The State vs the Citizens

Increasingly I have become fascinated by the exercise of power by public bodies. At a recent talk on commissioning and personalisation a member of the audience suggested that as long as the local authority is by far and away the biggest purchaser of care related services it will make it very hard for personal budget holders and self funders to go direct to the ‘market’ as the ‘market’ will remain underdeveloped. For all the emphasis on user choice and citizenship models it appears that for now and maybe for a long time to come it will be the professional gift model that prevails.

The case seemed to be that public bodies such local authorities had become the ‘Tesco’s’ of each local area either delivering services themselves or purchasing services from a few larger suppliers at the expense of developing a real market place.  For prospective purchasers of services it can mean a very small or non existent market to choose from. As one person commented, “people have the money but bugger all to buy”.

At another recent talk led by social services staff there was much talk of moving from a ‘professional gift’ model to a ‘people first/ citizenship’ model. I expect social services departments up and down the country are giving these talks. What if what they are presenting is all show and no substance? What if they have no intention to substantially change how things are done, citing for example issues of safeguarding as a major barrier? If choice for users is so limited, what do we do? One local authority officer, from Hampshire County Council, was keen to stress the scope for personal assistants and micro-providers to emerge and that he was focusing energies on this type of ‘business development’. An audience member seemed to believe that this was the exception as opposed to the rule.

The case for user choice and personalisation seems to be a strong one. There appear to be some very good case studies to back moves in this direction. It is said that there is no going back to the older models of institutionalised or top down care, but how far have we to travel to realise the new vision?

Radical Efficiency – is that the bigger picture?

In my most recent blog I was uncertain if there were a bigger picture driving our efficiency programme. A couple of days back colleagues alerted me to the launch of ‘Radical Efficiency’ – Is the bigger picture radical efficiency?

A colleague was recently tweeting about some effective hyper local sites including the East Dulwich Forum which has 15000 registered users and 3200 unique daily users and appears to be achieving results on the ground.

We recently hosted a network event for local artists and arts groups to promote the idea that they could get far more involved in how the arts is developed and delivered locally. Its inspiration was from ideas around co-production. Those involved in the network were keen to point out how poor marketing and promotion lessened the impact of all the work they had put in to recent arts festivals. For me it was a very small example of how we can fail in not utilizing our collective power rather maintaining a system that appears to rely too heavily on the ‘official’ to produce the results.

The recent publication ‘Radical Efficiency’ charts some case studies which appear to suggest what is possible by harnessing the power of the group with examples from the US, Australia, Rwanda, Brazil and UK. The example from Australia was of a scheme that trained community members to support fellow citizens in moments of mentaI crisis whilst the scheme in the US fostered a partnership between police officer and the community to map crime. I reflected to a colleague that we have a situation currently where colleagues within the local authority can complain about what is not happening but also be unwilling to support or allow anyone else to bring about any change – that cannot be good.

Is it the case that for too long officers have been part of organizations that inhibit collaboration and innovation whilst promoting silo working and the holding on to power/resources. Maybe this is part of the reason why despite the significant investments in recent years into public services we have not had the kinds of improvements envisaged because the culture of the organizations we expect to deliver these improvements are far removed from what our networked age demands.

The new coalition government appears to believe that the private as opposed to the public sector now need needs to take the lead however is it really a question of private vs public models or is it more to do with the culture and design of organizations – currently do our private and public organizations largely mirror one another?

Are our private organizations that efficient? Many fear that just letting the private sector in will lead to more price hikes for users, more greed, poorer service and the creation of monopolies and cartels which the commissioning bodies will find harder and harder to control. It will end up costing as much to manage the new system as any ‘saving’ the private sector may bring.

A friend was retelling stories about working in the ‘private sector’ and how poor management contributed to high staff turnover and a poorer experience for the customer  – is this the model, the private model that we will see increasingly take the place of the current public sector model? The model of businesses where work is low skilled and staff are dispensable. Businesses where mission and value statements are created for appearances and in actual fact mean nothing on the ‘shop floor’. Businesses where there are manuals galore on all aspects of the business but no real mechanism to audit or bring to account poor management and a poor culture.

Will we exchange one poor model with another? Or is there a third or fourth way? Is this where radical efficiency comes in? Ultimately it appears to be about harnessing the power of the group; supporting co-operative efforts that will really drive improvements. A workforce or users that feel empowered, involved or with a genuine stake in what is produced and delivered. Is that the bigger picture?

How the mighty fall?*

Currently the West is running a huge trade deficit with Asia which appears to have been building for many years now. Asia produces and the West borrows and consumes.

Recently walking around some designer shops a friend bought a bag costing £40 that had been made in China and looked as if it was made for £1. The reason the price was so inflated was the designer branding on the bag. Is this hubris the type we are told existed at the end of the Roman Empire?

If the west continues to shift manufacturing jobs to Asia we can’t buy their goods without getting into more debt. We are told that the system as it is currently set up is unsustainable.

Do the private businesses that we are told need to foster the recovery in this country realize this? Recently a businessman returned from China having collected travel products he had designed and made out in China to sell in the UK. His family business no longer makes anything in the UK and many jobs have been lost. He sees no reason not to use China to continue in business after all his family have got the contacts here and he wants to make money. Some economists argue that Germany and China need to consume more so that countries such as ours can export more.

If many businesses are doing the same will there be a longer term recovery for the UK? Another business helps ‘import’ workers from abroad to do the work it appears we no longer want to do – to staff the care homes and to be nurses. There appears to be good money in this form of recruitment – but again what is the longer term benefit for this economy as people here fail to take up these jobs and we import more and more.

We are told the new government’s industrial strategy is focused on deep sea water, space and wind farms and therefore the complaints at a cut to planned growth of Sheffield Forgemasters is misplaced. Maybe the new government is right to focus in this way but is the risk that it is high tech jobs for a skilled elite?

Some argue that the past two years have been wasted because all we have done is get ourselves into more debt without solving the underlying crisis. Opinions on what to do differ widely as do our actions. According to our new coalition government recent events in Greece changed everything. The 700 billion euro bailout for Greece seems to have triggered a Europe wide public spending cut with the following cuts (in billions of dollars) – Germany (80), UK (78), Italy (24) and Ireland (10).

Some say that the cuts will be worse than those under Margaret Thatcher, however, other commentators say that in fact under her premiership public spending went up. Some draw parallels with the post war period – there are two points on this 1) in the face of this new period of austerity are we the ‘grin and bear it’ Britain of the past? 2) After WW2 to get out of a very tight financial situation the UK borrowed heavily from the US (only paying off its last debt in 2002!).

The Canadian model is cited as a best practice case study. But are people right to emphasize how different the conditions in Canada and the World at that time were – Canada instituted cuts at a time when the world economy was resurfacing and maybe more importantly it had spent a long time preparing for the changes and secured wide spread support.

At a local level it can appear that we are like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Do we really know what we are doing as we set about our own local ‘efficiency’ programmes? Is there a bigger picture driving this or even a willingness to engage in a variety of methods to see what could be the best approach. Are we trying to fix a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the overall picture should look like? Is there a danger that in service by service assessments and cuts we forget the links between services and the link to some kind of bigger picture of where we are going?

*See ‘Losing Control’ by Stephen D. King – a book of insights and reflections on the West’s changing fortunes particularly vis a vis Asia and its emerging loss of a pre-eminent position in the World.

Privatise the profits and socialise the debts

5 trillion dollars…

In a recent addition of ‘This Week’, Digby Jones (former CBI Director General) talked about the key role of the City of London to our wealth creating hopes – how it had helped to provide a sizeable chunk of our tax take in the past and could do so again – and therefore we need to ensure we can encourage it do the same again. Michael Portillo on the same programme however struck a word of caution reminding Digby not to get too enamoured with the wealth creating capacity of the City by stating that over 5 trillion dollars had been lost in the value of pension funds as a result of the recent banking fuelled financial collapse. On a recent Question Time there was talk that we will need to earn our way out of  this financial hole and that private industry will be key. As one Question time participant asked, ‘weren’t the banks priviate?’

Triumph of political will over economic reality…

Paul Mason writing in the New Statesman outlines the case for how the Eurozone was constructed on a falsehood that is unravelling now under financial pressure. The falsehood that southern Europe was the ‘equal’ of northern Europe. With the crisis, northern Europe has to take the main risk for any default in return for imposing austerity measures. However, the real risk according to Mason is borne on the streets with the likelihood of increased social unrest (See Paul Mason in the New Statesman 24 May 2010).

Bronwen Maddox provides an overview in a recent edition of Prospects magazine (June 2010) on the potentially fatal mess the Eurozone now finds itself in as political will triumphed over economic reality. In hindsight it seems so clear that how could nations as distinct as Greece and Germany ever form economic union. Events unfolding may make the unthinkable happen.

In Mason’s piece, the suggestion is that unless the big exporting countries stimulate their own domestic demand to allow countries in fiscal crisis to export their way back to growth, Europe faces a double dip recession. The main implication of these comments from Mervyn King are that countries like Germany need to ask its consumers to borrow more and its voters to rubberstamp bailouts for southern Europe – very unlikely!

The big picture…

Larry Eliot (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/31/world-crisis-economic-experimentation) confronts head on the view that there can be any big picture explanations of the world. He suggests that since the demise of communism the west has had three competing belief systems – free market capitalism; Europe and environmentalism. Up until 2007 the belief was that markets worked best and the role of the state was to remove barriers to trade. The outcome of this belief system was to make a small elite very wealthy and growth was a bubble and indebtedness masqueraded as wealth. As someone recently said this has led to the unappetising situation where we have privatised profit and socialised debt.

If 2007 put pay to the view that markets will triumph, the current fiasco in the Eurozone seriously questions the belief, fuelled during the recent financial bubble, that bolting together a wide range of different countries together would be successful. He suggests that countries such as China and India are better able to exist without some kind of ‘meta narrative’ and more with a mixed economy approach that existed in the west in the heyday of social democracy. An approach of what works is what counts. I suspect that the success of China and India is in no small part to the strength and potential of their economies which is something the west appears to be fast losing.

Meanwhile, in a critique of recent times Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford refer to the emergence to power of a banking oligarchy that oversaw a huge transfer of wealth to the  rich and powerful. For those on more modest incomes to maintain their standard of living they increased their borrowing fuelling the current debt crisis. Meanwhile the Labour government encouraged more ‘entrepreneurialism’ through a more flexible labour market using short term contracts, agency work, sub-contracting and hiring the ‘self employed’. Between 1978-2008 4 million manufacturing jobs were lost whilst in the poorest communities a culture of failure has taken root where children expect nothing and give nothing in return. Governments and oppositions took tax revenues that were a fraction of the City’s totals in return for cheering the return of a new golden age of finance. (See Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford in the New Statesman 31 May 2010)

Going to the gym…

Recently a friend went to the gym. They were keen to get fit and wanted to go to a comfortable and clean gym (they had been to the public gym and pool but felt it was poorer quality and very unappealing). Membership is over £60 per month and if you pay more you can get someone to help you. As my friend readily admits left to do it alone it is unlikely they will persevere.

We would like to get people more active we know it could be good for people on many levels most importantly on health. The Chief Medical Officer suggests that 5 times 30 minutes is recommended for a healthy life but are we providing the right facilities, at a reasonable price with the necessary support to encourage participation. When we ask the inactive what are the barriers to participation facilities, price and encouragement are flagged up very highly. Has the cost and provision of many things that matter, like keeping physically active, seemingly gone beyond the reach of the many?

To remain competitive…

Take major industries like retail – you have to work full time to earn just over £1000 per month – where the hours are very long and on top of this you have to factor in travel and preparation time which can end up leaving you with a few hours each day of your own in which you need to relax, eat, wash and maintain your accommodation. Days off can be busy with family, friends, shopping or just sleeping to prepare for another week. I suspect this to be the reality for many and we are told it is what is needed because that is all the economy can afford if we are to remain competitive.

I don’t know what others experiences are, however, I am unsurprised now that retail staff can be so unhelpful and unsmiling? Recently on a trip to a store to buy some clothes a lady ahead of me in the queue complained to the till attendant that there were very few staff in the store and the level of service was nothing like John Lewis. The till attendant said that they did keep staff numbers lower and that many of the provisions that used to exist to reward and motivate staff had been taken away.

Talk of cuts is not going away from public services and is now being intensified in this latest round of belt tightening. Is the long and short of all this talk of efficiency, of more for less, of cutting back spiralling us downwards into a place where are we in danger of losing the point of public services completely? Will what happened in retail services be the fate of public services? In our quest for ‘competitiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ in public services will we end up like the retail industry?

In a fascinating recent essay (Digging for the Future), Charles Leadbeater looks back at the movement of the Diggers and Levellers to see if there are any modern day lessons. He suggests that if we are to be successful this time the focus would need to shift toward:

• Seeing the life chances of the poorest as the prime measure of social and economic progress
• Investing in capabilities and focusing on prevention and engaging as many people as contributors in seeking solutions
• Sharing and collaborating more to drive innovation

His point seems to be that if the new Diggers are to be more successful than their predecessors they will need to work more astutely with mainstream political power and find an accommodation with the market rather than seek to operate entirely outside it. It all sounds good but he and others don’t seem to say how exactly this accommodation will be reached? Is there a toolkit somewhere?

The Wall in the Head

‘Social inequality is vile. It stunts and demeans lives; it causes hideous problems for all those who cannot buy their way out of its effects; and it is unbelievably wasteful’ Estates by Lynsey Hanley (p216)

In a very moving book, Lynsey Hanley provides an account that highlights many of the serious and seemingly intractable issues that have arisen as a result of the withdrawal of support for social housing. Hanley suggests that the tragedy of social housing is the reduction in funding and building which would be unheard of for the NHS and that we are now paying a heavy price for this.

How do we quantify this damage? According to Hanley those living in the poorest areas, which invariably means an estate, can result in your life being shortened by upto 10 years and that your children are one seventh as likely to go to university as those growing up in affluent areas. Living in council housing means you have a higher percentage (up to 15%) leaving school without any qualifications and only a 25-30% chance of leaving school with 5 A-C GCSEs.

So what has gone wrong? Hanley says that in a country that has universal free health care, a free education system and a benefits system aimed at preventing people falling through the safety net, people are still falling through to a place so low that teams of social workers, teachers and others have immense difficulty picking them up.

In a chapter entitled ‘The Wall in the Head’ Hanley tries to convey the sense of separation caused by the tragedy of social housing which creates a ‘wall in the head’ for those living on estates which in turn feeds the view about ‘chavs’ and council tenants being thick as if they were incapable of jumping over barriers of knowledge, self awareness and social mobility. Hanley refers to a form of classism over taking racism as the nation’s favourite conversational knockabout.

Hanley’s challenge to us all is that social housing should be of the same quality as private housing and have the same access to good schools, trains and tube stops. Research she points to shows that improving social housing provision can have benefits in terms of social return on investment. For example that visits to GPs are less, people are less likely to be prescribed anti-depressants and are more likely to feel that they have energy and vitality when they get up in the morning.

I fear that Hanley’s challenge has been dealt a heavy blow with recent financial developments. What are we going to do on those estates where people have literally fallen through the net? Who will take responsibility here? Hanley suggests that estates will ultimately work if tenants participate in managing their homes and estates so that they feel a sense of ownership and control. Is this where we need new social ventures to emerge that will advocate and protect our most vulnerable? Clearly many challenges still lay ahead.

Social Innovation

Introduction

Nesta in collaboration with the Young Foundation have produced a fascinating series on social innovation. The series appears comprehensive and covers a wide variety of areas which include three publications and a website (www.socialinnovator.info).

The three publications (in no necessary order) are ‘Danger and Opportunity – crisis and the new social economy’ this argues that in the early 21st century we are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of economy that will have profound implications for the future of public services as well as our daily lives. The next is ‘The Open Book of Innovation’ which sets out what it terms the methods and tools for innovation – 527 to be exact! Finally there is ‘Social Venturing’ which focuses on how to establish and grow a social venture.

People and Pay

Recently re-reading some of the material on social ventures* I was struck by the section on people and pay (see Social Venturing, p176).

Relative Wages

The key point appeared to be that rather than a social venture having a salary scale similar to the private market the relevant comparison is with the circumstances of those whom the venture’s work is directed at.  The example cited is from development assistance where a consultant may be paid in a day what those they are studying would earn in a year. Whilst acknowledging that there are differences in the cost of living, the case is made that a venture needs to have a moral economy underlying its wage policy that is seen as fair by all those engaged with the project.

Secondly the issue of relative wages – for example in the community sector the differential can be as low as 2:1 or 3:1 – coupled with full wage transparency can promote a far greater sense of equity that can strengthen an organisation and its effectiveness.

Innovation

Another area of interest was the recommendation for the key role innovators need to play to help sustain and grow a venture. There is a recognised tension between operations and innovation and normally the tendency in organisations when confronting this tension is to appoint the competent operational manager as the CE with the innovators as the subordinate, rather than the other way round. However with the looming crisis the need to provide innovative solutions and ways forward maybe key.

Benefiting the wider social economy

Also highlighted was the idea that a social venture should see itself first and foremost as a form of ‘action academy’. At a time when many in public services may be thinking what may happen to their jobs or feel that their contributions may be disregarded it maybe some comfort to think that people in public service have gained valuable experience and skills that are valuable not only to themselves but to the wider social economy. The example cited is of the BBC (though reference is also made to the NHS and army) who have trained many people who went on to set up their own firms which has resulted in the growth of industries in the broadcasting sector.

Questions

What would the implications for other public services be if they were to think more like a social venture? What if we were to adopt some of the methods or to more fully adopt some of the thinking that is emerging? Much of it I suspect has been around for sometime however maybe it is the unique set of conditions we find ourselves in coupled with the helpful bringing together of this thinking that is the difference? Some possible questions to think about:

1. Do we need far more pay transparency? Do we need to radically overhaul pay ratios particularly in how they relate to the people we say we serve?
2. Do we replace our performance units with innovation units? Or do we need to replace our performance units with better integration of innovation into our services?
3. Do we need to introduce (quite quickly I suspect) support to help employees look at how their skills and knowledge could be transferred for the benefit of the wider social economy?

It’s a series I would recommend (if you haven’t already come across it) and I wanted to share something with colleagues…

*the Tower Hamlets Community Recycling Consortium is an example that is highlighted

The birth of the relational state

Geoff Mulgan in a short essay, The Birth of the Relational State, outlines what he term a shift from the production or delivery state to the relational state. Whilst in recent months the state has been resurgent saving the banks and the economy there does not appear, according to Mulgan, an appetite for this trend to continue.

He makes an interesting observation about the nature of the government, namely that it exist primarily to legitimise itself which can also mean that it does good and serves people. Don’t know what others think about the nature of governments and if you have any other suggestions or references to follow up?

Part of the process of legitimisation has been about becoming more like the manufacturing industry with a focus on transforming inputs of money into measurable outputs. The point however is that even when government meets the targets it may completely miss the point and the public may not be grateful for this.

If as Mulgan suggests legitimization is at the heart of the state than it may do this far better by developing the quality of its relationships with the public – rather than doing things to the public it’s about doing things with the public.  A recent collection of essays from Demos, The Long  View, appears to take this further by suggesting that rather than policy makers thinking they have all the answers they need to provide the structures and the support framework through which to channel the expertise of the frontline and service users.

Mulgan suggests that in this new vision of government the focus is more on co-production; social network analysis; building coalitions of equals to tackle ‘wicked’ problems’; seeking intensive feedback; 360 processes that leave behind a stronger set of commitments and relationships; becoming a commissioner as opposed to a deliverer. He goes on to suggest that the role of the public servant may also need to adapt from being simply the agent of the politician to someone who needs to manage and account for their relationships in their own right.

It maybe very true that the rising costs and demands, particularly in the fields of aging and healthcare, require the public to share the workload far more with professionals. How willing either party will be to take on these additional responsibilities is a very topical area of debate. In the most recent edition of the MJ (06.05.10), Rob Whiteman, the new MD of the IDeA suggests that there needs to be a conversation with the public on ‘what is the role of the state, what is the role of the individual, and what is the role of the community’. He believes it is key to the future of the whole public sector and an area where local government and the IDeA must play a key role.

Questions

• Can governments retain any sense of legitimacy after this downturn which arguably is as much to do with a collective political lack of stewardship? Will the public ask for or accept newer forms of representative democracy that may help avoid or lessen the likelihood of arriving at this mess again?
• Will the public accept a model where more is expected of them? Do they really have the time or inclination for what some envisage? Or will they argue that if they pay higher taxes they deserve quality services or that they should pay lower taxes for less services?
• Can government ever successfully adopt a commissioning role?  Is it better to allow things to emerge ‘organically’ and from the bottom up?