On 23 July, Liz Kendall, the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions announced ambitious plans to fundamentally reform the employment support system and tackle the “most urgent challenge” of spiralling economic inactivity.
For these plans to have any chance of success, it is imperative that people who have direct personal experience are actively involved in the process of redesign. The evidence from across a range of different sectors is that designing or implementing new policies to tackle poverty – including Jobcentre Plus and the wider employment support service – would be significantly improved by directly involving people with lived experience as integral partners in the process.
The advent of a new government, elected with a mandate for ‘change’, offers a real opportunity for something truly ambitious and new. In announcing the plans for reform, Liz Kendall confirmed that the Department for Work and Pensions will “empower local leaders and local areas to tackle economic inactivity and open up economic opportunity. We will give local places the responsibility and resources to design a joined-up work, health and skills offer that’s right for local people…”
At the same time, the Secretary of State also announced a new group of external experts who will provide labour market insight and advice to drive change throughout the system.
At both local and national levels, policy and practice will immeasurably benefit by involving people with lived experience of what the Secretary of State describes as “having been denied their rightful chance of participating in the labour market, and the hope of a brighter future. They’ve been excluded, left out, categorised and labelled.”
Why directly include people with lived experience in welfare policy making?
Policy and implementation design is a complex and challenging process. Including people with lived experience of poverty and economic marginalisation is important in principle, and brings practical benefits.
Firstly, the principled reasons: ‘Nothing about us without us is for us’ is a slogan used to communicate the idea that no policy should be decided by any representative without the full and direct participation of members of the group(s) affected by that policy. This often involves national, ethnic, disability-based or other groups who are marginalised from political, social and economic opportunities.
In the UK context, the slogan has been particularly associated with disability activism since the 1990s, and was later adopted as the starting point for Poverty Truth Commissions. It identifies that lasting social change only happens when those who experience the struggle participate in generating change.
Secondly, it is important to directly challenge and counter what Professor Ruth Lister has described as the ‘othering’ of people experiencing poverty. This is widespread within political and public debate, as well as public policy making. ATD Fourth World rejects the construction of people living in poverty as ‘objects of other people’s knowledge, not as authors of their own development – as problems’ for ‘they have something to offer, something to contribute’. What is at issue here is the value accorded to poor people’s own interpretation of their needs and demands and recognition of and respect for the expertise born of experience.
Practical benefits include the fact that people close to an issue know best how to solve it, particularly with regard to local culture and context. Designing responses locally will be more effective and much more real. The design process could start with local experience of the question ‘what would work for these people in this actual place?’. The DWP’s proposals to devolve responsibility for redesign to local leaders and local areas offer a great opportunity to put this into practice.
More than this, you just get a better policy. Over 20 years ago, Caroline Robb argued that the international evidence from a decade of Participatory Poverty Assessments showed that ‘the poor have the capacity to appraise, analyse, plan, and act to a far greater extent than had heretofore been acknowledged by many development experts… engaging with people in poverty leads to better technical diagnosis of problems and better design and implementation of solutions’.
A tried-and-tested approach
The involvement of experts by experience has been standard practice for many years within mental health, social care and the healthcare system more generally. As Nesta has highlighted, ‘there is rich evidence that people who have experience of using services are uniquely placed to help plan and develop those services. Service users and their carers are ideally placed to educate and de-stigmatise the issue of mental health; one person, one team, one organisation, at a time.’
Affirming the policy expertise of people with lived experience of poverty
Anti-poverty organisations have long highlighted the role of experts by experience in co-designing anti-poverty policy, including ATD Fourth World, the APLE Collective and Expert Citizens. Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Grassroots Poverty Action Group has been exploring what it is like to live on a low income through the cost-of-living crisis.
ATD Fourth World’s The hidden dimensions of poverty was a multi-year participatory research project, in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The project connected people who have a direct experience of poverty with other experts. A key aim was to complement ‘top-down’ definitions of poverty with experiential ones, and to demonstrate that it is possible to develop research methodologies that enable the fulfilment of human rights obligations and engage people in poverty in global policy making. It was conducted using ATD’s Merging Knowledge approach: a specific methodology aimed at overcoming the distinction between people in poverty who recount their lives, and academics who analyse them. This involved developing a form of knowledge specifically linked to the life experiences of people in poverty.
One of the best practical examples of the difference lived experience can make to policy making was the Salford Poverty Truth Commission, co-facilitated by Church Action on Poverty and our local partner organisation, Community Pride. Twelve people with lived experience of poverty and 12 senior policy makers from Salford spent 18 months engaged in a joint process of deep listening, relationship building and co-designing new ways to tackle poverty in Salford. The results were transformative. The Commission not only influenced key parts of Salford’s Tackling Poverty Strategy, it altered the way that it speaks with, writes to and meets with residents. In concrete terms, the process led the council to:
- review its debt recovery/income collection systems, ensuring they are as sensitive as possible and do not create further hardship, distress or difficulty for vulnerable people;
- stop using enforcement agents when recovering debts from the most vulnerable residents who receive a Council Tax reduction;
- launch new face-to-face coffee drop-in sessions for people seeking help with debt: re-writing its standard letters to prevent ‘brown envelope syndrome’* and giving full Council Tax exemptions for Salford care leavers; and
- waive the £11 charges for copies of birth certificates for homeless people, enabling them to more easily obtain the official identification they need to access benefits.
Imagine what would happen if the Department for Work and Pensions were to commit to a similar process of deep listening and co-designing new policy solutions with people with lived experience of the social security system? Imagine a world in which people felt positive about claiming the benefits they are entitled to, were welcomed and treated with dignity and respect at their local Jobcentre, were offered tailored help and support in relation to the issues that really matter to them, and were empowered and enabled to live fulfilled lives.
Is this too much to ask?
Niall Cooper has been Chief Executive of Church Action on Poverty since 1997, with a particular interest in participatory, community-based and movement building approaches to tackling poverty in the UK.
Jane Perry is Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Coordinator with Church Action on Poverty, and has extensive experience in Government and independent social policy research in relation to welfare, poverty and livelihoods.
* ‘Brown envelope syndrome’ was the term used by one of the lived experience members of the Poverty Truth Commission to describe the fact that he never opened any letters which came in brown envelopes, as they invariably contained demands for unpayable Council Tax arrears or other bad news.
Image credit: Samuele Dean via Unsplash