Designing good policy isn’t easy, but it is possible. However, when we get it wrong, the consequences can be devastating. Government policy decisions do not affect each of us equally. When policy results in unintended, or worse, deliberate harms for marginalised groups, we need to look to the process of policy design.  

If we want to build fair solutions to the challenges facing society today, we need to start with the process. The principles below show how governments can design policy in a way that works for everyone — not just the majority. 

1. Participation 

Responding to consultations is an important part of any public affairs toolkit. In the last year, government departments have run more than 600 consultations on a wide range of topics ranging from digital ID to company tax returns.  

But how effective are these consultations in practice?  Their actual effectiveness was summed up by the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, when speaking about the digital ID consultation, “This consultation is not a performative consultation, it’s a genuine one. That’s why we’re not just doing a kind of online consultation in the way that normal consultations might happen.”  

The suggestion from a senior minister that most consultations are ‘performative’ is deeply concerning. For PLP, strengthening the accountability of public bodies is central to our work; consultations must move beyond being a box-ticking exercise. 

In 2025, the High Court ruled that the Department for Work and Pensions had acted unlawfully by running a misleading consultation on benefit assessment reforms. The proposed reforms to the Work Capability Assessment were presented during consultations as a way to support Disabled people into work, without making clear that the real motivating factor for the reforms was cost savings.  

PLP client Ellen Clifford’s legal challenge exposed just how flawed the consultation process can be. Rather than enabling genuine public participation, the Work Capability Assessment consultation was used to push a false narrative about motivation for reforms.  

If one consultation can be ‘genuine’, then all of them should be. Gathering diverse perspectives and expert opinions can only produce better, fairer policy — if they are actually taken into account.  

2. Lived experience 

As well as public participation, policy design must specifically seek input from groups with lived experience relevant to the issue at hand. When public services are being developed, reviewed or reformed, engaging with the perspectives and experiences of those who actually use them results in a more effective, and fairer, system.  

In 2025, the Right to (Addiction) Recovery Bill in Scotland, the Scottish Health, Social Care and Sport Committee ran a dedicated lived experience engagement process to their call for evidence. Interviews with Committee members have later showed that this engagement challenged their biases and changed their perspectives on addiction. 

Lived experience engagement allowed the Committee to investigate whether the bill would really meet the needs of those recovering from addiction, and questions raised by participants were later asked to witnesses in oral evidence sessions.  

One Committee member said, “I’m sitting [and] writing down the potential amendments to the Bill directly from input from people with lived experience”. 

The third sector has a major role to play in facilitating this process; multiple Scottish Committees have partnered with NGOs to set up lived experience committees as part of consultative processes. Although charities should not be a filter of what lived experience is ‘valid’, this case study shows how charities can achieve impact through their networks and convening power — and how decision makers can incorporate lived experience to improve their work.  

3. Scrutiny 

Recent changes to refugee status in the UK have been dominating the headlines. Refugee status has become temporary, with leave to remain that refugees receive reduced from five years to two and a half. Further proposed changes could mean it would take a refugee twenty years to become eligible for permanent settlement.  

The fear and lack of stability this creates for refugees putting down roots in the UK, and the probable increase to the asylum backlog that will result from doubling how often cases are reviewed, are deeply problematic. 

However, there is another cause for concern. These changes were pushed through as changes to Immigration Rules, without parliamentary scrutiny. The Home Secretary has expansive powers to make such policy changes without proper oversight or scrutiny — raising important questions about accountability. 

The process of parliamentary scrutiny provides an important opportunity to improve (or in some cases, mitigate the risks of) a change in policy. If this change had gone through the legislative process, it would have been debated, amended and potentially rejected. Migrant and refugee rights organisations would have also had a stronger opportunity to warn against the harmful impacts of these changes.  

No government should be introducing life-altering changes with so little scrutiny. The legislative process is a critical period for stakeholders, including charities, campaigners and lived experience groups, to have their voices heard. Legislative scrutiny opens up influencing opportunities beyond those handpicked by the government. It is crucial that civil society and the wider public stand ready to take these opportunities.  

Join our upcoming webinars to explore this discussion further. 

The post Three ways to make policy fairer by design  appeared first on Public Law Project.

Climate change isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s a public law failure. 

This crisis we are living through is shaped by countless government decisions:  what can be built or extracted, where resources and funding flow, who is protected from harm, and who is left to bear the risks. And as ever, those least responsible for the damage being caused are paying the highest prices.  

Many communities are already experiencing devastating impacts, while climate breakdown threatens to deepen inequalities across housing, health, migration, and access to justice. These harms compound and reinforce one another. 

Public Law Project has always been about protecting rights and fighting for justice. Over the years, that mission has taken many forms. We have used public law to challenge unfair decision-making,  to hold public bodies to account, and to stand alongside people and communities most often shut out of power. 

For the first time, PLP‘s strategy now explicitly includes climate change. The reason is simple: justice. Climate change magnifies injustice, and public law is one of the few tools capable of exposing and confronting the decisions that drive environmental harm. 

As interim CEO of PLP, I am truly excited about this new chapter of our work — one shaped by experience, grounded in justice, and focused on how public law can meet the realities of the climate crisis.  

Communities, public law, and environmental decision-making 

Having spent over a decade at Friends of the Earth, working in roles ranging from community organiser to CEO, I saw first-hand how public decisions can profoundly affect communities — sometimes offering protection and opportunity, but too often exacerbating harm and exclusion.  

I had the opportunity to work at both ends of the scale: from the UN climate talks where international legal treaties bring nations together to tackle shared challenges, to communities far removed from the corridors of power but on the frontline of environmental struggles. 

Across that spectrum, I saw communities empowered to take on the state through judicial reviews and planning inquiries. I saw people stand up for their rights and use the courts to demonstrate that the law should be a tool for justice for all, and not something to wield power against those already marginalised. And I saw communities working alongside NGOs, lawyers, and campaigners to successfully challenge the fossil fuel industry time and again — most notably in defeating the insidious fracking industry. 

Many of these community-led victories did more than stop individual projects. They resulted in landmark legal rulings that improved decision-making and access to justice for everyone.  

One powerful example is the recent Supreme Court win by Sarah Finch and the Weald Action Group, which challenged the approval of fossil fuel extraction and set an important precedent for future cases. 

“The Weald Action Group turned to the law after years fighting oil extraction in our area. It was a big learning curve. I had no expectation that our fight over one oil development would have such a big impact. It’s exciting to be part of one of the increasing number of cases that are challenging the status quo on climate around the world. The law is a powerful tool for climate campaigners – and we need to defend it from regressive forces who want to use the law against us.” Sarah Finch (Campaigner, Weald Action Group) 

As PLP increasingly engages with environmental injustice, our long-standing commitment to standing alongside marginalised communities will remain central to our work. 

The intersection of climate, race, class, and justice 

PLP is proud to work in solidarity with marginalised groups, using our power, privilege, and expertise to help create a fairer society through public law. Much of this work has focused on immigration, where we have challenged unjust systems and policies that deny people safety, dignity, and fairness. 

We know that climate change will intensify these injustices, and we will see a rise in those looking for a safe haven as they flee from increasingly unsafe areas of the world. At the same time, it is working-class communities and racialised communities who are on the sharp end of environmental injustices. It is often poorer areas of society most blighted by air pollution or facing unwanted infrastructure projects at their doorstep. 

The connections between environmental harm, race, class, and inequality are clear, and PLP will be making and strengthening those links and joining forces with the movements for justice that span across them all.  

Environmental justice must be rooted in social justice, and public law has a critical role to play in achieving both. 

Our ‘Public Law and the Planet’ conference in March marks the beginning of a new chapter for us, bringing together these issues and showcasing how public law can be used to challenge environmental injustice and support movements for justice in all their forms. 

I hope you can join PLP as we explore this new work.

– Jamie Peters, Interim CEO of PLP

Image credit: Creative Commons / Ivan Radic

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As the Constitution Committee report says, ‘the future of our democracy relies on us protecting the rule of law against challenge’. To defend the rule of law effectively, we must tell a positive story about its value for our society and culture, and about democracy, fairness, and empowerment. 

Hostility on the horizon

Many in the UK feel that our legal and constitutional systems no longer work as they should. Attacks on the judiciary and human rights are often in the headlines, and the Government’s recent announcements on asylum policy would weaken the prohibition of torture and the right to a private and family life provisions in the UK. 

A crucial part of the rule of law is that justice must be seen to be done. The report highlights how the state of our policing—evidence of bias and discrimination within police forces, and their inability to deal with some of the most visible crime—undermines that belief as well as trust in the existence and value of the rule of law.  

PLP has also seen disillusionment with the rule of law resulting from growing economic inequality, failing access to justice, underinvestment in public services, and the increasing and unregulated use of AI by public bodies. Polling has also highlighted a strong correlation between economic deprivation and anti-immigration extremism. 

A positive story 

Public law defines what the government can and can’t do, and what it must do. These legal rights bring us closer to a society founded on fairness, equality and justice. For many of these rights, we rely on international frameworks, built after the atrocities of the Second World War. 

Domestically, judicial review is one of our most important legal rights when it comes to government accountability. If you are affected by a government or public body decision which is unfair or unlawful, you have the right to challenge that decision and have your voice heard in court, and you don’t have to be able to afford legal fees. 

Indeed, as the Constitution Committee asserts: ‘the power to hold the Government to account for breaches of the law is a vital part of the rule of law’. We are glad the Committee has supported our call for Government to ‘refrain from presenting the judicial review process as a blocker to government action’, and we hope the Prime Minister will reconsider this damaging characterisation of judicial review. 

Keeping a focus on communities 

Speaking at the Constitution Committee’s Evidence Session, Shameem highlighted fairness as her favourite component of the rule of law, as it ‘brings to life the law for marginalised individuals and makes sure that the law is not only accurate but just’. Shameem spoke about how empowering it can be, as an individual, to bring a case against a government and hold it to account, and how this can help prevent cynicism. If people understand their legal rights and how to enforce them, they can resolve their problems, often much faster and more easily too. 

The rule of law isn’t only about big political issues— it can make our day-to-day lives easier too. If politicians want to halt disengagement and deprivation, helping people to better understand and enforce their rights is a good starting point. 

What next? 

As we look ahead to the policy and legislative agenda for 2026, PLP would like to see urgent and sustained attention on: 

• Improving access to justice: an essential condition of the rule of law is that people in need must have access to legal aid and a lawyer. Investment in the legal aid system will be worthwhile in combatting disenfranchisement. As the Constitution Committee says, we are at risk of a society where ‘justice is available to only those who can afford it’. Costs in judicial review should be reformed so that this crucial element of the rule of law is affordable for all.  

• Upholding and protecting key international rule of law frameworks: recent immigration announcements have shown the Government is considering weakening,  rather than strengthening, our human rights. As the tides of authoritarianism rise across Europe and the world, we EUSSmust protect the international bedrock of the rule of law. 

• Better AI safeguards: what does the principle of accountability mean when governments use automation to make decisions? It is disappointing that the Constitution Committee didn’t highlight this point from our evidence.  Paying heed to digital rights is an essential component of rule of law in today’s world, as are the provision of practical mechanisms to challenge automated decisions.  

The post The rule of law: Addressing threats, seizing opportunities   appeared first on Public Law Project.

At Public Law Project (PLP), our work is in pursuit of a fair and inclusive society and we see Party Conferences as an opportunity for politicians and policymakers to lay the foundations to deliver fairness. As well as being interested in whether parties engage with the topics we work on (such as regulating automated decision making or ensuring fairness in the welfare and immigration systems), we are interested in how parties engage with these issues.

This blog outlines the 4 things we hope to see at this year’s Party Conferences. 

1. Marginalised communities have a seat at the table 

In a fair society, everyone should get the chance to have proper input into policies that affect their lives. We are in a political moment where the shape of crucial public systems like the NHS, welfare benefits, and the asylum system are up for debate. No public service exists in a vacuum, and a huge variety of lived experience shapes the way each of us interacts with the state and the services it provides. Parties should be proactively engaging with marginalised communities to design a state that works for us all.  Being able to draw on their experiences would practically benefit anyone designing an efficient, let alone inclusive, system.  

PLP strongly encourages parties to commit to working with people with relevant lived experience when designing their policy platforms. This would be a critical step towards more informed and empathetic policy- and decision-making. This consultation shouldn’t be tokenistic; marginalised people shouldn’t be in a room just so a box can be ticked. We want to see the contributions of people who have been marginalised valued and listened to.  

2. A fair and respectful tone 

Politicians too often rely on simplistic narratives to justify their political choices, scapegoating marginalised communities instead of acknowledging the profound impact that marginalisation and inequality have on individuals within our society. Those who are already on the receiving end of injustice and unfairness – like asylum seekers, benefit claimants, or the trans community – deserve better than to be used as deflection by those who avoid confronting the systemic problems facing us.  

A critical marker of a successful party conference will be whether marginalised communities are treated with respect. When the party leaders speak about groups of people, we have to ask – would they say it that way if they were sitting in the room? Could they repeat it and look someone with lived experience of that issue in the eye? 

The emphasis should be squarely on fairness and inclusivity, however complicated these can be. The unravelling of marginalisation comes first from respecting and understanding it, and the results will improve life for us all.  

3. Visions for a future where all power is accountable 

We are in a global political moment where authoritarianism and disregard for the rule of law are on the rise. We will be watching with anticipation to see how much emphasis parties put on ensuring accountability for the current, and all future, governments to safeguard against the potential for unchecked power.  

Because of public law protections, each of us can legally challenge the state when it acts unfairly towards us, for example through judicial review, a process where a judge reviews the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body. Through Judicial Review, PLP was able to support a refugee torture survivor threatened with deportation to Rwanda to challenge the Home Secretary in court and bring an end to the deeply harmful Rwanda policy. This ability must be safeguarded, not weakened in the pursuit of quick fixes and legislative workarounds.  

This rebalancing of power through public law does not truly exist without universal access to justice. Amidst the cost-of-living crisis, legal advice is out of financial reach for many, so our crumbling legal aid system must be reinforced. The ability to challenge unfair decisions should not be restricted to those who can afford it; those who are not privileged, whether economically or otherwise, are inherently more likely to experience discrimination. 

4. Fairness at the heart of policy making

Ultimately, we want to see is fairness and inclusivity at the heart of policy making. We don’t expect perfection from any one government or party – which is why it is so important to be able to hold any government accountable.  

Engagement with communities, respectful narratives and true accountability are the building blocks of a conference that effectively addresses the political and public law issues of our day. This autumn sees all the parties set the tone for a crucial year in British politics – we hope it will be one of fairness. 

The post Putting people at the heart of Party Conferences: 4 things we hope to see  appeared first on Public Law Project.