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Department for Work & Pensions
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Confidentially Open -
DWP Challenge Lab
23 February 2015Robin Van den Hende
Department for Work & Pensions
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Making open policy
• Broaden the range of people you engage with
• Engage people earlier in the policymaking process
• Increase the quality of engagement
• Ask meaningful questions
• Be prepared to change what you are doing
Department for Work & Pensions
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Making policy sensitively
• Issues can be sensitive - contentious, emotive, high impact, zero sum
and/or have no easy wins.
• Ministers and colleagues want the security of discussing issues in
confidence and expect confidences to be kept.
• Once you let go of information, you don’t have any control over what
happens to it.
• Options publicly released before they are fully developed can alarm,
frighten and/or generate opposition.
• It’s risky admitting that you are having trouble solving a problem and
explaining why that is.
• Another person’s idea of what “confidential” means may be different to
your idea of what “confidential” means.
Department for Work & Pensions
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How do you discuss challenges?
• How do you have constructive conversations with
outside parties that help solve sensitive issues?
• How do you get fresh perspectives?
• How do you reassure colleagues concerned about
open discussion of sensitive issues?
Department for Work & Pensions
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Challenge Lab
A space to freely discuss challenging child maintenance
issues and come up with practical, deliverable and
innovative policy solutions.
• Existing stakeholders to provide subject matter expertise, but also a
risk that they might bring preconceptions.
• Officials from elsewhere in Government to bring expertise in making
policy and a different perspective.
• Critical thinkers from outside Government who bring expertise in
making policy and a different perspective.
• Not “this is our idea, what do you think?” But “this is the challenge,
what do you suggest?”
