You read it here first …
As the election nears politicians of all parties are being pressed to come up with new policies. Here is a simple, cost-effective, socially inclusive, modernising one they can all have for free.
The Government has been pretty successful in getting more of us to fill in our tax returns online. I think the figure for 2008/9 returns was over seventy percent. By contrast, only about one percent of claimants go online to claim the Job Seeker’s Allowance. Yet with nearly all families with children now on line and with the excellent work of UK OnLine Centres in providing digital access (both the computers and the hands-on guidance) there is no reason why the gap should be so great.
I am told that there is a plan to simplify and re-launch digital JSA forms in the summer. This will no doubt do some good but my idea would lead to a transformative shift.
Any claimant who moves online with their claim and who commits to continuing to transact in this way should be given a £30 online shopping voucher. The Government would pay £15 and retailers would make up the rest (claimants could choose between vouchers for various supermarkets or other participating shops). Some may object to this handout, but right now, as we emerge from recession, public opinion is tending to be sympathetic to those out of work.
For the Government the £15 cost would be substantially less than the savings in staff time and paperwork. For the retailers, they would show their corporate responsibility and open up the online shopping market to a new group of consumers. And for claimants their lives would be easier, they would get a free bag of shopping and by picking up online skills they would improve their employability and access to other services. A scheme like this could realistically aim for 50% of existing claimants and 90% of new claimants to be online within three months.
So there we are: a way of saving money, promoting social inclusion and contributing to the vision of digital Britain. Don’t be surprised to read it in a manifesto very soon.
Localism – the way to save Whitehall
With OFSTED reporting that progress in primary schools has been hampered by too many central initiatives, and the the inquiry into events at Stafford Hospital in part blaming the ‘target culture’ of the NHS, today is going to be another bad day for centralism.
As I said last week, there is a debate going on at the heart of government over how far Gordon Brown should go before the election in showing real determination to decentralise. For a long time now I have been encouraging politicians to adapt one of Bill Clinton’s most famous phrases and assert that ‘the era of big central government is over’.
But I sense that the localists in Government are still having a hard time, especially in the face of the unwillingness of large service departments such as DCSF or DWP to give up any of their levers of control. If Labour doesn’t move on this, an incoming Conservative Government probably would, offering local councils a non-negotiable deal: ‘you won’t get any more money for several years but you can have much more control over how you spend it, and by the way, the buck stops with you’.
But even after news like today’s, the way this argument is structured in Government makes the localist case difficult to sustain. It is up to the localists to ‘prove’ that devolving power would improve outcomes. But given its complexity and the confounding variables this is an impossible case to make.
Instead every presentation on this issue to ministers and officials should start with a slide headed ‘myths of centralism’, containing the following bullet points:
1. Centralism does not lead to uniform performance levels or outcomes
2. Every new central initiative/target reduces the salience of existing initiatives and targets
3. The messages sent by the centre (especially if there are lots of them) are very different to the messages eventually heard at the front line
4 There are systematic reasons why opt-in pilots are more likely to succeed than the same policy when it is made a mandatory national programme
There is a big opportunity here for new ways of thinking, but my recent discussions with insiders leave me with little confidence it will be grasped.
For many years now the Cabinet Office has been conducting capability reviews of Government departments. All well and good. But the question not asked is whether the capabilities these reviews are looking for – the ones currently expected of Whitehall departments – are those that will be needed in the future.
A radical devolution of power (and, of course, there need to be safeguards about how this is done and how the centre deals with demonstrable local failure) could be accompanied by an equally radical recasting of the way that Whitehall plies its trade.
Instead of a machine driven by the desire to maximise control, to compete with other departments for money, power and legislative time, and by silo accountability, a modern on-line Whitehall needs to be a place where people get what they want through thought leadership, trust, persuasion, innovation and collaboration.
Most local authorities and other public agencies have no desire for the centre simply to abandon them. But they want supportive and clever leadership rather than mechanical and oppressive interference. If Whitehall doesn’t learn these skills, then, when the inevitable shift of power away from the centre comes, it will not only lose an empire but find itself without the skills to perform a new role.
So, far from devolution being a threat to Whitehall, it can be the opportunity for it to become the kind of centre it needs to be in the 21st century. Most people who think hard about the medium and long term future of Government get this. Sadly, the combined nervousness of Number Ten, intransigence of service departments and limited vision at the top of the senior civil service suggest it may have to be a different administration that makes the shift.
The foundations of localism
Ministers are digesting the results of the Total Place pilots, 13 schemes around England which explored in depth how public money is spent locally on a particular set of outcomes. It seems that the pilots have found scope for major savings as a result, first, of the simple exercise of analysing why things are being done and whether they achieve any purpose and, second, by much greater inter-agency collaboration – for example, recognising the savings that can be made on health and social care costs by investing more earlier to help people stay in their own homes.
The results of the pilots will go towards yet another Government public service strategy (the fifth in three years) which will emerge around the time of the budget. If there is to be any chance of a disengaged and sceptical public noticing a new approach, it will have to be very bold. And so, yet again, the debate is on in Whitehall between the devolutionists and the centralists.
Of course, all the party leaders have pledged to remove power from the centre yet none so far have engaged properly with the implications such an approach would have for Whitehall, Westminster and the public at large. This means the fine words have very little credibility.
If this is to change, Whitehall needs to undertake a piece of work which has, to my knowledge, never previously been commissioned. Instead of another review of whether power should be devolved, or of what the next grudging incremental step might be, Number Ten needs to commission research which starts from the assumption of radical devolution and then explores with rigour and realism what is involved in making this happen.
What does a post devolution Whitehall look like? How does accountability in Westminster happen if most service outcomes are determined at the local level? How can the media be educated to accept that ministers cannot be held responsible for devolved outcomes? If local politicians are to have more power, how should local accountability be strengthened? How can we – without undermining the core strategy – address the social and legal issues arising from people getting different services depending on where they live? (By the way, one of the myths used by those opposed to devolved power is that people get the same outcomes in centralised services. They don’t. It just that differences result from bureaucratic and professional discretion and differential performance rather than choices made through democratic processes.)
If this piece of work was undertaken it might slightly increase the chances of Labour’s new strategy being taken seriously. But even if it did nothing to change the likely outcome of the election it would be a valuable resource for an incoming Government. And, given the apparently limited impact that Conservative blunders (and haven’t there been a lot!) and the Brown media offensive are having on the polls, legacy may be all the current inhabitants of Number Ten have to comfort themselves.
Prison works, or at least, it can do
At the end of last week the RSA published the report on its Prison Learning Network. Despite there being plenty of news coverage for prison related issues – including the Conservative debate about prison ships – we have had very little take up in the national media. Is this because the report isn’t saying anything interesting, or just that it is hard to get coverage for moderate, constructive ideas? You judge….
Can you name the European countries that boasts the following projects? The first is a prison restaurant, opened last year, where inmates cook and serve dishes such as paupiette of chicken with spinach mousseline, using organic ingredients direct from the garden. The restaurant offers prisoners the opportunity to gain skills and catering qualifications and encourages employers to take on ex-offenders.
The second is a prison radio station that recently won a prestigious broadcasting award even though its audience is limited to 800 inmates. Programmes are pre-recorded and edited by civilians who run the station. As well as shows covering religion and music, the station broadcasts interviews between prisoners and a regular slot where the governor responds to questions. The aim is to improve communication within the prison and increase the chances of inmates getting a job when they leave by building skills in broadcasting and in information and communication technology.
These initiatives are not in Norway or the Netherlands, nations with reputations for welfare-led approaches to criminal justice. The Clink restaurant is in HMP High Down in West Sussex and Electric Radio in London’s Brixton Prison. They are just two of many examples of innovation taking place within the UK prison system. It is this work that the RSA set out to explore through its Prison Learning Network, led by Professor Malcolm Grant, Provost at University College London.
There is consensus that this work in prisons is important in reducing the number of people who re-offend when they leave. The Conservative Party has emphasised the role of work and education in custody as central to its proposed ‘rehabilitation revolution’. The government has recognised learning and skills provision as fundamental to achieving its target for reducing reoffending. Indeed there has been in recent years significant improvements, particularly in relation to young offenders. Spending on prison education and training has risen in recent years to over £150 million in 2007/8. This is very welcome but is dwarfed by the staggering £11 billion that reoffending by ex-prisoners is estimated to cost us each year. But this has been progress by stealth, as good news gets drowned out by a more strident, negative narrative on prisons dominated by exposes of overcrowding and, alternatively, poor or ‘luxury’ conditions.
This conversation, the one we tend to hear on our airwaves, is like a domestic row between warring parents – the egalitarian father and the authoritarian mother – whose children have gone off the rails. As each blames the other for their offspring’s transgressions, for being too harsh or too soft, the children either sneak out of the house or struggle to do their homework. The egalitarian position at its purest believes that accepting that prisons should be the ‘school of last resort’ is a form of defeat; while the authoritarian believes only in punitive measures whether they ‘work’ or not.
Without better understanding of what takes place inside prisons and stronger evidence on what works to reduce crime, the public remains either suspicious or fatalistic, without the basis to support one policy or another. A shift in the quality of the public conversation occurs only when we see prisons not just as a way of punishing criminals and assuaging victims but as a vital public service that can benefit us all. Politicians may differ in emphasis, but their core script about public service modernisation is likely to have common features: the role of technology, the need for services to focus on outcomes, the importance of engaging service providers and users to design new solutions.
It turns out that this is exactly what is needed to transform the effectiveness of prisons. Take technology, high tech security innovations are already being used: the UK is likely soon to see its first keyless prison. A similar transformation of technological infrastructure needs to be applied in relation to offenders learning and skills if we are to maximise the chance of prisoners securing work on release.
The prison system should also take a more strategic approach to user engagement. Recent work by User Voice, a charity run by ex-offenders, shows that many governors recognise that prisoner engagement is a priority. Prisoners want prisons to work, and they usually know what needs to happen inside to help them avoid reoffending outside. From the design of prisons to the content of training and employment programmes, prisoners, like all service users, have the best insights into how services can be modelled to achieve the outcomes we all want. Prisoner engagement is an education in itself, requiring constructive engagement from to people who, if they weren’t truanting, generally spent their school years sitting at the back of the class .
Prisons must also follow the lead of other public service institutions, like schools or Sure Start centres, seeking to mobilise what former Downing Street advisor David Halpern has described as ‘the hidden wealth of nations’. This is the willingness of all of us to play our part in strengthening the social fabric; taking responsibility for our behaviour, volunteering, caring, or in the case of prisoners, giving people a second or third chance in life. Greater community and business engagement with prisons serves to remind the public that rehabilitation is not within the power of any one institution and underlines the social benefits of making offenders more employable.
My liberal friends won’t like me to say it, but prisons work. They keep off the streets people who would otherwise be committing offences. Albeit at huge public cost, the expansion in places has probably played its part in the fall in crime. But that doesn’t mean this is all prisons can or should do. Tomorrow’s prison should be a modern, intelligent institution, one in which prisoners can learn not just the error of their ways, but the skills and the self respect they need to start a new life.
Bleedin’ obvious? You tell me
We hosted an event here yesterday organised by a Scandinavian charitable foundation which promotes dialogue about major social, economic and environmental issues. Although flattered to be asked to attend, I was a bit sceptical.
There are so many places where various experts discuss these big issues. In the artificial environment of a seminar in a smart location and with the lubrication for good food and wine they soon develop great ideas to right the world’s wrongs. But rarely do these ideas survive their first encounter with life back in the real world. Maybe all the well-meaning conversation in the ends adds up to something, but I’m not so sure so I tend to turn down the many kind invitations I receive.
But as this event was here I didn’t really have an excuse. Partly, I suspect, because almost all the people attending really were experts in environmental economics, it turned out to be fascinating. In particular there was a presentation by a Swedish academic which, in essence, poured a very large bucket of iced water on many of the claims of green consumerism. Anyone reading this who knows this area will know all these arguments, but I had never heard them put together as powerfully.
First, she argued that the impact of economic growth and our consequent greater ability to consume easily outweighs any reductions in emissions resulting from greener forms of consumption.
Second, she cited a study of twenty families who were given strong incentives to reduce their overall emissions by twenty percent (I can’t remember the reference, maybe someone else can help out). They families did change their living patterns and reported they were happy with the new arrangements. But then, as soon as the incentives were removed, they reverted almost entirely to their old ways.
Third, in response to the idea that people can save money by consuming less – for example through home insulation – she explained the ‘rebound’ problem, which is that people go on to use their savings to buy new stuff with its own carbon footprint
Fourth, she pointed out that the service or knowledge economy sectors, which people say allow us to consume more without using up finite resources, generally involve material goods, for example, the boxes or consoles for video games, or mobile phone sets.
Her conclusion, as an environmentalist, is that the only way rich countries can get anywhere near their carbon reduction targets is to accept zero, or close to zero, growth.
As might be expected in a room of economists, some of whom were in business these views were very controversial. One respondent said that he could not think of a single human civilisation which had survived without economic growth. In particular, it was forcefully argued that technological innovation in the energy sector can break the link between growth and carbon emissions.
I took this from the exchange: the crucial challenge for the public in relation to climate change (if we accept it is real and man-made) is not so much to change our lifestyles (although we might choose to do that for our own ethical or symbolic reasons) but to give our leaders permission to make brave choices on our behalf. For it is only through regulation (preferably international) and through investing heavily in technological innovation that we can hope to reconcile growth and sustainability.
Not for the first time I fear I am guilty of Basil Fawlty’s judgement of Sybil ‘meet my wife, specialist subject the bleedin’ obvious’. But it was, anyway, a new line of thought for me.
Twitter @RSAMatthewRSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.