Accountability and public scrutiny – it seemed to go OK!
Thanks again for the many helpful comments on yesterday’s post. The speech seemed to go down well and some of the points I picked up from the blog were the best received.
After describing the reasons why the traditional bureaucratic form of scrutiny is having the rug pulled from under the scrutineers’ feet, I went on to describe the four features of what might be called ‘post bureaucratic’ or ‘big society’ scrutiny.
First, a much deeper and more imaginative commitment to public and user engagement in scrutiny. Like for example the award winning panel in Cheshire West and Chester which put huge efforts into engaging young people themselves in an assessment of services for ‘looked after children’.
Second, scrutiny has to offer a different order of evaluation – more rounded and in depth – than can come from other forms of performance assessment. Local government Secretary of State Eric Pickles has talked about ‘armchair auditors’ using new data sets like those now available on central and local public spending. Scrutiny has to show it can complement these forms of DIY accountability.
Third, scrutiny needs to spend less time on exploring whether policy solutions work and more on whether agencies are defining the problem adequately. A focus on problems inherently leads to a viewpoint which is both more ‘joined up’ and which sees the vital importance of public mobilisation.
Fourth, this focus on problems builds a bridge from scrutiny about the past to deliberation about the future. If scrutiny is going to be seen as relevant and worth funding it has to as much about getting policies right for the future as about reflecting on performance in the past.
I started my speech by talking about the RSA idea of a ‘social aspiration gap’ between the future citizens want and the one they will create relying on existing forms of thinking and behaviour. Ordinary scrutiny describes aspects of that gap. Post bureaucratic scrutiny can help to close it.
PS Hats off again to the Coalition for its boldness on prisons policy. It makes me feel embarassed and slightly ashamed of New Labour’s almost complete unwillingness to confront public opinion and the press on this issue. Another tough question for those Labour leadership hustings?
Help me improve my performance before it’s too late, please
I am due tomorrow to give the keynote address to the annual conference of the Centre for Public Scrutiny. Actually, it’s only me calling it ‘keynote’. This is a private joke going back to 1996 when part of my job for the Labour Party was to enforce the rule than no shadow minister should make any spending commitments. It didn’t take long for people to get the message, so the enforcement job soon became nugatory. All except, that is, for a very fastidious, and more than slightly self-important, junior spokesman.
I remember one Friday night having to go back to Millbank at almost midnight because the shadow minister was insisting that I check his speech. No matter that I assured him I trusted his judgment: being such an important figure making such a newsworthy speech, he feared that any gaffe would grab the national headlines and jeopardise the General Election (in truth, he could have run naked through the streets shouting ‘I’m a teapot’ and made not a dent in Labour’s prospects).
So it was that I left my dinner party and found myself standing in a deserted Party HQ as the fax machine started to churn out the very lengthy speech. There was something so ‘Pooterish’ about the wording of the front page that I have kept it to this day:
‘Keynote address to the Gwent Community Safety Conference (morning session)’.
Anyway, back to my big moment tomorrow. I am finding it a bit challenging to get back into speech mode after my annual lecture, so I would be grateful for any advice.
My current thinking is that formal scrutiny and accountability will be subject to a fourfold assault:
1. On grounds of efficiency, deregulation and decentralisation the Coalition Government is committed to dismantling much of the apparatus of target and inspection, see for example the abolition of the Comprehensive Area Assessment.
2. Deep public spending cuts will make many public services feel like battle zones with services and staff fighting for their survival. In such an atmosphere not only will corners be cut, but those who complain may be seen as unrealistic or irrelevant.
3. Devolving power to individual services providers, users and communities and giving them a greater right to run their own services can be seen as an alternative form of responsiveness and empowerment to that offered by the sometimes blunt and bureaucratic methodologies of formal accountability.
4. The opening up of public information, for example the COINS database on public spending will offer more opportunities for ‘DIY’ scrutiny and accountability. There may indeed be an argument that accountability can now be left to the whistle blowing of public spirited or anti-establishment individuals.
All of which leads me to conclude that the champions of scrutiny need to strengthen the links between this concept and two others: evaluation and deliberation. Scrutiny must be seen, on the one hand, to offer a more rounded and in-depth exploration of performance than can emerge from on–line data mining. While, on the other hand, scrutiny needs to be linked to more participative forms of decision making so that it is less about questions like ‘why was this done?’, ‘how did the service perform?’ and ‘who is to blame for failure?’ and more the basis for better decision making about future policy.
Most of all – and regular readers won’t be surprised to hear me say this – we need to get behind the tendency for scrutiny and accountability to reinforce the idea that service outcomes are simply a reflection of the performance of politicians, managers and staff. A more forward looking and participative model of scrutiny enables the focus to move towards asking ‘what do we – the public service provider and the wider community – need to agree to do together to protect and improve service outcomes?’
I am making the speech in 22 hours so if no one gives me helpful comments and I flop I will make sure to share the blame with you, my dear readers.
The origins of the present footballing crisis
Fortunately, I was distracted from the football fiasco by spending much of the day moderating the final event in the RSA Changing Chelmsford programme (of which more later). But I can’t resist a Marxist interpretation of England’s abysmal showing.
In a famous New Left Review essay published in 1964, Perry Anderson wrote about ‘the origins of the present crises’. Anderson was discussing the sense that Britain was inexorably set on a long process of post imperial decline. At its core, Anderson’s argument was that the English Civil War was not a proper class based revolution – of the kind which occurred in other European countries – but a fight between factions of the aristocracy. That the war centred on religion also meant class interests were obscured. In consequence a historic compromise took place in which the bourgeoisie was allowed to come to power as long as it kept the aristocracy in place. It is this compromise that underpins the sclerotic, complacent nature of British (and especially English) political culture.
The application to English football is clear. It too is a unholy compromise between a useless, status-ridden, incompetent ruling class at the FA and a money-grubbing, self interested and amoral Premiership. The deal has two aspects. The Premiership can keep raking it in and enjoying all its perks despite doing terrible damage to the national game; witness its utter indifference in the face of the disastrous financial regimes at clubs like Portsmouth and Hull and the irresponsible and transparently dishonest buy outs of Liverpool and Manchester United. In return the FA is allowed to stumble on, incompetent, unreformed and increasingly ludicrous.
And who is it that suffers in this pact? Well, who else but ordinary fans; many priced out of watching their clubs, the national game reduced to an international laughing stock, many smaller clubs on the verge of bankrupcy and a shambolic youth system in which, for example, 10 year olds are expected to play on full size mud patch pitches.
It’s not a new manager we need, nor touchline technology, but a full scale footballing revolution: who currently in a position of authority in either the Premiership or the FA should be left in post?
Anyway, back in Chelmsford we had a great day with lots of ideas and commitment. In the end the initiative will be judged by whether, now the formal process is coming to an end, the seeds it has sown turn into new policies and projects. Not for the first time I was struck by the overwhelming desire of people to live in places which feel more distinct, more rooted in their past, more connected to a compelling future. From a variety of starting points the RSA is getting more involved in place-shaping, a task which will I think become even more important as public sector austerity kicks in.
In praise of the IFS
In my annual lecture I spoke about the need to create a 21st century public sphere, a modern equivalent of the flowering of new spaces for discourse and civic invention which took place in the eighteenth century Enlightenment. This was a time which saw the opening of coffee houses where the growing middle class could talk about philosophy and current affairs, the creation of learned societies like the RSA, and the emergence of mass publishing, especially in the form of newspapers.
I am developing ideas for debate, research and development around the goal of new institutions for a new public sphere, and of course, we walk the talk by working with FRSAs to change the ethos of Fellowship. (By the way, I was delighted to see that this month we have again another good crop of applications for RSA Catalyst, our seed corn fund for Fellows’ projects.)
An important challenge in the cultivation of a new public sphere is creating institutions which can be seen to be putting social purpose ahead of organisational self interest. Too many organisations which claim to act in the public good are prone to self indulgence, special pleading and empire building. Whilst the third sector contains great organisations held together by the commitment, courage and creativity of amazing people, it also features producer-captured bureaucracies who go to great lengths to avoid searching questions about their own effectiveness.
In the think tank sector one organisation stands out as a beacon. The Institute of Fiscal Studies is well-managed, well respected, and – most important of all – fearless of Government. In the early says of New Labour, when everyone was genuflecting to ‘The Project’, Andrew Dilnot’s IFS was one of the first organisations to ask hard questions. I remember them pulling apart the first comprehensive spending review and Gordon Brown’s misguided tactic of rolling up several years spending in a single impressive figure. Brown’s people were furious and there was a concerted, but thankfully unsuccessful, attempt to threaten the Institute’s funding and undermine its credibility.
Now the IFS is back at it again. Under the splendid leadership of the razor sharp, eloquent and dapper Robert Chote, it has swum against the tide of fawning to the Coalition to expose the less than fully honest Budget briefing.
In response to the Coalition’s claim that the budget measures are redistributive, the IFS has pointed out that: first, this is largely because of the inclusion of measures already announced by Labour (particularly the 50 pence tax band); second, measures whose effect cannot be fully predicted (like housing benefit caps) will almost certainly impact hardest on the poor; and, third, future deep public spending cuts are again most likely to hit the poorest hardest.
Many Conservatives will be relaxed about this making the case for discouraging welfare dependence, protecting the ‘squeezed’ middle classes and maintaining incentives for enterprise and risk taking. But the IFS analysis must be very uncomfortable for the Liberal Democrats.
I suspect that if any other organisation has made these criticisms (particularly had they been linked with Labour) the Treasury would have been quick and aggressive with their rebuttal, but so sound is the reputation of the IFS that any attempt to rubbish its analysis could be deeply counter-productive.
The IFS is a great British institution. It has established its unparalleled authority through years of high quality analysis by sticking to what it does best and a willingness to say what needs to be said, regardless of the reception it receives. I take my hat off to it.
The defenestration of central Government (in seven minutes)
Preparing for my annual lecture I pushed everything in my diary into the second half of June and early July. This means I have, on average, about ten free minutes a day for the next four weeks. So get ready for my ten minute blog blasts….
Assume:
a) The British people decide (regardless of the voting system) that they want coalition Government for the foreseeable future. This, by the way, is already the situation in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as most of Europe. This will mean it simply won’t matter as much as it used to who runs Whitehall and Westminster as whichever is the lead Party, it will always have to compromise.
b) This Government really has embarked on a fundamental downsizing of the centre through dismantling aspects of the surveillance state, through the abolition of the target culture and through a huge reduction in centrally funded functions.
The conclusion is that the locus of power shifts. Increasingly, it will feel like the place where people make a difference locally rather than nationally. Being a Mayor or a Council leader will be much more important than being an MP. Politics will become more local and more civic.
Meanwhile, looking up: it was fascinating that George Osborne, the Chancellor of a fiercely anti-European Party, told the House that he has secured agreement from France and Germany to a coordinated approach to bank levies.
The American sociologist, Daniel Bell, famously said something like this:
‘in the future the nation state will seem too big for the small things in life and too small for the big things in life’.
Our national government will come to be judged not by what it does itself directly (it will do a lot less) but by its effectiveness as a global player and its ability to create the right strategic framework of local initiative.
These are big and fascinating questions. They should be discussed by anyone interested in politics and society. Sadly, they are about as likely to be debated intelligently in the Labour leadership campaign as Emile Heskey is to score a hat trick this afternoon.
7 minutes 38 seconds. Not bad eh?
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