Co-production, what’s that?
Think tanks tend to over-claim influence in high places. But sometimes you just have to admit no one in Whitehall is listening. So it is with this week’s Coalition White Paper on public service reform and the RSA 2020 Commission on the future of Public Services.
At the heart of the analysis of the 2020 Commission was the idea of social productivity: public services should be judged on their ability to enable people to meet their own needs individually and collectively. In essence, this means redefining the production mode of public services so that value (social outcome) is seen as the result of a process of co-production rather than one of delivery to consumers.
This idea features centrally in the core recommendations of the recent Christie Commission on public services which reported to the Scottish Executive.
Here are Christie’s top recommendations:
- Recognising that effective services must be designed with and for people and communities – not delivered ‘top down’ for administrative convenience
- Maximising scarce resources by utilising all available resources from the public, private and third sectors, individuals, groups and communities
- Working closely with individuals and communities to understand their needs, maximise talents and resources, support self-reliance, and build resilience
- Concentrating the efforts of all services on delivering integrated services that deliver results
- Prioritising preventative measures to reduce demand and lessen inequalities
Coalition Ministers might argue that there is nothing here which contradicts the thrust of the White Paper but that would be disingenuous.
Christie (and the 2020 Commission) emphasise two things which get pretty short shrift in the White Paper. The first is the idea of better service integration. The White Paper gives some nods in this direction including a brief mention of community level commissioning. Also, the allocation of new responsibilities to local government such as public health and, possibly, skills might help join-up some areas of policy, but there is more on the negative side of the ledger.
The Coalition has removed the clunky but well-meaning measures the last Government put in place to encourage better integration, such as Local Area Agreements and local strategic partnerships. Schools are being encouraged to be entirely independent institutions with no encouragement to form links with other local schools let alone other services. There will be new, separate, lines of accountability for police and commissioning for health services. In many places – like Conservative-led Peterborough where the RSA is doing its Citizen Power project – local leaders will continue to work together on collaborative strategies but this will be in spite of, not because of, Government policy.
But more striking even than the limited enthusiasm for integration is the absence of any interest in the idea of co-production. As I said yesterday, the favoured forms of citizen engagement are through consumer choice and citizen control. But the notion that public services and institutions should involve creating shared social value through shared social responsibility is almost entirely absent from the White Paper. Children’s learning should not be something that schools do to pupils but should engage parents, pupils, communities and schools in a jointly designed and delivered endeavour. But such an idea seems completely alien to the current Education Department. This kind or re-imagining is also of no apparent interest to other major policy departments.
This speaks to one of the core weaknesses of the Big Society (which is still, I believe, an important concept): it largely relies on citizens spontaneously choosing to step forward (or doing this because they feel let down) rather than exploring how the services people use day to day could be redesigned to put user and citizen engagement at their heart. Perhaps it is not surprising then that the Big Society does not receive a single mention in the White Paper (apart from a reference to the Big Society Bank).
I can see how the White Paper aims to shift power from the centre to the citizen and the community. And it many areas – such as greater citizen access to information – the Government really is opening up services. But neither shifting power, nor even sharing information, in itself creates value. And – as today’s report today from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility vividly demonstrates – we face an ever growing gap between public expectations and what the state can provide using existing methods.
If the Big Society concept is to regain credibility or to have any chance of success it needs to involve a fundamental value re-engineering of public services, one which citizens themselves would help to design and implement. Maybe I am being too pessimistic but as far as I can see the White Paper shows no awareness of, let alone enthusiasm for, such an approach.
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 CSR is a big test for the Big Society
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics, Public policy, The RSA
Today many people – public service workers, users and welfare beneficiaries – will start to learn their fate. Soon after, I suspect, we will find out whether the deficit plan and the fear it is bound to instil in so many people will knock a vulnerable economy back into stagnation.
Fewer people will care, but it will also be a big day for the Big Society. It was widely noted that George Osborne’s June budget statement and supporting documents did not mention David Cameron’s big idea. It is important to its credibility that there is some reference to the idea tomorrow.
On the one hand, there needs to be evidence that the concept has helped shape the decisions being made. I understand there will be a strong localist theme in the statement and plan. The basic deal is that local authorities get less money but more freedom over how they spend it. This is the right strategy and it is credible to link it to a Big Society approach.
On the other hand, advocates of the Big Society need to emphasise its relevance in the context of austerity. The point here is not, as it is often characterised. that communities will be expected to provide voluntarily that which was previously funded (although there will no doubt be some of that). Even if Labour had won the last election and cut less deeply, less quickly there would still have been a gap between social aspirations and what the state could guarantee. Big Society champions have to show how their perspective can help close this gap.
One way of thinking of this is through the liberation of three types of hidden or dormant assets:
At the level of the individual we know that people accept that they should engage more and give more back to society. While three quarters of respondents regularly tell pollsters that local people should have more influence over local decision-making, fewer than a quarter say they are prepared to participate in community activity themselves. The Big Society is about releasing this asset by making it easier, more enjoyable and more powerful for people to engage.
At the level of the community, we know that even deprived neighbourhoods have many human assets. For example, there are often strong social networks but these are hidden from policy makers and service providers, different networks don’t always join up and many people who could join in are isolated (these are all findings from the RSA Connected Communities project in New Cross). The Big Society is about a deeper understanding of community assets and how to foster and mobilise them.
At the level of organisations a huge amount of benign social potential is wasted. The reasons are many ranging from unclear mission, lack of ambition and an overload of external demands and targets to a failure to engage and innovate or the deadening impact of organisational culture. The Big Society approach challenges organisations in the public, private and voluntary sector to maximise the social multiplier effect of their actions (this is what the RSA 2020 Public Service Commission meant by ‘social productivity’).
In the face of a lot of bad news tomorrow, people who think (for reasons good and bad) the Big Society is vacuous or a scam will have an easy script from which to read. The rest of us, with a more positive inclination, need to sharpen our argument and deepen our evidence that whatever the immediate context our country cannot flourish in the long term unless we get better at mobilising social assets.
One (or maybe two) good things to listen to …
I’m just rushing off to give a talk on the Big Society / public services / the world so just have time for a quick mini-post (I realise, by the way, this implies a deluded belief that thousands of you are waiting at your computers for my latest missive to appear!).
Here are two Radio 4 items that I thought people might enjoy. The first – and most important – is a recent item from the Today programme and is a fantastic example of what the 2020 Public Services Commission refers to as ‘ social productivity’: the idea that the ultimate measure of public services should be the degree to which people gain greater control over their own lives and become more engaged , resourceful and pro-social. But forget the theory, just listen – the idea is crystal clear (thanks to Nigel Kippax for pointing me to it).
The second is my own little essay about the 1960s, which went out last night. I’ve listened to it again and there are a lot of tweaks I would have made if I could do it again, but it would be good to get some more feedback than I’ve had so far. Both my mum and Barbara have been very nice about it – but then they would be, wouldn’t they …
Connecting the dots at the RSA
A few months after I started at the RSA there was extensive media coverage of the excellent report of its Drugs Commission. This ended what had been quite a barren period in terms of press coverage, with some really good work by the Society – for example, on migration – not getting anything like the profile it deserved.
In the last couple of years RSA coverage in the national media has started to pick up gently and this week may have been the best in the Society’s recent history. Not only was there the broadcast and print reporting of the 2020 Public Services Commission’s final report, but today we have bagged the front page of Guardian Society with our Connected Communities project.
Rachel Williams has done a great job in summarising the key features of the report and developing the human interest angel around a popular local publican and quizmaster (the fact that he is called Phil Nice does help!). I feel rather embarrassed that most of the quotes in the piece are from me rather than the team who undertook the research, but knowing how modest they all are I don’t suppose they’ll care too much.
We have always seen the second year of the Connected Communities project as the most innovative and exciting. This is when we play back the social network analysis to the community in New Cross and explore how local people can develop, strengthen and exploit their links. So let’s hope this time next year we get even more attention to the final report.
While I’m blowing my own trumpet (and, yes I know this is the unspoken opening clause to almost every sentence I write), Radio Four is tonight broadcasting a short lecture by me on the sixties. I wrote it over my summer holiday and although I am a little nervous about its personal reminiscences, I was pleased to be able to weave the RSA into my critique of the sixties idea of freedom.
The 2020 report contained many references to other RSA work, not just Connected Communities, but Peterborough too. It was good to see the Big Society minister Lord Wei say positive things about the RSA on his blog the other day. And, as I say, I was without contrivance able to weave the RSA’s work into broader reflection on British social history.
Overall, it feels like things are coming together. The RSA has always had great strengths – not least of which is its amazing Fellowship – but it has tended to suffer from a lack of understanding about its core mission and focus and limited public awareness of its work. Without, I hope, being complacent, it is really heartening to see this changing.
RSA Animate
RSA Mobile
RSA Comment- RSA Projects Blogs
- Twitter @RSAMatthew
- RSAMatthew: Just off to do Moral Maze on the monarchy - I'm for the Queen
- RSAMatthew: @billgibbon thanks Bill - I really think the collaboration between Newcastle Council, Newcastle Uni, RSA and others could be special
- RSAMatthew: @NCC_Leader Thanks Nick - I will now steal your best ideas for my speech
RSA 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.