and perspectives into public participation exercises, to make sure the participants are being shown the full story.

What happens as a result?

It is always disheartening when it feels like consultation and public participation has very little effect on what public bodies actually choose to do. When people and groups actually get involved – whether writing responses to consultations, attending engagement meetings, or taking part in a people’s panel – it so often feels like a waste of time, which decreases trust in and the perceived legitimacy of decisions made by the public body, and means that people either disengage or adopt other techniques to get heard. These can range from adversarial campaigning to backroom conversations, which are systemically biased towards those that have the spare time, resources and connections to make them work.

The Cabinet Statement commits to revoking performative consultations, but getting public participation to not be performative requires addressing the performativeness, not just swapping one engagement approach for another. The Gunning Principles provide a benchmark for meaningful consultation – a strong benchmark that can form the basis of judicial reviews:

1. consultation must be at a time when proposals are still at a formative stage
2. the proposer must give sufficient reasons for any proposal to permit of intelligent consideration and response
3. adequate time is given for consideration and response
4. the product of consultation is conscientiously taken into account when finalising the decision

In any move towards public participation, we either need an equivalent appropriate benchmark, or these principles need to be adapted towards the style of engagement that public participation entails (where, for example, “adequate time for consideration and response” might look quite different from a 12 week consultation window). The key points about proposals needing to be at a formative stage, and the results of consultation taken into account, have to remain.

What I’d ideally want, especially as public bodies get up to speed on how to do public participation well, is for any public participation exercise to be accompanied with a (proportionately scoped) independent evaluation, which is then published. For a quick afternoon workshop, this could be a brief questionnaire to participants; for a longer-term series of engagements, it could include interviews and more sophisticated analyses.

Evaluations would help point out improvements for the public body themselves, for next time; it would ensure that the approaches taken by public bodies are shared with other organisations to learn from; and it would provide evidence that could be used in any campaigns or challenges around the exercise, supporting accountability in the process. In addition, when your work is being evaluated you tend to take more care over it, so this should be a way to drive up quality, even if it will doubtless feel uncomfortable and be politically challenging.

Where’s the infrastructure?

The final observation I want to make is about infrastructure, from two perspectives: the infrastructure within the public sector to support engagement, involvement and collaboration; and the infrastructure outside the public sector to participate in these activities.

Traditional consultations are relatively simple – they require public servants to write a consultation document, publish it, receive responses, and analyse those responses. Good public participation, on the other hand, requires public servants to have ways of identifying a representative set of individuals to take part; shaping appropriate exercises for them to undertake; pulling in expertise and advice to ensure the process is fair and balanced; facilitating workshop sessions; capturing qualitative and quantitative data; analysing the results; and then feeding back to the people involved. This not only requires a wider and deeper set of skills, but also more confidence in engaging with the public, which generally comes from seniority: consultation documents can be signed off, but in-the-moment responses in a workshop can’t, so public servants need to be on top of the messaging, and artful enough not to appear to be stonewalling.

I suspect that this is a place where local governments will have something to teach national bodies. Councils tend to have people who specialise in local engagement with their communities, while central government tends to think in terms of one-way public communications. But either way, we should not underestimate the skills and resources required to involve and collaborate with the public. There’s a range of infrastructure that could help – digital platforms that support deliberations and data analysis; tested workshop plans and facilitation materials that can reduce reinvention; opt-in participant databases to help identify representatives to take part and so on – many of which are described in Demos’s Citizens’ White Paper from two years ago. Now is the time for central government to put more in place to support this.

On the other side, civil society organisations play an incredibly important role in public participation, and more generally democratic accountability and control. They are frequently the route through which potential participants – particularly those in particular targeted communities – can be reached. They can aggregate the lived experiences of their communities to identify patterns and lessons. They are intermediaries for communication that invites the public to get involved, and can confer trust on the results of deliberations. They provide ongoing social infrastructure that brings people together and builds cohesive and powerful communities.

Central government should undoubtedly be less of a micro-manager of local government, but for devolution to work there needs to be effective local accountability. Journalists have rightly been highlighting the need for better funding for local media but frequently it’s civil society organisations that flag stories to journalists and inform councillors and parliamentarians about their communities’ needs. They need support too.

In conclusion

In my particular world of data and AI regulation, digital public services, and public sector AI adoption, the challenges of the pace of change, unpredictable impacts, and need for buy-in does mean that consultation is rarely fit for purpose, so it’s really great to see an emphasis on public participation in the Cabinet Statement.

But I don’t think we should be adopting an attitude of “traditional consultation bad; public participation good”. Rather, we should set our sights on democratisation of the form described by JP Spencer in his paper on Democratic Public Services – i.e. democratic accountability and control – and use whatever combination of engagement, involvement and collaboration techniques work best for achieving that.