Feeding the beast that bites? A blog by SASW member Henry Mathias
Now that the Scottish Government’s plans for a National Care Service (NCS) have finally been ditched, a St Andrew’s House juggernaut is grinding to a halt. With all the advisory groups and stakeholder engagement disbanding SASW is taking stock, like many other key players on the national stage. There’s certainly no shortage of meaty policy implications to chew over, but what of the process itself?
The experience of engaging with the National Care Service programme was perhaps indicative of a wider cultural dynamic happening across Scottish Government. I am a volunteer with an environmental group, and I know that similar processes are at play across this domain. Firstly, there’s the sheer weight of engagement. The number of current consultations SASW is handling seems to reflect a growing industry. I know that the world of social work and social care is not alone in being overwhelmed by the increased volume and frequency of public consultations on changes directly affecting them. Surely greater Scottish Government engagement sounds good, no? This must mean the civil service is upping its game and working closer with the communities it serves. In theory, yes. But not if it is consultation in name only, and the resultant fatigue causes some participants to collapse, leaving only those individuals and organisations with sufficient resource to sustain this persistent and ongoing involvement.
As well as quantity, there’s also the issue of quality. The public consultation machine is a hungry beast. It eats up the morale as well as the time of individuals and organisations. We’re all becoming wary in addition to weary! Given the breadth of policy change and the St Andrew’s House shift from drawing in ‘subject matter experts’ from the sector on secondment, it is becoming more likely that the Scottish Government engagement will be managed by a civil servant without lived or working knowledge of the sector. My previous experience of participating in advisory groups and being able to engage in genuine dialogue with civil servants with deep understanding of the issues feels increasingly consigned to the history books. Armed with ever more sophisticated digital whiteboard and visual collaboration tools, advisory and working groups risk becoming a process that extracts data from contributors rather than responds to their influence. As the National Care Service proposals unfolded, with more civil servants being deployed using more sophisticated digital engagement tools, so I experienced less dialogue and less ability to understand the mind of Government. What it was thinking became less rather than clear.
For this game of engagement and consultation to work, representative organisations need to believe that their involvement is worthwhile, that it is actually influencing government decision making. However, many of us have experienced decisions being made that do not appear to be supported by the evidence. Our Government has also developed a tendency to oversell its engagement, claiming co-production when the lived experience is way down Hart’s ladder of participation[1].
I wonder how common is the feeling of being used, if not abused, by the whole process? A sinking feeling that comes from reading the final statutory publication resulting from the engagement process, with your own name listed and the Scottish Government reporting that it has fully taken on board the views of those on the list. Attendance has been taken as tacit approval. It’s one thing representing a professional organisation as a paid employee however, where this tension engaging with central government goes with the territory, but it’s another thing representing oneself and other people experiencing services. I’ve spoken to a range of individuals with lived experience who have responded positively to being invited to join an advisory or working group, only to find themselves unhappy that their contribution has been used selectively, sometimes to override the views of organisations representing people with lived experience. I’m not advocating withdrawing from all statutory engagement processes.
We should continue to enter as long as the door remains open. However, those individuals and organisations who do enter the virtual room need to become wise to the challenges as well as the opportunities that engagement with Scottish Government brings, so that they can look after themselves and those they are representing.
[1] Hart, R. (1992) Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship. UNICEF Innocenti Essays, No. 4, Florence, Italy: International Child Development Centre of UNICEF.