Three lessons from the Treasury’s Spending Challenge fiasco

 By HM Treasury

You’ve seen the Treasury’s Spending Challenge website, right? The one which asks members of the public to tell the government how to cut. The one which has quickly filled up with ideas that are horrifically illiberal, racist, or just wearily predictable? Doesn’t it make you despair about ever asking the public about anything ever again?

Well, personally, no. No it doesn’t. There’s nothing like a great example of a project where absolutely everything has gone wrong to help you think about how to do things right. So in short order, here’s three things I’ve learned from the Spending Challenge.

1.  Tap into knowledge, not ignorance
For central government, asking the public about things is a good idea. After all, the public are experts. As parents or pupils, patients or pensioners, they have invaluable insights into how public services actually work. If the government could find a way to access that information, they might actually find some of those vaunted efficiency savings.

But the Spending Challenge actively discourages people from sharing this kind of information. After all, we all know the background here: massive spending cuts. So the real question is where the axe should fall, and the answer, unsurprisingly, is ‘over there’ in the most distant part of society that we know least about.  Asked to offer up a sacrificial victim for cuts, people are pointing fingers at all the old tabloid demons – single mothers, immigrants, the long-term unemployed – because talking about the savings that could be made in the services they know and use is tantamount to putting their own head on the block.

To get the best out of the public, then, government needs to start by asking people to talk about the things they know about - their own experiences - not to pass judgement on others.

2. Good ideas are like Lego: some assembly required
In the Spending Challenge, ideas are like property: you’ve got yours and I’ve got mine. Every suggestion made, no matter how bizarre or unworkable, is a complete, perfect whole. It can be commented on, rated, but never improved. And in the end, each idea is in competition with every other for the meaningless title of ‘highest rated’.

In the real world, that’s not how things work. The best ideas are shared, discussed, revised, merged, and split. They grow and evolve as people work together. We brainstorm, we collaborate, and at every stage our ideas get better.

The virtue of holding this kind of conversation online should be that it pools peoples’ knowledge to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s what has let sites like Wikipedia produce towering intellectual achievements from the contributions of hundreds of thousands of users. That’s even what makes our own Crowdwise process work so well (we think).  But collaboration around ideas – not the ownership of ideas – must be built into the process from the very start.

3. Above all else: know what you are doing, and why
Engagement expert Andrea Cornwall has identified three reasons to get citizens involved in politics. Firstly, because it’s right: because in a democracy, it’s the public’s right to have a say. Secondly, because it makes them better citizens: because taking part in politics helps people understand better and care more about the way government works. And thirdly, because it’s effective: because decisions made with public input tend to work out better.

But just asking the public what they think won’t automatically achieve all these things. And the way that the Spending Challenge is set up doesn’t achieve any of them. If the public have a right to a say, then you should do more with their answers than promise to maybe think about looking at them. And you should make sure that everyone, not just the most opinionated and tech-savvy take part.

On the other hand, if you are engaging with the public to help them be better citizens, then you need a process which educates them, makes them feel empowered or gives them access to new experiences – not merely gives them a little white box into which to vent their spleen.

So presumably, the point of the Spending Challenge is option three: to help government make better decisions. After all, the public are experts. But with a process which discourages people from applying their expertise and which stops them working together, useful suggestions will be few and far between.