A favour – go further on father …
Over the years my blog readers have often come to my rescue when I have needed clarity and ideas. That time has come again. I have been tentatively commissioned to write a magazine article about fatherhood.
In the wake of the recent decision to allow parents to share their entitlement to time off work after the birth of a child, the question is whether the state should be encouraging fathers to be more sharing and caring and whether, in view of the mixed evidence on whether fathers actually want to change their role, such encouragement will work. (The magazine thought of me because several years ago I wrote a book with my own father called ‘what are children for’. Sadly, despite lots of press publicity, the book went down like a lead balloon and, as a consequence, I have the regular ego-puncturing experience of an account statement from the publishers which invariably tells me that the number of copies sold in the previous year is precisely zero). I haven’t yet sorted out my own ideas on this subject, nor spoken to, nor read up on, the experts. But my starting points are these:
In this case the Government does appear to be in the business of social engineering. As there is little evidence that ministers are responding to overwhelming public demand, accountability requires that we have an open and thorough debate about why.
The case for encouraging fathers to be more hands-on parents has four distinct aspects: the interests of the father, of the child, of the mother and of society as a whole.
Unless the Government is willing to be very heavy handed or to spend lots of money (neither of which fits the Coalition’s modus operandi) its actions will only work if they go with the grain of wider changes in social context and norms.
The emergence of an engaged, rounded but also distinctly masculine model of caring fatherhood could be an important step towards a more humane and contented way of living.
I have another thought which is even less well formed. Parental leave entitlement applies only up to a child’s fifth birthday (unless the child is disabled, when it is 18). As a (very proud) father myself, I have become more and more besotted and fascinated by my boys the older they get. Is there anything to the suggestion (requiring as it does huge generalisation) that perhaps paternal input is most valuable at particular, later, stages of a child’s development?
Far too many fathers opt out or disappear very early on in their child’s life. While not trying to defend them, could it be that men panic or simply feel useless at this early stage, and that rather than focussing on getting dads to be better in the early years (the focus of parental leave entitlement) we should be helping them understand how important they can be later on?
As you can see this is rough and ready thinking so – as always – I need my readers to set me straight.
PS Although a case can be made for a link between this subject and the RSA’s focus on enhancing human capability, I will be doing most of the work on the piece in my own time. Mind you if any Fellows wanted to develop a project on supporting fathers…..
Big Society – scope for a hostile takeover?
Although everything I saw was slightly obscured by a film of snot (so far, for me, 2011 has involved only three days free of colds) yesterday was a fascinating day. It gave me a new perspective on the politics of the Big Society.
In the morning I attended the launch of Lambeth’s report, ‘The Co-operative Council’ subtitled ‘ Sharing power: A new settlement between citizens and the state’. The report emerged from the work of a Commission of which I was a member (although I was only able to attend a minority of its meetings).
For a local authority really to shift power outwards and downwards requires three things to happen together. There must be leaders who genuinely want to hand power away, even if it means making difficult decisions. There needs to be sufficient capacity and goodwill in the community at large to take the offer seriously and rise to the challenge. And the machine between the leaders and the community – which means, inter alia, other councillors, council officers, trade unions, financial and legal processes (both those generated internally and those imposed from outside) – must be able to act as an effective transmission mechanism between the two.
It is too early to say whether the revolution to which Lambeth leader Cllr Steve Reed has committed will take place. There is little doubting the sincerity of Steve and his cabinet and the enthusiasm of a vibrant South London community. It is the stuff between which will be the highest barrier. As Victor Adebowale said at the launch event, ‘if you mean this, there will be many jobs lost in the council bureaucracy’. The Lambeth plan is staged and has many safeguards built in but by its final phase it envisages independent mutual ownership of everything from libraries and adventure playgrounds to regeneration (through ‘community improvement districts’) and the council newspaper.
So this is surely the Big Society in practice. Although both Tessa Jowell and Steve Reed were at pains to say their vision was very different from the Government’s version, which both of them see as nothing more than a cover for cuts.
So it was interesting that my next meeting was of the Friends of the Big Society, Lord Wei’s loose association of activists, think tankers and Government advisors. The meeting was enthusiastic and – as we all introduced ourselves and our organisations – an impressive arrays of initiatives were laid out. But as the meeting proceeded the only thing that got clearer was the lack of clarity.
Nat Wei can boast a wide variety of Government initiatives that can be corralled under the Big Society banner – the Localism Bill for example. There is also confidence that the next few months will see big progress on headline projects like the Big Society Bank and ‘your square mile’. But – as I said earlier this week – this is happening despite the absence of a core account of what the Big Society is. The various fragments don’t add up to a whole, certainly not one that can much longer withstand a critique from both Labour and elements on the right who have always been suspicious of the whole idea.
But the definitional issue is not the biggest problem. If one way of measuring the Big Society is the amount of third sector activity, especially that which relates broadly to increasing civic capacity, there is no question at all that the next two years will see society get smaller. In the face of the scale and rapidity of the reduction in funding, Councils are finding that scrapping third sector grants is a much cheaper and easier way of make immediate savings that making staff redundant. It is statutory services by professionals that will be preserved while preventative, community based provision withers away.
This is an inevitable consequence of the Coalition’s strategy. Between my two meetings yesterday I crossed Waterloo Bridge in the company of an academic who I have always found a reliable and incisive commentator on Government policy. His view is that the senior figures in the Coalition see the next two years of deeply painful change as inevitable. They hope, of course, that the final two years of their term will see things pick up but they are philosophical about the dangers. It is better to have one term that changes everything forever than three that do not (which is how they read New Labour’s record and Blair’s own view of it).
Coalition supporters who are also advocates of Big Society thinking face a massive – and probably unbridgeable – credibility gap. For the next two years many of those things they say they are most value will be undermined by the Government which they support. They can, of course, argue that the Big Society offers the best way of respond to the cuts in publicly funded social infrastructure, but for the charities and their clients this is a bit like a small member of a gang offering you some ointment after a big member of the gang has just kicked you.
Ironically, Labour is in a stronger position to use Big Society rhetoric; in attacking cuts, in describing the way Labour councils are trying to defend communities from those cuts and even to start describing the future that Labour might want to offer at the next election.
Some people on the centre left have urged Ed Miliband not to allow the Conservatives to have sole ownership of the ideas of the Big Society, but perhaps he could be even bolder and try to take make this very ground his own?
A Catalyst for the future of Fellowship?
Once in a while, there is a meeting at work which feels really significant. This happened yesterday. The focus was RSA Catalyst our fund to support Fellows’ projects.
Catalyst is going pretty well, certainly beyond our initial expectations. We have a steady flow of between ten and twenty bids per month and as well as grants we are gradually building the FRSA skills bank of people offering to give advice and support. Projects in eight out of the thirteen UK RSA regions and nations have received awards with the total awarded to Fellows so far (in year one) just less than £35,000.
It is also clear what the priorities are for growing Catalyst, in terms of both quantity and quality. We need to increase FRSA awareness of Catalyst, to emphasise the importance in development and implementation of Fellows working together (rather than a bid just being one person’s bright idea) and to explore how we can encourage bids by issuing challenges to Fellows arising from our own research or from collaborations with other organisations.
These are important next steps, but the meeting started to feel special when the staff and Fellowship Council members of the Catalyst Board (kindly giving us their valuable time and brainpower) stepped back to look at Catalyst through a wider lens.
This started with a presentation from our own Projects team exploring a whole variety of different innovation platforms. Based on some work we have being doing with a London Council on developing a civic innovation fund, we had compiled a basic typology comprising ‘Incubators’ like Seedcamp, and Sproutbox, ‘Funds and non-financial support platforms’ like UnLtd, Acumen, Social Enterprise Investment Fund, ‘Peer to peer market places’ like Skipso, Zopa and Buzzbank and ‘open innovation platforms’ like Open IDEO and X-Prize. In addition a number of public agencies and local authorities have created their own funds usually targeted on particular services.
Given the clever cutting edge kind of people who read this blog, I’m sure there will be comments suggesting that this typology is wrong or missing something, but the value for the meeting was to think about what might be the defining characteristics of Catalyst, especially if we start to move it more online.
This led us to a second thought which was how the idea and brand of Catalyst could come much more to the heart of our Fellowship operation; having been incubated at the margins of the organisation, could RSA Catalyst come to be the core brand for RSA Fellowship?
Which then led to a third related thought - that engaging in Catalyst, developing bids, supporting bids (learning from success and failure) could become the most distinctive part of being an RSA Fellow. People would know that joining the RSA carried with it the expectation of supporting the ideas and projects of other Fellows and the opportunity at some time to get support for an idea of your own. This expectation could also be at the heart of how we identify and recruit future Fellows both from the centre and through the mechanism of Fellow get Fellow.
Of course, these are all big issues. We touched on some of them at the last Trustees’ meeting and I hope we will start to engage with them at the next Fellowship Council. But the revelation for me was this: while we can learn a great deal from what works (and what doesn’t) with other much more developed and large scale innovation platforms – in terms of process, support, toolkits, technology etc. – we have one thing that few, if any, of these platforms have, the thing which makes the RSA special – the Fellowship.
A wonderful evening – marred by my gender bending
I attended a great event last night jointly hosted by the RSA North East and the School of Design at Northumbria University. There is an exciting vision of a cultural partnership between the two organisations and over 150 Fellows and non Fellows turned up to hear what we had to say.
Apart from the great people and the stunning venue in the University’s still new campus, the best thing about the event was the focus on action. Several members of the design school issued calls to action asking RSA Fellows to support their research or work with students. Then, in return, during networking, several Fellows spoke to the academics describing problems which they thought designers could help solve.
Much of the discussion in the event focussed on service design and particularly on public services. I found myself repeating an argument I made several years ago when helping to set up the ultimately unsuccessful ippr commission on public service productivity: the North East economy is very dependent on public service spending but – given that health, education, crime prevention etc are growing global markets – the region could turn this to its advantage if only its leaders and creatives committed themselves to innovation.
Building from the 2020 Public Services Commission report, I also talked about social productivity and the need for public services which are better able to help individuals and communities meet their own needs as individuals. How can services be designed to tap into the hidden wealth of people’s commitment to improving their lives and places and to looking after themselves and each other. Also, thanks to my former RSA colleague, Laura Billngs, I was able to cite this fantastic example of innovation – making something wonderful happen by giving one group something they need while the givers find fulfilment in giving. ‘We need more people with the commitment and creativity of Professor Mitra’ I exclaimed ‘she shows what the Big Society could mean in action’.
So it was all a great triumph until, that is, someone from Newcastle University approached me as I wolfed down a bowl of dry roasted peanuts. ‘I’m sure Professor Mitra would be delighted that you praised the project’, the lady kindly said, ‘but ‘she’ might be slightly less enthusiastic that you changed his gender.’
I guess this is reverse sexism – believing only a woman could have such a warm and brilliant idea. But as I have an incredibly low embarrassment threshold, I fear this might end up being the strongest memory I have of the whole event!
PS: My Animate has passed 400,000 views – if you have watched it thanks. If you haven’t, please help me make half a million by March.
The Big Society debate must move on
The Times front page splash is ‘Big Society in crisis as economy weakens’. The article is a bit of a dog’s dinner conflating a number of different stories to suggest a build-up of pressure on David Cameron and his Government. But from what I can see running on Twitter (including among ‘the friends of the Big Society’), it feels like unless Number Ten moves quickly this might be a turning point against the credibility of the whole project.
I have posted on what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of the Big Society so far. One of the vulnerabilities of such a broad strategy is that all of us who have expressed support have our own idea of what matters most. The Times piece contains many quotes from Phillip Blond, head of the think tank ResPublica (whether he undertook the briefing on behalf of elements in Number Ten is an intriguing question). While my biggest worry about the Big Society is the lack of realism about capacity in disadvantaged areas, Phillip sees the promotion of mutualism as the key issue. From ailing football clubs to the Port of Dover, he has been disappointed by the failure of the Government to get behind opportunities to expand the mutual sector.
The ideas of the Big Society can’t change the world overnight, and anyone with any sense recognises the challenges of taking the idea forward in a time of public sector austerity. But as long as the Big Society continues to be everything, it is in danger of becoming nothing. Economists sometimes criticise a theory saying it is ‘not good enough to be wrong’. By this they mean the idea lacks even the explanatory power even to be disproven, let alone to be validated. Whilst it may not be possible to save the credibility of the Big Society by a new policy or spending announcement, it could be given some new life by a clearer intellectual exposition.
Even among its more eloquent advocates – like Lord Wei (one of the targets of the Times briefing) – accounts of the Big Society rely too much on assertion and anecdote and too little on testable hypotheses on the one hand, and a clear headed recognition of dilemmas and trade-offs on the other.
Here’s an example of the latter: I was chatting the other day to a community activist who had up until then been giving me a largely positive account of meetings in her area to promote the idea of a neighbourhood plan, an idea which could potentially be a very exciting route into greater local engagement. But now it appears, even at this early stage, that factions are emerging. This throws open the question of who is going to be the facilitator and honest broker of neighbourhood planning. The obvious candidate is the local authority but as neighbourhood plans may often be developed explicitly to counter local authority planning policy this is a bit like asking a turkey to organise Christmas lunch.
A couple of years ago we might have looked to CLG civil servants or maybe an organisation like CABE to develop thinking and support practice in neighbourhood planning, but it is unclear where the capacity now lies. Which leaves the impression that the Government simply thinks communities will somehow work it out by themselves. But, this is such a vague and groundless expectation it doesn’t even provide something to debate.
If the Big Society debate doesn’t get more substantive and granular quickly, it will feel like the only credible thing to do is knock the whole idea.
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