The House Opinion Article | Here’s how we problem solve, not point score

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Social care, welfare reform, and the governance of artificial intelligence and digital technologies are among the defining policy challenges of our time. They are very different issues, but they share something in common. They demand more than another review, consultation or parliamentary statement. They require an enduring national settlement.

That should encourage us to think not only about the decisions we make, but about how we make them.

Politics has always involved disagreement. It should. But too often our modern politics rewards the performance of disagreement over the practice of solving problems. A relentless news cycle, social media and the rhetoric of permanent campaigning too often reinforce that instinct.

Point scoring becomes easier than problem solving.

Recently, I had the privilege of leading one of the government’s most ambitious People’s Panels on a major area of public policy. New prime ministers are entitled to change policy. Clear priorities make for better governments. What stayed with me was not simply the policy under discussion, but what the People’s Panel taught us about consensus building and the future of policy making when problem solving, not point scoring, becomes our starting point.

The People’s Panel brought together 120 people from across every nation of the United Kingdom, selected to broadly reflect the country we serve. They arrived with different experiences, different assumptions and strongly held views. Some were instinctively supportive. Others were openly sceptical. That diversity was not an obstacle. It was the point.

Over several weeks, they heard evidence, challenged assumptions, questioned experts and wrestled with genuine trade-offs. Nobody expected unanimous agreement.

The lesson was not that disagreement disappeared. The lesson was that disagreement became productive.

We did not ask people to think alike. We asked them to think together.

That feels like an increasingly rare thing in public life.

People who began from very different places found common ground not because differences were ignored, but because they had been aired honestly, challenged respectfully and worked through collectively. Consensus was not engineered. It was earned.

Watching that process reinforced something I have come to believe. When we are all given the time to hear evidence, challenge assumptions and deliberate together, consensus becomes far more achievable than our politics often suggests.

Representative democracy remains the foundation of our country. Governments govern. Parliament decides. A People’s Panel does not replace those responsibilities. It strengthens them by helping build the public legitimacy that our biggest national settlements demand.

It will not be right for every decision. Nor should it be. But where the choices are profound, trade-offs unavoidable and the consequences felt across generations, this approach has real value. Not only in shaping better policy, but in rebuilding confidence that politics is capable of listening before deciding.

Policies will change. Governments will change. Priorities will evolve. They should. But if government discovers a better way of bringing people into the difficult decisions that shape our country’s future, that is something worth keeping.

Tony Wilson famously said: “In Manchester, we do things differently.” It was more than a slogan. It reflected a confidence that original thinking often produces better answers than familiar habits.

Perhaps that is the mindset we now need for some of our oldest national challenges.

If we want to restore faith in politics, we should spend less time asking how politicians can persuade people of their answers and more time trusting people to help shape them.

Because the public do not always expect politicians to have all the answers. They do expect us to ask the right questions and trust them enough to help answer them.

That is how we build stronger national settlements. That is problem solving, not point scoring.

James Frith is Labour MP for Bury North