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In conversation with Ceri Davies, Director of the Centre for Deliberation at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)
The state pension triple lock could once again be suspended, renewing concerns around the mechanism’s long term sustainability. The triple lock mechanism guarantees that the state pension will rise each year by the greater of wages, inflation or 2.5%. As wage growth reached 8.5% and is the highest among the three metrics, aligning the state pension value with this will cost the government £2 billion more than budgeted next year. At the moment neither the Conservatives nor Labour has committed to maintaining the triple lock in the immediate or long-term, despite the effect policy change could have across generations.
Earlier this year, we highlighted the long term affordability challenge of the triple lock mechanism and that trade-offs, such as accelerating the state pension age increase, are likely to ensure the future sustainability of the state pension. When these decisions are made, it will be important there is a holistic approach that supports the impacted population to meet any retirement income shortfall through other benefits, and also incentivises private saving. The public must be sufficiently consulted on any changes they are well informed and these are trusted and fair for all generations.
In our recent research with King’s College London, we imagined the UK state pension’s future with the public through large scale deliberation. Despite most participants having relatively little knowledge about the subject before, both their understanding and empathy for policy changes such as accelerating state pension age increased after the workshops1. Similar results were also found in the last public deliberation on a holistic long-term strategy for both state pension and private pensions under Turner’s Commission in 2010.
For over a decade, the long-term decision on triple lock and state pension age’s future has been postponed because of the potential political ramification of changes. How could we gain the public’s trust and support in developing complex strategies for similarly crosscutting policies? We spoke to policy experts to understand how public deliberation might help. This blog covers our conversation with Ceri Davies, Director of the Centre for Deliberation at NatCen.
In a simple way, what are deliberative democracy and public deliberation?
Deliberative democracy is the normative idea that citizens should have a say in the decisions that affect them. Public deliberation is a practical expression of this idea; giving members of the public the right time, information and conditions to engage with complex or technical areas of policy making and come to conclusions or recommendations about what they think should happen.
What kind of policies are suitable to be shaped through public deliberations? How cross-cutting or simple should the topic be to be effective and the outcomes to be legitimate?
Deliberation works well on issues that are complex, technical and salient. It can also be used a different points in the policy making cycle and can be useful when the way forward it uncertain or an injection of new ideas can help. Deliberation tends to work better when there is a tangible policy option or trade off on the table; rather than something more speculative and it is here there is more direct likelihood that the public can have an impact on decision making in this way.
On this point, it is best practice (though doesn’t always happen) that the most suitable policies are those where the decision makers commit to doing something with the outcomes of the deliberation2. Public deliberation can be done in a wide range of formats – and can deal with complexity, and it is often the case that issues are cross-cutting – e.g. our work for Phoenix Insights on longevity brought in considerations of health, economy and society.
I think the key here though is that sufficient time needs to be available in a process to deal with any increase in complexity. Commissioners are typically very ambitious with what they want a dialogue to cover, but the reality is that topics need a lot of working through to make them clear, tangible and discussable.
Policy decisions, especially those related to longevity, have prolonged, intergenerational and cross-cutting impacts. Multiple policy changes might be needed simultaneously or over time to balance the interests of different groups, devolved matters might also be handled differently. How can we ensure continuity and legitimacy across these policy decisions, and how can public deliberation help?
Current practice tends to be oriented around policy for now, so I think there a few different ways public deliberation can help. One is by bringing the public into these conversations - you are likely to better reflect the range of different groups and generational impacts and considerations that are implicated in this thinking which itself could have a benefit as well as underscoring legitimacy; another is to think about drawing together the outcomes of different processes of public deliberation that might deal with these things separately and seeing what it offers to look at the evidence base as a whole. Public deliberation can also give a bit more freedom than traditional evidence processes in terms of creativity and scope, which can unlock some different ways of tackling some of these issues.
How could different approaches, e.g. citizen assemblies or participatory budgeting, contribute to the decision process, and what are the differences?
I think one of the main points for me here is that it is helpful to bring as much distinction as possible to the different formats and models. Their differences tend to be along the lines of sample – so whether participants are representative of the wider population (known as mini publics) or not, what the main purpose of the process is: to inform, generate new ideas, explore public attitudes, give the public decisions to make etc. We also need to consider the likely impact – is this about a live policy issue on the table, is it about informing , is it about developing capacity of a particular group to advance their knowledge/interests etc. Being clear about these distinctions increases their value to the decision making process and ensures policymakers are serious about involving citizens/the public in meaningful ways.
Are we expecting public deliberation to be more common in policymaking in the UK? Why and why not?
I think we currently see an increase in the number of areas in which public deliberation is being used or explored. This is happening alongside a more general ‘participatory turn’ in policy making and a sense of the need for new ways/ideas to better connect policy to the public.
What are some recent successful examples of deliberation or models that worked well?
At Phoenix Insights we are keen to support new approaches to resolve complex issues related to longevity. Public deliberation is an important methodology within our work, with important partners in the area such as NatCen. We will continue to explore different views on how it could support long-term policy decision making in this blog series, next time with Demos.
1 King's College London (2023) The Future of the state pension
2 A recent example is Public Dialogue on the role of Biomass in achieving Net Zero, which had a prominent place in the UK's recently published strategy
