Engaging Citizens in Policy Design - The Practicalities

Discussants

• Viki Cooke of Britain Thinks (who facilitated the jury)
• David Halpern - Head of the Behavioural Insights Unit
• Nick Jones - Director, PWC

This session was chaired by Julian McCrae - Director of Research at the Institute for Government.

The Institute for Government and the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight Team held a roundtable discussion on how policy makers can more actively engage with citizens in the design of policy.

The discussion focused on a specific example of deliberative engagement - how a citizens’ jury developed views on a controversial policy area, charging for public services. A citizens’ jury is a deliberative research tool used to investigate the views of the public on what they would do if they controlled the policy making process. Members of the public are randomly chosen and provided with information relating to the particular issues under discussion and then given time to deliberate before making a series of recommendations.

Nick Jones set out  the rationale for considering changing as an instrument for public policy.  

Viki Cooke described the citizens’ jury commissioned by PwC and run by BritainThinks in July 2010 to inform government thinking by providing insight into citizens’ attitudes and views on the deficit, and to understand the criteria important to citizens that government should use when selecting where and how to make cuts in public spending. 

The jury reconvened in November 2010 to consider how well the Spending Review had met their criteria for spending cuts and to look in detail at two specific areas of policy – educational reform and user charging. It concluded that the spending review was along the right lines and surprisingly recommended some of the most radical proposals put to them.  The jury believed that charging for services should be introduced as an important way to drive behavioural change and manage the use of limited resources.

These results were reconfirmed by another citizens’ jury commissioned as part of the Christie Commission in Scotland in April 2011: citizens expressed concern about the consequences of the provision of free public services in Scotland, and the unintended negative effects upon investment in other areas like Scottish universities.  

Discussion

Should deliberation become part of the policy making toolkit? 

The CJ process made clear that citizens are willing to accept the case for unpopular and radical decisions when they understand the issues and are engaged in a meaningful discussion about the options. Citizens’ Juries provide insight into which arguments work with the public and which frankly do not.  Legal juries were already well established parts of the criminal justice process.  

There was concern that perceived cost could be a barrier to more widespread use of citizen juries – but the actual costs were probably pretty small in relation to the (uncounted) total cost of making policy – and the costs of getting policy wrong.  Another risk was if the conclusions were ignored.  Clarity was needed for jurors on how their findings would be fed into the policy making process as a whole.

There was a case for making citizens’ juries part of the landscape – running regularly – though the membership would change to avoid them becoming insiders. As such they could enhance the quality of policy making. 

More information

• Watch an interview with panel chair Julian McCrae 
• See details and results of the convening of the original jury in PwC’s report
• Watch the PwC video summary of the UK jury
• Watch the PwC video summary of the Scottish jury
• Read Julian McCrae’s blog on the citizen’s jury last summer
• Read more about the Institute's work on Cutting Edge Policy