Public Service Matters

Who is really creating neighbourhood level outcomes – self organising communities, co-production or public agencies?

2011-12-23T11:45:00.000-08:00

In spite of several decades of intense research on public participation, there is still very little understanding of what the relative roles of citizens and public agencies are in creating publicly-valued outcomes. Research into public participation has focused on the process, not the outcomes, while evaluation of public interventions has tended largely to ignore the inputs made by citizens. Both these stances have been wrong-headed and have led to serious misunderstanding of the cost-effectiveness of public policies. The time has come to put this right.

One important attempt to correct this ‘citizen-blindness’ in public policy is represented by the Modelling Birmingham project, which is establishing cause-and-effect chains between public interventions and key quality of life outcomes in the city. An important part of this project is intended to be the quantification of citizen inputs as well as inputs from the public sector and business, leading to a whole-systems approach to the evaluation of local governance mechanisms, rather than the public-sector-centred approaches used by government in recent decades.

To understand the potential of neighbourhood governance, therefore, we need to explore much more deeply the levels of self-organising in local communities, the levels of self-help by potential and actual service users and the levels of co-production, where both public agencies and citizens make important contributions to services. Quantitative evidence on these pathways to outcomes is very scarce – the Governance International survey of five EU countries in 2008 is one of the only data sources which explicitly looks at both individual and collective co-production of public services.

Such evidence as we have available suggests that citizens are most willing to make a contribution towards improving public services when it involves them in relatively little effort and when they do not have to work closely with other citizens or staff or professionals in the government – i.e. individual co-production (e.g. the 1.8m regular blood donors, the 8m people signed up as potential organ donors, and the 10m people within Neighbourhood Watch schemes) is easier to promote than collective co-production. Of course, this doesn’t mean that collective co-production is unimportant – in the UK there are about 350,000 school governors, about 5.6m people helping to run sports clubs, 750,000 people volunteering to assist teachers in schools and 170,000 volunteers in the NHS, who befriend and counsel patients, drive people to hospital, fund raise, run shops and cafes, etc. However, the imbalance between individual and collective co-production is worrying, as there is a strong suggestion in the literature that collective co-production is likely to have larger, more sustainable impacts on quality of life outcomes than individual co-production. Our current AHRC Connected Communities project (Bovaird and Stoker – ‘Activating the Big Society’) is exploring ‘nudges’ to identify ways in which the public sector can influence more citizens to engage in collective co-production. It seems likely that more vigorous and imaginative neighbourhood action will be key in the future to unlocking the potential for collective co-production – and for turning ‘self-help’ and ‘self-organising’ activities into genuine co-production with the public sector.

There have been several major problems so far with the public sector’s approach to neighbourhood working (including the wholly inappropriate scale of the ‘neighbourhoods’ which many public agencies have identified (typically far larger than any ‘neighbourhood’ with which local people identify), the unimaginative ways in which people have been invited to get involved, the lack of careful segmenting of who is invited to do what, and the unwillingness of local service providers clearly to differentiate their offer in differ small-scale geographies). Most of these actually derive from one major assumption of public policy makers – that larger scale is essential for more cost-effective services. This assumption now looks seriously misguided.

The conventional wisdom about public services improvement over the last decade, starting from the ‘unitary reforms’ in England, becoming strongly evident in the Beacham Report for Wales, and still partly informing the Christie report in Scotland, has been a differentiation of public services according to their potential for economies of scale in provision:

• Transactional services are seen as having big economies of scale, suggesting centralisation at county, regional or even national level, but subject to competition and regulation.
• Personal services are seen as having few, if any, economies of scale, suggesting a ‘commissioning’ approach (often procured externally) and increasingly co-produced with users and communities.
• Infrastructure-heavy services are seen as needing flexible solutions, partnering with other services and partners to ‘sweat the assets’, e.g. through co-location in service hubs.
• Regulatory services are seen to determined by ‘economies of scope’, seeking to operate at a scale justifying employment of a full team with all specialisms needed for the function.

However, this model, though valuable a decade ago in shift thinking from the previous ‘service silo’ fixation, is no longer tenable. The analytical goalposts have moved, as our understanding of the strategic management of services has widened and deepened. There is now growing realisation that:

• ‘transactions’ are often holistic, with an ‘social component’ – while some ‘back office’ services can indeed be centralised without penalty to cost-effectiveness, many transactions which involve direct contact with citizens can be used for a variety of valuable interactions, many of which get lost completely when the service focus is on a concept of ‘efficiency’ which boils down to minimising contact with the citizen;
• ‘personal’ and ‘infrastructure’ services are seen to have multiple outcomes and therefore ‘commissioning’ is multi-stakeholder – current commissioning processes are often absurdly tunnel-vision (e.g. DWP programmes for getting people into work, which ignore, do not reward, and therefore underachieve, the much wider outcomes often created for the service users) and therefore sub-optimal;
• regulatory services can now be partly externalised, so that internal ‘economies’ of scope are much less important than previously thought. Moreover, key external providers of the ‘specialisms’ needed for regulation are likely to be service users and other citizens, who understand much more clearly than ‘technical’, ‘professional’ or ‘managerial’ staff how, and to what extent, the service produce the desired outcomes.

Given the major changes to the way in which we now view services, including public services, there is the possibility of analysing the potential role of neighbourhood governance in service improvement. In particular, the following criteria become important:

• Which of the outcomes desired are likely to benefit from neighbourhood inputs?– e.g. the outcomes specified in the Children’s Act (healthy, safe, enjoy & achieve, positive contribution, economic wellbeing) clearly will benefit from neighbourhood action, at the very least to improve the levels of ‘enjoyment’ of children and young people – and probably for most of the other outcomes as well.
• When activities contributing to ‘services’ are unbundled, which of these activities could be delivered at neighbourhood level? – i.e. which elements of the ‘value chain’ (governance, commissioning, prioritisation, planning, design, financing, management, delivery, assessment) are likely to be strengthened by inputs at neighbourhood level?
• Which configurations of organisations and partnerships are likely to be cost-effective in providing these activities to achieve these outcomes? – e.g. what roles can citizens, councillors and other stakeholders play in these organisations and partnerships
• How resilient is the service system, given the risks of failure? – In particular, to what extent could neighbourhood involvement enhance the resilience of the service system and/or the desired outcomes?

The lesson from applying these criteria is clear: Almost ALL services can benefit from being devolved to neighbourhood level, at least in part. We should therefore expect that most of them will therefore be so devolved in the future, at least in some local authorities, as the possibilities become more apparent. Therefore, the real question is not “Should we have EITHER large-scale OR neighbourhood level services?”, it is “TO WHAT EXTENT and HOW should we organise the neighbourhood contribution to services?”

Conclusions

The world of service management is changing radically across the world and in all sectors. In this period of All Change!, the old assumptions no longer hold – a bold new conception is needed for how services can be improved.
This era of radical change comes with huge risks – risks associated both with the scale and nature of the changes being tried but also with misguided attempts to suppress the need for change.

Key to the changes taking place are two major global renegotiations of the relationship between citizens and the state. First, citizens expect their potential role in governance to be appreciated, respected and embedded within decision-making processes. All public services need to come to terms with this new governance agenda. At the very least, commissioning of public services cannot remain an ‘expert’ or ‘technical’ process, divorced from the priorities of local politicians and uninformed by the wishes of local people.

Secondly, the relationship between service providers and service users is everywhere being renegotiated – perhaps more quickly in the private sector (where users are now expected to carry out many of service activities on-line, only using provider personnel for those activities where technical expertise is really essential) but now also in both public and third sectors. This co-production both allows the assets and resources of service users to be harnessed and also allows service users to ‘personalise’ the service in a way which is more meaningful than ‘personalisation’ devised by service providers. The implications of this second global change have still not been fully appreciated in UK public services. It may well turn out to be even more radically challenging than the renegotiation of governance relationships.

And the prospects for these renegotiations? Research continually indicates a substantial latent willingness of citizens to become more involved in the decisions which influence their lives. However, this is only evident where citizens feel they can play a worthwhile role. It is this latter condition which the public sector has, up to now, largely failed to deliver. The public-sector-centred approach to participation has run its course – and we should not underestimate its achievements. However, successful neighbourhood-based working in the future is likely to require a much wider and deeper co-production approach, which responds directly to citizens’ agendas, not simply to public agencies’ agendas.

Such a citizen-centred approach will, of course, need experimentation. Indeed, it may need radical experimentation - since neither the current self-organising approaches in civil society nor the current approaches to co-production with the public sector are well understood as yet, none of the public sector’s current recipes for involving users and communities can be regarded as ‘reliable’.
Experimentation necessarily means that some failures will occur. This means that there will be a need to design resilient systems, develop ‘last resort’ intervention plans, and allow slack resources to respond to emergency needs where the failures are serious. In the private sector, as basic design principle for innovation would hold here – ‘fail early, fail fast, fail cheap’. This is clearly harder to implement in the public sector. However, rather than running away from the prospect of failure (which is occurring to some extent in all of our public services already, although often not visible to the public), we have to be positive – creative experimentation is also likely to turn up many unexpectedly successful approaches which can be rolled out quickly.

To experiment with a much more citizen-centric approach at neighbourhood level, the public sector must be ready for the scary world of ‘trusting’ – trusting users, citizens, partners, voters. Part of this trusting will involved surfacing much more clearly than in the past the likely outcomes of public interventions and the likely risks of outcomes not being achieved. And a further major area of trust will need to be in accepting that the contributions of service users and other citizens at neighbourhood level may well turn out to be ingenious and cost-effective in terms of the overall societal cost-benefit results. Trust between the public and the public sector has been in short supply in recent decades – on both sides. It will have to be earned – by both sides. However, there is little point in waiting for it to emerge of its own accord – the public sector needs to start the process of change and to convince the sceptics in neighbourhoods that it really means to negotiate a new settlement in the use of public resources.

Finally, all radical change costs resources – ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ interventions, even when based on ‘co-production’ and ‘community assets’, are not ‘free’. But they also mobilise new resources. It is time to explore how we might rebalance community and state inputs in order to enhance the outcomes which are jointly produced.

[Based on a presentation to the ESRC/AHRC DCLG Workshop on Neighbourhood and Community Involvement in Public Services on 13 December 2011 in London]

Has the new 'EU minus one' outlawed leftist governments for ever?

2011-12-10T18:40:00.000-08:00

Has the new 'EU minus one' outlawed leftist governments for ever by its banning of public sector fiscal deficits? Are the Centre-Right parties that dominate the current EU using these new intergovernmental agreements to ensure that Keynesian solutions to economic problems are now impossible? These are the views of Owen Jones in his New Statesman blog of 9 December (http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/european-treaty-cameron-stop).

However, Owen Jones' arguments are way off-beam. The new 'EU minus one' deal does NOT outlaw expansionary fiscal policy, as long as it's investment- led, not based on a structural deficit.

Moreover, there's nothing leftist (or indeed Keynesian) about a 'structural deficit' - subsidising current voters at the expense of future generations is just as irresponsible as refusing to invest on their behalf, which is the Osborne agenda. An investment-led budget which is green and equality-enhancing does NOT contribute to a structural deficit, indeed it REDUCES the risk of future structural deficits.

Owen Jones also misses the point that a balanced budget can represent expansionary fiscal policy, if it is at a higher level of tax and spend, which is what EVERY country in the EU (including Germany) now desperately needs.

The fundamental socialist agenda is about fairness and equity. A fairer tax and spend regime will be no more difficult under the 'EU minus one' intergovernmental treaties than it was before. Interestingly, one of the comments on Owen Jones' post is by Jon Burke, who argues that the new 'EU minus one' agreements will be good for genuinely leftist governments in the EU, since they will have to make the case explicitly for a more progressive tax and spend system, rather than simply using deficit financing to bottle out of taxing the rich at appropriate levels (and making sure they pay up, rather than evading and avoiding tax). This is a valid argument but underplays the importance of investment-led expansionary fiscal policy.

A genuinely equitable and sustainable growth agenda, based on investment for the future, is what we should be fighting to convince European voters to accept. This will be a tough argument to win. However, it will be a lot easier - and a great deal more important - than trying to interest voters in the arcane details of which international forces ('the markets', 'the credit rating agencies', 'Brussels', 'the IMF') are most responsible for making it 'essential' that our governments impose savage cuts which are socially unjust, speed up irreversible climate change and undermine our economic future.

UK public spending cuts: Good news, bad news

2010-07-13T11:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I was interviewed on BBC Midlands Today on the current UK spending cuts, which are dominating the local news headlines, as budgets are cut daily for social care, schools, etc. As usual, it was not possible to say what I really wanted to say – the questions were narrow and my reactions were too slow to bend them to my message!

So my core argument didn’t get across – there’s good news and bad news about the cuts so far. And no political party is spelling out what is really going on.

The bad news is pretty clear. Overall, the current estimate is that the ringfencing of health and overseas aid, plus the ‘protection’ afforded to education and defence, means the average expenditure cuts in the rest of public services will amount to around 33-35% over the next five years. This is savage and not remotely possible without affecting frontline service staffing. The level of consequent unemployment of public service staff will be at least 600,000, possibly nearer 1m.

What will this mean for service users? First, a lot more people will be told they are not eligible for a service, where public agencies can exclude them– eligibility criteria will be drawn much tighter. If you are eligible, you will have to wait longer, you’ll get less service, it will be delivered by less experienced and trained staff and you will have less choice (if any) in what type of service is available to you. If you try to book an appointment (e.g. with a doctor or a social care worker), you’ll have to wait for it, it may well be cancelled before it happens and you’re unlikely to see the same professional staff as the last time.

Of course, you may well be able to turn from the Big State to get some help from the Big Society. But there’s likely to be bad news there, too. The recession has increased the number of people volunteering to help out others – but reduced the capacity of third sector organisations to use them productively, because they too are short of funds to organise themselves.

So, some tips:

• Don’t get ill (just protecting NHS spend won’t be enough to provide the likely number of future users with current service quality levels).
• Don’t let anyone you depend on for support get ill (or leave the neighbourhood).
• Be (VERY) nice to your neighbours (you may be needing them a lot more in future).
• Start saving – if you need any public service in the future, you may well not be able to get it or you may have to pay a large part of it when you do get it.
• If you’re young, start learning a foreign language (you may need to go abroad if you want a public sector job in the future – or a public service).
• Take up ‘easy access’ leisure activities like walking and birdwatching – anything that requires public sector provision, like swimming or sports centres, may be too expensive for you or too far away from you in the future.

It’s a pity that the coalition government parties don’t want to talk about these inevitable consequences of their decisions. The new era of ‘transparency’ is being spun as fast as the previous era of ‘transformation’.

But there is some good news as well. The first is that the cuts are possible – the number of public sector employees who are due to retire in the next five years is huge. This means that the spending plans can indeed be implemented and at relatively little cost (at least, compared to redundancy payments – of course, this will hit the public sector pensions bill but that would have happened anyway, irrespective of this round of cuts).

Second, we have just emerged from a period of higher public investment on capital than at any time in UK history (both in terms of money spent and in terms of spend as a proportion of GDP). This is particularly evident in the new schools and hospitals all over the country. This will mean that quality in services where the budget has been cut will not be so badly savaged as it would have been in the past – at least the service buildings and equipment are now in tiptop shape, at last putting right the damage from the 1976 IMF cuts and the abandonment of public service infrastructure in the Thatcher-Major era.

Third, not all the cuts in staffing will mean that services will be worse in ways which matter to users. We’ve slowly come to realise, particularly as a result of the Best Value regime in local government ten years ago and the ‘transformation’ agenda of the last five years, that the way we do local public services is probably NOT the best way. Many of the changes in the next few years will be for the better - e.g. social media will make access to services much easier and revolutionise understanding of how to get the most out of them. However, we don’t know which ones will be positively affected in this way – for most public services there is still no consensus on how to reconfigure them to improve them. Many of the changes in the next few years are likely to turn out to be blind alleys – at best, not leading to improvement and, at worst, making services significantly worse.

This applies both to ‘traditional’ public services – those that continue to be delivered by the professionalised public service providers – and also to the ‘co-produced’ services which in future will become the joint responsibility of public service agencies, service users and other members of the community. While the coalition is placing huge hope in the potential for the Big Society to mop up the service needs which will no longer be covered by public spending, the truth is uncomfortable – all our research indicates that the public sector (managers and staff) does not understand co-production, that professional public service staff are reluctant to get involved in it, are largely clueless on how to stimulate it and are poorly prepared to manage it systematically. Moreover, the public is likely to be given the message that they are being sold short by being palmed off with second-rate, non-professional services.

Funnily enough, the Labour party hasn’t been talking much about these ‘good news’ items. Maybe that’s because it wants to exaggerate the damage done to public sector jobs by the cuts, is embarrassed by rather than proud of its capital spending record in government and nervous about attacking public sector workers for the way they coldshoulder co-production. This is a pity, as Labour can only prepare for future government if they recognise the realities faced by the current and immediately previous governments.

Unfortunately, each of the ‘good news’ items has a sting in the tail. The early retirement of a huge part of the public service workforce will leave most public services to be delivered by relatively inexperienced staff and managers in agencies with seriously depleted organisational memories. The huge Noughties capital spending programme is being terminated early, leaving at least 20% of the high need schools, hospitals, transport and housing projects high and dry, so that some areas of the country will be massively disadvantaged for the next five years, compared to their luckier neighbours. And the big gains which will come from reconfiguring public services in intelligent and imaginative ways will be offset by the damage done by the precipitate speed with which the programme is being rushed through - too soon to find out what works, so that service changes imposed in a panic will cause pain for years and over a wide area, even when it’s quickly apparent that they are truly dumb.

Of course, there is still the battlecry from the coalition government that radical spending cuts are needed soon. We have to ask: “Really? Whatever damage they do?” That is hardly a rational approach.

Rather, we need to weigh up the pros and cons of radical and rapid spending cuts. We have on one side of the balance the avoidance of the high interest costs which would arise from a longer period of high debt levels (substantial, but not crippling) and the risk of a UK credit rating downgrade (very low).

On the other side of the balance, there is the major damage done to the quality of life of much of the UK population over the next five years, particularly those most vulnerable. In addition, there is the danger of a double-dip recession, which even the Office of Budget Responsibility has admitted has been increased by the government’s emergency budget.

There are red herrings to throw out of the scales entirely – e.g. the argument which has recently reappeared (though it was hardly voiced during the election campaign) that public sector spending crowds out private sector investment and production. This hoary old non-sequitur will surely not confuse as many people in 2010 as it did in the heady Bacon-and-Eltis days of 1976. Again, there is the argument that the debt will ‘crush future generations’ – the ‘one hand clapping’ argument which I’ve written about in this blog previously, which ignores the fact that public sector assets cover a large proportion of the debt and, as the economy recovers, will reflate fast in value and reduce the net debt value. Not to mention the fact that it is largely public spending which has stabilised housing values and reflated the stock UK market by 40% since the bottom of the recession and has therefore been responsible for a huge increase in the value of private wealth (corporate wealth and household pensions), far from ‘crowding out’ the private sector.

So, the verdict is very simple – the bad news outweighs the good news. These UK public spending cuts are too much, too soon, too fast.

Why Red and Yellow might lead to 'Go'

2010-05-08T12:43:00.000-07:00

So, just two days after the general election, Clegg is being courted by both Tories and Labour – and being encouraged to jump for one or the other. I think that he would be unwise to jump for either at the moment, if he is not to throw away his hard-won cards.

My bet is that Clegg won't (or won't be allowed by his party) to enter into ANY arrangement with the Tories, mainly because they won't offer any real promise of PR and his party will make it clear he MUST vote against their '50 day' budget, if it goes beyond the bare minimum cuts that Cable would recommend.

So what then? It’s clear he has to make at least a show of talking to Labour. (My bet is that Gordon Brown will make it clear at such talks that he is willing to resign, now or before the autumn party conferences, if that will smooth the way to an agreement). However, I believe that Clegg will conclude (as other leading figures in Labour will also conclude, whatever Brown’s view) that a coalition with the Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, SDLP (plus Green/Alliance/Indep MPs) will be too greedy in its demands and too vulnerable to last. In any case, there could be no ‘easy fix’ which could quickly align their two manifestos in a way which would be acceptable to EITHER set of party members, so that any patching together would anger key party members, including MPs. So that won't work either.

This means that David Cameron will have to run a minority government. However, his '50 day' budget (presumably in mid-July) won't get through Parliament – all the opposition parties will lose face if they do not vote it down. Consequence – another election, presumably early September. Same result! Utter mess.

So, is there any way to avoid this? No doubt there are several – probably mostly unappealing. However, there is one route which would appeal to me – and, I guess, to many who fear the damage which a long-running Tory government would wreak, if allowed by the LibDems.

If Brown and Clegg agree that the foregoing scenario would be disastrous, they might also steel themselves (whatever their tribalistic tendencies) to agree that it requires drastic measures. So, it would make sense for them to agree to discuss the basis for a joint manifesto, over a period of months. It would be presented to their respective party conferences in the autumn. (Under a different Labour leader, probably). Both parties would have to swallow and accept that only such a manifesto gives any real chance of power after the following general election. I think they would buy it (while spitting forcefully, naturally).

In the meantime, Brown and Clegg could give Cameron notice that they will not vote on ANY economic or financial legislation until the Budget in March 2011 - he will have carte blanche to put through whatever he wants. But they would simultaneously put him on notice that, if they cannot accept Budget 2011, or any subsequent economic or social legislation, they will force a vote of 'no confidence' and intend to fight the next election together, with a view of forming a coalition. Finally, they should agree the subsequent coalition will run for four years, but then be reconsidered by both parties, with a view to returning to independent running for the subsequent election.

In my view, they would win (especially after the Tories have had a year to make a mess of the economy). And they would sacrifice relatively little of their core policies by working together for four years. And they would save the UK what might otherwise be some years of utter indecision.

Not all complex adaptive systems lead to system growth

2010-03-18T00:28:00.000-07:00

This picture provides a stark reminder that complex adaptive systems sometimes exhibit behaviour that leads the whole system to termination rather than growth. As ever, the lesson for social systems is whether we can identify that the 'strange attractor' underlying the system's behaviour contains system termination points - and whether there is a lever available in our meta-planning toolkit either to eliminate such points from the set of possible options or to make them less likely as system destinations.

For the starfish, the answers to these two questions appear to have been 'Yes' and 'No' respectively. If our social systems are to avoid the same fate, it would be good for us to find the answers which apply to us. We still seem some way from this position.

Why the Times wouldn’t pass Politics 101 in its analysis of universities v. Sure Start

2010-03-17T04:27:00.000-07:00

A strange and wildly misguided editorial in today’s Times (‘Politics ABC’ at http://bit.ly/cxhPsJ) argues that “In the context of a looming budget deficit, Sure Start expenditure of more than £1 billion a year is exactly the kind of line item that politicians should be scrutinising, not protecting”.

It is particularly risible that the Times leader suggests that “the regrettable reality of the public finances would make this necessary …even if some [children’s] centres had not morphed into middle-class crèches from the route out of poverty that they were originally supposed to be”. Given the stranglehold on university applications held by the middle classes, turning many parts of the university system into middle-class finishing schools, this is very rich indeed.

The Times recognises that “extensive research clearly indicates the importance of investment in the early years” but goes on to argue that “the prize of greater social mobility will not be won if investment in early years comes at the expense of opportunities later in life”. Is this seriously meant to suggest that the UK university system is major vehicle of social mobility’? Clearly, the idea of ‘extensive research’ by Times leader writers doesn’t include most of the current public policy literature on higher education.

For example, in the UK, the recent Milburn report on access to the professions (http://bit.ly/a1Daun), drawing on the current academic research (nationally and internationally) concludes that social class has been, and remains, “a strong determinant of participation in higher education, and this gap has not closed substantially in the last half century”. It reports that the participation rates by higher social groups (III, IV and V) have risen over 1960 – 2000 from under 30% to about 50%, while for social groups I and II the rise has been from around 5% to about 20%. The Sutton Trust report in 2007 found that 44 percent of those from the richest 20 percent of households attained a university degree compared to just 10 percent from the poorest 20 percent of homes (http://bit.ly/cZT9OZ).

In a direct test of social mobility, the OECD found that, in the UK, 50% of the economic advantage that high-earning fathers have over low-earning fathers is passed on to their sons - in Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries, by contrast, less than 20% of the wage advantage was passed on( http://bit.ly/c9jOUI). It concluded that the chances of a young person from a less well-off family enjoying higher wages or getting a higher level of education than their parents was "relatively low".

In the US, the picture is little different – Robert Haveman and Timothy Smeeding (http://bit.ly/9447FU) have concluded “The US system of higher education reinforces generational patterns of income inequality and is far less oriented towards social mobility than it should be. If university education is to improve the chances for low- and middle-income children to succeed, the current system must be radically redirected”.

And what are we to make of the figures cited by the Times leader, that “Britain is now at or above the OECD average for spending on pre-school and school-age children, but below the OECD average for spending on tertiary education”. Given that higher education mainly provides the finishing touches to a cruelly skewed system, ensuring the reinforcement of the advantages already conferred upon children by accidents of birth into the right income and social class, why should public spending on the tertiary education of well-off young people be regarded as a priority? This would only make sense, if the argument were that we should expand public spending in order to give zero and low university tuition fees to a wider group of young people from families with low incomes, along with significant subsistence grants to compensate them for not earning for three years (never mind not contributing wages to families that badly need it).

However, even this argument, while at least logical, is questionable. Surely it is the continuing system of low tuition fees to young people who come from better-off families (i.e. the majority of university students) which “is exactly the kind of line item that politicians should be scrutinising, not protecting”, to use the Times leader’s own phrase? Up to recently, there has been a lot of mumbling that the tuition fees being charged by universities, and the consequent debts being amassed by students, would eventually choke off the demand for higher education. This argument is certainly not open to the writers of the Times leader, given that they are starting from the ‘shocking’ premise that more than a quarter of a million university applicants may be denied a place this year. It seems that young people (or, more accurately, their parents) see the long term economic and social payoffs from a university education as well worth the (relatively minor) investment they have to make.

I do not want to argue that those who can’t get a university place this year are not being disadvantaged – in public policy, any initiative which is promoted for good reasons (like Sure Start) crowds out other initiatives which could have significant net advantages, as some forms of university expansion in the UK would surely have. It’s a matter of priorities, as all politics must be.

However, I do want to argue that our concern for those not getting a university place this year should lead us to different conclusion from those reached by the Times leader writers. From the point of view of the applicants themselves, we should recognise that most of them, if they have the required grades, will get into university a year or two later – this is the normal pattern every year. Nor is it an unambiguously bad thing that they have to wait a year longer – indeed, there are good arguments that we are allowing far too many young people into university at too young an age, without the experience or maturity to make best use of their university experience. It is also interesting that many young people in Europe now choose to study in other countries, either because they want the international experience (and we should seriously ask why such a low proportion of British students takes this route) or because they cannot pursue their chosen course in a university in their own country. (It is now common, for example, for young German students who want to study medicine but cannot get a place in a German university to enrol in courses in Hungary or elsewhere – and those who do well can then transfer later back into the German system to take the places of those who fall by the wayside in those courses). Of course, it may cost more to study abroad (although this is often not the case, given the relatively high cost of living in the UK) – but for the majority of this ‘blocked’ quarter of a million, their application to universities across the UK already suggests they are willing to pay the necessary costs. The Times leader writers seem to see this quarter of a million students as locked into the UK university system. This is a symptom of how narrow and restricted is the conventional view of the role and potential of higher education in this country.

For policy makers, the implications of this argument are quite radical. The current university funding system is failing dramatically to achieve the social mobility which is often claimed to be one of its most important purposes. It is time to institute a serious of policies which will actually make it more likely that this key purpose is achieved in the future (see bit.ly/8LaBn4), including:

• no more tax breaks for private universities (or the private schools which dominate admissions to the UK’s top universities);
• free choice of state universities for all students with the right entry qualifications, with lotteries where universities are oversubscribed;
• attractive bursaries for all students whose parental income means they do not have to pay student fees, so that more low income students are attracted to university;
• an end to the wholly artificial division between full-time and part-time higher education, particularly in relation to its funding and student support mechanisms;
• a radical extension of degree study opportunities within further education, so that talented individuals have access to degree qualifications, where their study programmes merit it;
• two-year exemption from national insurance contributions (by both employers and employees) for the top 10% of every degree class in the UK, whatever sector they are employed in
• a guarantee for the top 5% of performers in every degree class in the UK that they can enter a two-year training programme in the public sector, so that entry into the public sector is on merit.

In passing, I do not want to argue that Sure Start has had an unambiguously ‘green light’ from its various evaluations – although they have highlighted a mainly favourable picture. Nor am I arguing that it is enough, by itself, to focus on children at the start of their lives - the Sutton Trust report in 2007 ((http://bit.ly/cZT9OZ) pointed out that children from poor households who are in the brightest group at the age of three slip back in developmental tests by the age of five, and are likely to be overtaken by those from affluent backgrounds by seven. However, this is an argument for continuing to experiment and improve Sure Start, and other early years programmes, not cut them back.

In sum, the argument in the Times leader today that funding of the university system should be increased at the expense of Sure Start in order to promote social mobility is not only logical nonsense, it is arrant hypocrisy – it betrays an underlying desire for Middle (and Rich) England to continue to hijack public expenditure for its own purposes, under the guise of ‘making the most of the younger generation’. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see such arguments in a Times leader?

I think it is safe to assume that the wholly unconvincing Politics ABC which appeals to Times leader writers will be seen through by those who have done Politics 101 at the universities they seek to advantage. Let us hope it also seen through by the majority voters (voters whose children and grandchildren have gone to or are likely to go university still make up well under a half of the population) and by politicians. For the moment, let us be thankful for small mercies – it would have been worse if these fatuous arguments had appeared in the Daily Mail, a newspaper to which politicians actually pay some attention.

Raising the Elite of Tomorrow

2009-12-31T04:01:00.000-08:00

Originally published in hardback in 2008 but now high on the Christmas 2009 bestseller charts in Germany (a ‘Spiegel bestseller’), Julia Friedrich's book Gestatten: Elite is essentially one journalist’s inquiry into how the young in Germany are being groomed to form the next generation of leaders of the economy and, perhaps, politics.

Why has it been so successful? The tale it tells is not encouraging – but perhaps Germany , like so many other countries, is now ready in the middle of the financial and economic crisis to reappraise the social and economic policies of the boom period.

The basic story of the book is that Germany is now raising new elites – in private universities, in private business schools, in private boarding schools, even in private kindergardens – who are being given enormously expensive education in the expectation that they will eventually take over at the helm of the German economy – its biggest firms, its investment banks and its consulting firms. However, they are not an ‘elite’ in the traditional sense of being particularly gifted – indeed, many if not most of the beneficiaries of this elite education are at or even below average achievement level in educational terms. Their advantage is not their ability, nor even particularly their dedication to hard work or their special ability to work with and lead other people – no, it consists essentially of the wealth of their parents, combined with their parents’ determination that these children will inherit power as well as wealth.

Worse, the book retails how the state is encouraging this new elitism in a variety of ways. At one level, it is importing these ideas of elitism into secondary and higher education in the public sector, in ways which are allowing rich parents to commandeer a disproportionate share of public resources for their own, not particularly gifted, children. For example, it is now common in Germany, as it has been for generations in the UK, for well-off parents to move into areas where the state schools have a reputation for being particularly good – something which Germany has largely avoided until relatively recently. Moreover, the private education sector is benefiting in tax terms from charitable status, just as in the UK, although the effects of this system are far from being ‘charitable’, being to the major disadvantage of the ‘losers’ who are not able to claw their way into this ‘elite’ class of students.

I guess that most UK readers of this book will feel a degree of Schadenfreude . After all, the ills which it documents have already been a central reality in our society and a matter for political disagreement for many decades. It is, naturally, a little comforting to find that others, particularly those who have long enjoyed enviable social and economic circumstances, now share some of the same plight as ourselves. The book provides a journalistic ‘human touch’ to put flesh on the bones of recent academic research, such as the recent book by Charles Harvey and Mairi MacClean into business elites in the UK and France, which demonstrates that the main factors which influence business success in both countries are family and education (along with professional bodies). Nevertheless, it is rather surprising to find that the Germans, who have for so long prided themselves on having transcended the ‘class society’ traditionally associated with the UK and the ‘two class’ society which scars the USA, have recently allowed and even encouraged the incursion of similar perversions of justice, with the economic inefficiencies which they bring in their wake.

However, my main reaction to the book was a reinforced horror of the way in which we in the UK have not only failed to tackle these issues – which are both more longstanding and more serious in the UK than in Germany – but have actually proposed in recent years to make things worse. We now have private universities, privately-funded and -controlled secondary ‘academies’, and are proposing to introduce a new generation of US-like ‘foundation’ schools, where the wishes of parents will override the social values which should be at the heart of any publicly-funded school system.

It is not as if we are unaware of the divisiveness and the mediocrity which ensue from an education system dominated by the decisions and expenditures of rich parents. Research has long charted the damaging effect on the UK economy of inherited positions and the promotion of those young people whose parents have bought their entry into the right schools and universities, irrespective of their abilities. However, this revealing book , which shows us how the same damaging tendencies have now surfaced and become strong in one of our closest neighbours, should remind us that we have been quiet for too long about the nonsense of current government policy, allowing the moneyed ‘elite’ to suffocate the meritocratic society which we once hoped to build in the last half of the twentieth century.

The book does not look beyond the education of the ‘new elite’ – it doesn’t attempt to map out for Germany the damage done to major private firms through MBA-itis, in the way Mintzberg has done for North America. It doesn’t attempt to highlight the demoralising effects on staff which nepotism has had in UK firms. And it doesn’t attempt to quantify the effects of lower innovation in companies due to favouritism towards less capable managers and staff, who happen to have come from the ‘right’ schools and universities. However, it holds up a mirror in which we can see our own faults more clearly.

At a time of New Year resolutions, it would be good if this book encouraged more readers to take a stand against the untalented and damaging ‘elites’ in our country, just as the author encourages her readers to do in Germany.

Such a platform needs to be debated and widely promoted. For starters, I suggest:
• no more tax breaks for private schools and universities;
• free choice of local schools for all parents, with lotteries where schools are oversubscribed;
• free choice of state universities for all students with the right entry qualifications, with lotteries where universities are oversubscribed;
• attractive bursaries for all students whose parental income means they do not have to pay student fees, so that more low income students are attracted to university;
• two-year exemption from national insurance contributions (by both employers and employees) for the top 10% of every degree class in the UK, whatever sector they are employed in
• a guarantee for the top 5% of performers in every degree class in the UK that they can enter a two-year training programme in the public sector, so that entry into the public sector is on merit;
• a proper wealth tax which ensures that people can spend the money they earn but not the money which they have inherited, through no skill or contribution of their own.

An elite based on merit has many drawbacks – but far fewer than an elite based on family income. It’s time to tackle the deep injustice and inefficiency of our current system. Your suggestions are welcomed.

Reference

Gestatten: Elite - Auf der Spuren der Mächtigen von Morgen, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, München, 2009 (by Julia Friedrichs).

Public influence outside political parties is not an illusion!

2009-12-05T04:02:00.000-08:00

This is a response to a post by Andrea DiMaio headed ‘Why Citizen Participation May Be An Illusion’ on December 5th, 2009 at http://bit.ly/5hmCkL in which he argues that “It is all fair and good to say that politicians and government officials will carefully listen to what virtual communities say, but until when those communities can sit at a table and have a voting right, they won’t be able to make much difference”. He illustrates his point with reference to recent experiences in his original home town, near Milan, where a ‘city league’, i.e. a group of citizens not associated with any political party, decided to self-organize as an alternative to traditional politics, achieved a high profile and significant support, but didn’t have a single member elected as a councillor. Now they are considering forming as a more traditional political party, paradoxically in order to combat traditional party politics. He argues that this suggests that unorganized citizen involvement, e.g. through e-government and e-governance, will never have as much influence as organized involvement, which means getting ‘a vote at the table’.
Normally I enjoy the posts by Andrea DiMaio very much but this one had me shaking my head with dismay. I think he’s almost entirely missed the point here. Yes, many community groups and social movements will ‘go formal’ from time to time – they have that right. And, yes, many will become indistinguishable from the parties they originally formed to combat. (Of course, a few of them will go on to take over from those very parties – he has some good examples in Italy!). But this is NOT the way in which most citizens, even activists, have an influence.

We need to make a very clear distinction between ‘activists’ and ‘general citizens’. Most ‘general citizens’ are reluctant to spend much of their time making any positive contribution to civic debate or action, as Nick Jones points out very well in his comments above. However, they also resent being kept out of the debate, so they expect clear and visible invitations to participate, if only ‘arms-length’, on a reasonably frequent basis, though they will not generally take up those invitations. So it’s essential that they receive these invitations and feel included, if only at this very peripheral level. Occasionally, on issues which really switch them on, a proportion of general citizens (although usually only a quite small proportion) will become ‘activists’ for a while – not necessarily for long but it is likely that for a long time afterwards they will judge the responsiveness and the quality of the public sector by the experience they have in these periods of intense engagement.

Activists are different, of course – they know about and they care about the issues. But they often DON’T believe that they need a vote at the table. They do generally believe that they need a PLACE around the table. However, becoming formally enmeshed in ‘the system’ often seems to them to be counter-productive. We recently did a survey of a large number of high profile national and local activists in the UK on behalf of Communities and Local Government, our government department responsible for community empowerment. The majority had little involvement with MPs or local councillors, who of course DO have ‘a vote at the table’ but, as activists see it, almost no influence. Our activists had, however, huge involvement with the people they see as shaping the decisions made by public bodies – many of whom hold relatively low posts in public agencies and ministries, but write the reports which are rubber-stamped further up the decision-making chain. And our activists were VERY media-savvy. Almost NONE saw any circumstances in which they would be prepared to become MPs or local councillors, believing it would be of no value in furthering the causes and issues on which they were campaigning. (This is reminiscent of Tony Benn’s statement, when he announced that he would not stand as an MP again, that he was ‘leaving Parliament in order to be able to spend more time in politics’!) Yet these people generally have a very much higher profile than most national or local politicians and are believed by top decision makers to have an important influence on decisions which are made in government.

So, I would argue that the experience in Andrea DiMaio’s town in Italy is common but not a good guide to how the public can influence decision-making. In particular, we should recognize that both the public and activists can exert important influence on those with ‘a vote at the table’ and do not necessarily have to have a vote themselves. Moreover, those with ‘a vote at the table’ may have little real influence on the debate shaping decisions. Let’s not confuse having a vote with real influence over the debate, or authority with influence!

Creativity: three reasons why organisations have less than we would like

2009-11-03T10:43:00.000-08:00

First, because we know better how to put down creativity than to create it – see Haefele’s suggestions, but no doubt you can add some corkers of your own:

 “We tried something like that years ago”
 “That’s ridiculous/ too radical”
 “Let’s form a committee to consider it”
 “That’s against policy”
 “Has it been tried elsewhere?”
 “It won’t work”
 “That’s too obvious/ superficial”
 “We could never market that”
 “That’s interesting but … we don’t have the time … the staff …”
 “That ‘s not the kind of idea we expect from you”

Source: Haefele, J. (1962) Creativity and innovation. New York: Reinhold Publishing Company.

Secondly, because we don’t employ the sort of people who are especially likely to be creative. Remember Tom Peters’ slogan: “Crazy times need crazy people”, followed by his warning about that department in your organization, one of whose key tasks is to make sure that any job applicant whose CV shows even a nano-second gap between the moment they left university and the moment they applied for this job, then THEY ARE NOT TO BE SHORT-LISTED!

Actually, even these potential creatives are short-listed, what chance do they have of getting the job? Remember Anthony Storr’s summary of the research into the characteristics of creative people (below) and ask yourself “How many people like this will get through our tests and interview panels?”

Characteristics of creative people:

- Independence
- Influenced by inner rather than outer standards
- Likely to belong to fewer organisations & social groups
- Sceptical, reluctant to acquiesce in the findings of authority
- Aesthetic Sensitivity
- Concern with form & elegance of design
- Preference for Complexity, Asymmetry & Incompleteness
- High level of tolerance of tension & anxiety
- 'Incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge' (Keats)
- High Intelligence
- Level of intellectual ability (but not necessarily IQ scores)
- (For males) High Scores on Scales Measuring ‘Feminity’
- Openness to own feelings and emotions
- Understanding self-awareness
- More than average share of vanity, narcissism

Source: Anthony Storr (1976), The dynamics of creation. London: Penguin Books.

And, anyway, apart from you and me, how many such people ARE there around, nowadays?!!!

Unacceptable behaviour – Ministerial sackings

2009-10-31T03:43:00.000-07:00

The rules in the UK which govern how and when Ministers can sack officials and advisors need to be changed. Two dreadful decisions have been made in recent times which undermine the credibility of government and Parliament – the sacking of a local authority Director of Children’s Services by Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and the sacking yesterday of Prof. David Nutt, Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary.

Of course, Ministers should have the right, in the appropriate circumstances, to sack the people they have appointed. This is not in question. It is the criteria for deciding when the circumstances are appropriate that we need to get right – and they are clearly not right at the moment.

Let us take the two cases in turn. The sacking of a top local government officer by a Secretary of State, for behaviour in office in that local authority, should not be acceptable. If the behaviour of that officer had serious consequences in other agencies, in other areas or for the country as a whole, then there is indeed a case for a Secretary of State to step in. However, this was not the case. Their mistakes, if indeed they are properly found to have made mistakes, should have been dealt with by their own agency. If that agency is generically mismanaged, then there are indeed powers for the Secretary of State to step in and arrange for the management of such an agency to be supplemented or even replaced. But picking on one Director, on the grounds that the Secretary of State can tell more appropriately than the local politicians who should be employed and who shouldn’t, is patent nonsense. That way, madness lies. It is necessary to change the rules so that Ministers cannot again intervene in this way in the affairs of a local authority.

Turning to David Nutt and the Home Secretary, it is NOT in question that Ministers have the right to disagree with the advice given to them by scientists and other expert advisors – and indeed, sometimes it is essential for them to do so. Scientists and experts don’t know everything. Politicians bring different expertise to the decision making process – in particular, they bring a value system which has been legitimated by their election to Parliament and their appointment to Ministerial posts. However, we need to be clearer as to when it is appropriate for Ministers to exercise these powers to countermand expert advice. When it is in the public interest, and Ministers clearly have an understanding of certain public interests to a greater degree than their expert advisors, we should celebrate that we have a system which protects us from the narrow perspectives of ‘experts’. This particularly applies when there is a moral dimension to a decision or when choices have to be made between the interests of different groups in society which are in fundamental conflict. No way do I want ‘experts’ to get their way on such decisions – here, all politicians, but especially Ministers, must be up front and brave in challenging the ‘expert’ advice they get and making sure the policies recommended to Parliament take into account the public interest.

Inserting a moral dimension? Resolving fundamental conflicts between groups in society? Were these the grounds on which Jacqui Smith, the then Home Secretary, intervened to regrade cannabis as a drug more harmful than alcohol and tobacco, when her advisors have unambiguously told her the opposite? No, it does not seem so. Sheer party political interest, driven by ill-informed and hysterical commentary in the national media, appeared to drive her decision. Not acceptable grounds for overturning scientific advice.

And Alan Johnson’s decision now to sack the Chair of his Advisory Council? He writes in his letter of dismissal: “When you wrote previously around the relative harms of drugs comparing ecstasy to horse riding my predecessor made it clear that it is not the job of the chair of the government’s Advisory Council to comment or initiate a public debate on the policy framework for drugs”. Yet, actually, it is precisely the job of that Advisory Council to advise on the evidence for the relative harms of drugs. To do so in a way which makes the issues clear to the public (albeit embarrassing to the government) would seem especially praiseworthy (and, of course, particularly unusual).

Then Alan Johnson goes on to write: “It is important that the government’s messages on drugs are clear and as an advisor you do nothing to undermine public understanding of them.” Well, I think we would all drink to that. (Sorry, ‘agree’ to that).

So, have David Nutt’s recent statements in the press “undermined public understanding” of the government’s messages on drugs? In no way. In fact, quite the opposite – they have significantly increased the public’s understanding that the government has acted to regrade cannabis, not because of its likely harms to the public, but for party political advantage. Here, it is clearly the government which is behaving unacceptably, not its advisor.

And can we justify Alan Johnson’s decision by using the general principles of public interest? For example, has he injected moral values into the debate, on behalf of those who have elected him? No, the government claims it is simply reacting to the evidence given to it on relative ‘harms’. Or is Alan Johnson claiming that his intervention is to resolve fundamental conflicts between the interests of different groups in society? No, the government claims that there is a general public interest in reducing the harms from drugs – so that both those groups who argue for utterly draconian penalties on drug takers and dealers, and those who argue for complete legalisation of (unadulterated non-lethally-poisonous) substances have got it wrong – both groups will have their interests best served if the government acts to reduce the harms arising from drug misuse.

Conclusion? Ministers are currently taking significant decisions on the appointments of public figures without any reference to the public interest and with clear intention to secure party political advantage. This may not be surprising. It may not be unprecedented. It may not be easy to eradicate. But it IS unacceptable. We should launch a search for new rules which make it harder and less likely in the future. Parliament should debate this immediately and set this search for new rules in motion.

'Opinion' elevated over 'expertise' in government 2.0?

2009-10-17T03:15:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog, Will Davies (following Mirowski) has argued that 'government 2.0' is the final realisation of the neo-liberal state. “No auditors, no experts, no objective knowledge, no sense of the common good, just maximum freedom for individuals to form opinions and privately process information.” He goes on to argue that siding with perspective over expertise cannot be the basis for legitimacy (potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/what-is-the-postbureaucratic-state.html).

While these concerns are understandable, Will Davies in this post does a disservice to the government 2.0 debate. He is actually talking about ‘non-government 2.0’ and sets up a straw-man-opponent in which hardly anyone could possibly believe, then demonstrates convincingly how to knock this opponent over. Most of those involved in the government 2.0 debate want much richer interactions between citizens, service users, professionals, managers and politicians. Few want the views of citizens and service users to trump the views of the others. They just want those views to have much greater weight in the future - not a lot to ask, given how little weight they have had up to now.

A long way down the line, we are going to have to face up to the issues which Will Davies raises here, deciding where the proper balance lies between expertise and 'perspective' (better characterised as 'formally-validated expertise' and 'experience-based experience'). And we will certainly wish to ensure that BOTH play major roles in decision making on public services and issues. But it is wholly implausible for Will Davies to suggest that we are now reaching the point where 'expertise' is being swamped, so that the legitimacy of current governmental decision making structures and systems is threatened by ill-informed, non-expert 'opinion'-peddlars.

The Press Complaints Commission, the Daily Mail and Jan Moir

2009-10-16T15:27:00.000-07:00

I submitted a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about the Daily Mail article by Jan Moir ‘A strange, lonely and troubling death …’ on 16 October 2009. My complaint, under clauses 1, 3, 5 and 12 of the Code of Practice ran as follows:

“This article is speculative without any attempt to find out the facts, intrusive into private issues and a family grief without any relevance to issues which are in the public interest, and outrageously homophobic in both content and tone. If this kind of abusive and ill-informed comment is allowed to proliferate, we will have a press full of insinuations against anyone in the public eye, full of poisonous innuendo, pretending to preach warnings and caution to a public intended to be terrified, but based on absolutely no research, knowledge or intention to inform. It is not sufficient to sanction the author, who appears to be simply a big mouth looking for attention. A national newspaper which publishes such material, without any attempt to verify its insinuations and without any regard to the insult which it gives to the gay community which it belittles and demonises, should be publicly upbraided for its shockingly low standards of taste and banned from carrying any advertising for a period of at least a month, to ensure that it suffers an economic sanction for its lapse of standards.”

I very quickly received the following reply:

“Dear Tony Bovaird

Thank you for sending us your complaint about the Daily Mail article on the subject of the death of Stephen Gately. We have received numerous complaints about this matter.

I should first make clear that the Commission generally requires the involvement of directly affected parties before it can begin an investigation into an article. On this occasion, it may be a matter for the family of Mr Gately to raise a complaint about how his death has been treated by the Daily Mail. I can inform you that we have made ourselves available to the family and Mr Gately's bandmates, in order that they can use our services if they wish.

We require the direct involvement of affected parties because the PCC process can have a public outcome and it would be discourteous for the Commission to publish information relating to individuals without their knowledge or consent. Indeed, doing so might unwittingly add to any intrusion. Additionally, one of the PCC's roles is dispute resolution, and we would need contact with the affected party in order to determine what would be an acceptable means of settling a complaint.

On initial examination, it would appear that you are, therefore, a third party to the complaint, and wemay not be able to pursue your concerns further. However, if you feel that your complaint touches on claims that do not relate directly to Mr Gately or his family, please let us know, making clear how they raise a breach of the Code of Practice. If you feel that the Commission should waive its third party rules, please make clear why you believe this.

Press Complaints Commission”

Somehow, this doesn’t seem very convincing, does it? I find it hard to believe that this very weak response has anything to do with the fact that the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission is Paul Dacre, who is editor of the Daily Mail. However, I’m thinking about what else might explain it and haven’t managed to come with anything very plausible just yet. Can you help?

From self-organising of services to co-production

2009-10-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

David Gale, in a post to a blogsite on which Martin Ferguson of SOCITM is asking for ideas on issues to raise at a forthcoming PSI event on service delivery, suggests that the posts made say nothing at all about taking a few steps back and starting by putting the customer at the centre of service delivery and information management (http://alturl.com/48b9). This note is based on my reply to that post.

Actually, most users are already at the centre of what public sector professionals and managers would see as 'the service', since they are already doing lots of things that either make the service unnecessary (core preventative activity, e.g. eating better, exercising more, taking more stuff to recycling centres, locking their houses and cars more carefully, etc.) or are undertaking some of the core problem-alleviating service activity for themselves or with friends and neighbours (e.g. caring for a loved one, learning a new skill, taking a course of non-prescribed medicine, cleaning up a dirty corner of the local pond, intervening to ask local kids to stop making such a racket around the local bus stop late into the evening, etc.).

The big and embarrassing issue is this - users and citizens DON'T see this as 'co-production of public services' - and quite rightly. That's because they very often see themselves as pretty well producing the improvements ALONE and without help from professional staff, whether from the public sector or third sector (never mind the private sector). 'Co-production my arse', you can probably hear them mumbling. So actually, it's not really a question of 'us' (public service professionals) putting 'them' (users and citizens) at the centre of service delivery and information - no, the challenge is to find ways for US to get to the centre, alongside users and engaged citizens. And if we are to ask their permission to get in there with them, and make use of their energy, commitment, expertise and time – and get them to recognize and make good us of OUR expertise and other resources - well, then, we're going to have to do something to improve our credibility, which in many cases is pretty shot through in the eyes of these 'everyday' makers of real improvements in the life of our communities.

I think that such an approach (‘from self-organising to co-production’) is directly tackling David Gale's point, but it suggests that we need to step back and see things from a very different perspective. Good news, bad news - bad news first: it's a humbler perspective, which is a bit hard for many professionals to take; good news - it often doesn't involve trying to create something that doesn't exist, rather it's about asking service users and citizens for permission to join them in their everyday mission to improve their own lives and those of the people around them. In other words, co-production would often be easy - if we weren't always trying so hard to see it and sell it as something WE have to convince THEM to do!

Role of user and community co-production in service transformation

2009-10-15T06:44:00.000-07:00

Martin Ferguson of SOCITM has been asking for issues to raise at a forthcoming PSI event on service delivery, which would interest colleagues from Cabinet Office and other Whitehall departments. The following suggestions are mainly taken from my reply. You can add your own comments here - or at his blog (http://www.opensocitm.com/profiles/blogs/speaking-at-psi-event).

A key element in service transformation in the next decade will be intensifying and systematising the co-production of services by users and other citizens - expert patients in health, recycling champions in local environmental services, neighbourhood watch convenors, peer support in social wellbeing, 'street champions' in neighbourhood service commissioning, 'job buddies' for NEETs, etc.

SOCITM members, and others working in social media, can help in several ways - one is just in improving the content and availability of information on WHAT co-production is happening and HOW to support it, but another key role is in connecting up all the users and citizens who already do a lot and want to do more, with professionals who can find ways of making use of their contribution.

Building up the role of co-production is a two-way process - in the public services, it's about helping professionals to understand and to access the huge contribution which users and other citizens can make to improving services; for users and citizens it's about helping them to use the expertise of professional service providers so that their largely self-organising activities become more effective, more widely spread, and less burdensome to them.

Of course, many local authorities (and probably most of Whitehall) will be especially interested in the potential efficiency savings arising from user and community co-production. We're currently researching this for LARCI (the Local Authorities Research Council Initiative). Ideas, examples and case studies gratefully received!

Seminar on Co-production of Services, Co-creation of value

2009-10-09T08:12:00.000-07:00

THE FOLLOWING DRAFT FLYER SETS OUT A PROPOSAL FOR A SEMINAR WHICH WE HOPE TO RUN ON 10 DECEMBER 2009 AT UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM.

AS WELL AS CIRCULATING THIS DRAFT AMONGST COLLEAGUES AT THE UNIVERSITY, WE'D WELCOME INVOLVEMENT FROM OTHER RESEARCHERS AND PRACTITIONERS WHO ARE WORKING ON THESE TOPICS.

SO PLEASE FEEL FREE TO EDIT THE MOCK FLYER/'NEARLY-WIKI' BELOW AS YOU SEE FIT, ADD YOUR NAME AND EMAIL IT TO Tony.Bovaird@bham.ac.uk SO THAT I CAN CIRCULATE IT TO COLLEAGUES WHO ARE PARTICIPATING IN THIS CO-DESIGN EXERCISE! (YES, I KNOW, IT'S A WORD-WIKI, NOT AN HTML-WIKI, SORRY BUT IT'S FASTER FOR THE MOMENT!)

CO-PRODUCTION OF PUBLIC SERVICES, CO-CREATION OF PUBLIC VALUE
Seminar on the shaping the research agenda

In the last few years, an enormous groundswell of interest has arisen in the potential of ‘co-production’ and ‘co-creation’, working with users and citizens.

Lots of different terms are used to describe what's going on here. They include working with users and citizens on:
• Co-production of services (e.g. expert patients) and products (e.g. software)
• Co-design of services
• Co-planning of public policies
• Co-creation of value
• Co-evaluation of public programmes and policies

A number of staff in Birmingham University are working on these themes. So far, many of these efforts have been unconnected. We think that it might be good to see if we could productively join up some of these research streams.

So we invite you to a seminar to explore what we are all doing, and potential links. And, if some links are found, we hope to have a few follow-up events.

Tentatively, we have pencilled the seminar in for 10 December (probably from 10.30 – 12.30). But let us know if that doesn’t suit – we may have to change it. In any case, you may catch us at some of the follow-up events.

To make sure something happens, we’re seeding the seminar. The people whose names are at the end of this email are committing to say something about their own research – but add your name, too, if you’re going to come along and say something. We’ll find someappropriate format, however many (or few) agree to come along!

And let’s co-produce this flyer like a wiki. Feel free to edit it (don’t bother with tracking mode) and send it out (to all the people who were copied into the email you got it from) with a short note of what changes you made – so feel free to improve the scope, the content and the process as best you can.

One other thing, we’ve invited a few people from outside the Uni Bham community to come along, too, as they have some really interesting things to contribute – if you want to do the same, feel free and add their name to the list (but only if they have agreed to come!) – but do please make it clear that you've done that in your subsequent emails, so that we keep a handle on the potential room and refreshment implications!

Tony Bovaird, INLOGOV and Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham
Elke Löffler, Chief Executive, Governance International
Graham Hill, Strategyn UK and Customers and More

The Governance Impossibility Theorem

2009-09-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Arrow famously fashioned an Impossibility Theorem 60 years ago which changed the course of welfare economics and social choice theory: no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking, while also meeting a certain set of reasonable criteria, each of which is likely to be widely supported.

In other words, we cannot base collective decision making simply on the individual preferences of the members of the collective – we need to trade off some ‘reasonable criteria’ against other ‘reasonable criteria’, when we made a collective decision. (And, of course, this means giving more weight to the values of some members than to others).

So what? Well, in the intervening period, we have learnt to live with Arrow’s theorem and have reconciled ourselves to the necessarily limited claims that welfare economics and social choice theory can make about the social rankings of different courses of action. However, we have allowed an entirely new substructure of criteria to grow up in relation to social choice and community decision making, without noticing that a similar logic is likely to apply to them – the ‘principles of good governance’.

I don’t wish to attack the desirability of these ‘principles’. I’ve actually written quite a lot on them in the past (see, example, my article with Elke Loeffler on “Evaluating the quality of public governance: indicators, models and methodologies”, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Vol. 69 No. 3 (2003), pp. 313-328). However, even in that article, we hinted that any full set of principles of good governance might be ‘over-determined’ – it might not be possible to achieve all of them simultaneously. Not a surprise, when you consider that we were proposing principles which related to all of the following dimensions of public governance:

• Citizen engagement
• Transparency
• Accountability
• The equalities agenda and social inclusion (gender, ethnicity, age, religion, etc.)
• Ethical and honest behaviour
• Equity (fair procedures and due process)
• Ability to compete in a global environment
• Ability to work effectively in partnership
• Sustainability
• Respect for the rule of law

Now I’m much more confident that there is indeed an ‘impossibility theorem for public governance:

no decision making system in any organisation or society can conform simultaneously to all the reasonable principles of good governance, each of which is likely to be widely supported by most members of most stakeholder groups

I was most recently reminded of the importance of this when reading Amitai Etzioni’s essay “Strength in numbers” in the recent RSA Journal (Autumn 2009, pp. 24 -27). Etzioni contrasts the obligations which arise from one’s commitment to the community (or communities) in which one lives to those obligations which arise to all our fellow men and women – universal human rights. He writes "One cannot maximise either individual rights (and in their name destroy particularistic values and the communities on which they are based) or community (thus ignoring our obligations to all human beings). Comunitarians like me see the tension between the two as a given; hence, it is best to seek out how the commitments to both core values can be combined.” In other words, bad news, a trade-off is needed.

So what? Well, I think the main implication is that we now urgently need to explore the grounds on which we might be prepared to make this trade-off between different ‘good governance’ principles. As with the reactions to Arrow’s original impossibility theorem, we are likely to find that the trade-offs we consider most convincing will actually differ significantly between contexts, and over time. And, of course, between stakeholders – so that there is likely to be disagreement (if not outright conflict) between parties as to which governance principles should have highest priority at any given time.

This is hardly a surprising lesson. However, much of the governance literature still suggests that there is always a potential ‘win-win’ situation for all stakeholders, if they only buckle down, engage with each other, seek compromise and accept the principles of ‘good governance’. Not so. These governance principles are indeed a basic part of human interaction. But human interaction requires collective choices and prioritization – and some people are always likely to lose out in such collective processes. We should not pussyfoot about in trying to hide this.

A further implication is that there may well be more important tasks in governance today than the endless elaboration of each of the ‘good governance’ principles. Of course, it is interesting and, in the long term, it may be valuable to make ever more sophisticated our understanding of what is meant by ‘achieving transparency’ or ‘respecting diversity’. However, many of these principles are likely to be only partly met in practice, so that finding better social and political methods for achieving an acceptable trade-off between these principles may bring far greater benefits to our citizens than pushing our definitions of the principles to their logical limits.

This is not to say that governance principles do not matter. Far from it. It is because they matter so much that we need to be become more adept at choosing which ones matter MOST to us, in the communities in which we live, at this particular time.

Participatory budgeting in a period of financial restraint

2009-09-22T01:45:00.001-07:00

Last week, at a seminar for the KGSt (the German equivalent of theUK Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government), I gave a paper on ‘Participatory Budgeting in the Financial Crisis’, mainly focusing on the UK case. There were over 60 German and Austrian participants, mainly from local government or local government associations. It was clear that participatory budgeting is now a real issue in Germany. Moreover, it was clear that a key driver was the growing concern in Germany that the financial crisis is going to hurt German local authorities – they have been forecasting for years that this was likely to happen but, to UK eyes at least, German local government has continued to be financially well-off in recent years. It seems that real financial restraint may be about to hit German local communities, as it is now hitting UK local authorities.

The key issue, however, was whether a set of approaches to participatory budgeting which were fashioned through experimentation in times of ‘plenty’ will also be appropriate in times of financial restraint. The 32 PB pilots in the UK, all supported by the Department for Communities and Local Government, and the best-known German examples of PB (Berlin-Lichtenberg, Köln, Freiburg, Potsdam) have all developed at a time when service development was a key issue. Now attention is spreading to how PB might help in a period of cuts (or ‘decommissioning’ as some now like to call it in the UK, perhaps to make it sound less political).

However, there is one huge difference between participative approaches in relation to development proposals, as compared to proposals for cuts. When development proposals are put forward, people tend to focus on, comment on and promote those proposals about which they know something and in which they are interested. Their comments on these proposals are therefore based on strongly-held preferences and these preferences are (at least partly) well-informed. In this sense, many citizens (and certainly many service users) are actually more appropriate judges of priorities than politicians, service managers or professional staff. The views of informed and interested citizens deserve to be listened to – and, rightly, they are likely to have an effect on others who participate in the decision making process.

However, this is not the dynamic when citizens are asked to comment on proposed cuts. Here, citizens are likely to suggest cuts in areas about which they know little and have no interest. This is natural. They will lobby to protect the services which they value. So the dynamic is that most citizens will focus on services where their judgements are NOT well-informed and where they have very weak preferences. Relying on information like this in the decision-making process is dangerous. It leads naturally to widespread demands for the abolition of those services which are used by minorities and which are disliked by majorities – often ‘equalities’ units in local government come under threat, services to those disadvantaged groups seen as ‘undeserving’, and (in the UK at least) arts and cultural services are vulnerable.

This is not to say that PB can’t be useful in the cuts debate. But it has to be redesigned. It has to be undertaken in such a way that the preferences which people express are given most weight when they have knowledge and interest in the services concerned. It has to allow the strength of the preferences of those who benefit from services to be explored and understood in the decision making process. It has to ensure that the decisions on which people express their views are decisions about which they actually have views. Otherwise, major damage can be done to the balance of the overall public service system on offer to citizens. Worse, people who are highly dependent on public services may find those services withdrawn or seriously reduced in effectiveness for their purposes. And, perhaps worst of all, the faith of citizens in the democratic decision making system – already seriously weakened in these times of political scandals and media hyper-criticism – will be further damaged, as the implications of unthinking cuts slowly sink in and their impacts become evident.

So, the challenge is: how to design a PB system which can give citizens real voice in the cuts process which now faces us – without running into the potential pitfalls outline above? Comments will be welcome – and some innovative thinking is seriously required.

Should we reward the weather?

2009-09-13T02:03:00.000-07:00

“If the weather is to blame for the bad years, how can it be that the talent, wisdom and hard work of bankers, traders and Wall Street Executives are responsible for the stupendous returns that occurred when the sun was shining” (Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard University, in New Statesman, 14 September 2009 - http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2009/09/bonuses-financial-public). Interesting starting point, and worth asking where it might lead us. One route would surely lead us back to the idea of a ‘betterment levy’ on capital gains?

‘One-hand clapping': discussing the National Debt in a vacuum

2009-09-12T03:03:00.000-07:00

In all the discussion of ‘stimulus’ packages in the newly Keynesian world of the 2008-09 recession, one highly misleading line of analysis has been given major prominence in the media. This is the argument that the National Debt is going to be increased by an enormous amount and will hugely increase the burden on the average citizen. The argument typically runs along the lines: “The annual government deficit has risen from 2.7% of GDP in 2007 to 11.6% of GDP in 2009 and the Treasury predicts it will hit 13.3% in 2010”. Scary stuff.

But, wait a minute, why are we comparing changes in the National Debt to GDP? This is like working out how well off a family is by comparing its increase in debt after taking out a mortgage with its annual income, without taking into account the value of the house bought - or calculating the value of a company to its shareholders by just comparing its debts to its annual dividend. Would anyone be so stupid? But we’re doing it all the time in relation to the government’s borrowing.

Let’s look at it another way. Figures calculated for the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8248645.stm) show that household wealth (including housing wealth and financial wealth) dropped in 2008 from £6,730bn to £5,920bn, a fall of £820bn. The increase in the national debt in 2008 was £60bn and in 2009 is likely to be around £83bn. If these increases in debt, due to the financial stimulus package, do succeed in reinvigorating the economy, promoting house price increases and recovery of the stock market, then they would appear to be a very small price to pay. (And there is the danger that, without such a stimulus package, the UK economy could be stuck in zero or low growth for a long time – see David Blanchflower in the New Statesman (14 September 2009 - http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2009/09/mpc-bank-recession-king-rates). Certainly, most voters would consider that an attractive package. But that is not what they are being told is happening.

Of course, economists will blanche at such a simple way of picturing what is happening. For them, the real pay-off from the stimulus is the increase in the stock of assets (not simply their financial value) and the increase in annual consumption goods which the stimulus allows. Funnily enough, this hasn’t been talked about much, either, in the media, although there have been widely expressed concerns about job losses. But it’s pretty obvious that the recovery will bring significant gains along these lines – and the debate should be about whether these gains outweigh the disadvantages. (The problems with the economist’s line of argument are well known – the calculation of the value of increases in the stock of assets, and indeed the flow of consumption, is fraught with contentious assumptions and there is still major debate on how to calculate the damage to ¬economy efficiency through the methods used eventually to repay the debt – either cuts in public services or tax increases).

Moreover, all of this analysis leaves out one major element which, in the long run, may be the most important piece in the jigsaw – the value of public sector assets. In large measure, public sector borrowing is undertaken in order to invest in public assets – schools, hospitals, roads, museums, social housing, etc. To worry about the value of debt without considering the value of the assets which it has bought is plain silly. And to allow these assets to deteriorate in value simply in order to avoid an increase in debt would be utterly foolish. Yet, we very rarely hear about the value of these assets ( even though this value now has to be calculated on a regular basis as part of the government’s resource accounting process).

Taken as a whole, these arguments suggest that the National Debt is often a symbol of an active and successful government. Having a high debt is highly desirable, if matched by high public asset levels and if it has seeded fast growth in the economy, and therefore in household wealth. Having a low National Debt is a symbol of government incompetence, if matched by very low public asset levels and if it has constrained the economy, and household wealth, to very low growth levels.

These arguments are not simple and, even more awkwardly, they are hard to encapsulate in one headline or one soundbite. However, they are about the things that are fundamentally important to every voter when deciding how well the country is run. To discuss increases in the National Debt as if they are unambiguously an evil is to engage in one-hand clapping – lots of gesturing, no results.

Strategic commissioning: reframing or just relabelling public decision-making?

2009-09-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

I had the chance to make a presentation this morning to the PAC conference at University of Glamorgan - topic: "Strategic commissioning for services - or for citizens and places?". Lots of useful comments to take on board for the next draft of the paper (let me know if you'd like me to email you a copy).

One line of discussion was especially interesting. How new, really, is 'strategic commissioning'?

Seen as 'the whole set of activities which enable the needs of citizens and service users to be met' (essentially the CLG approach, and the DH approach in the 2006 Health Service Reform report), is it anything more than a relabelling of the old 'rational management cycle'?

On the other hand, if it is meant to distinguish planning/design/procurement/review stages of decision-making from the 'delivery' stages (an approach adopted in some other initiatives of DH), then we may be revisiting a very longstanding argument. In its last guise, this argument turned up as the debate on whether we can divide 'policy' from 'implementation' - either in theory (one set of critics disputes this vigorously) or in practice (and many have argued that this has turned out to be a wrong turning in public management in the last 25 years).

So, what do you think? Is strategic commissioning just a relabelling of an old set of concepts? Or a new way of making a useful distinction between the 'delivery' and the policy' areas of public decision making?

Tony Bovaird

Welcome to Public Service Matters

2009-09-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog site. I intend to use it for posting ideas and arguments arising from research and training programmes that I'm involved in. And to start, pursue and nail arguments. That means arguments with you, of course!

So I'm hoping that a lot of the blog entries will stimulate you to provide your views in return. And that some of the ideas we co-create together, through this discussion, will feed back into research and training programmes - mine, yours and those of other readers, too.

So, welcome - and please help me to develop some new, rigorous and practical demonstrations that Public Service Matters!

Tony Bovaird