Cluster’s last stand?
We all agree but we may all be wrong. From David Cameron’s Big Society to social democratic ideals of social solidarity and an empowering state, and including many public service experts and voluntary sector thought leaders, there is a consensus around a big idea: in essence, blurring the boundary between state and civil society so that social outcomes are achieved through the combined efforts of publicly funded programmes, individuals and communities. Yet the evidence of this approach succeeding at scale is limited and many who are at the front line of public service delivery seem sceptical.
As I have commented before there are examples of public service reform which engage citizens as co-producers of outcomes. One is refuse collection in which rising recycling rates are a joint effort of councils and households; another is individual budgets which – at their best – turn the desire of social care clients for greater autonomy and dignity into a resource which reduces the cost of bureaucracy and of providing unwanted services.
But the idea of co-production is still at the margins….In many ways some – as yet unpublished,- findings of a recent LGIU/RSA survey of local authority leaders make reassuring reading. Despite the scale of cuts, councils report they have been able to achieve the bulk of savings through efficiency measures, such as sharing back office services with other councils and public agencies. Furthermore, and this is very good news for the Coalition, the councils are just as likely to say that services to the most vulnerable have improved as that they have deteriorated over the first two years of cuts. Of course, it is early years and the vast majority of cuts are still to come but councils also report that they are being forced to do things differently with the implication being that this is a good thing.
However, one area where the findings are less positive relates to the Big Society approach. Councils continue, generally, to be sceptical that citizens and communities will step forward to fill gaps left by a receding state.
One interpretation of these findings is that the whole fluffy, empowering, civic idealism thing is for the birds: ‘end of’. Austerity will force councils to cut bureaucracy and less essential services (which is a good thing), what will remain is a residual safety net focussing on those in most dire need (which is an inevitable consequence of sorting out the public finances).
Another interpretation, to which I am clinging for the time being, is that the RSA’s idea of social productivity – judging services by their capacity to help people meet their own needs individually and collectively – is still vital and necessary but we are running out of time to move it into the mainstream. Which returns me to a question which has recurred in several conversations I have had recently: ‘What are the necessary ingredients to generate social innovation so that we can protect and even improve social outcomes at a time of falling budgets?’
Every once in a while I am like a dog with a bone with a project idea. So it is with this question. I would love to do a piece of work exploring the conditions for generating successful large scale local social innovation; what I have previously referred to as a social innovation cluster.
I have spoken to people who know about social finance, to social entrepreneurs and innovators with great ideas (some of which are up and running on a small scale), and to experts on organisational change in the public sector. They all agree the question is how to bring the various pieces of the change process together and to create circumstances in which not just one but many substantial innovations are explored, commissioned and rolled out. Which city or county wants to be the first to create a social innovation cluster which has parallels with industrial clusters or innovation hotbeds like Silicon Valley?
I realise I may be shouting into a void (which could almost be a synonym for ‘writing a blog’) but is there anyone out there with a budget and some change levers who wants to talk to me?
PS I may not even be alive to take the idea forward if I perish on the mountain marathon I am running to raise funds for the RSA Great Room appeal. So even if you can’t meet my ambitions for an innovation cluster you could always sponsor me….
A jobs opening in Number 10?
Like a Russian doll of misery the jobs crisis has layers on layers. We all know about the problems in Britain, with an estimated seven million people who would like full time employment either out of work or working part time. Then today there is a report from the ILO questioning the effectiveness of austerity strategies and predicting widespread social unrest, and showing the number of jobs across the global economy to be still fifty million below the pre credit crunch level. Then looking into the medium term Jim Clifton, head of Gallup, has shown that employment is the single factor most strongly correlated with well-being across the world but has estimated that of the three billion formal jobs for which there is demand the global economy is currently creating only 1.2 billion.
There are many factors which determine how successful an economy is at generating jobs, not least of which is its underlying strength and level of demand. But picking and mixing from countries which do relatively well – like Germany, Austria and Uruguay – a broad approach suggests itself combining three factors: tax policies which encourage investment and job creation, active industrial policy directed particularly to areas with the greatest job creating potential, and industrial partnerships through which Government, employers and employee organisations work together on a core commitment to avoiding high unemployment. Our own Government is doing some very small things in the first area, but nothing that is likely to release the huge stocks of capital sitting in corporate bank accounts; there is also some talk of industrial strategy in the second area, but again it is very limited reflecting the Conservatives’ continued scepticism. As for the third, there has been little or no evidence of high level industrial partnership in the UK for over thirty years.
Much of this is fertile territory for Labour, although it is less vocal on the problem of weak and out-dated trade union leadership. But despite the rolling omnishambles the next election won’t be for three years. Mr Cameron could do with reasserting three things right now:
He is focused on the issues which most matter to people
He can be bold
He can do what it is the interests of the country even if it makes his party uneasy
On the initiative of our Chair Luke Johnson the RSA held its own reasonably successful Jobs Summit a few weeks ago. If I was advising Mr Cameron I would suggest he take a leaf out of our book. How about a major Number Ten jobs summit involving not just the Conservatives’ usual favourite business people but a much wider range of experiences and views (including, for example the ILO and TUC). Like the RSA event the summit could have sessions looking at both the short and the long term but with strong emphasis on solutions.
There are risks. Not just in what people will say but also the acknowledgement that the Coalition hasn’t got all the answers and in the implication that Government might be willing to explore some kind of new ‘post bureaucratic’ mechanism for industrial partnership.
As I know from my own time in Government, one good aspect of a crisis is that sometimes the left field suggestions to the Prime Minister which were previously discarded get called up from the records and re-examined in a fresh light. Who knows they might even look at obscure blog suggestions too?
By the way, it may only have been a subsidiary consideration but when the RSA decided to go ahead with our House redevelopment one factor was the sense that we should make our own contribution to generating economic activity and jobs in these austere times. As an RSA fan (if you are) you can make your own small contribution to the Society’s mission and to economic recovery by sponsoring my insane bid to run a marathon up a mountain.
Ain’t no mountain high enough …
A few weeks ago I was asked to talk to the UpRising Leadership programme which caters for talented 19-25 year olds from diverse backgrounds. I guess I was there as a high achiever to describe my journey and experience. Instead, to the initial shock and later amusement of the students, I explored why I may not have used whatever talent and ambition I was privileged to inherit to make the biggest impression on the world.
I am very proud to be CEO of the RSA. Alternatively I wonder if, perhaps, with more discipline and guile, I could have been a national politician and made decisions to improve the lives of millions. With more consistency I could have been a professional, maybe a doctor or a lawyer, with the knowledge and skills to help people profoundly in times of need. With more self sacrifice could I have dedicated myself to making a concrete difference to the lives of the most disadvantaged here or in the poorest parts of the word? With more focus and patience could I have been an academic working on ideas which take on a power of their own?
Instead I recycle ideas, trundle around the lower reaches of the second division of public intellectuals and try to live up the honour of running this great organisation. As well as the salary, being boss brings status. But it is oh so transitory. As all organisational leaders know, at the first staff meeting a few days after a leaving party to mark their many years of blood sweat and tears, the new boss will be reassuring an enthusiastic staff, with more or less directness, that it is time to blow away the accumulated cobwebs and march into a brave new future. All those things we fondly saw as achievements are either taken for granted or scorned.
‘Is there nothing’ I ask myself in sleepless nights ‘that will endure?’ When it comes to the RSA I derive most comfort from the slow revolution being brought about by the Fellowship. More and more Fellows are engaged, and more and more of that engagement is contributing to the Society’s charitable mission. One example is Catalyst, formed a couple of years ago to provide small grants to groups of Fellows seeking to develop new initiatives or social enterprises. Every six weeks we get twenty or so bids, each of which has genuine value and of which two or three are good enough to deserve a grant. But because the sums we can provide are small we have always hoped that some Catalyst winners would go on to find funding from other sources. Increasingly, this is happening. For example, last week we heard of substantial new funding for a project in Tower Hamlets, Ladies Who L-Earn, which offers unemployed young women training and mentoring by Fellows and local business people to enable them to run market stalls for local designers.
Another aspect of change has been the concerted attempt to engage Fellows more fully in the RSA’s research and development projects. Just the other day my colleague Rebecca Daddow was enthusiastically describing the many ways in which Fellows are supporting our groundbreaking work in West Kent, which aims to support the rehabilitation of people recovering from drug and alcohol dependency. As our method is all about helping people in recovery to integrate as full members of civil society, Fellow engagement is part of what makes the project distinctive and powerful.
And then this week I heard that in sums ranging from thousands to fivers, many Fellows have already generously responded to our appeal for funds towards the refurbishment of the RSA’s Great Room. One of the many improvements in the new Great Room will be cutting edge technology which will make the on-line experience of watching and participating in RSA events even better. There have in the last eighteen months been around sixty million global views of RSA lectures.
Many people who watch the lectures, and who read this modest blog or visit the RSA’s website are not Fellows. We see spreading great ideas around the world as a core part of our charitable mission, but now, for once, I am asking those who like what we do but don’t contribute as Fellows to make a concrete expression of their appreciation.
One of the symptoms of my mid life crisis has been a growing obsession with physical fitness. I ran the marathon a few years ago and am still aiming to run 10k in under 40 minutes. So when a friend challenged me to run a mountain marathon my foolish pride would not let me refuse. The Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon on June 9/10 requires me to run a marathon distance mainly steeply uphill navigating my own route and carrying a six kilo overnight pack.
As I have gradually added each ingredient of difficulty to the training – distance, incline, weight, rough ground – the scale of my idiocy in volunteering has become clearer. A trial half marathon along the cliffs of Dover and Deal last weekend left me exhausted for two days. What is more, the whole exercise is costing me hundreds of pounds on travel and kit costs.
But you can lighten my burden. I have set up a JustGiving page and I am asking friends of the RSA to help me raise two thousand pound towards the Great Room appeal.
Perhaps in twenty years’ time a grey haired man, limping slightly as a consequence of a nasty fall in the Cairngorms decades earlier, will walk unrecognised into John Adam Street and point out to his grandchildren a small patch of beautifully restored mosaic on the staircase to the Great Room. ‘There’ he will proudly proclaim ‘I told you I had made an impression on the world’.
Matrix restated?
I chaired a fascinating conference yesterday. At the risk of being overly critical, the conference was slightly guilty of two often repeated failings of such gathering. There was an awful lot of content, with fourteen plenary speakers across a long day facing an, inevitably, diminishing audience. And because of the wide ranging nature of the speakers, from a very senior DCMS civil servant and National Portrait Gallery administrator to the brilliant young photographer Sara Shamsavari and Araceli Camargo founder of The Cube (who offered a beguiling vision of collaborative spaces flooded with oxytocin!), sessions occasionally felt unfocussed.
Having said that, the audience seemed to enjoy the day, and with so much varied content there were bound to be some ideas worth remembering. It was in the final session that I felt I had my own particular moment of insight.
As part of his speech, cultural commentator Ekow Eshun suggested that in developing collaborations – particularly with the private sector – cultural organisations too often underestimate the power of their networks, of their brand and the quality of their relationship with audience and the public.
This got me thinking about what it is in a relationship with an institution which we most value.
Imagine a two by two matrix. On one axis lies the degree to which we feel we have some combination of choice and control, on the other the degree to which we feel we have some mix of entitlements or rights. Then think about what lies in the four zones.
In the bottom left are institutions with which we engage without much sense of choice or of entitlement. This might, for example, be a how young offender feels about being in a detention centre.
In the bottom right hand square are institutions in relation to which we feel we have some rights or entitlements in terms of access or status but over which we have limited choice or control. This – despite the rhetoric of public services choice – is the feeling most people have most of the time towards mainstream public services.
In the top left hand square are institutions which offer us a feeling of choice or control but limited rights and entitlements. In essence, this is where consumer capitalism lies. We can choose whether to go to a shop and what to buy but beyond purchasing power we have neither entitlements nor rights beyond basic statutory safeguards.
The top right hand square offers both feelings of choice/control and rights/entitlements. And this is where publicly funded cultural institutions are able to reside. We can choose which galleries to visit, which BBC programmes to watch, which public art displays to visit, but as licence payers or tax payers we also feel we are visiting or consuming as a right and that we should have some say over the policies of the institution.
This is why the public and media complain noisily when they don’t agree with the choices a publicly subsidised gallery makes (see for example the furore over the Hirst exhibition at Tate Modern) or dislike a programming decision made by BBC chiefs. If private galleries or TV channels make equally unpopular choices, lacking the same sense of affront or agency, we simply don’t visit or turn off.
The matrix provokes some other observations. Much recent public service reform can be seen as an attempt to push services up from the bottom to the top of the square. The idea of free schools, for example, is that parents feel towards them much stronger choice/control than towards conventional schools. Conversely, commercial brands have long sought to cultivate the sense of collective ownership; this is what is meant by selling a relationship not a product. Apple stores are a good example of spaces which imply that access to, and status within, is based on something more than impersonal purchasing power.
Also, conflict emerges when the owners and managers have different views to users and public about where ‘their’ institution sits in the matrix. The most acute example may be football clubs. Many fans feel they are stakeholders with rights and entitlements whereas modern owners tend to see the public as mere consumers (whose blind loyalty is simply a bonus).
All this goes to reinforce Ekow’s point about the particular quality of relationships between state subsidised cultural institutions and the public.
My ‘insight’ may be nothing more than a restatement of aspects of the theory of public value. But I’ll leave that judgement to readers. After all, folks, I want you to feel this blog really belongs to you.
Close to the edge
I remember many, many years ago an announcer on a Radio 4 comedy programme starting an item like this: ‘Once, in a small village just outside France’. The subtle joke being, of course, we need to know what country a village is in before it can be narrowed down by which other country is close by.
I was reminded of this by the announcement this morning that the Treasury will require all Whitehall departments to identify 5% of their spending which will be the first call for cuts should an unexpected need for funds emerge after the budget has been set. Presumably this means there will be a swathe of public service workers who will live in a place just outside extinction.
In Danny Alexander’s speech, which was a powerful restatement of the Coalition’s commitment to deficit reduction, there was no indication of whether the new system is being adopted based on successful practice elsewhere. This is a pity because on the surface of it the proposal could have many fascinating consequences.
It could – and perhaps should – be possible to put a whole departmental budget in priority order, starting presumably with spending which is the direct result of legal requirements and then moving onto spending which is of critical strategic importance and so on. From the low priority end up, if there is an expendable five per cent of activity, presumably there is another five per cent which narrowly escapes the same fate.
Clearer prioritisation may be valuable but don’t underestimate the complexity. For example, because many expenditure items are related to each other, the candidates for the expendable five per cent are likely to be biased towards two areas: on the one hand, self-contained items which can more easily be subject to an immediate cut and, on the other hand, items like staff costs where proportionate, salami-style, cuts can be made across the piece by, for example, not filling vacancies. This could mean it is less the content and more the form of spending items which makes them vulnerable.
Perhaps I am simply being obtuse, but is the vulnerable five per cent a rolling budget item? Whilst normal contingency funds sit in the budget all year waiting to be allocated should the need arise; what happens if the unexpected demand to use the earmarked five per cent occurs in budgetary month eleven, when presumably only about 10% of the total departmental budget remains unspent, will it mean a fifty per cent cut in what’s left?
Like any other large organisation Whitehall budgets are subject to various forms of gaming. Indeed it was partly in response to gaming around contingencies that today’s announcement was made. But a new form may now emerge. If I were a minister or permanent secretary and keen to protect my budget in the face of an unexpected call on funds, I would be very tempted not to put a questionable item in the five per cent but things which are politically sensitive, for example something the Prime Minister is on record pledging to protect.
And what will be the impact on those who rely on wages or grants which fall into the near extinction zone? Given their vulnerability is a consequence not of their own actions but of unexpected events beyond their control, will they plough on regardless, albeit suffering more than their share of sleepless nights? Or will they work tirelessly to try to convince officials and ministers to push them up the queue and relegate another area. Could we see a monthly Whitehall equivalent of the sing-off on X Factor as jeopardised activities suddenly move up the ratings while former star performers are punished for having an off day?
On reflection, having, albeit briefly, considered the case for telling various RSA staff that what they do is the least valuable of our activities, and that they should remain vigilant for the possibility that failure, fraud or flooding will lead to their immediate redundancy, I think I am tempted to stick to the boring old system of having a contingency line in the budget. There is a risk come year-end that managers will try to raid an unspent fund, but I guess I trust my budget holders more that Treasury ministers appear to trust theirs.
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