My thoughts on the Citizens’ White Paper (it’s great!)

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Desiderium Sciendi

19 min readAug 1, 2024

On the 19th of July, Demos, in association with Involve, released their long-awaited Citizens’ White Paper, a publication dedicated to persuading the new Labour government to significantly increase the role of citizen deliberation in policy development and service iteration. It can be found here.

Like an episode of the podcast I co-host with my wife, this essay will, in large part, be me doing a condensed recap of the p̶l̶o̶t̶ contents with added personal comments. If you’re already in favour of the concept or if you’ve already read the document (go you!), I still urge you to read the final part of this article.

It’s no surprise that I loved every part of this publication and, to me, it feels like one of the most important proposals I’ve read in years. I’ve been a supporter of increased levels of citizen participation for many years, often highlighting the importance of user research and the 2017 research on government consultations undertaken by GDS and Snook consultants.

To slightly misquote Lawrence Lessig of the Harvard Law School:

“It’s not that [lack of trust in government] is the most important problem; it’s just the first problem we need to solve before we can solve the rest.”

There are some terrifying stats quoted below about the levels of trust British citizens currently have in the state. I firmly believe that this is one of the significant contributors to the global rise in populism and leaders like Trump, Duterte and Orban. Organisations like the International Association of Public Participation make it feel like the time is now to come together globally to counter this rising tide.

On a recent episode of the Leading podcast, I listened to ex-Danish Prime Minister

Helle Thorning-Schmidt say that one of the reasons for her success was efforts to bring as many people as possible, even those with extreme political views on both ends of the spectrum, into the conversation. She was insistent that, only by ensuring that the maximum number of people in the country felt that they were being listened to, could you have a highly functioning democracy.

To that end, I was delighted when Prime Minister Starmer took an opportunity to comment on this in his speech following the State Opening of Parliament this year, saying this:

“The fight for trust is the battle that defines our political era.”

Development

Demos is the convener of the Collaborative Democracy Network, which was created specifically for “politicians, policymakers and civil society to come together to discuss innovations that put people at the heart of policy making”, of which this document is an excellent example. I’m sure members of the Collaboration will have contributed to and reviewed the paper, such as the Sortition Foundation and others.

I was impressed to read that most of the recommendations were developed through the use of a policy design sprint, which brought together civil servants, academics, and other interested parties to design the ways in which the government could embed public deliberation in national policy making. This is the kind of thing Policy Lab has been slowly introducing to the government for many years, so it’s excellent to see it gain even more traction here.

There is acknowledgement of participation of 17 ex-ministers, shadow ministers and current and former senior civil servants. In addition, 14 civil servants attended a related workshop and 34 members of the public took part in “Citizens’ Conversations” to contribute to the final release.

It’s understandable, but I think unfortunate, that none of the politicians or civil servants that took part are named, as I think that would have lent a great deal of weight to the proposals — especially if they put their names to the recommendations.

Finally in this section — I was surprised not to see Policy Lab specifically giving their backing to these recommendations. I know civil servants need to be impartial but this isn’t a political proposal and, if they deemed it too small-p politically risky to put their names on this, I think that shows a sad current state of affairs in government at the moment. (NB, I have no evidence of this, it’s possible that they are either specifically not allowed to back think-tank publications or Demos didn’t ask them to for some reason.)

Target audience

The target audience is defined as both political and civil service policy makers. Interest in participatory policy making in both groups is anecdotally said to be high but remains unmeasured. What is known is that both sets feel significantly disempowered to try new things. For politicians, this is often due to the so-called Daily Mail Effect, where potential criticism by the popular press or on social media often limits actions to well understood strategies. For civil servants, it is partially due to a lack of understanding of what is allowed by policy makers and, for some, concern about the potential effect on future promotion of trying untested ideas.

This publication seeks to address both concerns and, in addition, seeks to highlight another connected issue, which is simply a lack of understanding of both the details and advantages of increased public participation in policy development. It’s my hope that this latter concern can be quickly addressed by new training courses provided by Civil Service Learning and third party training providers, such as Apolitical.

UK government use of public participation today

It’s important to acknowledge that there is already a certain amount of public participation in government, although it is both significantly smaller and implemented rather differently than the proposals in this document.

These are some examples of the status quo:

User research. This is a key part of development of digital services in government and has been a part of the Service Standard since its inception in 2013. It involves professional user researchers working with individual service users and small groups to provide feedback on ideas, prototypes and live services to enable positive iteration of the service.
Service Design. Across both national and local government, there is an ever-growing community of service designers who also work with service users and their representatives to develop high quality, often digital, services.
Policy Lab. The UK government policy design community now has over 2,000 members. The group has existed for ten years and seeks to “radically improve policymaking through design, innovation and people-centred approaches”.
Customer Panels. These are increasingly being put in place to enable the public to hold specific groups of private sector organisations to account, such as the water industry.
Participatory Methods Forum. This is a relatively new group formed in 2023 to “support a systematic, evidence-based approach to participatory methods across government.”
Finally, good old fashioned consultations. While often providing insight during policy formulation, there are few examples of significant changes to a policy design following a consultation period. In addition, they tend to only receive submissions from “the usual suspects” (to quote the Demos paper) — groups and individuals whose opinions on the topic under discussion are already well known. The 2017 research on government consultations undertaken by GDS and Snook consultants unfortunately did not lead to many of its recommendations being implemented.

Polling

As well as using pre-existing research, Demos and Involve did some polling of their own for the paper. A link is provided to the research but I personally felt that lacked sufficient detail. Also, rather than having a section on polling results in one place, they are mentioned in various parts of the document, sometimes leading to repetition. Given that, I have no reason to suppose the results aren’t 100% genuine and they do offer interesting and useful insights.

These are some of the key results quoted:

32% of people agree that the UK is a well-functioning democracy.
76% of people have little or no trust that politicians will make decisions in the best interests of people in the UK.
43% of people believe politicians make decisions in the best interests of people in the UK.
76% of the public want politicians to be honest about the scale of the problems the country faces.
63% of participants polled by Westminster Council said they felt listened to after they ran a public participation process around climate change — up from 21% before.
63% of the British public say they would be likely to accept an invitation to take part in a public participation exercise by the government.
41% said the biggest thing stopping them is their belief that the government wouldn’t listen to what they had to say.
74% of people felt the public should be more involved in decisions around public services.
70% said the same around “moral issues” such as assisted dying.
66% said the same about infrastructure issues (e.g. housing and transport planning).
45% said there should be some kind of public participation in international or defence-related issues.

Types of participation

As part of the proposal, the authors included a list of the various kinds of policy deliberation that citizens could be involved in. To do this, they referenced the International Association of Public Participation’s Spectrum of Public Participation and the OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes.

The following models were highlighted:

Citizens’ assemblies. Longer-term bodies addressing open-ended questions that are used to directly feed into policy making decisions. For example, assisted dying.
Citizens’ juries. Like a citizens’ assembly, except organised slightly differently and run over a much shorter time period. May be restricted to a local issue. For example, controversial planning decisions.
Citizens’ panels. Used to help service delivery owners decide how to implement the details of a previously defined high-level policy. For example, allocating resources in Health and Social Care.
Deliberative workshops. Distributed lower-intensity method of investigating public opinions and suggestions on long-running complex issues. For example, public input into climate change policy or increasing use of AI in the workplace and in government.
Co-design workshops. Used iteratively as part of the ongoing service implementation process. Takes advantage of multidisciplinary inputs from a range of civil service roles, including policy, service design, digital and front-line staff, as well as service users and other relevant members of the public. Excellent work is already being done using this method by Policy Lab and others. This should be used as a standard for every service. For example, Universal Credit.
Community conversations. A more informal way of capturing discussions with a diverse range of people across a geographic area on a given policy issue. For example, community policing.

Examples of previous success

A number of previous examples of citizen participation around the world at different scales are highlighted by the paper.

A short-list includes the following:

Digital and AI

In this section, I’m going to quote the paper directly (my highlighting).

“There are also digital tools that can be used to capture public sentiment and ideas at scale, for example Pol.is and Your Priorities. While these tools are excellent for enabling more active public participation by feeding in ideas and expressing support for or disagreement with others’ ideas, we have not included them in this list of participatory methods as they do not yet enable genuine public dialogue or consideration of trade offs. There are greater possibilities around more participatory civic tech like Decidim and Citizen Space that blend the online with offline engagement.”

I found it interesting that Demos made such a statement without backing up their reasoning that existing technology does not yet “enable genuine public dialogue”. They may well have very good reasons for saying this but it does seem to fly in the face of evidence from, for example, the gov-zero experience in Taiwan. Ideally, I’d love to see Demos expand on this in a separate addendum to the document.

There’s certainly a lot going on in this area. Even a cursory internet search turns up an article listing 50 digital products that can be used for deliberation.

It’s impossible these days to write on a government-related topic, or pretty much any topic really, without having to consider the impact of AI in the space. Here, like in so many cases, it’s unclear what the consequences will be. AI is certainly already being used in consultation analysis but it’s unclear how it would be used as part of face-to-face deliberation.

Transparency

A key part of the component of any significant method of public participation in policy development will need to be how it is communicated. This includes everything from the standards for recruitment, the impartiality of organisations, the lists of speakers and materials and any decisions or recommendations reached. This is in contrast to the personal details of the participants and any discussions that take place during the deliberations, which must remain private.

I’ve written previously that my solution to this is to have a whole new section of GOV.UK dedicated to transparency in the development of policy. There could be a simple page template for a piece of ongoing policy work that could contain sections of reading research done, existing comparable policies (UK and international), standard consultations undertaken with outcomes and now a section on wider public participation methods used.

I was going to say that this could also be used to update the template for the pages on GOV.UK for each of the new Labour Missions but I was extremely surprised to find out that those pages don’t seem to exist yet!

The most important thing in relation to public participation and such transparency efforts is that the outputs from such deliberations must be published in a place that is associated with that policy development effort even if, or especially if, they disagree with the initial policy direction stated by the party currently in power. The government should make a commitment to empower the civil service to do this under all circumstances.

Criteria for participatory policy making

The essay proposes six key criteria to be adopted by the government in relation to participatory policy making.

Commitment. Make a commitment that any participation processes will make a difference to policy making and / or service delivery and be prepared to demonstrate this to Parliament and the public (see above for how this could be done via GOV.UK).
Time. That sufficient time is made available for the manner of deliberation used but that the period is timeboxed and well understood by all. That a defined decision or set of recommendations is reached as an integral part of the process.
The right people. That appropriate group(s) of people are involved in the deliberation, including service users and / or their representatives if appropriate. Make sure engagement is appropriately diverse with a strong focus on inclusion. Ensure diversity of the attendees is recorded.
Facilitated deliberation. The process is well structured, with a clear progression through learning and deliberation, to decision making. The process allows time for plenary feedback, so that participants can hear views from all other participants.
Independence. There is independent review of the agenda, design and inputs of a process to ensure balance and impartiality. This should include some representation of different viewpoints, in particular from civil society groups on all sides of the discussion. The process is designed and facilitated by impartial and trained process designers and facilitators (whether from within or outside the civil service).
Transparent and accountable. All related processes, plans, workshop materials, conclusions / recommendations and next steps are openly published.

Recommendations

Demos and partners include a very detailed set of recommendations for ministers and civil servants to review. These include a detailed suggested roadmap of the staged introduction of various kinds of citizen participation in different areas in government during this parliament.

I’m going to list them below and include my thoughts on each one, as well as how likely I think they are to be implemented.

During the first year:

Create five flagship Citizens’ Panels to feed into new Mission Boards:
– I think this would be an excellent way to not only add further legitimacy to the missions but also to increase interest from the public by not only doing something new but also being seen to involve them directly.
– Unfortunately, I think the fact that they are so high profile means it’s not very likely that Labour will commit to something this radical this early in their government. Probability: Low.
Set up a cross-government standing citizens’ pool for Mission Boards and departments to draw on:
– I’m a huge fan of this idea. I especially like the idea of combining it with both a pool for user research and an organisation that could finally take the notion of a central pool of user research insights seriously. I think it could learn a lot from the Scottish Government’s Social Security Experience Panel.
– I think that the Cabinet Office may well be interested in undertaking some public participation experiments and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was something they set up to help facilitate that. Probability: Medium.
Create a central hub of participatory policy making expertise in government:
– This seems like a no-brainer, especially if it’s achieved by expanding Policy Lab. There’s an opportunity to build on the work of the Participatory Methods Forum by bringing that and its head, Catherine Day, into Policy Lab. I hope there are opportunities for secondments from experienced external organisations to get the work off the ground and also ones from departments so those people can spread their newly developed skills when they return. There’s an opportunity to build a public participation evidence base through a “What Works” programme in combination with a UK university or the UKRI.
– I think there is a good chance of this being created as a GDS-style body to kick-start a number of participation prototypes as the government and civil service like to move cautiously. Probability: High.

After the first year:

Announce a programme of flagship Citizens’ Assemblies (ideally at least three):
– This feels like a big ask. The new government will want to be seen to have achieved as much of their election manifesto as possible without requiring input from anyone else.
– That said, I do think something like social care is such a critical issue that has built up multiple layers of intractable problems that announcing a Citizen’s Assembly to focus on that as part of Labour’s manifesto for the next election is certainly a possibility. Work to plan the required Independent Advisory Board is something that could be quietly worked on during this Parliament. Probability: Medium (for one, eventually).
Implement “levers” to encourage participatory policy making across government:
– This is about encouraging and supporting departments and arm’s-length bodies to build their own skills in this area. It would require building new training in Civil Service Learning, working with the Policy Profession, creating material for the Fast Stream and Future Leaders Scheme and developing senior civil service champions. The paper also suggests the development of a “Citizen Participation Standard” to be applied to all new pieces of legislation after a specified date. It also proposes this be run out of the Modernisation and Reform Unit and to introduce a new citizen participation-related prize at the Civil Service Awards.
– Unfortunately, I think this is going to be a hard sell in the current climate. There’s already so much to do in departments with so little money and frequent turn-over of upper-middle-grade staff and higher. It’s always difficult to find incentives from the centre to promote new ways of working and I think the Cabinet Office will spend its small-p political capital working with senior departmental civil servants on other things. Some bits might be done at the centre (such as developing training) but I don’t think there will be a solid drive to influence departments in this Parliament. Probability: Low.
Introduce citizen involvement in select committee enquiries:
– This would involve the government having to spend time and energy working on updating the archaic workings of Parliament on top of everything else it’s doing.
– I think it would be an excellent idea including citizen participation in select committees, especially ones impacted by the services the committee oversees, but I don’t see it happening soon. I’m planning to write a blog post specifically about select committees in the near future. Probability: Low.

After three years:

Create a “Duty to Consider Participation”. This Duty would require bill teams to give consideration to deliberation via a Citizen Participation Assessment. This should be set out in guidance by the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee of the Cabinet:
– I love this idea, particularly that it makes it harder for a new incoming government to dismantle any participation-related infrastructure when they come into power. Although that’s still always possible — see the Fixed Term Parliaments Act.
– Again, unfortunately, I think politicians are going to see this as potentially tying their hands in future when they develop new policies. I think it’d be an extremely hard sell. Probability: Low.
Citizen involvement in post-legislative scrutiny:
– The idea is to introduce the role of citizens to provide testimony on the actual impacts of implemented policy, enabling the select committee to hear directly whether the intended outcomes of the legislation were achieved, and whether it had unintended consequences on people’s lives.
– Again, this is an excellent idea. There’s minimal follow-up legislation scrutiny as it is and implementing this could only help. However, I see MPs as being very resistant to this, as select committee members will see it as a weakening of their power and their position in the spotlight. Probability: Low.
Ensure independent standards setting for citizen participation in government:
– This would start as an Advisory Board, probably in the Cabinet Office, and evolve over time into a completely independent arm’s-length body like one of the regulators.
– This feels like something that could happen as it probably has minimal short-term impact on immediate creation of policy or passing legislation and sets up the government to invest more time in developing public participation at a future date if they choose to prioritise it. Probability: Medium.

In short, I think the current government will likely expand Policy Lab to take on the Participatory Methods Forum and spend some money to develop training and standards while it chooses one or two relatively small pieces of policy to prototype these ideas on before even contemplating doing anything large-scale.

Spending required

Of all the things in the paper, this definitely surprised me the most. It’s fair to say that the figures quoted below were likely drawn up with somewhat rose-tinted spectacles. That said, given the huge multiple advantages potentially introduced by increased public participation, even if these values are out by 100%, I think they still represent incredible value for money.

To deliver all nine of the above recommendations would cost approximately £21.9–31.2 million in the first year. This money could be transferred from existing public consultation budgets, resulting in zero net cost.

Following the first year, if additional funds are required, the paper proposes the funding comes from the government’s Research & Development budget. The government spent £533 million on policy research in civil departments (excluding Ministry of Defence spending) in 2022. Reallocating just 5.85% of that budget each year would free up the £31.2m needed to deliver all the recommendations in the proposal,

Potential issues

Before concluding in the section below, it would be disingenuous of me not to list some of the issues with both trying to introduce further citizen participation in the policy development process but also in the processes themselves.

James O’Malley has written a blog post where he highlights a number of issues with increased public participation, not least the possibility of introducing further delays in policy development, and therefore service delivery, in a situation where many things need acting on as soon as possible. Ben Welby’s response is excellent (as is all his writing).

In terms of blockers to implementation, like any other large-scale change project, there will be areas of natural resistance to change, even if there is positive leadership and messaging from very senior figures.

Some of the potential issues are listed here:

Concerns from politicians that public deliberations may come to decisions that are counter to those held by their voter base. A good example of that might be drug decriminalisation in the same manner as Portugal, which is likely to be in opposition to the manifesto commitments of most parties in the UK.
Worries that the civil service or brought-in third parties will be completely impartial when organising public deliberations (this is why transparency is key).
Some quotes from previous members of the government, or shadow government, are concerning:
“There is often quite a degree of arrogance in sort of central policymakers, be that elected politicians or civil servants, or political advisors that ‘I know what the public are going to say about it. I’ve seen YouGov polls, I’ve sat in a couple of focus groups, I know what people say about this, I don’t need a very expensive citizens assembly or whatever… to tell me something I already know.’”
“We already have an assembly which is made up of citizens chosen to represent the public. It is called the House of Commons.”
“I think most politicians know what they want to do and what they should do. So [involving the public] becomes an impediment.”
“How does it improve my career?”

So, those in favour of this iteration of how the government develops policy may have our work cut out but, as with the introduction of service design or digital ways of working, it’s very much worth doing the hard work to sell the huge benefits that can be gained from implementing these changes.

Campaigning on this topic

Welcome, if you’ve skipped down from the first section 👋.

For me, the biggest question is almost always: “What happens next?” It’s no secret that there’s an ever-growing mountain of extremely well researched and well intentioned PDFs from UK think tanks, each containing (mostly) sensible recommendations on how the government of the day should act. What is almost always lacking is any follow-through to campaign for the proposals to be taken up or any later reviews to judge whether the publication can be judged to have been a success.

In this specific example, it’s well known that Sue Grey, the current Downing Street Chief of Staff, is in favour of increasing citizen participation in government but her public comments were largely removed in the lead-up to the election, so it remains to be seen what influence she will have in that regard, now that Labour is in power.

So, to finish this piece, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my own set of recommendations to Demos as to how they could proceed, following the publication of this excellent paper.

Create a dashboard page on their website, showing the adoption status of each of the recommendations as an excellent example of the kind of transparency advocated in the document.
Via the Collaboration Network, facilitate a discussion of how a sustained campaign can be put in place to advocate for the recommendations in the paper. The conversation could include the following:
– Who are the champions for this? Which high-profile individuals would be prepared to put their names to endorsing the proposals in a public space (e.g. on Demos’ website)?
– Can this include civil / public servants or are they prevented from doing so? Specifically Policy Lab, the Service Design Community and the Participatory Methods Forum.
– What about spads?
– Via volunteers, ideally in the appropriate constituencies, maintain a list of MPs who back the recommendations.
– Collect a list of supporters in the Lords.
Commit to publishing a follow-up paper, one year after the publication of this one, which reviews the progression of the proposals.
– As part of that, repeat, and potentially extend, the survey undertaken as part of this work to see if public opinion about the proposals has changed.

As I said at the top of this essay, I’m a huge proponent of this kind of work and very impressed by this publication. My concerns at this time are all centred around the possibility that, now this piece of work is seen to be concluded, it will be left for discussion by politicians and civil servants, rather than supported by an active campaign of encouragement. This is something I would be very happy to volunteer to support, as would, I’m sure, many other people.

I know Demos has a Relationship Manager who is looking into how the Collaborative Democracy Network may evolve over time so I hope this is something they will discuss with the members.

Who knows? One day, we may be discussing how this beginning fed into the concept of Global Citizen Assemblies. Here’s hoping.