Today’s Select Committee report on local authority refuse collection took me back three decades to my
first full time job as a street sweeper for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Clocking-on time was 5.30 and even as a teenager with a mind on girls, punk rock and soft drugs, I couldn’t help being impressed by the view from Chelsea Bridge in the early morning summer sun.

The only other people I remember seeing were Brighton-bound bikers stopping for a strong tea and cigarette at the tiny snack hut on the south side of the river.

On my first day I was allocated to Pat, a short wiry Irishman of few words. We walked down to the Kings Road, pointing down the side of a posh residential square and he gave me my broom and set me to work.

Half an hour later I was wondering what I had let myself in for; dripping in sweat, eyes and nose full of dust and with a hatred of irresponsible dog owners that was fast becoming pathological.

At this point Pat strolled up to me. Gently removing the broom from my red hands and glancing back at the couple of hundred yards I had covered, he uttered possibly the ten most influential words I’ve ever heard: ‘Listen son,’ he said, ‘this is a job not a bleeding vocation.’

Two hours later we clocked off for an elevenses which ended at the conventional time despite beginning just after eight. When I asked another fellow sweeper – a drug addict who used to hide stolen car radios in his dust trolley – whether we might ever be caught out for our five hours off in every eight hour shift, he reassured me that the council inspector made it a matter of pride that the timing of the weekly round on his motor scooter never varied.

As long as I was hard at work behind John Lewis on Friday at 10.00 the rest of my time was my own. We used to give him a friendly wave as his Vespa turned the corner and we looked for somewhere to hide our trolley.

I have to admit this experience of the public sector ethos did leave a mark. But over the years my main argument for reform has not focussed on efficiency, I have instead majored on the need for ‘empowering’
services.

By this I mean services designed around the idea of the user as the joint producer of the intended outcome. Thus, health services are better if patients have greater choice and control, results improve when pupils and parents feel engaged with the school, the police have a chance of success if the community accepts a role in delivering the crime prevention strategy.

This idea is now very popular with pundits, politicians and progressively-minded managers. But not everyone is so convinced. For many hard pressed public employees the task is keeping the public at bay rather than inviting them to get more involved. While for critics of the state the idea of empowerment is just a cover for a continued failure of basic service delivery.

More than once I have heard members of the latter camp respond to my idealistic vision of state-citizen collaboration with the stark assertion: ‘People don’t want to be engaged or empowered they just want their bins emptied on time.’

Preparing for a speech the other day to Kent County Council managers I was wondering whether I would face this line at attack again. When it struck me – in my house we have a bag for recycling, a bag for the compost heap I recently established in the garden, and we try to keep the remainder down to no more than one black bin liner a week – I am a co-producer of waste services in Lambeth.

Indeed, the amount of time my family spends separating, rinsing and bagging the rubbish is probably as great as that spent on my household by the council’s refuse collection service.

What was once cited as the classic example of a ‘delivery’ service of which the public would be mere passive recipients, wanting little more than reliability, has turned into a partnership.

Instead of council officers needing only to think about when the cart turns up and whether the collectors tidy up after themselves, they must now carefully work out how best to cajole residents to be
responsible waste managers.

The thrust of today’s Select Committee report was that councils are using insufficiently strong incentives to encourage residents to recycle.

Imagine how revolutionary it would be if responsibility for service outcomes in schooling, primary health care and policing were shared as equally with the public as is increasingly the case with refuse collection.

So, the next time I am waxing lyrical on the need for the empowering state and someone shouts out ‘rubbish’ I’ll know they are agreeing with me.

All of which gives me the excuse to recall a favourite TV comedy moment, one which uses rubbish to raise the most profound of philosophical questions. For surely no amount of innovation or empowerment will match the efficiency of Trigger’s broom?

As you will recall he won Southwark public employee of the year for having had the same trusty sweeper throughout his career. As he boasted to Del Boy and Rodney: ‘Maintained it for 20 years. This old broom has
had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in its time.’

Sorry for the gap since my last post. I won’t mention my long hours, as the last time I did someone told it was ‘unbelievably self-serving’.

Last week a gang of RSA folk went to Manchester for a series of meetings including a very successful new Fellows’ event.

It was another chance to talk about our plans for the Fellowship engagement strategy in the autumn. Once again the reaction from both the regional network and new Fellows was overwhelmingly positive.

An issue I shared with the network members and that I have referred to before is the challenge of social innovation through voluntary action.

The vision of a hundred networks of Fellows grouped by locality, profession, interest, expertise, or concern seems to capture the imagination. People like the idea that to be an activist in the RSA you don’t have to be elected or appointed to a committee, simply to take initiative and attract other people who share your experiences, views or priorities.

And with the invaluable advice and support of Fellows with expertise in social networking – like Steve Moore from Policy Unplugged – we are confident that we can choose the right tools to enable Fellows’ networks to develop.

But we have been clear from the beginning that this online activity is only a facilitator for real world interventions. This will be the hardest challenge.

In Manchester we held a Coffeehouse Challenge in a hospitable but noisy Starbucks in St Anne’s Square. The group of about 30 Fellows and guests agreed early on that we should focus on the gap between the ever more successful Manchester elite who tend to work or live in the town centre and the large numbers of poorer Mancunians who continue to be locked out of the success story.

As we knocked around various thoughts, the mentoring of young people surfaced as a popular idea. That was until someone told us that they had been involved in exploring mentoring as an option for a company’s CSR programme. It turned out, he told us, the city was full of mentoring schemes, not all of them demonstrably successful.

A youth worker then chipped in that effective mentoring might mean a 10 year commitment to a young person whose strongest need was for continuity.

With mentoring sidelined we were just starting to get on to other ideas when the allotted CHC time ran out. This underlined how much time and hard thinking it takes to get an intervention right.

Half a lifetime as a political and community activist has taught me two things…

First, a small group of committed people can make a huge difference if they apply their collective intelligence and will to an issue.

Second, a huge amount of time spent on campaigning and volunteering is simply wasted in futile or even counterproductive activities.

Ultimately, when we have very many networks able to learn from each other, when we have refocused the RSA so that supporting Fellows’ activities is a central task and when the vibrancy of the Fellowship is attracting others to become our allies and partners, then I am confident we can develop some really powerful ‘pro-social’ interventions.

But in the early stages this is going to be more difficult. Fellows are busy and have many other calls on their energies.

Between now and the start of our new engagement strategy we need to have a substantial and clear headed dialogue across the RSA about how Fellows working together really can make a difference.

Let me know if you have any ideas on this, or have been involved in similar initiatives.

Some responses to earlier comments -

Justin: It was great to meet up again and I hope you made the church on time!

Gemma: Hybrid:arts sounds great. One idea I had for an RSA network was arts practitioners using creativity to foster social inclusion. There is loads going on but how effective is it? Are you an RSA Fellow?

Chris: Good point, the early years are crucial. But we surely can’t give up on children even if they have had a bad start? And we are exploring how we can apply the Opening Minds approach to primary education.

Peter C: This is just the kind of issue we need to address by opening a dialogue between parents and schools. I don’t think bullying is limited to the state sector, but I am sure you are right that many parents fear that bright, hard working children can get picked on by their disaffected schoolmates.