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Beyond the spreadsheets and on to the streets: what policy makers can learn from the front line

Stories and experience must be part of the policy making toolkit

Most of us like to hear about real life stories – they sell newspapers and magazines and stick in our minds in a way that statistics don’t. Policy makers are no exception, as our recent guest blogger Dr Jo Maybin found through her research into how government policy makers learn.

While efforts to improve use of data and evidence in policy making are all to the good, stories and experience must also be part of the policy making toolkit. Our partnership with the Big Lottery Fund is helping policy makers connect with the real world. Going out, observing, listening, talking to the people that are affected by the policy decisions you help make or seeing a public service in action might sound obvious but is still too much the exception than the rule. Ministers have a ready source of stories from their constituency surgeries and out on the campaign trail, but the civil servants advising them in Whitehall have too few opportunities to leave their desks and develop an in-depth understanding of what is really going on. That disconnect can frustrate both sides, and is acknowledged in the Civil Service Reform Plan. The IfG and Big Lottery Fund programme which recently kicked off - Connecting Policy with Practice - aims to give policy makers a broader understanding of how policy ideas translate (or don’t) on the ground. It connects a group of 30 Whitehall policymakers and frontline practitioners running services for people with multiple and complex needs, and for young people alienated from the jobs market. We hope that the programme will help to foster better networks between the sectors and improve the quality of policy making around these complicated issues. Last week, our first programme workshop illustrated the sort of grassroots insights that would never be apparent from a set of statistics. The social enterprise Participle talked about how they helped a man with health problems, including diabetes. He swore he ate healthily, but this just didn’t seem to tally with what they knew about his physical health. By spending time with him and getting him to write a food journal, Participle found that it was a drinking problem that caused him to eat unhealthily – and then forget about it. That insight was the key to helping him on the way to a healthier lifestyle. Similarly, co-ordinators of a service for young offenders in Haringey discussed the importance of getting to know the young people they help, and involving them in service design. 'There’s lots and lots and lots of engagement… how can I as a 30-year-old, who does 30-year-old things, design services for 17-year-olds? I don’t live and breathe their life, I have degree of understanding about the issues that affect them, but the best advocates would be the young service users themselves,' commented one of the co-ordinators. The next stage in the programme is for pairs – one from each sector – to get to understand each other in greater depth. They will be going out on exchange visits and trying to identify and overcome barriers to effective working. Keep an eye on these pages for their own blogs and musings – Pat Russell from DWP and Nick O’Shea of Resolving Chaos will be blogging for us about their experiences shortly. Of course, policy makers should be wary of creating ‘policy by anecdote’, mistaking a single example for something representative, or of using second or third hand tales of dubious veracity to justify policy initiatives, all traps that ministers have been known to fall into (remember Theresa May getting into hot water over the tale of the Bolivian immigrant and his pet cat?). But broadening and sharing their experience base should enable policy makers to better understand the dimensions of the strategies they are trying to make work. Policy makers need robust information sets and they must be rigorous, objective analysts. But they should not forget to look beyond the spread-sheets, value the experience and insight of practitioners, and get out into the real world to generate their own stories and experiences. We’ll be tracking this over the year – stay tuned for more stories!

Keywords
Public sector
Publisher
Institute for Government

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