A home for the incurably smug
When I was at secondary school we had a mock trial and I was chosen as lead for the prosecution. I cleverly set a trap for the gang alleged to have broken into the tuck shop. But when the plan worked and the two witnesses directly contradicted each other I punched the air and whooped in delight. Unfortunately, this irritated my classmates so much that they found the defendants not guilty to spite me.
In a similar vein my fellow Moral Maze panellist Clifford Longley, who is a learned, witty and modest man, made the mistake on one programme of starting a contribution with the words ‘I think this is my killer point’. He has never been allowed to forget it.
So now on those very rare occasions when I think I have scored a goal in an argument I try to keep my satisfaction to myself. So it was last week in an LBC debate on immigration that we hosted here at the RSA.
Peter Lilley was the most anti-immigration voice on the panel. As the evening wore on it wasn’t so much his views that got me down as his insistence that anyone who expresses any concern about immigration is labelled a racist. Given that almost every single national newspaper is in favour of tougher restrictions, not to mention the Coalition parties (even Ed Miliband said that a failure to express concern about the impact of immigration lost Labour supporters), this does seem a rather out-dated view.
Although the Great Room audience was pretty balanced in its views, it was clear from the phone-in comments that the LBC listeners were on Peter’s side, and many of them shared his slight persecution complex.
Anyhow, my moment of inner triumph was when Peter responded to a question about the low paid. He said that if we stopped immigration the labour market would tighten and wages for UK workers would go up, thus reducing poverty. My response was to point out that in many occupations which rely on low paid migrants it is far from clear that the market will tolerate higher costs. The example I gave was social care and, I added, given Peter’s support for the Government’s austerity package presumably he wouldn’t want anything to raise public costs. Perhaps he was just sipping his water but I couldn’t help noticing that at this point Peter was slightly less ready than before with his rebuttal.
So, I was interested to read about the problems besetting Southern Cross care homes and the wider issues of finances and standards affesting teh sector. cross this morning in the newspapers that many companies providing care homes are now in dire financial straits, as well as too often delivering poor standards. It doesn’t seem that wages are the precipitating factor but it hard to see how the sector, residents, carers or the state could pick up the tab if wages did rise significantly.
So there you have it, my killer point. And even though there’s seemingly nothing I can do to eradicate the self-satisfaction from my tone, at least I managed to wait a week.
Tea, sympathy and flying pants
What are the criteria for saying one is good as something? When I was at secondary school my best mate was called Dave Street (a friendship which had its prosaic origins in alphabetical seating). His mum was a very friendly woman who had that old working class habit of rushing off to make a big plate of sandwiches whenever anyone came round. But for some reason she always called me Malcolm.
For a while I tried subtly to correct her, saying things like ‘as my mum said to me this morning, Matthew, you’ll be late for school’, but when she persisted I assumed she had somewhat arbitrarily chosen it as a nick name.
Once Mrs and Mr Street came in when I was making Dave a cup of tea, so I offered them one. Then, a few days later, Dave’s mum said to me ‘ooh, make us a cuppa, me and Dave’s dad were saying what a great mug of tea you brew’. It will not surprise regular readers, well aware of my narcissistic fondness for self-deprecation, to hear there are not many things I am sure I do well. So, being middle class and therefore generally useless at anything practical, I was thrilled. Over the next few years I would take any opportunity to make tea at the Streets and smile with idiotic pride as Dave’s mum told me ‘Malcolm, you’re a wonder with that teapot’.
I seem to have lost my edge as a tea maker but there are some new additions to the short list of activities I undertake with confidence. As it happens, I am very good at flicking my underpants into the laundry basket with my feet (mind you, it hasn’t been easy to perfect my technique), but this isn’t a skill for which I can expect to win many public plaudits. Running 10km in under 37 minutes is not bad at fifty years old, but whilst I am proud of my fitness it doesn’t really add to my market value.
But one skill which is related to my job and for which I have occasionally been paid is chairing events. I’m not sure quite why but I always enjoy it and usually get praised by my audience. So if anyone out there needs a moderately high profile chair and is willing to pay the going rate to the RSA, I’m your man.
It’s a service I performed this morning for a fascinating seminar about mediation. Although I was aware that mediation has grown as an industry over recent years and that the Government favours an expanding role for it in family and employment law, I learnt many new things. There are, for example, several different sectors of mediation running from often highly lucrative commercial mediation to the hand to mouth work of community mediators (many of whom are currently being axed by councils).
But the focus this morning ended up being on regulation and standard setting. Anyone can call themselves a mediator and often company managers and public service workers claim the status without following basic guidelines let alone having formal training.
There have been various attempts over the years to create stronger governance but many of the self-proclaimed regulatory bodies are compromised by being service providers. With mediators being asked to replace lawyers in many areas and with mediation being subject to the same cost cutting pressures as any other public service provider, there is an urgent need to create a framework to protect the public and start to raise the standing and standards of the sector.
There was a telling moment in the seminar when someone complained that no one, regardless of their previous experience, is allowed to become a family law mediator unless they have taken an accredited course. From the tone of the complaint and given the life changing importance of good mediation in family disputes, I assumed the course must be very intellectually demanding, time consuming and expensive, so I was more than a little gob smacked to hear it lasts five days.
‘My word’ I said to myself ‘it took me longer to conquer pant flicking’
Anger, organising and innovation
The argument about community organisers which has been rumbling on for a while has been given new impetus but some surprisingly forthright comments by Lord Maurice Glasman, a key advisor to Ed Miliband and the guru of ‘blue Labour’. Speaking to the Public Administration Select Committee, Glassman described Locality, the organisation which beat London Citizens to the Community Organiser contract as “paternalist” and “well-intentioned busybodies”. Locality’s Jess Steele has been quick to respond.
The underlying issue here has been vividly described in blog posts by my great friend, social innovator and active FRSA Tessy Britt0n. Glasman seems to favor an approach which sees community organising as primarily about mobilising resistance and driving campaigns. In contrast Locality, and Tessy, starts from a focus on solutions, seeking to develop constructive local responses in the face of local needs and shrinking publicly funded services.
Although I like Maurice and enjoy his work I am broadly on Locality and Tessy’s side in this argument. However, the problem is not so much principle as practicality. As I go around the place talking about the Big Society and associated themes I hear again and again people saying that it is grievance and protest which are right now the main drivers of community engagement.
Of course, we can all find examples of solution based organisations and initiatives, but – as I have said – the Government and its allies need to go beyond stories to explain why they are confident about the aggregate outcome of their approach. The other day I was chatting to LSE Professor Tony Travers who was telling me about some research he has been commissioned to undertake for London councils. I hope I have got this right – and also that I’m not stealing the thunder from his report – but Tony told me that few, if any, of the Big Society champions to whom he had spoken to could even offer a coherent account of why we should expect to see a largely spontaneous increase in the number of people giving up time and effort to community activities (after all rates of volunteering seem to have been stuck at more or less the same level for many years).
There may be two more positive ways of thinking about this conundrum. The first is to explore how community mobilization which begins as protest can in parallel be channeled into developing ideas and solutions. There is a view that if you start with opposition, its very dynamics make it extremely hard to move into solutions mode. This may be true, but London Citizens claim to have been able to do just this so it may be a matter of effective organizing and group work.
A bigger point is the role of local public services. Tomorrow the 2020 Public Services Hub here at the RSA is publishing a report calling for FE Colleges to shift from a model of churning out qualifications to one which sees colleges as economic, social and cultural hubs. I won’t say any more about the report as it is embargoed until tomorrow (when it will be available from our website) , but I am sure that the approach of reimagining public services as centres of civic engagement and collaboration is correct.
Yesterday, I did a talk at Edge Hill University (which is a very impressive place). In a discussion of these issues I suggested that public institutions like schools, libraries, health centers etc. need to rethink their value proposition. Instead of focusing exclusively on the core activity of processing people as students, patients or service users they should explore their scope to widen their impact by connecting to local civic networks, exploring reconfiguration and collaborations with other public and third sector services and, where relevant, developing new business models based on delivering locally commissioned social outcomes.
This is not a new aspiration and no one sensible says it is easy. As I said the day before yesterday, there is precious little encouragement for this way of thinking coming from Whitehall’s main public service departments, but it is surely the best and most realistic way to try to protect the public sphere whilst also helping achieve the Big Society goal of greater public engagement?
BA in dressage and fly fishing
I am very impressed by so few readers objecting to the Julian Clary-like smutty connotations in yesterday’s blog title. None of you have dirty minds or those of you that do keep your thoughts to yourself. I am rather distracted by double entendres today as I am about to give a lecture at Edge Hill University. Until I read about what a splendid place it is (brilliant for example on widening access), I had previously associated this part of Merseyside with the phrase ‘she made me get off at Edge Hill’.
To avoid upsetting anyone I won’t explain further except to say that this reference to the station just before a terminus as a way of expressing a failure to reach the desired destination has apparently got equivalents in other cities (feel free to share).
Anyway, as I’m off to make a speech, it’s just a short post today.
I was struck by the possible connection between this point, made in a fascinating piece by Howard Hotson in the current London review of Books:
Market forces are the reason American private universities have become so expensive, but why does all the extra money pouring into US universities generate such a poor return in the rankings? Evidently, a large fraction of this funding is being invested in something other than academic excellence…..
Jonathan Cole, former provost and dean of faculties at Columbia, wrote in the Huffington Post last year that in addition to fee inflation, a major contributor to the increased cost of higher education in America stems from the
‘Perverse assumption that students are ‘customers’ that the customer is always right, and what he or she demands must be purchased. Money is well-spent on psychological counselling, but the number of offices that focus on student activities, athletics and athletic facilities, summer job placement and outsourced dining services, to say nothing of the dormitory rooms and suites that only the Four Seasons can match, leads to an expansion of administrators and increased cost of administration.’
If Cole is correct, then the marketisation of the higher education sector stimulates not one but two separate developments which run directly counter to government expectations. On the one hand, genuine market competition between elite universities drives up average tuition fees across the sector. On the other, the marketing of the ‘student experience’ places an ever increasing portion of university budgets in the hands of student ‘customers’. The first of these mechanisms drives up price, while the second drives down academic value for money, since the inflated fees are squandered on luxuries.
And this article in yesterday’s Evening Standard, which exposes how many independent schools with charitable status spend a large sum of money offering their students experiences such as hunting, shooting and fishing – as well as golf, beagling and dressage.
Behavioural economics teaches us that what attracts people to products is not the same as their intrinsic merit or real lifetime use value. So is there a danger that if universities are allowed to charge what they want, rich students price everyone else out of the market by demanding extra-curricular add-ons rather than academic excellence (after all it is much easier to assess the quality of a sports centre is standing in front of you than a three year degree course which you have not yet taken). Also, given that the Hotson piece shows pretty conclusively that, once weighted for size and per capita spending, the current UK university system outperforms that in the US, is there a danger that subsidies paid by taxpayers to provide poorer students for places will not go into quality HE teaching and research but making our richest campuses palaces for the fortunate few?
Excited by the Prime Minister’s closing passage
Poor old Big Society. It does sometimes seem to be doomed.
The day in December when David Cameron made his set piece speech on business and the Big Society was also the day England got trounced in its World Cup bid. Today the Prime Minister has tried again to get people enthused but I rather suspect it won’t be his speech in Milton Keynes but a certain Welsh footballer who will be dominating the news headlines for the next 24 hours.
But the speech is important reading for that dwindling band of us willing to put up some defence of the Prime Minister’s big idea. I’m afraid I have to admit to being pretty underwhelmed by most of it. The long section on Big Society public services served to confirm the suspicion that almost anything can be referred to as a Big Society initiative. There may, for example, be lots of reason to give parents more school choice and set up more Academies (although very few of those set up by the Coalition are in the poorest areas) but it is hard to see how individual parental competition for places and establishing institutions which can – if they choose – more easily divest themselves of links to the wider local community is anything to do with strengthening social bonds.
I haven’t read the Giving White Paper and the tax changes look like they could be powerful, but I do have some concerns about the approach to philanthropy. It is good to offer people new ways of donating but as people tend to over-estimate how much they give the danger of being asked to round up our grocery bills and add a quid to our cash withdrawal is that it will, at best, simply displace other forms of giving
But that’s enough churlishness. Near the end of the speech there was a passage that was genuinely interesting. It chimed with my point on Friday that social brain thinking should direct us to looking at the whole purposes and systems of public services not just some nudging at the margins (by the way, thanks for all the people who responded far too kindly to my pathetic attention seeking threat to stop blogging). The Prime Minister’s words also offers a lever for those of us trying to get the whole of Whitehall to be a bit more convincing in its commitment to the Prime Minister’s agenda
“ And in a way that I don’t think has been sufficiently appreciated, we are bringing that insight right into the heart of the business of government.
Right across Whitehall we are today applying to the design of policy the best that science teaches us about how people behave – and what drives their well-being.
We are revising the ‘Green Book’ – the basis on which the Government assesses the costs and benefits of different policies – to fully take account of their social impact.
We are developing a new test for all policies – that they should demonstrate not just how they help reduce public spending and cut regulation and bureaucracy – but how they create social value too.
And, the Office for National Statistics is developing new independent measures of well-being so that by the end of the year, we will be the first developed country in the world that is able rigorously to measure progress on more than just GDP.”
I have in the past questioned the Government’s resistance to strategy and measurement of any kind. But if a social value test is to be meaningful it will have to have some basis in method. Perhaps what method should be chosen is an issue we could debate here at the RSA?
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