This article is written by Andrew Knight, Head of Policy Design Community for the UK Government.

  • The problem: In governments around the world, policy and public service initiatives are often given the go-ahead based on assumptions and biases.

  • Why it matters: A build-first approach can lead to poor public service provision for citizens.

  • The solution: A multidisciplinary research-design-test-build approach to make public services that work and deliver value.

What is policy design, specifically?

Policy design provides a way to move from that lightbulb moment where someone has a brilliant idea or thorny problem through to delivery of a public service. Design is a practice that enables people from different walks of life to constructively collaborate – whether they are decision-makers like ministers or senior officials, subject matter experts on topics of national interest, technical experts like researchers, designers and delivery experts who specialise in different aspects of making public services, or citizens who use public service. Policy design is a truly multidisciplinary way of making evidence-led policy.

What would you like to change about the world of policymaking? What problem are you trying to solve?

Quite simply, policy design drives up public value. When you ask policymakers, “Do you want to deliver more meaningful outcomes for citizens?” they say, “Of course we do …that’s why we are in the job!” Policymakers are driven by an extraordinary sense of public duty. But governments are increasingly asking them to work on complex, wicked and super-sized problems, like climate change or Covid-19. No individual has the skills to navigate these complexities and reduce these uncertainties alone. Policy design provides a systematic way to bring people together to make sense of the world and incisively delivers meaningful outcomes for citizens by fusing government intent with what people need and deliverability.

Why does the problem matter?

In governments around the world, policy and public service initiatives are green-lit based on assumptions and biases. There is a tendency to build big, pilot at scale, and run evaluations many years later, all in a slow and linear way. All this means that decision-takers and policymakers often don’t find out if their initial idea had the desired effect until years after, usually after they’ve moved on to new jobs.

Our role as policy designers is to super-charge policymaking capability, so they can take the best decisions and give the best advice to ministers.

Policy design turns this way of working on its head. We advocate for a research-design-test-build approach in short iterative cycles. The last thing you should do is build your public service – and only when you are confident it will work and deliver public value.

Crucially, this approach can save years of pain for citizens or businesses or other people who have to use poor or failed public services, by simply bringing them into the process at the start and taking an evidence-led approach to policymaking.

How does the community come together?

We currently work with over 40 central and local government organisations in the UK. Our policy design teams range from well known, well-established labs, like Policy Lab, to much smaller outfits where people are trying to incrementally modernise how they make policy and services.

The community provides opportunities for UK policy design practitioners to network and learn together several times a year. We have a strong bias to action and we are building learning networks with the top design universities in the world, training policymakers on multidisciplinary design fundamentals, and developing future practice skills and infrastructure for government on methods like citizen co-design.

What impact would you like the community to have on policymakers in the UK and abroad?

Our job is to make policymakers look good! Ultimately, it is policymakers who are the stewards of long-term national interest – they are now, and will be in the future. Our role as policy designers is to super-charge policymaking capability, so they can take the best decisions and give the best advice to ministers. We build policymaking muscle in government by enabling policymakers to provide credible assurance that their policy ideas are needed and that people will respond to them as expected, effectively safeguarding the public purse. The policy design community aims to be the government's catalyst for delivering more meaningful outcomes for citizens.

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