Thank you for a very helpful post which pulls together a lot of current thinking. Not sure if you’ve seen an essay by Hugh Mackay on real communities
http://tiny.cc/LhwdS – he also talks about social infrastructure, saying that while grand visions of society have their place, it’s in the neighbourhood that we join the dots.

Given it’s Christmas I also wanted to say a big thank you for all your posts this year. Apologies for not posting more comments but I have found your posts both stimulating and of practical help in my work. You’re example encouraged me to start my own blog, too, – which may or may not be a good thing!

John

However, the trouble is too much thinking about “good” soon leads to thinking about “purpose”. That’s when I’m glad it’s almost christmas and I can forget these dizzying thoughts.

(Long-time lurker, driven to comment in case you think local govt is non-sexy )

1) Decentralising service provision increases the variation in the service people receive – which is something our political landscape does not appear in favour of – all my life newspapers have been filled with articles about “Postcode lotteries” in health and education, not to mention the evergreen strand about refuse collection on either side of a council boundary… This attitude can change, but it’s important to realise how deeply entrenched it is and what a powerful driver of recentralisation it will be, the first time things get hairy at a mutual and it’s reported in the press.

2) The basic underpinning of all this “greater self-reliance and civic activism” is a belief that we can get back to getting decent quantities of “free work” out of people to maintain their own communities (as was apparently the case in the past.) However, there’s some serious unanswered questions here:

a) The estimates I’ve seen of “civic activism and self-reliance” (CASR) in the past seem rather variable, there are stunning examples which we’d like to emulate and then, in other places, the picture is less attractive – do we really understand the landscape of factors underlying “civic activism”? (I’d argue that we have most of the pieces to understand it, but there’s a lot of ideology which leads to a lot of handwaving in a lot of the proposals I’ve seen.)

b) One factor we do know underpinned a lot of CASR was an entirely different relationship between the population and work. Rates of formal employment (having to clock in for the boss) were overall much lower (mainly due to fewer women in the workplace) and crucially employers had a generally different relationship with geographical communities – which led them to enable communities to use spare resources (both human and otherwise.)

Now one can argue that with the increasing work capacity of people at retirement age, plus the expected increase in unemployment from the financial crisis we’ll have a pool of volunteers to make these mutuals run… but I think the case needs making in serious terms – because without the pool of volunteers you’ll achieve little more than breaking up the big monolithic organisations into smaller ones. That might be a win in itself – but it won’t do much about engagement…

I think I’m like most people in the working population, I do some things for my community, but I’m fairly sure I do less than my father did at my age – but equally I’m fairly sure that my employer wouldn’t give me the flexibility/support that his did for community engagement.

Think beyond narrow binaries – local vs central, big vs little state, individual vs society. None are particularly helpful

Be open about the trade offs – some difficult decisions must be made. For example, more pooling might require more data-sharing; behaviour-shaping might require compulsion or paternalism; long-term sustainable outcomes might skew short term results

Question assumptions about fairness– according to MORI, the public tend to think of fairness in public services as universalism: ‘the same for everyone’. Some of the trends you articulate would seriously challenge this.

Recognise the importance of collective capacity and social cohesion. All of your trends involve forms of collective behaviour. But personalisation and choice can also challenge this. I think you are right to set out these trends as a corrective.

some of these issues are being worked through by the 2020 Public Services Trust at http://www.2020pst.org (but you know that already!)