Why do I do it to myself?
As my regular reader knows, my self-esteem isn’t high at the moment.
A couple of years ago, at the 20th anniversary dinner for IPPR, Patricia Hewitt paid handsome tribute to the Institute’s former and current directors, before adding as an afterthought ‘and, of course, we all remember Matthew Taylor and his excellent jokes’.
I was reminded of this last night when I spoke at the official launch of Counterpoint, the think-tank of the British Council. My speech offered three compelling accounts of how the world had changed and what now needs to be done. At the end, there was a polite ripple of applause as the relieved audience looked round for a fresh glass of wine. As I inched towards the exit, someone came over to me and grabbed me by the hand. ‘Thank you so much for your speech’ he said, ‘it was so fast!’
Now today, as I write, I am at Jesus College, Cambridge, attending the Rustat Conference on the Future of Democracy. This small-ish roundtable (actually rectangular, but you know what I mean) event features presentations by some of the country’s leading political theorists and … me! I have, of course, done no preparation; indeed, all I have to cling to – like a piece of driftwood in choppy seas – is an idea. It is this: modern representative democracy, as it is practised in England, is based on a false metaphor – that of consumerism. We think the task of democracy is to give us what we want, the customer is always right. In contrast, I want to argue that representative democracy is actually much more about trying to agree what we can’t have and coming to accept the reasons why. This, after all, is the question posed by the public spending deficit and by the even bigger challenge of reducing our national carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. But deciding how to make sacrifices is much harder than promising everyone goodies. The way we think about and undertake representative democracy is incapable of supporting this kind of discussion.
So, I think I will argue, an important question is how do we make democracy better able to foster an informed and engaging conversation about trade-offs and sacrifices. Here, in headline, are four ways we might do it:
- Radically devolve power because it is simply easier to understand and manage trade-offs locally (partly because citizens can better see how changes in their own behaviour can improve the terms of the trade-off).
- Use proper citizens’ juries to advise on two or three major policies every year.
- Have a significant part of the upper chamber chosen by a ballot of members of the general public. This is so citizens get to see how difficult decision making can be for people like them (and not just for the despised class of professional politicians).
- Finally, require the publication in full of policy advice to ministers so that we get used to understanding that every policy option has a downside and involves a real political choice (and try desperately to persuade responsible broadcasters and newspapers to treat this new openness fairly).
Goodness know how it will go down in this august setting, but I’ll be sure to make some jokes and talk quickly!
The end of an education era?
Next month, at the RSA, I am delivering the annual lecture of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. The speech is in draft form but it contains the observation that the framework of central prescription, repeated pupil assessment and inspection has run out of steam. So, I welcome the briefing ahead of next week’s schools white paper that the Government is moving away from the centrally prescribed literacy and numeracy strategy.
The strategies are expensive, unpopular with many teachers, and are no longer delivering any significant gains. But, even as we bury a key part of the centralising approach which has been dominant ever since the 1988 Education Reform Act, it would be wrong to conclude that the whole thing was a terrible mistake.
As I have written before, even the best designed public policy tends to end in failure. This is for three related reasons:
• The world changes. To take one example, single parent benefits which were introduced in the sixties to meet the needs of a small and disadvantaged group took on a different meaning and massively greater cost with the growth of one parent families.
• Even as policies succeed, they change incentives and generate unintended consequences. It has been alleged that in successfully meeting its four hour maximum waiting target for casualty departments, the NHS has encouraged staff to attend to the needs of people with minor problems who have been waiting three and a half hours rather than the more severe needs of patients who have only just arrived.
• But the most important reason is that if a policy succeeds, the problem it was designed to address has, by definition, diminished. In 1988, and still in 1997, there was a very long tail of terribly underperforming schools and teachers. In my own borough of Lambeth an OFSTED report in the mid 1990s not only found many pupils in higher years of primary schools unable to read or write but that teachers seemed unaware of, or impervious to, the fact. The number of profoundly failing schools is now much lower and – as a result of the changes over the last decade – we have the systems to identify failing schools and turn them round. At the same time parents have become better informed and more demanding and the quality and preparedness of teachers joining the profession has improved.
As any manager knows, tight systems of regulation are more effective at tackling under performance than they are at fostering high performance. So as the system improves the centralising approach produces diminishing returns.
Some time ago I wrote an essay about public service reform for the think tank IPPR. Drawing on the work of Christopher Hood I offered a cultural theory (yes, back to that again!) perspective arguing that reform strategies could be broadly mapped against cultural theory’s four rationalities: the hierarchical, the egalitarian, the individuals and the fatalist. I argued that the swings between these different ways of thinking about change can explain as much of the history of public service reform as the ideologies of the Governments in charge.
Next week’s white paper will signal the end to a long wave of hierarchical management in favour of a more egalitarian emphasis on devolved control, professional values and institutional collaboration. It is the right thing to do. But one day, when this new approach has, in turn, run out of steam, there will be another new start.
The recession will suit the ‘Provvy’ – should we be worried?
One aspect of the recession is the growth of family debt. The Council of Mortgage Lenders predicts that half a million households will fall into serious mortgage arrears in 2009. But, as with all major aspects of the downturn, it is amongst the least well off that the greatest pain is felt.
Poor families were unattractive to banks before the crisis so they’re probably not even allowed in the building now – which is why many poor people fall back on money lending. The biggest provider of what is referred to as ‘home credit’ is a large, profitable and entirely legitimate company: Provident Financial. But ‘the Provvy’, as it is known to its customers, is constantly subject to criticism: For its door-to-door, week-to-week, small cash loans it charges annualised interest rates of up to 200%.
When I was at ippr we had events sponsored by Provident Financial and we came in for concerted criticism from various charities that saw the company’s agents as nothing more than loan sharks who had somehow managed to gain respectability. In contrast, the company itself claims to provide a unique and valued service to customers whom the rest of the financial service industry ignores.
In the end, I decided that the only way I could get to the bottom of this was to spend a day shadowing one of the thousands of Provvy agents as she went on her rounds in an estate in South London.
I was impressed. The collector had been working the same round for years. She knew all her customers well. One mother had just seen her husband put in prison, another was suffering from cancer, a third had agoraphobia. Many people weren’t able to pay that week. The agent accepted their excuses while encouraging them to start chipping away at their loan as soon as possible. One family asked for more money on top of the £50 already outstanding but the agent gently refused, advising them not to get too deep in debt. I ended up a convert. The Provident was providing a unique service to people with difficult lives who desperately needed the personal touch. The customers knew that the £30 loan today would have to be gradually paid back over the following weeks as £35 or £40, but they preferred this to burning up a credit card or begging a bank. The borrowers may have had impossibly tough lives but they weren’t the hapless or ignorant victims often portrayed by the Provident’s critics.
I wrote up my experiences, but it cut no ice with the Provvy’s critics who claimed I had been brainwashed. So, I was fascinated to read a largely unreported piece of research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The Foundation had set out to explore whether a not for profit, credit union type, home loan service could be created with significantly lower interest rates than those charged by the regulated commercial sector. In essence the answer was ‘no’. What’s more, given that, even on the most optimistic of estimates, a not for profit service would have to charge interest rates of 125%, there was little enthusiasm from the third sector to provide the service.
Our social ambition should be for all families to have the economic know how and financial stability to get conventional banking services. But as long as the mainstream banking sector fails to cater for the very poor, and as long as the Government’s Social Fund is too restrictive and bureaucratic for many short term family needs, then the choice is between the Provvy and unregulated loan sharks.
Not all Provvy agents are as good as the one I spent time with, and given what they do and who their customers are, the company deserves and should welcome close scrutiny (not to mention savage mockery [avoid if squeamish]).
But the JRF report (and my suspicion is it will make little difference to the Provvy’s critics) confirms how much easier it is to attack the problems with an existing service than provide a viable alternative.
Why migration policy is never right
My old friends at ippr have a report out today on immigration. In typical ippr style the work is balanced, evidence based and progressively inclined. It comes to the conclusion that there is no net impact on the existing workforce as a result of immigration. However, all the evidence upon which the project was based comes from before the recession, so I fear it won’t cut much mustard with the kind of people who have been protesting against the hiring of foreign workers.
Coincidentally, a former ippr colleague of mine, who now works for the US based Migration Policy Institute has asked me, ahead of a seminar they are hosting in London next month, to lay out a cultural theory approach to migration policy.
I’m not sure I am entirely equipped for the job (either in terms of expertise in migration or cultural theory) but here goes:
Migration policy is tough because it has to deal with powerful forces and perspectives along each of the three active paradigms of cultural theory: individualism, egalitarianism and hierarchy.
Hierarchists (by which in this case we generally mean Government agencies) want a migration policy which is orderly and leads to predictable and manageable outcomes. Moreover, they feel a great deal of pressure to show that they can engineer and deliver such a policy. This helps to explain why Governments not only tend to talk tough on migration but also consistently exaggerate their control over migration and its outcomes. The state’s frailty in the face of the uncontrollability and complexity of migration threatens to undermine its credibility not just in this area but more broadly.
This is because migration is an issue which stirs huge egalitarian feeling. People often associate egalitarian instincts (an emphasis on ideas of fairness, shared values plus a suspicion of change driven by the state and markets) with the left, but in this case egalitarianism is most often expressed in hostility to migration. Progressives and champions of the rights of migrants and refugees do attempt to counter this with their own appeal to common values and grass roots mobilisation (see, for example, the brave and creative campaign, Simple Acts, advanced by the Refugee Week Partnership, which includes he Refugee Council and a number of other agencies) but these appeals lack the intensity of nationalism or tribalism.
The individualist approach to migration combines the desire of migrants themselves to improve their lot (or in the case of refugees – to save their lives) with the need of business to have as broad a labour market as possible from which to select employees. Thus, individualism, which is normally associated with a right of centre perspective is, in the case of migration, the foundation for what looks like the progressive stance on this issue – the one argued by the RSA itself in a report published during the time of my predecessor.
Migration policy is complex for many reasons but a cultural theory analysis highlights why this is such a ‘wicked’ issue. Egalitarians, individualists and hierarchists share powerful and apparently irreconcilable views which invert traditional alignments between ideology and models of change.
A successful migration policy has to find the aspects of each perspective which can be reconciled with the others. How can hierarchists accept a policy that recognises and works within the limitations of state regulation? How can egalitarians be engaged in shaping a realistic and humane migration policy that can be reconciled with cohesion and local fairness? And how can individualist aspirations be met in ways which recognise that for many people migration has few obvious benefits.
As usual, cultural theory offers no answers but it does force us to address the really tough questions. As the recession deepens, the tendency of hierarchists to over-claim, and egalitarian to express fear and suspicion, will grow. But people’s desire for a better life will not go away, nor will the globalising effects of modern business and technology. At a time like this a workable and progressive migration policy requires exceptional insight and courage from those who frame discourse, develop policy, and live with its consequences.
2020 Public Services Commission – and some nerve wracking memories
My busy Tuesday ended with the launch of the 2020 Public Services Trust, an independent, all-party inquiry which we are hosting here at the RSA and on which I sit as a Commissioner. Having Times columnist Camilla Cavendish in the chair helped compensate for the rather white, middle-aged, male feel of the panel (and, yes, that does include me).
Originally, the 18 month time scale for the Commission was designed with the idea in mind of reporting around the time of the next General Election. But now it fits neatly with the point at which public services will experience a massive deceleration in revenue and deep cuts in capital allocations. This is a vital turning point for public services and provides a good focal point for our deliberations. Anyway, I suspect that next spring is now the most likely election date.
Personally, I will be relieved if we are not publishing at election time. I will never forget being woken at 6.00 in the morning on 16 May 2001 with the news that the Guardian had splashed with Labour’s secret plan to privatise public services, a plan apparently based on the recommendation of the IPPR Commission on Public Private Partnerships. As the Director of IPPR, I was at least relieved of my worries about how we were going to generate interest in our learned but rather dull and worthy Commission report!
I still don’t know who gave the draft report to Patrick Wintour. I was told the leak was authorised by Labour strategists worried that the 2001 Manifesto was insufficiently New Labour. Unsurprisingly, elements in the Labour Party and trade unions were apoplectic with rage.
Later that day I got a call from a friend in Millbank with a warning:
‘I overheard one of Gordon’s people telling a journalist to try to do you and the Commission in. Be prepared’
Ten minutes later a call came from a journalist. ‘About this Commission, I see it was part funded by firms that sell private services to the public sector. How do you respond to the charge that you were paid to call for privatisation?’
I won’t reveal the name of the journalist as I don’t bear a grudge and we are now friendly acquaintances. Anyway, as he’s a Sunderland fan, I will be hoping to get more morsels of revenge when the Baggies go to the Stadium of Light on Saturday!
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