Minimum Income Guarantee: Experts by Experience Panel report

Reflections

The Panel brought together a total of 38 members (across the two phases). These members represent a range of diverse demographics in Scotland and reflect family types at particular risk of poverty. By bringing together these different experiences members were able to consider a range of views as they formed their recommendations. However, it should be noted that there are some limitations in who was represented in the panel and therefore the potential for further work to address this gap. Of particular relevance to the development of a Minimum Income Guarantee it should be noted that the panel had none or very limited representation from:

• Island communities.
• People under the age of 25, and particularly people under the age of 25 who are parents.

Involve recommend further engagement with these groups particularly to ensure that the design of a Minimum Income Guarantee reflects their needs.

By working together over a period of almost two years, members built confidence and technical knowledge to optimise their ability to apply their experiential knowledge to the development of the Minimum Income Guarantee. However, the following process limitations should be noted:

With the exception of the first meeting, Panel meetings took place online. While online deliberation has proven an effective alternative that allows people over a larger geographically dispersed area to come together easily and efficiently, it does bring some limitations. It reduces the range of ways in which information can be provided to the members, and deliberative exercises can be carried out. This is the potential particular disadvantage for any member whose learning style is not well suited to hearing information presentations in the online setting. Further, while Involve provided significant technical support to members, confidence to use platforms did vary.

Panel meetings took place over three hours (again with the exception of the first meeting). Facilitators and Panel members consistently felt this was not long enough.

Panel meetings took place on a varying timescale with timescales between meetings varying from six weeks to three months. Whilst the long-term nature of this Panel was necessary in order to complement the work of the Expert Group, the gap between meetings led to a need for the basics being reasserted at every meeting. Short bulletins, updates, and optional online drop-in sessions were provided between some of the meetings.

The Expert Group and Panel were intended to work closely together. This worked well with Panel members attending meetings of the Expert Group. It also worked well when members of the Expert Group were able to attend meetings of the Panel. However, due to time constraints this did not always happen. Further, the work of the Panel ended up progressing at a different rate to the work of the Expert Group. This meant that some of the information that the Panel hoped to hear about to inform their deliberations had not yet been determined. We worked with this structure well by utilising an iterative approach where Panel members returned to earlier topics when new data was available.

Taken together, these process limitations meant that some panel members were less well able to reflect on the information they hear and apply it to their own experiences. This is not to say that members were unable to do this, but that with process improvements this could be further optimised to aid members' learning and experience. Ultimately this would add additional nuance and depth to their recommendations. We recommend future processes would be strengthened by:

• holding a mix of in-person and online meetings.
• setting a maximum time between meetings of six weeks.
• allowing the time needed for deliberation to be dictated by the aims of any specific panel meeting, taking a bespoke approach rather than working to a preset timeframe.
• trajectory planning at inception with the parallel group experts by professional expertise.

Involve would like to thank the 38 members of the Scottish public who took part in the Expert by Experience Panel, committing their time and energy to learning about the Minimum Income Guarantee, hearing and discussing their values, views, experiences, and opinions with each other, and together developing the above eight principles.

The work of the past two years was recognised in the last meeting by Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice Shirley-Anne Somerville, who thanked the Panel and acknowledged that the Panel recommendations challenge the Expert Group thinking and that of the Scottish Government and that this is important to build constructive feedback and recommendations to push the government to go further and better to ensure successful policy.