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The front line and policy
Comment on the Cabinet Office Report ‘Listening to the front line: Capturing insight and learning lessons in policy making’
The public sector has a need to reform and reengage with the front line.
The need to provide better services with less money means new ways of doing things are required.
Following on from the Sunningdale Institute’s study (Engagement and Aspiration: Reconnecting policy makers with front line professionals’) the Cabinet Office has released the response entitled ‘Listening to the front line: Capturing insight and learning lessons in policy making’.
The Cabinet Office report makes clear the need to renew innovation in the public sector and ensure effective customer focused services. It indicates broadly the need to:
a) develop policies ‘in partnership with the people delivering them at the front line and the people who use them’
b) embed front line insights into policies ‘as part of a wider culture of evidence-based policy making and innovation’
c) ensure effective mechanisms exist to do a and b. Mechanisms which ‘support already busy policy teams in embedding the gathering of insight into their policy making processes.’
The report indicates that:
‘…better policy outcomes will follow from policy development with a more comprehensive front line evidence base that includes the views of citizens and public service professionals and leaders…’
Having worked at the interface between the front line, the organisation and wider national policy objectives a number of questions arise as to how such embedding and cultural change might occur:
- 1) How do we practically place information gleamed from the front line at the heart of policy?
- 2) How do we ensure the information is transmitted intact from the front line to civil servants and policy makers?
- 3) How do we enable policy makers to interpret this information?
- 4) How do we enable the front line to openly provide this information?
Finding practical answers to these questions is, I feel, a prerequisite to effectively establishing the ‘…routine use of front line insight systemically across government, turning it from good practice into common practice, and further embedding the gathering of front line insight into government’s general approach to policy making.’
Though placing this insight at the core of policy seems essential for reform given expectations of our public services and changes to their funding situation, inexperience of doing so could in fact pose risks to the effectiveness of our public services.
The goals of this change programme are exquisitely large:
- establishing the ‘routine use of front line insight systemically across government’
- turning this routine use from good practice into common practice’
- ‘embedding the gathering of front line insight into government’s general approach to policy making’
- embedding the ethos of front line insight and its importance to policy ‘into the ethos of all those who are involved in and who support policy making and its delivery’
If these goals are to be practically realised a huge amount of work will have to be done and it will have to be done in the context of increasing uncertainty and concern about the safety of public sector jobs.
Such a programme of change will be a decade long revolution in the way we understand the role of the front line, how policy is made and the way we design service delivery.
Tags: Cultural change, engagement, front line, policy
I think the question ‘How do we enable policy makers to interpret this information?’ just about says it all about policy makers. The policy makers need to spend some time on the front-line to truly understand the misery experienced by everyday people in our neighbourhoods.
I agree, for policy makers to really appreciate what’s going on, on the front line, they need to get out there (regularly) and see it for themselves