The UK’s Government Policy Lab recently launched its latest blog, a guide on lived experience in policymaking, which explores the principles, behaviours, and mindsets underpinning good lived experience work. The Policy Lab aims to improve policy-making through design, innovation, and people-centered approaches, using multidisciplinary expertise to understand the present, imagine the future, and design ways to achieve the policy impact they intend. The guide emphasises the importance of incorporating personal experiences into policymaking and the involvement of people’s lived experience, which is reported to significantly shift policymakers’ understanding of problems and potential solutions. The guide is based on a decade of lived experience work and specific lessons from the Changing Futures project, particularly the collaboration with the National Expert Citizen Group (NECG), to improve services for people facing multiple disadvantages. It highlights the Policy Lab’s work with the Changing Futures program in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), building cross-sector solid partnerships at a strategic and operational level. This can help design and implement an improved approach to tackling multiple disadvantage, coordinate support, and better integrate local services to enable a ‘whole person’ approach, create flexibility in how local services respond to the people who use them.
Previous Policy Lab Blogs include;
- What can innovation bring to place-based policymaking?
- Launching the Healthy System Indicators: A new way of relational working across local and national systems.
- Launching “Systemic” – A game for applying systems change thinking to policy.
- Shifting policy systems – a framework for what to do and how to do it.
- Introducing RegBox: using serious games in regulatory development.
- Launching NSPARC – our new National Security Policy and Research CoLab.