Care, compassion and cutting-edge data with Dame Clare Moriarty and Citizens Advice

Dame Clare Moriarty recently became Chief Executive of Citizens Advice, having previously been Permanent Secretary of the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for Exiting the EU.  The UCL Policy Lab has been talking with her about new collaborations to tackle the challenges of our time. 

Clare Moriarty is clear about the social emergency many are facing this winter. The red lights are flashing, and not just metaphorically. At Citizens Advice, the organisation Claire leads, their ground-breaking cost-of-living data dashboard gives real-tome insights into how the crisis is affecting people—in some cases, predicting the next major social and economic challenges of our time. 

“One of the things that I've found absolutely fascinating and wonderful about Citizens Advice”, she says, “is that we're operating on this kind of continuous feedback loop.” “The core of what we're doing”, she continues, “is providing advice and support to people: two and a half million people are one-to-one, and about 10 million get self-service advice from our website.” But what Citizens Advice can also do, “because we've got excellent case management systems and unique data systems, is translate that into data that tells a story and insights, and then we put that together with the capacity to think about policy solutions.”

That data currently tells of a social crisis that has already arrived. When Clare Moriarty speaks, she was armed with the data from the dashboard. Not just anecdotal evidence. But the cumulative real-life experience of millions. 

“One of the things we've seen developing in the last few months is the number of people who've come to us because they can't top up prepayment meters”, she describes. “In June, we looked at the trend line to see if the number of people unable to top up continued to increase. And what we thought would happen, has. It's continuing to rise. We're seeing winter problems arrive during the summer. We’d never normally expect the energy to be such an issue in the summer.”

Turning this observation into policy recommendations, Clare Moriarty calls for a moratorium on forcing households onto prepayment meters. As she points out, pushing those who are struggling to pay into a system that causes them even more economic pain can never be the answer.  

This data-led and people-centred approach is one reason why Clare Moriarty is one of the reasons is excited about working alongside the UCL Policy Lab. 

“The UCL Policy Lab has situated itself at the hinge between the lived experience of individuals, the storytelling of politics and the data analytics of research,” she summarises.

It is a combination that she found transformative during her time in government.

While at the Department for Health, she spent time in an NHS hospital, witnessing the implantation of a policy she’d helped write. “I really thought it was good policy, properly thought through and very well constructed”, she says. But when she was led to see it rolled-out on the ground she realised, “it just doesn't connect with real life.”

This is the front-line experience and understanding that Citizens Advice has developed over decades of working directly in communities. The volunteers and paid advisors understand the unique challenges their communities face, while the data analysts look at the big picture and the policy advisors come up with solutions.

“You can always improve policy by having more eyes, a bit more direct experience, and bringing that into the room as can improve it. Putting that on-the-ground experience alongside good quality, high-class data analysis and understanding is vital to good policymaking.”

It is this combination that Clare brought to her work in the Civil Service that she now brings to her role at Citizens Advice.  As winter rolls in, her voice and the collective experience of Citizen Advice will be needed more than ever. 

A voice of care and compassion underpinned by cutting-edge data.

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