Connecting Policy with Practice: The First Year

Nat Sloane, Big Lottery Fund chairman, began by outlining his organisation’s approach to strategic investments, with a specific emphasis on creating better partnerships between policy makers and practitioners through ‘virtuous feedback loops’.

Amanda Dickins, Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser at BIS, who participated in the Connecting Policy with Practice Programme, was joined by her partner Adrian Ball in explaining what they found useful from the programme. Amanda spoke first and, using experience of her visit to the Broughton Trust, introduced some slides symbolising the challenges faced by the organisation in delivering services in potentially tricky policy areas, such as safeguarding. Her first slide pictured wildflowers, which she said represented the diversity, flexibility, and to some extent, the creative chaos that allows small organisations to flourish. Her next slide featured a pile of paperwork that represented the 20 separate safeguarding policies, to which the charity is required to adhere. She also gave the example of the reinterpretation of policy, which often led to documents being rewritten – a time-consuming process in any organisation, but for a small charity it can often mean that important work with users can be delayed in the meantime.

Adrian, who spoke as former Director of Positive Steps in Oldham, explained that creating effective partnerships between policy makers and practitioners involved building trust between the two to overcome pre-existing prejudice. He also spoke about the commissioning process, outlining how voluntary organisations must learn to communicate precisely how they add value through their specialist knowledge and approach.

Nicola Hughes, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Government who ran the programme, used a Prezi to illustrate the projects objectives and findings. It included a two-minute video from Nick O’Shea, Director of Operations at Resolving Chaos, and Pat Russell, Deputy Director for Social Justice at DWP. Together they outlined how their participation had helped them to think differently about policy implementation and formulation respectively. Nicola’s presentation also identified a number of policy disconnects that formed the conclusion to her report: Insights from the Connecting Policy with Practice Programme in 2013.

They are:  

1. People’s lives are obviously complicated. They need whole person support…but too often, policy operates in silos.
2. Long term problems take time to fix…but chops and changes in policy and funding make it hard.
3. Prevention can be valuable…but it’s hard to do in a constrained funding environment.
4. Policy often starts with good intentions…but these get lost as it is re-interpreted.
5. Understanding and involving service users helps brings out the positives…but too often policy discussions are about problems, not assets.

Questions:

• How prescriptive should central government be in how policy plays out on the ground?
• What is the role of local government?
• How do you create the right connections to make these partnerships thrive?
• What is the best way for civil servants to engage with voluntary sector organisations when you get the impression all they is looking for is funding?

Stephen Aldridge, a former head of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, added the following points in relation to the five policy disconnects identified in the report:

• Addressing the demand side is important. Do you devolve responsibility to the individual, or rely on local government?
• Lack of long term policy solutions is something that the Institute for Government has addressed in its previous work on Making Better Policy. What works centres are also important because they raise the political cost of using non-evidenced based solutions.
• Policy chops and changes can be a good thing; improvements can be made through trial and error. Our problem is that we tend to do the wrong things for too long.
• Better data sharing between organisations will lead to better targeting of individuals. 
• There ought to be mechanisms in place so users can exit a programme if it is not working.

Dharmendra Kanani, England Director of the Big Lottery Fund, concluded by noting the richness of the dialogue the programme has fostered.