Not local, not big, and not clever?
Two stories of unmet social need have featured in the news in the last 24 hours. First, there was David Cameron’s announcement of matched funding to tackle the problems of dysfunctional families. Second, there is today’s report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists highlighting failings in care for patients with dementia. One aspect of these stories is the apparent fading of two key Government principles; localism and the Big Society.
Although we are told Eric Pickles fought off an even more centralised approach, the troubled families scheme will effectively mandate local expenditure on a priority chosen by central Government. The content of the scheme is also likely to be tightly specified by Whitehall. This may not be a bad thing. I am sure my old friend Louise Casey could make a strong argument both that councils should be forced to invest in this area and that there are tried and tested techniques which every scheme should apply. But this effective imposition of a priority through earmarked funds stands in contrast to Eric Pickles’ promises when he abolished Local Area Agreements, the mechanism through which councils negotiated their priorities with Whitehall.
An even more striking example of central control comes in the response of Care Services Minister Paul Burstow to the RCP report. Apparently, next year will see the introduction of a financial incentive to encourage hospitals in England to screen patients for dementia when they are admitted for other conditions. It is hard to see how this kind of micro-management fits with the promise that health commissioning will be localised.
In both cases the Government can claim it is using incentives rather than targets and regulation, but when there is too little money to go around ear marked funds are surely as powerful in driving behaviour as any target.
Also noteworthy in both these stories is the absence of an explicit role for the community in addressing problems. As I argued a few weeks ago in response to the Care Quality Commission’s findings of terrible hospital care for vulnerable elderly people, a crucial factor is the place of family, friends and volunteers providing care and advocacy which goes beyond the basics of medical treatment. I don’t have any evidence to prove my point, but I am willing to bet a substantial sum that a key variable in the quality of institutional care received by older people is simply the number of visitors they have.
The extended family and wider community also have a crucial role to play in helping troubled families. The RSA’s own work with people recovering from substance abuse addiction has developed a strategy in which service users design and help provide the services they need with a particular emphasis on engaging other individuals and organisations across their locality. The aim is to create what we call ‘a recovery community’.
An impressive example of an approach with similar principles is Shared Lives. This long established and expanding scheme involves local co-ordinators identifying and supporting families who are willing to open up their homes and lives to vulnerable people. The families get back up, advice, help if things go wrong and something towards costs, but the scheme is based on relationships not transactions, love and compassion not service requirements.
In the context of growing needs and shrinking budgets it is crucial to develop interventions which successfully blend public services and funding with self-help, co-production and community mobilisation. This should be the golden thread running through every Government public service initiative. That it is not is yet another sign of the failure of the Big Society narrative to be understood or gain traction in Whitehall.
The consequences of throwing stones – and this time I really mean it
Apologies to Shane, Neil and Ian: you all commented on a post I wrote at Sydney airport on Wednesday afternoon which I then comprehensively rewrote when I got to Bangkok nine hours later. The original post was called ‘the consequences of throwing stones’ and contrasted the punishment being meted out to rioters and looters with the way those who behaved irresponsibly in the financial sector have got away Scot-free. I don’t sleep well on planes and at some point in the first leg of my journey back to London I decided the post was trite. But now, back in England, I find myself wanting to make the point more strongly. But this time in the form of an urgent challenge to the Prime Minister.
My conviction was renewed by two pieces on the BBC web-site. The first describes the sixteen month prison sentence for Thomas Downey, who helped himself to doughnuts from an already looted Krispy Kreme shop in Manchester. From his photograph and his record, Mr Downey is not, I think, the kind of person I would like to have as a friend or even sit next to on a bus. But, even so, banging him up for sixteen months for grabbing a box of doughnuts from a vandalised shop when he was drunk is surely unlikely to: (a) do him any good; (b) be a wise use of public money; or (c) appear to most people as a proportionate punishment.
The second story explores the profound and still unfolding consequences of the financial turmoil unleashed in the credit crunch. With stock markets crashing again yesterday (and it looks bad today) no one knows where all this will end, but we already know that hundreds of millions of people across the developed world will suffer hardship and insecurity and that many will never fully recover from the effects.
No one can argue that all this came about just because of the behaviour of bankers and speculators. I have been arguing since even before the crunch that the deeper cause lies in the fundamental and growing mismatch between public expectations of personal affluence and public services and what the state and market are able to provide in the absence of a strong civil society. But equally, there is no question that the finance sector bears substantial responsibility because of how it chose to make as much money as possible despite the risks and because it was a strong voice advocating the economic and policy framework which collapsed in 2008. Furthermore, there continue to be parts of the sector which not only make money out of adversity but also have an interest in adding to the turmoil (this is one reason why four European countries recently banned short selling).
I could stop here, simply highlighting the way rich and powerful people can cause great misery and get away with it and poor and hopeless people can be severely punished for minor misdemeanours, but we need to get past impotent rage. The contrast between what happened to Thomas Downey and the impunity of the bankers and speculators is at one level entirely rational. Downey was personally responsible for committing a crime, the finance guys are collectively responsible for making a killing in a system which has created, and is still exacerbating, a crisis. Some people do terrible things which aren’t against the law; other people do trivial things which are. The state can only punish the law breakers. It’s just the way things are.
But borne on the wind of turmoil and trouble can be heard the swirling murmur of contested moral equivalences. The Government is close to big finance and it made an explicit policy decision to put pressure on the judiciary to hand out longer sentences to all those involved in the riots, so it can’t simply shrug its shoulders if people find this imbalance of consequences ugly and unjust.
The Big Society is in part a way of addressing the limits of the state and market in meeting social need. And for this I have often commended it. But to have credibility, the Big Society must also be about a basic sense of justice, which is essential to social cohesion and morale. Fred Goodwin and thousands more like him are still rich and still making money out of decisions which have had a profoundly damaging impact on innocent people. Thomas Downey and hundreds like him, more guilty of stupidity and impulsive greed than malice, are starting prison sentences which could blight their lives. There may be nothing that can be done about this, but political leadership has sometimes to be about helping us understand why things seem unfair and describing ideas and principles which offer a better foundation for society.
A friend of my fifteen year old son got arrested after the rioting. He didn’t attack or hurt anyone physically but he was involved in the looting. It is clear that the consequences for him as a working class kid are going to be dire. My son said to me last night ’my mate was stupid and he knows it but he is going to lose everything. Why is it when rich people screw up they always seem to get away with it?’ As he spoke I sensed a deep and lasting impression is being made on him about the way things are and how unlikely it is that ‘the system’, as he sees it, will ever change.
If David Cameron is to return to the promise of his early years as Tory leader and provide a vision which unites, heals and invigorates society then he needs to balance the punitive rhetoric of the last few days. He needs to say something which touches and unlocks this hardening sense of injustice and cynical resignation. He needs to do it powerfully and he needs to do it soon.
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.
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?
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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