20 Comments on The night watchman state?

IAN CHRISTIE on Mon, 26th Jul 2010 6:39 pm


Fascinating, and a good list of Coalition principles. I don’t know whether anyone in the Coalition could have put this list together, but am glad they are seeking RSA advice. We could discuss all the points in the list, but if we take them as read then they still present large challenges to the civil service. Too much rapid downsizing of Whitehall could be counter-productive and might lead to even more reliance on over-priced management consultants, one of the banes of the New Labour years.

The welcome end of the excessive target-based regime still leaves a lot of traditional civil service work to be done. For a start, the old arts of snag-spotting could be revived – pointing out to ministers the practical snags to be overcome before a policy becomes practicable. And the new arts of liaison with the emergent Big Society outside Whitehall would be good to learn for many senior officials.

L Bayar on Mon, 26th Jul 2010 8:02 pm


A compellingly comprehensive list!

James Kay on Mon, 26th Jul 2010 8:13 pm


My heart sank last week when I heard that there was to be a team of civil servants to come to Liverpool “…to help build the Big Society”. They just don’t get it, I thought.

Civil servants can help to stifle self activity but really that is about the only direct impact they can have on civic society. The best thing they can do is step to one side – leaving a few people to keep an eye on very small amounts of seedcorn money which local organisations might be able to use effectively. They could also help Ministers do something really useful like giving VAT and local taxes exemption to all registered charities.

Two examples – local amateur and community theatre and the Housing Market Renewal Initiative (HMRI).

In our borough we have thirty odd amateur and community theatre groups, none of which get any public money in grants but nontheless we maintain annual programmes of local theatre at a price people can afford – typically £6 a ticket.

Over 100 shows are provided a year between us in a dozen or so local venues and all styles of theatre from big musicals to Shakespeare and modern drama. We involve about 500 local amdram enthusiasts between us with a total annual audience figure somewhere around 50,000 and an annual turnover of over £300,000 – just in one average borough – Wirral. Not a civil servant in sight.

Tranmere on the Wirral has an HMRI. It cost £53 million, has knocked down but not replaced about 150 houses and in the process destroyed 6 out of seven local businesses and left us with derelict unusable land. Civil servants are all over it like the proverbial cheap suit. They will tell you that they involved the local community but the local community has a very different story to tell.

If you want two examples of the big (very effective) society on the one hand and the big (very dysfunctional) state on the other – you could do a lot worse.

carl allen on Mon, 26th Jul 2010 9:08 pm


“Assumptions/principles”

Sorry, but on matters of great importance, one cannot simply accept that an assumption has any strong link to a principle.

And as for being radical, these assumptions/principles seem more like pieces of a picture puzzle with the asssemblers having no idea of the picture.

Worse yet, the assemblers seem unable to connect matching pieces or have not the patience.

Dave Boyle on Mon, 26th Jul 2010 10:12 pm


I’m intrigued by what is meant by markets in the first bullet; I think we know what is meant by planning and are familiar with the failures and limits of that approach, but what ‘markets’ are in this context seems to me to be as much part of the issue as the non-problematic assumption of their primacy and efficacy.

There’s a world of difference between ‘groups of people are invariably better at determining and providing their needs than bureaucracies acting on their behalf’ to ‘the provision of services by enterprises driven by the need to extract profit from their delivery of those services’; most uses of the notion of ‘markets’ seem to tend to the latter for more than the former, and that notion seems to be as morally problematic as it is factually unsupported.

Laura McInerney on Mon, 26th Jul 2010 11:10 pm


Question is, if these principles had been openly shared during the election would the Conservatives have gained so much?

I still find it extraordinary that a government got into power and is *now* sorting out its policies & principles. What did people vote on in the first place?

BrianSJ on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 5:58 am


Good list, with great clarity of thought.
How about:
Do no harm.
Get out of the way unless you are absolutely sure it is necessary to intervene.
It isn’t your money.

BrianSJ on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 6:05 am


Sorry to double post.
There must be something on democratic responsibility and accountability being as direct and as complete as possible.

Of course, these Sir Humphrey’s had read ‘The Plan’? Thought not.

henry on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 9:38 am


very clear and very interesting. I dont think it has been very at all clear how the govts public service reform narrative maps onto the fiscal/economic strategy- but if you take your 7 points, you could add to almost all of them ‘….and moving in this direction would be cheaper’. so i guess one test of how durable these principles really are could be whether they would pursued even if they cost more (e.g. because of upfront investment) in the short term.

davy on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 10:52 am


oh my what a long way to go for enlightened thinking!! sycophants praising what exactly?

All that list actually says is :
Private markets and self interest is better at planning and delivery of public needs or services.
Incentives to work together don’t incentivise
The great underused resources of society can be mobilised (but not by the markets who are best at everything but by voluntary community groups).

Although enlightened agreement seems order of the day how about a few assumptions questioned here.

Wasn’t the private markets planning and delivery found to be pretty woeful recently requiring a substantial public bailout and causing a global recession amongst other things. The purest market principles failed dramatically and now we propose to use those principles to organise a society around? How enlightened.

Incentives by definition do work, if they are incentives. Which highlights a further point if all the outcomes are to come from the bottom up then whose to say the outcome people want would be a private sector provider. Why hasn’t the glorified private sector already tapped into the underused resources? And why is the proposal that community groups not the private sector are best placed to revitalise this part of society?

This is all top down privatise society speak. You know best but then perhaps that is because you are enlightened? If markets really are the best planners and providers of public requirements then lets quickly privatise politics and policy so the markets can efficiently deliver this big society to its customers (and volunteeers).

Primary school thinking claiming to be enlightened. God help us.

Steve Folan on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 1:09 pm


Your first principle is wrong. If people are in a vulnerable situation then the market led approach is probably the worst approach as it will ensure that the greediest or the most savvy will get all the resources while the needy may be left wondering what happened. A bit like New Labour jamboree. There needs to be some prioritisation or focus before the resources are allocated.

Also measure the outcomes periodically and if there is no improvement then stop funding the activity.

Livy on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 1:22 pm


James Kay: Interesting post.

Laura McInerne: Well yeah – the fact that the whole idea was launched five minutes before the polling stations opened is testament to that. Either they didn’t have a fully coherent idea of what it would look like in practice or they were terrified it would seem ridiculously inane and hollow, a bit like their ‘The Great Ignored.’ But to be fair this stuff isn’t just right leaning blathering, David Miliband also says we need to take power out of Whitehall and put it in the town hall.

Make all charitable donations completely tax deductable for everybody, not just efficient for higher rate taxpayers who donate through Gift Aiding. An increasing number of lower income earners would prefer to give their money to the third sector than George Osborne, and small communities could pool these resources to invest in locally managed social enterprises and smaller initiatives like youth centres or whatever those areas need the most. Fine, volunteering and people’s personal time is great, but often it’s all about the cash.

Suspending disbelief for a moment, these recent blogs entries are a pretty decent tip of the hat. Too many criticisms of the Big Society stem from a deeply partisan and slightly petulant confusion of skeptical and cynical attitudes. Skepticism is both healthy and necessary; cynicism is sheer laziness which infects and compounds the doubting mind like a disease. It blinds us to an inevitable unfolding reality where aspects of the Big Society (which have legs) will likely constitute part of whatever new consensus or public paradigm we depend on from here on in. The slightly cringe-worthy ‘civil society’, ‘new politics’, ‘Fourth Way’ or whatever – needs to happen, as too much of our ground has shifted beneath our feet in such as short space of time. You can’t deal the cards unless you know what game you’re playing, and the left need to recognise this and re-hijack the ‘redistribution of power’ agenda before shame leads to ridicule and unelectability through a complete lack of centrist space.

The five candidates have been generally dismissive as they feel a need to talk to the party before the country, and in all fairness their concerns are not entirely without merit. The coalition will be naturally cavalier and opportunistic about Labour’s disgrace and alleged economic incompetence as long as a friendly media allows them a narrative of inheritance. That’s just the game. Obama did it too. The concern, really, is that Cameron is successfully capitalising on the honeymoon to misrepresent the frame of the conversation as a choice between ‘big society’ and ‘big government’, before the country goes from bad to worse. If memory serves, Ken Clarke was actually on record a year ago saying this would be the most unpopular Conservative government in living memory.

Labour believed the centre could make good things happen, the Coalition is much more sceptical.

This puts it mildly. Let’s remember why Tories are Tories – they fundamentally believe that individuals will always make better decisions for themselves and their immediate tribe than government can make for them. Meddling lefties think government can be used as an instrument of good. After the economic crash and lessons learned, whose ideology is left lacking? The coalition are in awkward position of being unable to make a morally appealing case for rolling back the state at a time when geographic disparities in income and opportunity mean the least fortunate in society are dependent on those public sector jobs or private firms which are in turn dependent on public sector contracts. Combined with the fact that they didn’t even win, it’s all too easy to see your ‘civic market state’ as either opaque language disguising long term positioning or simply immediate political cover for a dangerous economic policy with waning support, instead of something honest and concrete that has the potential to advance social change.

I suppose I’m interested in hearing more about this bit:

”Differences in local service levels and outcomes are the inevitable and justifiable price for innovation, local accountability and civic engagement.”

Livy

stef on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 1:59 pm


Coming from a Permaculture background I like guiding Principles, they present the opportunity of holding certain aspects in focus. I wonder whether in time, turning the points you mentioned into more of a Pattern Language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language) might be even more useful. This offers the possibility of those using them to embed in the new culture in public services that will undoubtedly emerge from all the changes due to happen in the next few years.

Emma on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 3:53 pm


An interesting list of principles. But I don’t think all of them are valid, and some could in fact present real danger to those who most rely on services if put into action. For instance – what evidence is there that private sector providers are better than public services? With healthcare the opposite has been proved time and time again.

Bottom-up deliberation is a fine principle – but only if we find a way to create deliberative forums and spaces that are open and accessible to (and used by) everyone. Otherwise, this will just involve those who have the most time to spare, can shout the loudest and and are well networked will have their needs prioritised. Sidelining those who most need and rely on public services.

The suggestion that differences in service levels is… justifiable for the sake of innovation and local engagement: Differences in services, perhaps. But differences in service levels? Justifiable to whom? Not service users. When it comes to services, I think people want good minimum standards as a priority – innovation is important, but should always be secondary to this.

Not in Kansas | Someday I Will Treat You Good on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 5:11 pm


[...] Matthew Taylor says of a visit he received from some of the government’s advisors: The fascinating starting point for last week’s conversation was the statement by one of the advisors that Whitehall civil servants have been cast adrift as a result of the effective abolition of outcome targets. The public service agreements which provided the core rationale for thousands of Whitehall jobs have been swept away, and many other regimes focussed on achieving measurable results – such as the local authority comprehensive performance assessment – have also gone. In time we are likely to see a major downsizing of Whitehall itself but in the meantime, the advisors asked, what are the officials to do? [...]

Livy on Tue, 27th Jul 2010 9:42 pm


@Emma:

this will just involve those who have the most time to spare, can shout the loudest and are well networked having their needs prioritised. Sidelining those who most need and rely on public services.

Superb

Chris Golby on Fri, 30th Jul 2010 3:40 pm


Why speak to them in the first place?

I’d have saved me breath if I were you.

matthew taylor on Tue, 3rd Aug 2010 5:19 pm


Thanks everyone. This is a really good rehearsal of the key arguments for and against the Big Society perspective. Although the old lefty in my agrees with Emma, Dave and Davys’ concerns I thought James’ story was quite compelling to. In fact we are trying as part of our Peterborough project to make better links between amateur or hobby art/craft and the commercial and publicly funded sector. Great comment from Livy too. But thanks to you all. I hope they are reading in the Cabinet Office.

DaveG on Tue, 17th Aug 2010 10:09 pm


Matthew,

Really useful and stimulating- reminded me of the first half of Mcgregor’s old theory X and theory Y. Might be a nice contrast to list ‘labour’ theory y to match coalition theory x and see what falls out…?

James Kay on Thu, 19th Aug 2010 8:11 am


Picking up on Dave’s reference to McGregor’s X/Y theories and the Big Society – I think a better way to use McGregor’s continuum would be to list specific interventions from New Labour and the Coalition and try to map them onto McGregor’s X/Y axis. I think you would find elements of both X and Y thinking throughout both sets of interventions. For those wondering about what this X/Y stuff is about – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y

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