Big Society – Fair Society
Generally leadership campaigns are good for political parties, but if you want to know why the longer Labour’s goes on, the more damage it is doing you need only read this reaction from Ed Miliband to David Cameron’s Big Society speech today. Ahead of actually hearing the speech he accused the Coalition of:
“Cynically attempting to dignify its cuts agenda by dressing up the withdrawal of support with the language of reinvigorating civic society“.
I’m sure this will go down well with the dwindling band of Labour activists and trade union paymasters. It may come across less well with a public which polls suggest is at least open minded about the Big Society, and in Liverpool which is hosting the speech. The Labour run City Council has successfully bid to be a ‘vanguard community’ taking forward the idea of the Big Society. And Liverpool isn’t the only Labour Council using the ideas of the Big Society.
I have just agreed to become a member of the Lambeth Co-operative Council Commission. From its well-deserved dire reputation in the eighties and nineties, Lambeth is now one of Labour’s most dynamic and successful councils. Here is a quote from its impressive leader Steve Reed in the introduction to the prospectus for the Co-operative Council:
‘ The first challenge relates to the type of relationship we need to create between citizen and public services. Increasingly communities and the state are recognizing that the public sector cannot do it all and that citizens need to be part of the solution to the challenges our increasingly complex and diverse communities face’
If the Coalition is guilty of ‘cynicism’, it looks like Councillor Reed has been well and truly duped! I might not use the ‘Spartist’ language of Mr Miliband but I have my own concerns about the Big Society idea. I won’t go into all this again, except to say that I do think Mr Cameron missed a messaging trick today. To underline his commitment to ‘progressive ends’ and to help counter scepticism, the Prime Minister could have had a stronger redistributive element.
In simple terms the message could be that advantaged communities have a great deal of resource in terms of money, skills, networks (to take one example middle class pensioners are healthier and live well longer than their poor counterparts). So the task involved in mobilizing those communities is primarily to create the opportunities for that capacity to be expressed.
But in disadvantaged communities the Big Society task is more difficult and more resource intensive. Here the need is to not just to tap into the ‘hidden wealth’ of these communities (and hidden wealth there is as the RSA Connected Communities project is finding) but also to provide the infrastructure of resources and skills needed to make the Big Society aspiration realistic and rewarding to those communities.
In essence the Big Society message should be ‘middle class people will be expected to do more, working class communities will be given the support to do more’. There will still be plenty of criticism, but such a message (using more nuanced language than this, of course) would make it even more difficult for pragmatic progressives like yours truly to heed the gloomy siren call of the likes of Mr Miliband.
Please read this – it might just be important
I know some of my blog posts are a bit silly or obscure but – if even if I say it myself – this one is worth reading …
In the next few weeks, the RSA will be publishing two reports: a first year conclusion of our Connected Communities project and an RSA pamphlet on social networks and public policy by the distinguished economist, Paul Ormerod.
I have read both reports in draft. They are fascinating and make an important contribution to the Big Society debate. Two general points stand out:
- Social networks are important; understanding and using them can make a significant contribution to tapping into civic capacity and meeting public policy goals.
- Social networks are complex and the way they operate unpredictable.
Together, these findings suggest a major shift in the methodology of public policy. Traditional policy interventions – particularly in relation to social problems – have these characteristics:
- They are large scale and expensive.
- They aim for relatively marginal improvement in outcomes e.g. a few percent lower unemployment or higher pupil attainment.
- They seek to minimise risk through systems of regulation, audit, and accountability.
But these design features do not fit the characteristics of social networks interventions, which are:
- They will usually fail.
- Occasionally small interventions will have major impact through contagion effects.
- Sometimes interventions will have an impact very different to those planned (sometimes good, sometimes not).
An emphasis on social networks changes not just the focus and design of public policy, but the whole way we think about success and failure.
Eureka!
As many current and former colleagues will confirm, it is a dangerous business presenting me with emerging research findings. Always eager to discover something newsworthy, and better at big concepts than methodological detail, I am prone to seize on tentative findings and turn them into a massive breakthrough in human understanding.
The dismayed research team has then to deal as best they can with the fallout as I charge around town, telling anyone who cares to listen that we have made a great discovery while each time expanding just a little bit further on what I was originally told. Within a short period any resemblance between the modest claim supported by the research and my towering hyperbole is mere coincidence.
So, I sensed a nervous frisson run through the team when yesterday I seized on a very early finding of our Connected Communities project, being undertaken in New Cross Gate. The researchers are now analysing the nearly 200 interviews which aim to map the social networks of local residents. The results confirm starkly the hypothesis that many people in disadvantaged areas have very limited social networks – for example a significant minority say not only that they don’t know anyone in authority but they don’t know anyone who knows anyone in authority.
But the finding upon which I alighted related to who and what are the main foci for networks. Not only are these centres – as we might predict - local institutions, like schools or Sure Start, or local public servants, like postmen or wardens, but a particular kind of person. It appears that those who say they most value neighbourliness are also those to whom most people connect.
This immediately put me in mind of two recent statements made at recent RSA Great Room events. First, there was David Halpern telling us that what appears to shape levels of happiness within nations is not so much their material circumstances as what they say most matters. So, for example, the Danes are the happiest people in the world partly because, uniquely, they say that ‘love’ is the most important component of contentment (unlike the miserable Bulgarians who say it is money). Second, there was the comment by the author of ‘Connected’, Nicholas Christakis, that there is a significant genetic component (around 40%) to explain why some people are better social networkers than others.
As the research team tried in vain to get me engaged with others aspects of their findings I was already air-born with my flight of fancy…..
It appears that some people bothvalue social networking (it is what makes them happy) and are adept at it. These people are potentially a massive resource for any community. There is no reason to believe that this character trait will be less prevalent in deprived communities than anywhere else. However, it may, for a whole variety for reasons, be the case that these people are not in positions where the community as a whole can best capitalise on these skills. (Indeed it may be that some of those in key formal positions of influence – the ones we tend to assume are the most important – are not themselves well-endowed with networking skills.)
Therefore, it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.
You might think this is a bold and interesting enough claim to be going on with, especially as it is based on analysing only about a quarter of the returns. But surely we can go that one step further. Doesn’t our research offer convincing proof of ‘the people gene’? If only we could find the people carrying the gene, support them, listen to them, make them be the leaders they were born to be, we could transform the resilience and capacity of every community.
The left would rejoice as deprivation was tackled, the right would celebrate the evidence that it is not in the actions of the state but in the capacities of civil society that the path to social renewal lies. The RSA would be seen to have been responsible for one of the most powerful findings in modern social science and its (surprisingly young-looking) Chief Executive would become a household name, winner of awards, friend of Presidents, feted at home and abroad for his leadership and wisdom, a regular on the One Show …..
‘Nurse, I think it may be time for Mr Taylor’s medicine.’
Public services – the stakes are high
The effectiveness of public services is vital to our social fabric and important to our economic competitiveness. Public service policy will feature heavily in the forthcoming General Election campaign, with debate overshadowed by the fiscal deficit.
Looking at this context, surveying innovative practice in public services and reading through the ideas being offered by the parties and their think tank advisors, a number of key trends can be seen emerging. They are:
Resource pooling: After years of discussing better joining up of information, budgets and back office services we will reach a tipping point. The Total Place pilots are already pointing the way. This will be made more possible by technological advances – better data capture and greater interoperability of systems and made more necessary by the squeeze on spending.
The search for legitimacy: Public agencies will continue to search for ways of engaging the public in decision making and service design. This will be made more possible by new techniques for engagement ranging from citizens juries and on-line deliberation to neighbourhood decentralisation. It will be made more necessary by continued public disenchantment from traditional forms of representative democracy (including our ailing poltical parties) and the need to legitimise difficult spending decisions.
Behaviour shaping: Policy makers and service mangers will continue to explore how public investment can be better used to shape the values and behaviours of citizens. This will involve services turning outwards and acting as a catalyst for change in the community. This will be made more necessary as, without encouraging greater self reliance and civic activism, services will not be able to meet growing needs. It will be made more possible as we learn about what shapes behaviour and social norms.
Social infrastructure: The goal of behaviour shaping is already leading innovative public services to try to find out more about what makes communities more or less resilient and resourceful. This will be made more necessary as we see the consequences of weaker social bonds, for example more isolated older people. It will be made more possible as projects like the RSA’s Connected Communities develop ways for agencies to map social networks and develop community tools to strengthen those networks.
From spending on to spending by: Personal budgets for social care are often cited as one of the best existing examples of innovation. Recently, reports from both right and left of centre think tanks have stressed the scope for turning public services into co-operatives or mutuals. These policies have in common the idea that instead of agencies spending money on services for disadvantaged people, clients are able to be the managers of their own services. The potential benefits are more responsive services, empowerment of service users and even scope for welfare budgets to provide the seed capital for emerging social enterprises. This is made necessary by the desire and the need for disadvantaged people to have more control. It is made possible by better, more accessible, data providing information about the cost of existing interventions and helping individuals and organisations to argue that they could use funding more effectively.
Taken overall, these trends see the core role of the state move from service provider to decision maker and strategic enabler. It will not be a smooth process of change ; there will be many pitfalls and dilemmas on the way. A key factor will be the degree of decentralisation. If local leaders are able to experiment then the welfare system as a whole can learn fast about what works (and what doesn’t).
If we get this right we will see wave upon wave of public sector innovation resulting in a smaller but more effective and strategic state alongside a deeper public commitment to collective decision making and social responsibility. If we get it wrong – if, for example, budget reductions are too extreme and too indiscriminate or if Whitehall reacts to tough choices and public concern by centralising control – then we are in for a decade of retrenchment, resentment and a hollowing out of the public sphere.
The stakes are high. The major parties are on their way to this vision but none yet has shown quite the clarity or courage needed. It will certainly be interesting, and even possibly electorally salient, to see who commands this debate in the next few months.
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