Policy design for resourcefulness
The RSA design team has been undertaking a project with the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) exploring how the police can be better at engaging and satisfying the public. Yesterday we held an event to discuss the research emerging from the project, much of it generated by work on the ground in Peterborough (this is an early example of our broader collaboration with the city).
Chief Constable Peter Neyroud is the thoughtful and articulate head of the NPIA and he provided closing remarks at the event. One of his themes was the need to move from a tokenistic, box-ticking approach to public engagement, which often features police officer turning up to virtually empty consultation meetings, to a more open, substantive and creative dialogue.
Having spent many, many years observing and participating in public engagement processes I offered the meeting what I have come to see as the key success factors for engagement.
They are:
Accessibility – engagement has to be in a form which fits with people’s lives and, if possible, it needs to feel like it could be enjoyable. A very small number of people may like nothing more than sitting in a cold church hall listening to a long and complex report from a council officer, but many more would rather do something more informal and enjoyable or simply something easier, for example on the web.
Efficacy – people need to feel they have something to offer. This is why schools – like our own Academy – find it easier to get parents involved in social and fund raising activities than in discussions about the curriculum. Most disadvantaged people have a strong sense of efficacy in their own lives (it’s not easy to live on a low income) but it declines dramatically when they engage with ‘the authorities’. So engagement needs to start with what people know and experience, not with the information or communication needs of the public agency.
Genuine choices – people need to feel that the engagement will offer them real choices either individually or collectively and that these choices will feed into decisions and actions. Otherwise engagement is either pointless or even counter-productive.
Positive sum-making engagement work is not all about the responsibility of the agencies hosting the process. It is also about offering a challenge or opportunity to those being engaged. The question being posed needs not simply to be how could the agency provide a more responsive service, but how could the authorities and citizens work more effectively together to achieve better outcomes from, what will be in the future, fixed or shrinking public spending.
This is all incredibly obvious. But how much public engagement really meets these simple success criteria? The problem often is that the policy framework is determined at the outset (often constrained by national targets on regulation) and the engagement is then tacked on.
Our design team here is working with the idea of design for resourcefulness – the issue being how can designers not just try to solve people’s problems but enable people to solve problems and create resources themselves? In many areas public policy needs more consciously to be designed with this idea in mind. How can the policy leave the space and flexibility for service users and citizens to ‘hack’ policy and redesign it for local purposes?
By the way, this is a lesson we have learnt the hard way. Our Fellowship Council (meeting for the second time today) and other active Fellows like the idea of our Fellows’ Charter but they want to open it up to much greater involvement so that what emerges has genuinely been crafted by the Fellowship itself. Of course, we have agreed and the Council will be exploring today how to make this happen.
Time to celebrate integration in Northern Ireland?
I enjoyed my trip to Belfast as a guest of the Northern Ireland Chartered Institute of Housing and RSA Ireland. Belfast city centre felt lively and interesting with its mix of modern shops, historic buildings, atmospheric bars plus an international market and big wheel. As an inner Londoner I envy people who live in cities – like Belfast, Edinburgh or Brighton – close to striking countryside.
My analysis of social segregation in Northern Ireland seemed to go down OK. It certainly spurred an interesting conversation in an audience made up of Fellows and other people working in various ways to tackle the problem.
There was general agreement that integration is best advanced though an incremental and multi-faceted strategy. This should involve exploring how religiously affiliated groups could be supported to be champions of change, how to encourage not just more mixed housing but also other integrated public, social and commercial spaces and how to back the pro-integration message of SDLP Minister for Social Development Margaret Ritchie as she tries to garner support among Executive colleagues in other parties.
An incremental model requires steady pressure to make a difference over time. Lots of good practice has already emerged in Northern Ireland. The question is how to knit this together into a strategy and campaign that can achieve irreversible change. With this in mind, two related ideas emerged in our discussions.
First, the integrationist cause could be aided by a high profile annual review of progress towards community cohesion. This ‘one community’ report would be jointly authored and supported by a range of organisations. It would collate and examine key statistics on levels of segregation. It would provide case studies of successful integration and celebrate those who had taken a lead. And, of course, the report would also identify areas of concern and priorities for state and civic action.
Then, linked to the report, a number of existing, relatively low profile awards for good practice on community cohesion could be brought together in a single annual gala dinner. This star-studded event would give out ‘one community Oscars’ to politicians, community leaders, employers, sporting and cultural figures who had gone the extra mile to promote understanding and integration. Imagine, for example, the Celtic and Rangers football captains jointly giving out the award for the best use of sport to promote community relations. As well as being a huge annual celebration of progress towards integration (after all, why should the sectarians have the best tunes?) the dinner would aim to generate money to provide seed corn funding for new initiatives.
Of course, the RSA cannot itself do either of these things, but with the backing of RSA Trustee Lord Richard Best (who is chairing the CIH inquiry into housing in Northern Ireland), I said on Friday that if a group of Fellows commit to bringing together various organisations to develop these ideas then we will see how RSA HQ might provide some small scale funding or admin support in the development stage. To start the ball rolling I will earmark the CIH fee for my speech for this project.
To overcome segregation will take a generation, after all 98% of social housing tenants in Belfast now live in neighbourhoods dominated by people of one religious tradition. As people in Northern Ireland who have been working heroically on this issue for years know, there is no easy answer. Indeed – as I argued on Friday – to push too hard on one lever could even be counter-productive.
It may be the annual report and gala dinner are already happening or that they aren’t great ideas, but one way or another I hope we will be able to support our Fellows in contributing to the vital goal of greater social integration.
As well as posting any views here, RSA Fellows in Ireland have also been having a discussion on segregation and other issues – again readers are very welcome to join in.
SIT STOP – small, but perfectly formed
As you may be aware from previous blogs, we have been having a lot of discussion of late – with staff, with Fellows, and externally – about what constitutes a Fellows’ project. Well, here is a small but perfectly formed example sent to me by one of our Fellows, Wendy Tansey.
SIT STOP grew out of the RSA Coffeehouse Challenge and was a double Challenge award winner. Three local Fellows got together in Richmond and organised a public meeting, to which 30 people came along. They chose a theme for their challenge of ‘accessibility of the borough’ and had a very simple core concept, championed by a small group of voluntary indivuals: providing more seats for people in public places. SIT STOP is solely about getting shops and businesses to make a seat available to anyone who needs it and to display the SIT STOP logo to make the public aware of this resource.
The underlying intent is to make Richmond Borough accessible to as many people as possible. So people who are elderly, pregnant, disabled or just not feeling very good that day can find a seat to rest whilst out and about… without feeling any pressure to purchase or consume. This small but practical and excellent idea has now:
• Been positively supported by Richmond Borough Council which has provided funding to match the RSA’s two awards and also given other support by providing training from their Community Toilets Scheme.
• Been adopted by Starbucks (original sponsors of the Coffeehouse Challenge) who operate the scheme in the all their coffee shops in the Borough.
• Received supported from 34 local businesses, which have been enthusiastic about the scheme, with no significant problems being reported.
• Been taken up beyond the Borough.
• Been endorsed by Boris Johnson, who thinks the scheme should be adopted across London in parallel with the Community Toilets Scheme.
So, what a great result – and what a perfect example of an RSA Fellows’ project: starting small, but coming up with practical solutions to a problem that can be replicated elsewhere. If you want to find out more, and have a go at getting the scheme going in your area, SIT STOP can be contacted via their website.
And, as some of you may have heard at our recent AGM, from the spring we will be setting up a ‘venture fund’ to provide seed funding to Fellows’ projects like this – so do watch out for further announcements.
Finally, thanks again Wendy, for letting us know about this.
Renewable energy in the South West – a role for the RSA?
The independent Committee on Climate Change reports that the Government is a long way from having any credible account of how it is going to reach its target of cutting carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. This comes after Professor David MacKay, the Government’s Chief Energy Scientist pointed out last week that the UK exports up to half its energy use through its reliance on imported industrial goods. Meanwhile hardly a week seems to pass without more bad news about the impact of climate change.
These were the issues that provided the backdrop to the Eden Forum which I attended at the end of last week. I wasn’t there for the closing sessions as I wanted to get back for my younger son’s first football match of the season (he won 11-0, as you ask). But a strong view has begun to emerge about the direction the Forum – a collection of environmentalists, politicians and political strategists, writers and business people – might take its future work. The Forum had heard from community groups based in the South West how hard it still is to cut through the economic and bureaucratic hurdles to micro generation, despite the scope for local energy which exists in that wet and windy part of the country and the incentives the Government has tried to create through Renewable Obligation Certificates.
James Cameron, Executive Director of Climate Change Capital and a long time friend of the RSA, discussed with the Forum the idea of some kind of South West energy bond which could provide much needed capital for putative micro generators of renewable energy, while also offering a decent return to investors as the price attached to energy production and carbon emissions inexorably rises. There are many things that would need to be in place for such a bond to get off the ground. One might be to demonstrate a real commitment to invest among the people of the region.
I don’t know what came out of the last session (maybe someone who was there can add a comment) but if this idea was taken forward could there be a challenge here for RSA Fellows in the South West? Could they use their networks to sign up thousands of local people willing, at least in principle, to become small investors in such a bond (by the way, many small scale example of funds like this exist around the country)? Ultimately, a regional bond will require the backing of major institutional investors but showing that thousands of small investors are committed could be very powerful in getting the backing of bigger funds, Government agencies and energy utilities.
An idea from Eden
I’m at an event for the great and good (and me) at the Eden Project. Some great people here, most of whom have done important things to try to promote sustainability. Unfortunately, we’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to agree how to work together. We’ve decided now on a kind of Dragon’s Den process in which we break up into groups, develop an idea and try to sell it to the rest of the group. My contribution has been to say that we should focus on what value this particular group can add to all the types of activity taking place already. I might do an extra post tomorrow to report how it’s gone.
The high point so far was a small exhibition of community based projects here in the South West. They ranged from the Transition Movement, which is now global but began in the UK town of Totnes, to a really impressive community regeneration project in Falmouth. Listening to the exhibitors talking about their projects I was reminded of my current obsession: encouraging the RSA Fellowship to work together to make a difference in the world. I was really pleased at the commitment to this idea of the first meeting of the Fellowship Council on Wednesday but the difficult question is, of course, how?
We have tried various approaches that get Fellows together to develop projects but while there are good ideas, the problem is that there is still too big a gap between the good intentions and the capacity to do something about it. So, I wondered whether a city network might try something rather like the exhibition here at the Eden Forum - inviting a number of innovative community projects to present to a group of Fellows identifying the ways their work could develop or be replicated.
This could provide the concrete challenge that might spark Fellows to think about how we can combine our resources to make a difference. To do something like this the city network would need to be confident that enough Fellows would come with a real openness to taking ideas forward. To be fair, we would probably have to cover the costs of the groups coming to the event and making their presentations – but this shouldn’t be much.
Could this be a runner? Is there a city group out there that might take it forward and if they did what support could we give from John Adam Street? (By the way it’s only my idea, so I’m more than happy if colleagues back at HQ comment – even to say it wouldn’t work!)
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