For years there has been the expectation that people will give their time for free to help public sector organisations to make decisions about how to improve, what services to offer and whether they are offering a high quality service.
We are now starting to have a split, with some organisations offering
payment for certain activities, others deciding that they will not offer
payments at all, and a raft of organisations in-between wondering what on earth
to do.
The systems needed to offer payments for citizen involvement activities
are starting to formalise this work and have the potential to create a
more business-like approach, and this, for me, is the outcome that I am most
excited about. You need a budget to pay
people, an audit trail and a very clear sense of purpose. Paying people requires the service to
seriously consider why they are doing a particular activity and what they hope
to get out of it. The quality of
insight, listening to a wider range of voices and being as inclusive as
possible becomes all the more important.
Imagine you are an organisation who would like to support a local
voluntary sector organisation to deliver service-user-led involvement
activities, or you might be hosting a co-design event and offering payment to
people taking part – both will require some kind of procurement or payment
system. Perhaps by having real money attached to this kind of activity ensures
that it won’t be a tick-box exercise. You are not going to spend hundreds of
pounds on getting insight that you then won’t use are you?
There is much debate about the power differential that exists between
those “outside” and those “inside” the system and the impact of paying people
on this relationship. For instance, when
you have members of the public, who use services, working alongside people who
work in the system, making key decisions and co-developing services, can a
payment offer start to balance out this difference? Offering payment has implications for the
relationship an organisation has with the people it involves, when there is
money involved the relationship changes.
From what I have observed so far, it does not
appear, as some would have expected, that views are compromised, as far
as I can tell, it’s more that there is a change in expectation on both
sides. We don’t yet know the full impact
of this change in dynamic and it will be interesting to explore the
implications of this over the next few years.
This is a tricky area to navigate. There will always be people who are more
comfortable volunteering their time and there is evidence that this is, if
managed well, a fulfilling activity that can lead to all kinds of benefits for
the person involved, as well as the organisation they volunteer for. Offering payments and other kinds of support
such as reimbursement for travel, or carers, as well as other development
opportunities can be a real incentive and there is evidence that it widens out
the kinds of people that might want to get involved both in terms of
background, lifestyle and age.
There is
a great deal of evidence that overcoming financial barriers can make a real
difference when trying to be more inclusive.
More than anything, I hope that the introduction of the option of payment
will ensure that we end up with well-planned and focused co-design activities
that are properly evaluated and the differences that participants’ insights and
ideas have made documented and shared.
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