In his Hugo Young lecture this month Ed Miliband set out his vision for a change of culture in public services. Information should be shared; users should be linked through social networks; decisions should be made by users and professionals together; and more decisions should be made at local level.
It is no discredit to this promising vision to say that it has some roots in past experience and experiment. It is by looking at some of the precedents that we can learn how to do it better this time, even though conditions are different. It took New Labour nine or 10 years to travel from its initial grand vision of joined-up government and social inclusion to a system for coordinating public services and participation. Two years were spent clarifying the principles, four or five creating separate area-based initiatives on all the major public services, and three or four working out a way of pulling them together under local strategic partnerships. Community involvement started as a side issue in regeneration and ended as the key to a universal system. But it was only embedded in time to be shattered by a combination of economic crisis, parliamentary disarray and then the change of government.
Ed Miliband gives examples of reforms in health, education, housing and other services. Each field has specific issues, and needs some dedicated action, but are we about to repeat the mistake of locking participation into departmental silos? It’s the same community that needs to be engaged across the piece. In our new pamphlet People and Services Partnerships Colin Miller and I argue that an incoming government would save years by going straight for a coordinated model of local community engagement across all services – but with some crucial differences.
First, names are important. ‘Local strategic partnership’ is a bureaucratic mouthful. Something like ‘people and services partnership’ says what it means.
Second, instead of making community engagement sound like an extra burden on public services, we need to find and use those local partnership models which make it feel like a liberation. Being responsive to their users makes services’ work easier, not harder. Managers need to allocate a margin of workers’ time to collaboration with local community groups to achieve this mutual energising. It will be more than repaid in greater effectiveness. Co-production needs to be forged at the point of delivery, not just by high-level committees and difficult budget negotiations.
Third, we need to invest in and modernise community development. This is the name of a low-profile but longstanding occupation which specialises in helping people to establish and strengthen community groups. The aim is to improve local conditions, partly by residents’ own activities and partly by negotiation with, or pressure on, authorities. It is currently in the doldrums in England, though flourishing in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The occupation has a mixed reputation for, on one hand, practical effectiveness, and, on the other, claiming to be ‘more radical than thou’. Its skills will be widely needed to mobilise residents, especially in the more disadvantaged neighbourhoods, but it should have a working ethos of making alliances between residents and services, enabling the state to work for and with the people.
Fourth, embed the vision in solid outcomes. Progress in community activity, involvement and empowerment can be measured just as well as other social outcomes, without making a fetish of overdetailed targets. For example, you can measure how strong and inclusive the local community and voluntary sector is. New Labour created a national basis for this (see www.nscsesurvey.com), but too late in the day. By pretending that ‘big society’ was a new idea, David Cameron avoided setting any baseline or measurement for it. This has conveniently concealed how local action has been eroded, not strengthened. Miliband’s vision sketches a much more productive alternative. But it needs a central image and a simple name.
———————————————-
Gabriel Chanan is is an adviser and evaluator on community involvement, engagement and development
———————————————-