In this chapter we argue that when the UK government engaged publics during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it did so in ways that reduced them to imagined publics or passive objects to be measured, rather than elevating them as active citizens whose values should be incorporated into decision-making.¹ To support this claim, we provide a brief survey of pandemic public engagement, contrasting the diverse range of activities conducted by non-central government agencies with the limited way the UK government engaged publics during the pandemic, remaining on the lower rungs of Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation

We highlight how the narratives and policies deployed by the government actively removed values from policymaking and communication with publics. This reflected a hollowing out of values in policy, supposedly justified by the oft-repeated scientistic mantra, ‘follow the science’ (GOV.UK, 2020: 8), an impossible guiding principle given the irreducible trade-offs governments face during a pandemic, but one which demonstrated a disinclination to engage with the plurality of values that publics would bring to policy questions.

This status quo posed a challenge for those who wished to engage publics more substantively in pandemic decision-making. In our experience, centring the perspectives of publics can uncover new questions, positions and values that may be neglected in their absence, particularly because of the epistemic benefits that engaging diverse non-expert publics can bring (Bohman, 2006; Landemore, 2013). This is a very different activity from providing direct guidance on the questions and policy challenges that decision-makers may already have formulated in the absence of engaging publics (Weible et al., 2012).

We explore this challenge through our own experiences of engaging publics and policymakers during the pandemic as researchers on the UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator, an interdisciplinary and cross-institution ethics research group,² specifically through our work on the Accelerator’s public dialogue and policy workshop. Our solution is to narrow this gap between policymakers and publics by institutionalising structures that allow publics more substantial deliberative engagement in policymaking. We follow the OECD (2020) in defining this institutionalisation as the incorporation of deliberative activities into governance structures in a way that establishes a legal or regulatory framework to ensure continuity regardless of political change. A variety of institutionalised public engagement activities conducted outside of the UK government is considered, before challenges to effective institutionalisation are acknowledged. Despite these challenges, we recommend the institutionalisation of participatory forms of governance that centre ethical deliberation of public values in policy decisions.

An overview of pandemic public engagement

The breadth of engagement work conducted by UK organisations outside of central government during the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the variety of methodologies, purposes and partnerships that can be employed for publics to participate in policymaking. The heterogeneity of these activities confounds any attempt at providing necessary and sufficient conditions for what makes something ‘public engagement’ (Webb, 2021b) but their overlapping features can be shown through case studies of work carried out during the pandemic.

Surveys, focus groups and workshops have all been used to gain a better understanding of public perspectives on key issues during the pandemic. For example, a 1,003-person survey inquired about views on coronavirus certification (Serco Institute, 2021), while another survey of over 2,000 UK adults investigated attitudes towards inequalities and coronavirus (Duffy et al., 2021). An online focus group was used to explore participant perceptions and experiences of social distancing and social isolation during the pandemic (Williams et al., 2020), while a dialogic workshop investigated attitudes towards vaccination among minoritised groups (Traverse, 2021).

Publics have also been involved in creating tools to help others manage through the pandemic: the CoRay project, led by Emerging Minds, worked with young people to develop and share their own resources for dealing with the disruption and challenges the pandemic brought (Emerging Minds, 2022). Partnerships have been devised between research institutes and publics, for example when Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) created an eighteen-person public panel to explore perspectives on making regional, linked health data available to support vaccine safety research (Slape, 2022). Elsewhere, the Scottish government crowdfunded ideas for the COVID-19 response from its citizens, allowing registered users to submit ideas, rate the ideas of other users, and provide (moderated) comments (Participedia, 2021c).

Even more radically, deliberative democracy has engaged representative groups of non-expert members of publics in learning from expert testimony, discussing, deliberating and making policy recommendations on pandemic issues, using deliberative bodies such as Citizens’ Juries and larger Citizens’ Assemblies. Cases in the UK include Citizens’ Juries assembled to deliberate on the provision of scarce ICU resources (Kuylen et al., 2021), on the use of health data to combat the pandemic (Oswald and Laverty, 2021), and on building public trust in a contact tracing app (Ada Lovelace Institute, 2020). Deliberative approaches have also been used in devolved and local areas. A Citizens’ Panel in Scotland was made part of the oversight of the Scottish government’s coronavirus response (Participedia, 2021d). A Citizens’ Assembly in Camden considered the impact of coronavirus on local residents (Participedia, 2021b), while one in Bristol set priorities for the city’s pandemic recovery (Participedia, 2021a).

Inadequacies in UK government pandemic public engagement

This diverse array of public engagement activities conducted during the pandemic stands in stark contrast to the role of publics in the UK government’s decision-making at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Major decisions were taken which rested on catastrophically false beliefs about the purported behaviour of a homogenised and imagined public. The choice to delay lockdown until 23 March 2020 was taken partly based on concerns of behavioural fatigue: the belief that the British public would never accept stringent lockdown measures for any significant length of time. This intuitive folk judgement – connecting exceptionalist narratives about freedom-loving Britons and the Orientalist assumption that what was possible with a supposedly pliable Chinese public would not be accepted here – was not based on any respected concept in behavioural science.³ Rather it was an imagined public, created by politicians and scientific advisers, that shaped the space of conceivable policy decisions during the initial spread of coronavirus (Ballo et al., 2022: 11–12). In 2020, the most important political decision since the Second World War was guided by the same phenomenon that pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey, identified in 1927: ‘our political “common-sense” philosophy imputes a public only to support and substantiate the behaviour of officials’ (Dewey, 2016 [1927]: 150).

This could be excused as an unfortunate consequence of decision-making under conditions of extreme uncertainty, at the start of a pandemic which has often been described as unprecedented and unforeseeable.⁴ However, since that point, the UK government’s use of public engagement to inform policymaking was limited. Public engagement was used as a tool of measurement, as with surveys and opinion polls. Here, knowledge has been extracted from publics – for example, their attitudes towards social distancing requirements, their engagement with contact tracing, their willingness to get vaccinated, their support for vaccination certification, and so on – to inform policy decisions taken by government (ONS, 2023). It was also used to inform and influence publics in certain ways – for example, through public information campaigns informing people about social distancing rules or encouraging them to get vaccinated (PHE, 2021).

Referring to Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation (Arnstein, 1969: 217), government engagement operated at the level of what Arnstein identifies as ‘tokenism’ (see Figure 6.1). Informing publics, while a necessary first step to more substantive participation, is often used as a one-way flow of information with limited opportunity for dialogue.⁵ Through these engagements, publics are made passive and disconnected from any direct creative influence on the decisions that affect them or the wellbeing of their fellow citizens.

More substantive government-led engagement was rare. When it was sought – for example, the call for evidence regarding attitudes to COVID-19 vaccine mandates for care home workers – no explanation was provided in advance regarding how responses would be taken into account in the policy decision (GOV.UK, 2021). When in-depth interviews and focus groups were conducted with publics during the pandemic by the government and its opposition, the focus was often on overcoming barriers, that is, how to make an already agreed policy more palatable for citizens, or on perceptions and compliance with an agreed policy, for example social distancing guidance (Mavron, 2021). Citizens who engaged in these discussions were not given the power to inform policymaking, merely to offer a reaction. This accords with Arnstein’s critique of ‘tokenistic’ consultation practices, which often operate as nothing more than window dressing, a façade of engagement with no real substantive impact (Arnstein, 1969: 217).

Further up the ladder comes partnership – where individuals are able to negotiate and engage in trade-offs with traditional power structures – and delegation and citizen control – where citizens occupy direct decision-making authority – all of which confer increasing degrees of citizen power (Arnstein, 1969: 217). The examples of public engagement conducted during the pandemic given at the start of this chapter demonstrate the wide variety of methodological approaches that can be leveraged to meet aspirations higher up this ladder. But this work was largely conducted by private organisations, academics, public and third sector bodies, or local and devolved authorities. Central government-led engagement never progressed above the lower rungs of the ladder.

The impossibility of value-free policymaking

This tokenistic engagement of publics was in keeping with the government’s self-mythologised model of pandemic decision-making. The claim that government decision-making was ‘guided by the science’ was a constant refrain at Downing Street press briefings (GOV.UK, 2020), as was ‘data not dates’ in planning the lifting of coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions (BBC News, 2021). These narratives legitimised the government’s approach to engagement. In focusing on measurement and communication, they created a role for publics as a collection of atomised data points, made passive subjects of scientific instruction, to be assessed like lab measurements in a research study, not engaged in collective processes of decision-making. Non-expert publics lack scientific expertise, and, if our decision-making process is simply following an imagined scientific consensus, climbing higher up the ladder of citizen participation to more proactively engage citizens is not only unnecessary but an irresponsible waste of time and money.

Of course, these narratives were fictions, promoting a model of scientific deference that obscured the essentially value-laden nature of political decision-making: for example, the relative weighting of economic activity, personal freedom, public health and diverging pandemic risks to different demographic groups (Ballo et al., 2022: 6). Nevertheless, as well as creating a scientised model of their imagined public, this narrative encouraged a hollowing out of how value-laden decisions were made and communicated. Inescapably moral decisions that rested with government were either offloaded to others, hidden from sight, or reimagined as encompassing purely ‘scientific’ concerns. In late March 2020, for example, when COVID-19 threatened to overwhelm hospitals and necessitate triage decisions over ventilators and ICU beds, UK health officials rejected a draft guideline that proposed a scoring system incorporating age, frailty and comorbidities to guide allocation decisions (Kirkpatrick and Mueller, 2020). No official NHS guidance was produced, leaving decisions to local health authorities and individual doctors (Wilkinson et al., 2020). The membership of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the minutes from its early meetings were kept secret until the end of May 2020. As a result (and, presumably, by design) the process of how scientific advice informed policy deliberations was made opaque to citizens in the crucial early stages of the pandemic (Freedman, 2020; Landler and Castle, 2020).⁶ Furthermore, in advising on whether to recommend the vaccination of 12–15 year olds, the Joint Council of Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) explicitly limited itself to consideration of the direct benefits and risks of vaccination on the child being vaccinated (JCVI, 2021). Consideration of the broader societal impacts of vaccination were not delegated to any other official body, nor was an explanation provided for how they would be considered in government decision-making. Arguably, a general culture of opacity as to how values informed government pandemic decision-making facilitated the obscuring of some of the values informing specific behaviours: for example, greed and cronyism in the procurement of government contracts (Siddique, 2022), and the prioritisation of internal Conservative Party unity in the decision to lift COVID-19 restrictions (Riley-Smith and Knapton, 2022).

While government may still contend that it was accountable to citizens, this notion of accountability was devoid of any reference to ethical values. This was most obviously seen with Partygate,⁷ as even government figures who accepted this behaviour was wrong claimed that the continuing focus on Partygate was a distraction from getting things done, which is what they said people ‘really cared about’ (Rogers, 2022). Further, a key contention was that, in any case, it was undemocratic for the Prime Minister to leave office over the scandal because of the majority the Conservative Party had won at the last election (Wingate, 2022). But Partygate was about the moral conduct of individuals in government, and people did care about what Partygate revealed about the ethics of people operating at the highest levels of public office (Ferguson, 2022). Restricting the ability of citizens to advocate for ethical standards in public life to a vote in the General Election every four years – when this vote must also be used to express policy preferences and pass judgement on the competence of their local candidates for MP – is, we argue, a massive hollowing out of ethics and public participation in governance.

The Hopkins Van Mil public dialogue

This reality – of limited government public engagement, ethically opaque policymaking, yet a strong independent evidence base of meaningful coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic engagement activities – influenced our own public engagement work during the pandemic. The authors of this chapter were researchers on the UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator (hereafter ‘the Accelerator’), an interdisciplinary and cross-institution research group which worked to bring UK ethics research expertise to bear on the multiple, ongoing ethical challenges that arise during pandemics. The Accelerator aimed to provide rapid evidence, guidance and critical analysis to decision-makers across science, medicine, government and public health (Ethics Accelerator, 2022).

Both authors were primarily attached to the Accelerator’s ‘public values, transparency and governance’ workstream. As well as producing pieces of theoretical work – including ethical analysis of pandemic public engagement activities (Webb, 2021b), a tracker of public engagement work conducted during the pandemic (Webb, 2022) and an analysis of the ethical arguments provided by Conservative MPs against COVID-19 certification (Webb, 2021a) – this work stream aimed to directly engage publics and policymakers in the ethical challenges that arose during the pandemic.

Building on our analysis of pandemic public engagement work, we entered the planning of our own engagement having made some explicit methodological choices. Rather than measuring or predicting the beliefs or preferences of publics to gauge support for a proposed policy choice, we wanted to give space to participants to explore the relationship between their ethical values and the coronavirus response. This took us higher up Arnstein’s ladder of participation (Figure 6.1), and required a methodological approach aimed at facilitating dialogue and deliberation among participants. This explicitly ruled out opinion polls or surveys as methods. The Accelerator therefore commissioned the public engagement firm Hopkins Van Mil (HVM) to lead a public dialogue. HVM specialises in encouraging engagement through social research techniques to design, facilitate and report on approaches including dialogue, focus groups and community mapping (HVM, 2023).

Although this was only a small-scale public dialogue with twenty-four people from across the UK invited to take part, a specification and screener were used to ensure that the group reflected a diverse segment of the UK population, including guaranteeing a range of different locations: urban, suburban, rural and coastal (HVM, 2021: 6). This was important because a major epistemic benefit of representativeness is that publics bring a diversity of experiences and expertise to discussions (Bohman, 2006; Landemore, 2013). Representativeness can lead to the inclusion of a broader range of ethical values than the usual risk-benefit calculations espoused by many experts, considering a range of social and practical considerations that impact on those affected by policymaking.⁸

We further reflected that many of the dialogic and deliberative events conducted in the UK during the pandemic, such as those detailed in the first part of this chapter, had a narrow, directed focus on a single issue or region. While the topics of dialogue in these events had clear ethical significance, public values were not always the explicit focus.⁹ In contrast, we wanted to give participants a wide degree of freedom to shape the topics of discussion and what they viewed as the key ethical issues emerging during the pandemic. A primary motivation for doing this research was the desire to use the results to engage policymakers with the values of importance to participants, in a way that prior government-led engagement work had not done.

HVM convened three two-hour workshops during July and August 2021, with sessions focusing on participants’ experiences with coronavirus, their priorities for the COVID-19 recovery, and how they believed the UK government should prepare for future pandemics. An online homeworking space was also in use before and during the dialogues, so that participants could watch informational videos, engage in online discussion and deliberation, and shape aspects of future workshop sessions.

A thorough summary of the processes and results of this engagement can be found in the HVM report ‘Pandemic ethics: a public dialogue’ (HVM, 2021). However, we wish here to briefly highlight some of the distinctive ethical perspectives participants brought to the engagement. Participants spoke candidly about their frustrations with the government’s lack of recognition of the value-ladenness of decision-making – ‘Not once have I heard anybody mention the ethical implications of going into lockdown’ (HVM, 2021: 34) – and a desire for meaningful public engagement to meet this challenge: ‘Let’s get a policy built from that, so all of us can be involved’ (HVM, 2021: 41).

Some participants were concerned that vaccines were not the all-protective shield they were sometimes presented as being (HVM, 2021: 16), and recommended extra steps be taken to protect the clinically vulnerable, including the destigmatisation of mask wearing (HVM, 2021: 21), increased capacity for home working (HVM, 2021: 24), and increased support for community healthcare (HVM, 2021: 27).¹⁰ Many participants were sceptical of the return to normal promoted by the government (HVM, 2021: 20), and viewed the pandemic recovery as an opportunity to embrace new ways of living, with increased support for mental health (HVM, 2021: 22), research into long COVID (HVM, 2021: 23), and experiments in Universal Basic Income (HVM, 2021: 28–29). Finally, they examined issues through novel ethical lenses, considering safety (HVM, 2021: 33) and kindness (HVM, 2021: 26) as key ethical values, and over the course of the dialogue shifted from an initial focus on individual choice to a more collective response to adversity (HVM, 2021: 40).

The researchers at HVM highlighted several key priorities identified by participants as particularly important for the coronavirus recovery and future pandemic responses. They included the following:

• Re-balance inequalities that coronavirus exposed and exacerbated: address disparities in healthcare, particularly those experienced by people with Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic heritage, and combat poverty which worsened alongside intolerable inequalities.¹¹
• Build trust and transparency into government policies and actions: for example, through greater collaboration across the home nations to provide consistent and clear messaging and communications for citizens across the UK.
• Develop public involvement in policymaking: to create a society which is resilient in the face of future pandemics, participants want ordinary citizens to be involved in shaping future policies (HVM, 2021: 2–3).

The Westminster policy workshop

Following the publication of the dialogue report in September 2021, the Accelerator hosted a workshop in the Houses of Parliament to engage policymakers, advocate for greater public engagement in ethical policymaking, and showcase the results of the dialogue. The logistical challenges of securing a venue in parliament, our desire to invite a wide variety of stakeholders, and the need to organise a high-quality programme and set of speakers, meant the workshop took place in May 2022. It engaged forty parliamentarians, policymakers, patient representatives and academics.

The ordering of events so that the public dialogue led into the policy workshop was designed intentionally to centre the outcome of the public dialogue in the aims of the workshop. Rather than centring the interests of policymakers, and having the questions they wanted to consider determine the content of the dialogue, we wanted the priorities and values of participants to be prioritised and decide the content of the policy workshop.

This was achieved in several ways. First, one-page summaries of the results of the HVM dialogue were distributed to attendees in information packs at the event. Second, the topics chosen to structure the event, and therefore influencing the choice of invited speakers and the content of the discussions, were taken directly from the priorities identified by dialogue participants. The first half of the event focused on addressing inequalities, and the second on trust and transparency. Both parts of the event involved one speaker directly describing the views of participants on those issues. Third, several speakers, including one of the authors of this chapter, made direct calls for more radical forms of participatory engagement to be institutionalised in pandemic policymaking (something for which dialogue participants had also expressed a desire).

Despite the clear methodological justification for doing things ‘this way round’, it is important to note the difficulties of this approach. One of the challenges of influencing policymakers is the need to meet them where they are: both physically – which is why we wanted to hold the event in the heart of government – and in the delivery of information, by providing specific content designed to fit their evolving agenda. A common objection to academics’ attempts to influence political decision-makers is that the former leave the latter with new questions, new problems and new complications, but few concrete solutions or suggestions as to how decision-makers should respond to the challenges they face. As Weible et al. point out in their widely cited paper on public policy, goal achievement in policy influencing often requires attention to issues within an existing government programme or policy (Weible et al., 2012: 6). Academics who wish to have a demonstrable impact on public policy are, therefore, often advised first to find out what problems policymakers face and want guidance on, and then to provide direct answers to those questions.

This is a particular challenge given the kind of ethical expertise we were attempting to provide to policymakers. Knowledge can come in two forms, either propositional or performative (Archard, 2011). Propositional knowledge is knowledge that something is the case, whereas performative knowledge is an understanding of how to enact or engage in a process. Propositional moral knowledge was not the form of ethical expertise that we wished the policy workshop to consider. Rather, we wanted to highlight the range of ethical factors that we argue must be weighed in pandemic policy decisions, and advocate for a long-term procedural shift where more power was given to the deliberations of publics as a key part of the performance of this weighing process. We wanted to give publics the opportunity to pose their own questions and develop their own solutions to the problems they have identified. It was observing a lack of opportunities for non-expert publics to have this kind of input in pandemic policymaking that motivated the HVM dialogue and our methodological choices. But this kind of engagement is less likely to receive uptake in policymaking, because, instead of producing results already tailored to the immediate policy problems of decision-makers in positions of power, it may suggest different priorities altogether.

It is, therefore, possible that our workshop might have had more chance of directly impacting policy if we had done things ‘the other way round’, with the topics of the workshop being set by policymakers, and with the speakers providing their responses to these predetermined topics. But this would have taken control away from the participants whom we wished to empower. This tension is potentially irresolvable within the current policy landscape. It would only be resolved by a significant redistribution of power from the executive branch of central government (revealed by the pandemic to be the main source of decision-making authority) to publics assembled to discuss, deliberate and, crucially, to inform decisions. A central aim of our workshops was to advocate for that approach, to try to create the conditions from within which our dialogue and its deliberations would seem a natural and essential component of policymaking.

A further challenge with engaging policymakers in a workshop specifically focused on ethics is that they are afforded relatively few opportunities for structured discussion and deliberation on ethical values. This can be seen in the ethical opacity of the UK’s COVID-19 policies, and the way ethical values were missing in ‘follow the science’ narratives, as described in the opening part of this chapter. It was also seen through discussions at the policy workshop. One attendee¹² described being asked to provide ethical input into the government’s decision of whether to introduce COVID-19 vaccine certification, but upon submitting their report, being asked to remove the references to ‘solidarity’ within the document.¹³ The reluctance on the part of government to consider ethical values was reflected in the relative novelty, more than two years into the pandemic, of having an event in Westminster explicitly focus on pandemic ethics.

Key points emerging from our workshop were a call for explicit engagement with the ethical tensions of pandemic decision-making through trustworthy processes, including engaging publics on these matters of ethical value. The Accelerator offered support for this work through sharing tools to help approach ethically complex decisions in fast changing situations and build capacity to ensure ethics is at the centre of organisational decision-making. A summary of the workshop was produced, distributed directly to all participants, and published online (Manku, 2022).

The workshop was well received, with positive engagement during and after the event. It provided an opportunity to build relationships with policymakers, many of whom wanted to engage with the Accelerator further. Given that the objectives arising from the workshop – particularly the need to effect procedural changes to embed ethics and public involvement into decision-making – can only properly be met in the long term, prolonged engagement with policymakers will be essential in securing them. However, the standard fixed-term funding model of projects like the Accelerator means that longitudinal engagement from within a single research initiative is a particular challenge. The maximum length for UKRI-funded coronavirus-specific projects was eighteen months (UKRI, 2020). The Accelerator officially concluded its research activities on 31 July 2022. Any further engagement that researchers on the project can facilitate with policymakers to meet the goals arising from the workshop can only be done as individuals, without access to the project infrastructure for resources and support.

Our experience was that the point at which we had begun to build significant relationships, crucial for developing ethics expertise, was also the point the project had to end. This funding model thus poses challenges to gaining the necessary recognition from policymakers for progress to be made. As Weible et al. (2012: 1) argue, successful policy engagement requires three factors: deep knowledge; building networks; and participation for extended periods of time. We were able to achieve the first two parts of this formula within the timespan of the Accelerator, but not the final one.

A final challenge was striking the balance between our work outside of governance processes, providing critique and modelling best practices, and that which made attempts, like the policy workshop, to directly influence policymakers and have an impact within the current political landscape. How best do we bring public ethics to policy: through modelling a constructive process from the outside or by trying to influence decisions from the inside? This is, in itself, a moral choice. The best chance of influencing policy entails moulding the advice to the needs of current decision-makers. It is hard to do that ethically when the behaviour of so many in the executive and ministerial positions of government has been shown to be unethical.

During the pandemic, there were multiple breaches of the Nolan Principles that are supposed to guide behaviour in public life (Oliver, 2021), and a revision of the ministerial code which failed to strengthen the enforcement of standards in government (Durrant, 2022). Prime Minister Rishi Sunak only appointed Sir Laurie Magnus as his government’s ethics adviser in December 2022, over six months after the previous officeholder, Lord Christopher Geidt, resigned in June 2022, with two other prime ministers in that time having left the position vacant (BBC News, 2022). Prime Minister Sunak ignored the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life to give the adviser the authority to begin investigations into ministerial conduct without the authority of the prime minister (Brown, 2022). Furthermore, the only independent ethical body institutionalised within government, the Moral and Ethical Advsory Group (MEAG), which was set up in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic to provide the government with expert advice on ethical issues in health and social care, officially closed in October 2022, following its last meeting in December 2021 (GOV.UK, 2022). The short-lived nature of MEAG’s tenure is not a sign of a government committed to proactively engaging with the ethical aspects of its own policymaking.

The attendees at our policy workshop all demonstrated a great commitment to integrating ethics into public life. But they were self-selecting. Those most in need of heeding the messages of the workshop were probably not in attendance. Unfortunately, at this moment in public life, they are the ones most likely to be wielding the greatest power.

Recommendations

How might these issues be addressed? There is no simple way to bridge the gap between modelling participatory governance and having internal influence on policymaking. One approach is through sustained modelling of best practice by non-government organisations. This approach enables reputations of competence to be built with sympathetic politicians or policymakers with power – which may be at a local or devolved level – as a foundation for integrating those best practices into decision-making structures. During the workshop, Simon Burall, one of our panellists and a director at the public engagement company Involve, spoke about his own recent experiences with Camden Council using participatory methods to design and implement a Data Charter, engaging local residents in deciding how their data should be used to deliver public services (Involve, 2022).¹⁴ This level of sustained engagement may not be possible for projects supported by short-term research grants, such as the Accelerator. But this would not be so great a problem if practices of participatory democracy were integrated into long-term decision-making structures, so that their presence would not remain dependent on sympathetic politicians and policymakers, who may be replaced by less sympathetic successors through the democratic process. Properly institutionalising participatory democracy would allow short-term research projects to utilise existing structures to engage publics on particular questions rather than justify, create and promote an infrastructure from scratch each time.

Institutionalising participatory governance could also address two of the challenges recognised during our work: the gap between the challenges policymakers face and the perspectives of publics. By recentring ethical discussion and deliberation about public values within policy decisions, the gap between the policymakers and publics would be bridged, and value judgements of publics would be integrated into decision-making from the outset. Experts who then engaged with policymakers on the pressing questions facing them would do so on the basis of their already having been informed by public deliberation. Our experience of the HVM dialogue indicates that those discussions would involve a plurality of sophisticated ethical perspectives grounded in the lived realities of ordinary citizens, ensuring that policy decisions would not be so detached from ethical reasoning as they have been during the pandemic.¹⁵

But what could this institutionalisation of public dialogue and deliberation look like in practice? Although it feels very far removed from how UK government decision-making operated during the pandemic, there are moves from governments across the world to use approaches from far higher up Arnstein’s ladder of participation to integrate the perspectives of their citizens. Taiwan is an excellent example of the potential for mass participation deliberative approaches. It used online platforms to great effect during the pandemic to mobilise citizens in the fight against COVID-19 (Nabben, 2021). Taiwanese citizens were engaged in information gathering, discussion and deliberation which directly informed decision-making: an egalitarian vision of technology-facilitated democracy. A Citizens’ Council has been made a formal part of government structures in Paris (Sortition Foundation, 2021) as has a Citizens’ Assembly on climate in Brussels (G1000, 2022). The EU’s Conference on the Future of Europe involved four panels of 200 European citizens from the twenty-seven member states, chosen through random selection (EU, 2022). This led to the European Commission committing to institutionalise European Citizens’ Panels (ECPs) as a regular part of consultations prior to major legislative proposals (Greubel, 2022).

There are opportunities to be similarly bold in the UK, where local examples such as the development of Camden Council’s Data Charter could be scaled up to a national level. In 2022, Labour unveiled plans for House of Lords reform, committing to a consultation on whether it should be replaced with an elected second chamber (Mason and Brooks, 2022). These plans were scaled back in 2023 (Helm and Savage, 2023). But even if an elected chamber were introduced, it is possible that it would be just as unresponsive to the perspectives, values and arguments of ordinary citizens as the democratically elected members of the UK government were during the coronavirus crisis. To fully elevate citizens up Arnstein’s ladder, a representative body of citizens assembled through sortition to deliberate on ethically laden policy decisions could become an institutionalised part of government decision-making.

These proposals are radical, and we accept they must be embarked upon carefully and with an awareness of the challenges they face. The Conservative government did not show a desire to engage publics higher up Arnstein’s ladder of participation during the pandemic. As such support is an important ingredient in securing institutionalised public engagement (Cornwall, 2004), the case for it must be made as strong as possible. Though this reputation has been severely tarnished in recent years, the government is expected to provide expertise and competence in decision-making. To create the best case for reform, efforts to institutionalise public deliberation should follow established best practice in order to ensure transparency, trustworthiness, and accountability to citizens (Chwalisz, 2021). Participatory work must always have its motivations explicitly conveyed, its methodologies justified, and its results properly contextualised.

Institutionalisation is still in the experimental stage (OECD, 2020). Even where it has seemed most successful, follow through is not guaranteed. Iceland’s 2010–13 constitutional process, which engaged a representative Constitutional Assembly to review its constitution, led to a revised text which won the support of 67 per cent of voters in a non-binding referendum. But efforts to enshrine it in law were abandoned following the succession of a new government (Landemore, 2020). Early participatory budgeting initiatives in Brazil, which particularly focused on the preferences of poor and minoritised citizens, and led to a greater acknowledgement of their needs in municipal spending priorities, have been held up as a great success of public deliberation. However, over time, the level of political endorsement for participatory budgeting waned, leading to its ultimate discontinuation in its birthplace of Porto Alegre in 2017 (Abers et al., 2018). The challenges of building a more radically participatory democracy are very real. The case for its long-lasting institutionalisation in the UK must be made now, then again as it is established, and then again, and again, long into the future.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that publics have only been permitted a passive, disengaged role in public policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic: policymaking that has too often failed to grapple with ethical values. Nevertheless, examples of more participatory engagement demonstrate that involving publics and ethics in policymaking is possible. To realise this potential, we conducted our own public dialogue and brought its results to policymakers. Although the Accelerator’s main work is now completed, we as individual researchers will continue to advocate for the role of ethics in public life, and for a more radically participative role for publics in ethical deliberations to inform public policy.