Politicians from all sides are talking about getting the public more involved in the design and delivery of public services. Tessa Jowell has called for services to be run as cooperatives, managed and governed by their employees and users. David Cameron has called for a ‘big society’ to replace the ‘big state’ and his favoured intellectual Phillip Blond talks of communities taking greater responsibility for running services themselves.
Policy wonks – I confess to being among them – have sometimes labelled this proposition ‘co-production’: that both the state and the citizen should collaborate in a reciprocal way to produce the outcomes we want.
Of course none of this is new: every time a parent sits down with their child to help them with their homework they are ‘co-producing’ better educational results with the state. All the time we spend separating our rubbish into different bins and boxes for recycling is time spent ‘co-producing’ less waste with our local authority.
Nevertheless there is now interest in a radical extension of this agenda. In part this is because while Labour’s ‘investment plus targets’ approach to public services bore fruit early on, improvements in outcomes in areas like health and education have since plateaued. Ministers have come to realise that further improvement requires the active participation of citizens themselves: so, for example, significant further improvements in health are more likely to come from changes to people’s lifestyles than investment in acute care services.
Another reason for the popularity of this agenda is of course the public deficit: everyone is looking for ways of doing more for less, and asking citizens and communities to do more is one way of achieving it. Individual budgets in social care are premised on the idea that service users will spend public money much more effectively themselves than if services are just delivered to them in a paternalistic fashion. Such innovations have the potential to be extremely empowering.
And yet there are considerable obstacles in bringing these ideas from the margins to the mainstream of service delivery. For one thing, social capital and civic participation have declined: one cannot help thinking that just as we are turning to communities to take on a more active role, those communities have become less able to do so. Moreover, it is unclear whether people want to do more: poll after poll has shown that while the public say they support this agenda, when asked whether they personally want to get involved, only small numbers volunteer.
We also need to think more carefully about which services are most amenable to this kind of approach. Clearly there are some cases where the expert should be king: when you go for open-heart surgery you don’t want to make the incisions yourself. There are other services, like paying your council tax, where we act more like consumers and want services delivered conveniently with minimum engagement. Those services most amenable to ‘co-production’ are those where outcomes depend crucially on the relationships between users and professionals: so, for example, educational outcomes clearly depend on pupil, parent and teacher relationships to a very considerable extent. In another example, the police depend critically on the information provided to them by the public to solve crimes and how the police and communities relate to one another is critical to achieving this.
This is a demanding agenda, which poses considerable challenges. But it is also one that has the potential to empower those who currently have very little power – and achieve better value for money at the same time.
Ippr and PwC’s Capable Communities project was launched in February 2010. The first scoping paper can be downloaded here.
Photo: Victoria Peckham 2006