Getting old in an ageing society – why we need a revolution in attitudes
I spoke this morning to the Resolution Foundation, an impressive new think tank focusing on issues facing the low paid. The conference was looking in particular at social care so I chose to focus on ageing and attitudes to old age.
If we continue to stigmatize the old and treat social care as a Cinderella service we are in for a grim time. Over the last five years local authorities have systematically rationed social care to only those with the very highest need. There is virtually no state funded provision focused on maintaining independence; it is about managing dependence. And this is at a time of rising budgets.
Over the next few years budgets will be squeezed and squeezed again and a crisis-ridden social care sector will be competing with virtually every other public service in it’s pleas for more cash. In terms of a new funding settlement, the Government has delayed its social care green paper yet again. It is difficult to see what ministers can hope to come up with given that any solution will require more contributions from individuals at a time when we all feel just as squeezed as the state.
Which is why I urged the conference delegates to seize the opportunity provided by the economic crisis, and the soul searching accompanying it, to restate and refresh the argument for a revolution in social attitudes to ageing and the aged
Drawing on new evidence and argument about how human beings operate, what motivates us and what brings us well-being, it is time for us to define the good society as a society where people can look forward to old age. It is time also to recognise that full citizenship involves a understanding and accepting our inter-generational responsibilities (a particular challenge for the resource-guzzling baby boomers) , and that individual well-being cannot be achieved while we view the natural process of getting old with fear and disgust (if you think I am overstating the problem with current attitudes and lives try reading AA Gill’s vivid essay in this week’s Sunday Times). I urged the conference to focus just as much on changing attitudes in society as policies in Government.
These are only the top lines of what I said, if anyone is interested I would be happy to lay out more of the substance later in the week.
Purpose, governance and engagement – why third sector organisations must face the big questions
(A short blog today as it’s already late, it’s Monday and I had some really good comments over the weekend so have already spent an hour on my site!)
We had an interesting session here this morning with a range of people from third sector organisations discussing issues around legitimacy, accountability and public value. The discussion deserves a fuller report but I’ll leave that to Katherine Hudson (who has promised to comment on this post).
Having listened to a wide ranging presentation from Indy Johar of Architecture00 and Joost Beunderman from Demos, and to the case study outlined by Dick Penny who runs the Bristol Watershed Media Centre I suggested that – in thinking about their public value – third sector organisations need to examine three distinct issues:
• Purpose and methods – what are we for and how do we work?
• Governance – how, and to whom, are we accountable?
• Engagement – how do we connect to the people we are supposed to serve?
When organisations are first created the three questions have one answer but through a process of organisational entropy the answers start to diverge. In many organisations (and I have to admit the RSA is sometimes one) the long standing formal structures of accountability can actually impede wider engagement. Other organisations may have gone through major changes in their aims and methods without being sure what this means for how they are governed or how they engage (this is Watershed’s issue).
As I said in a recent blog about membership organisations, many new charities are being set up with minimalist governance structures (akin to a private company). This doesn’t mean they don’t want to consult, engage or be answerable – just that they don’t see this being assisted by a cumbersome or quasi democratic internal governance.
But if a charity or social enterprise is having an impact, if it is receiving public money or acting with a public mandate, isn’t it important that it has robust governance? If an organisation has a long history where do today’s managers and Trustees get the authority to reform that mission?
These are tough questions. They lie behind some of the governance reforms we are putting in place here at the RSA. For too many organisations reforming, and seeking to align governance, purpose and engagement, feels like too much hard and distracting work. But a failure to examine, to modernise and to align will sooner or later undermine any organisation.
The stupidity of crowds
One of the many privileges of my job is chairing events in our lecture programme. Sometimes it can be nerve-racking. So it was last night. Not only did we have an all star cast, but so broad was the subject matter there was the danger we would end up having parallel, tenuously linked, debates.
More through luck than my own judgement a core question did emerge, and one on which views are widely divergent. In essence it was this: does the economic crisis point to a future in which expertise and authority are even more widely dispersed or to the reverse: the need for a renewal and reassertion of hierarchical oversight?
Don Tapscott, global business guru and best-selling author of Wikinomics invited us to understand a future in which ubiquitous technological capacity and know-how fundamentally undermine structures of control. Organisations need to abandon the goal of monopolising knowledge and policing the boundary between themselves and the outside world, instead accepting transparency and finding ways of tapping into the power of networks and the dispersed knowledge of the on-line public sphere.
In contrast, Lord Eatwell, one of the UK’s most distinguished economists, argued that the origins of the crisis lay in the failure of Governments and publics to understand the inherently irrational nature of markets. Indeed, that which Don Tapscott celebrated – transparency and mass communication – contributed to the scale of the crisis by accelerating the fever of debt fuelled speculation, and legitimising the hubristic individualism that led so many – from the politicians and bankers to the over indebted householder – to believe they could defy gravity.
Dan Hind’s contribution was to recognise the need for authority but to demand that this be held properly to account. He argued, for example, for public funding of independent investigations into the actions of corporations and Governments.
Finally, Andrew Keen, who can always be relied upon to be provocative, linked Don Tapscott’s fascination with the technological skills of his own children to a wider social malaise in which elders (for which read experts and those in positions of authority) have abandoned their responsibility to guide and, if necessary, control the young.
As you will by now have grasped, to call this debate wide ranging would be an understatement. It was one of those conversations that you simply have to let rattle around in your head until some part of it emerges that you can get to grips with or turn into a more concrete dilemma. Of course, my own bias as an advocate of cultural theory will be to look for ways in which new, more powerful and relevant, forms of regulation, and the power of mass collaboration, can somehow be brought together in new clumsy solutions. Ours is a world where the capacity to tap into the wisdom of crowds is matched by the catastrophic dangers of capitulating before the stupidity of crowds. Regulation cannot work without participation and consent; collaboration must be guided (as it is in Wikipedia).
As I left last night a number of people thanked the RSA for the event (and Encyclopaedia Britannica for sponsoring it) and urged us to return to these issues.
We will.
Job creation and social care – would this work?
Here is an argument you will be hearing a lot as the unemployment figure rises: it costs only a thousand pounds either to keep a family breadwinner in a £30k job or to create a new job for them. Why? Because someone on a £30k salary pays about £11k in tax whilst an unemployed parent will receive an average of £18k in benefits, tax credits and other entitlements.
Looked at this way the Government should surely create jobs for everyone out of work. I said yesterday that my proposal to employ a thousand former regional journalists, or newly qualified journalism graduates, to set up community websites would cost £30million. This assumed £5k start up costs and a gross salary cost of £25k. But if we factor in the cost of unemployment benefits and the tax our website developers would pay, the cost falls to between £5 and £10 million.
Whilst this is a valid case for more job creation it is important to understand three counter arguments, which are, in order of importance:
1. Administrative costs. Employment schemes cost money to establish, to manage and to regulate. It might cost a million pounds plus to establish and manage my community websites.
2. Dead weight cost. Despite a dire labour market we might expect about two thirds of the former journalists and new graduates to get jobs (even if not in their chosen field). So two thirds of the money we spend will not be offset by the benefit tax switch.
3. Displacement. It might be that other third sector and private organisations are thinking of setting up community web-sites. In which case the publicly funded scheme will simply displace other activity (and other jobs).
So, job creation schemes need to be unbureaucratic, well-targeted and avoid displacement.
There is much talk about what will be the new motors for economic activity. Many people hope for a ‘green new deal’. As I have said before, the Government should make its national priority in this area an ambitious and comprehensive commitment to tackling domestic energy efficiency. This might involve a commitment to 90% of homes being made energy efficient by the end of 2011. Low income households would get help free, the rest of us might be asked to sign up to a scheme whereby, in return for help to become energy efficient, we pay a surcharge on our lower energy bills for a fixed period.
Otherwise, I don’t think we can hold out too much hope for green jobs in the short to medium term. The combination of falling energy bills and falling energy use (due to recession) will reduce demand and investment (as we have seen today with more companies pulling out of renewables).
Instead, the focus should be on schemes which allow people to meet genuine social need in ways which the state cannot currently do and the market never will. In doing so we may help to create a new set of services which could – as the economy picks up – become partly self financing.
So, another idea focuses on those with lower level social care needs (who have been abandoned by cash starved local authorities). Based on the sums in my first paragraph an army of unemployed people providing low level care and support for clients and carers would meet real need and save families – and the state – money. Research shows that the market is failing for social care. Many people go into residential care earlier than they need to as they lack the support to stay at home. Residential care costs about £600 pounds per week. If better low level care meant that those receiving care stayed out of a home for an extra three months it would save the state much more than the net cost of employing support workers. And given that we already have the infrastructure of care assessment and services (in both the public and third sector) the administrative and on-costs of running such a scheme should be relatively minor.
That’s two ideas in two days. Any others out there?
Arts New Deal needs a sharper focus
In his stark warning against boosting the fiscal deficit Mervyn King gave the Government some leeway by agreeing the need for ‘targeted and selected’ spending.
By a strange coincidence I was making a similar point in 11 Downing Street. I would love to say this was because all has been forgiven, the big tent has had its final extension, and I am now once again a trusted advisor, but it wouldn’t quite be true. I was a late addition to a long list of arts and cultural industry luminaries invited to the launch of something called ‘The New Deal of the Mind’.
This is an initiative that has sprung up in response to a New Statesman piece by Martin Bright published in January. In it, Bright argues for the UK to emulate the major investment of public funding in arts that took place through the Roosevelt New Deal. He also called on policy makers to learn from the successes of the early 90s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, a pot of money that enabled many small scale cultural producers to set up their first business.
The event organisers, including its warm and hospitable host Maggie Darling, did amazingly to gather such a cast list quickly; Jude Kelly, Mark Thompson, David Putnam, Tony Hall, Trevor Phillips, John Tusa to name but six, plus cabinet ministers Burnham and Purnell and even shadow arts spokesperson Ed Vaizey . But there were three problems:
- In their enthusiasm the champions of the New Deal for the Mind had already created a brand including squiggly line logo, headed notepaper and lapel stickers. As the conversation went on and the ND4M concept got cloudier this created the sense that we were dealing with a mission in search of a cause.
- It was the American speakers, and particular New Deal expert, Professor Alan Brinkley, who opened up the big conceptual fault line. The Professor was clear that most of the art funded by the New Deal was pretty dreadful and much of it of a ‘agit-prop’ anti-capitalist bent. Some of the millions of dollars invested by the Works Progress Administration went into products of enduring value, for example the recording of oral histories and folk music and the production of vivid accounts of city life, but this was overwhelmingly a job creation scheme not an attempt to foster a new renaissance.
- The fault line then grew as the arts leaders (a community never exactly overburdened by its commitment to policy rigour) veered between a general plea for more arts funding, accounts of the specific challenges facing sectors such as the music industry or architecture (problems that will not be solved by standard job creation programmes), and some more specific ideas for an arts New Deal.
Which is why I made my Mervyn-esque intervention. I argued that the ND4M case must be about funding programmes based on a clear and costed rationale, quick and non bureaucratic to implement, targeted at those who most need help, creating something of wider relevance and value, and with the possibility that at least some subsidised activities might one day become self sufficient. And I offered one example (recognisable to the regular reader of this blog).
Why not create a national scheme to give newly redundant regional journalists, and those emerging from journalism course with no chance of a job, start-up funds to create strong community web-sites.
These sites could be of real values to local people trying to cope with the recession, generating new business and community self help opportunities. With a small national body to support these fledgling sites and foster innovation and best practice (as is being developed by William Perrin working with UK Online Centres and Channel 4), we could see hundreds of powerful local networks in months.
Assuming the site developers work from home and can use shared resources developed by the national body, a year’s set-up cost (enough time to see whether the site can succeed), including basic pay for the person running the site, would cost about £30k per site. For those who have access to premises there could also be a two way apprenticeship element where the former journalists take on school leavers, who, while they are learning writing and reporting skills may be able to teach their mentors a thing or two about social networking twittering etc.
So, a pot of about £30 million could fund a thousand community web-sites adding real social value, employing at least a thousand workers with valuable skills and offering some great opportunities for graduates and school leavers. What’s more, this spending can be fast and direct. It need take only weeks between committing the resources and the sites starting to make an impact. And this contributes to various other Government objectives around community cohesion and resilience.
I am sure there are flaws with my idea but if ND4M is to turn enthusiasm into impact and credibility it needs to spend less time on its logo and networking and more on developing detailed and costed proposals
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