what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label the big society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the big society. Show all posts

Monday, June 3, 2019

blowing up departmental silos

It was some 50 years ago when people first started to promise the “end of bureaucracy” but centralized control has been too seductive a notion for those with power to be willing to surrender it easily.
We have talked a lot since then about people getting lost in “departmental silos” but real reform of public services (and indeed of commercial organisations) is notoriously difficult.
The early efforts made in the UK in the 1970s introduced management techniques to government but Thatcher grew impatient with that and opted instead for the outright transfer of bodies and services to the private sector and, as a second-best, the contracting-out of services – with the subsequent explosion of audit and management controls…

And New Labour’s “modernization of government” programme from 1999 turned out to be a modern version of target-driven Stalinism.
The Coalition government of 2010-15 seemed to offer greater flexibility – with a new emphasis on the role of the third sector and even of worker-cooperatives. But that soon dies the death…

So it’s understandable that people should be cynical when they encounter talk of reform…..but I’ve just finished reading a rather different sort of book……Radical Help – how we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state” which has come out of someone taking the trouble to immerse herself for several years in the “Dead-end” worlds in which too many British citizens live these days – locked in an apparently never-ending cycle of despair and hopelessness.

We have all heard of these “Neighbours from hell” cases and it was with such families that Hilary Cottam then had the courage to work with – unable to accept a model which allows hundreds of thousands of pounds to be spent on them, taking up the time of dozens of welfare specialists. One example she quotes was actually visited by no less than 73 different officials from a variety of agencies!!
Slowly and patiently she built small teams to work with such families, selected by a small panel including the mother herself who then became part of “the solution” – a total inversion of the traditional model. The same, flexible approach was used for other “wicked problems” – the transition to adolescence; the search for good work; good health; and ageing well….

At one stage, the Prime Minister himself visited the project and was so impressed that he instructed the Cabinet Office to use the same approach on a wider basis. This was part of the “Big Society” idea which was reflected in ideas about “the enabling society” which The Carnegie Trust for one still seems to keep alive.
But government officials simply can’t understand that the mechanistic “scaling up” of such delicate work requires skills and methods not easily found in "toolkits" - and their efforts quickly failed

Seven years ago, it appears, Cottam was part of a small team which produced a pamphlet on the same theme - The Relational State – how recognising the importance of human relationships could revolutionise the role of the state (IPPR 2012).
Like me, she is attracted to the recent work of Frederic Laloux and also like me, she quotes favourably the liberationist work in the 1970s of Ivan Illich and Paolo Freire

But, so far, I know of only one government which has abolished Departments of State and really tried to get officials working flexibly on issues seen by citizens as problematic – and that is the Scottish government. That experience is briefly outlined in the pamphlet “Northern Exposure” you will find in the reading list attached.

A Resource
The Enabling State; sir john elvidge (2012)
Public Services Reform – but not as we know it; by Hilary Wainwright (Unison and TNI 2009)

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

limits of expertise

A scrappy blog today – I was still trying to make sense of William Davies’s intriguing paper from which I quoted yesterday which has, as its title, The Limits of Expertise. I have never tried to explain (even to myself) why I chose the Saul quotation for my masthead on the right - We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes. It is a reflection, I suppose, of the ambivalence within me about political and managerial roles. For the first 20 years of my adult life. I was a (technocratic) politician; for the last 20 years I have been an apolitical adviser
But in 1974 or so – based on my experience of working with community groups and trying to reform a small municipal bureaucracy – I wrote a pamphlet called From Corporate Management to Community action which reflected my disillusionment with the technocratic fashions of the time.
New Labour was a social engineering government with a vengeance – with Brown given the time and opportunity to invent a giant machine for minute tweaking of socio-economic processes acroess the board. His budgets (companies), tax credits (households) and PSA (public service agreements setting targets for Departments) were infamous for their detail and optimistic assumptions about the link between technical means and social outcomes. It was not just the sheer arrogance – it was downright ignorance of the literature on the perversity of social interventions – which amazes.
Davies’s The Limits of Expertise tries to look at the philosophical underpinnings of what we might call the "policy bent" – by which I mean the incredible growth in the past 20 years of Think Tanks and of interest in policy analysis. That reflects, of course, the huge expansion in universities of social science, paramount amongst which has been economics – with its weird but (until recently) unquestioned assumptions about human nature. He has an interesting argument -
Unforeseen by the policy architects who designed the New Labour platform, the defining problem of the past decade has turned out to be an ethical-political one: antisocial behaviour. Utilitarian calculations can only conceive of the world in economic terms (‘economic’ in the sense of weighing up profit and loss), and as such are entirely ill-equipped to deal with this problem. It can be bracketed as an aspect of poverty or even biology; it can be tackled through an extension of police and surveillance technologies; or it can be swept under the carpet through mystical references to ‘communities’ and the voluntary sector. All the while, it looks set to rise in the future, thwarting all our expert analyses of the psychology and economics that supposedly determine it.
For the foreseeable future, our politicians will treat it like crime or unemployment: quantitative phenomena that rise and fall as outcomes of policy and/or the economic weather. In time, however, it may have to be treated as an ethical and political issue. At an ethical level, Richard Reeves points out that there is a growing need to revive respect for 'character’. He point to three dimensions of this: a sense of personal agency or self-direction; an acceptance of personal responsibility; and effective regulation of one’s own emotions, in particular the ability to resist temptation or at least defer gratification.
That reminded me of David Cameron’s address in November which articulated his Big Society idea.
It reads very well – it is quite something for a Conservative Prime Minister to be committed to deal with poverty and inequality. He actually quotes from the recent Wilkinson and Picket book which strongly argues that healthy societies are equal ones.
Having proven (to at least his own satisfaction) that big government (spending) has not dealt with the problem of poverty, Cameron then suggests that the main reason for this is the neglect of the moral dimension, refers to various community enterprises, entrepreneurs and goes on -
Our alternative to big government is not no government - some reheated version of ideological laissez-faire. Nor is it just smarter government. Because we believe that a strong society will solve our problems more effectively than big government has or ever will, we want the state to act as an instrument for helping to create a strong society. Our alternative to big government is the big society.
But we understand that the big society is not just going to spring to life on its own: we need strong and concerted government action to make it happen. We need to use the state to remake society.
The first step is to redistribute power and control from the central state and its agencies to individuals and local communities. That way, we can create the opportunity for people to take responsibility. This is absolutely in line with the spirit of the age - the post-bureaucratic age. In commerce, the Professor of Technological Innovation at MIT, Eric von Hippel, has shown how individuals and small companies, flexible and able to take advantage of technologies and information once only available to major multinational corporations, are responding with the innovations that best suit the needs of consumers.
This year's Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, has shown through her life's work how non- state collective action is more effective than centralised state solutions in solving community problems.
Our plans for decentralisation are based on a simple human insight: if you give people more responsibility, they behave more responsibly.
So we will take power from the central state and give it to individuals where possible - as with our school reforms that will put power directly in the hands of parents.
Where it doesn't make sense to give power directly to individuals, for example where there is a function that is collective in nature, then we will transfer power to neighbourhoods. So our new Local Housing Trusts will enable communities to come together, agree on the number and type of homes they want, and provide themselves with permission to expand and lead that development.
Where neighbourhood empowerment is not practical we will redistribute power to the lowest possible tier of government, and the removal of bureaucratic controls on councils will enable them to offer local people whatever services they want, in whatever way they want, with new mayors in our big cities acting as a focus for civic pride and responsibility.
This decentralisation of power from the central to the local will not just increase responsibility, it will lead to innovation, as people have the freedom to try new approaches to solving social problems, and the freedom to copy what works elsewhere.

It is sad that I never found Blair or Brown singing a song like this. Of course one can make various criticisms – one of the best is in a TUC blog
But the fact remains that community enterprise (pity he didn’t mention cooperatives! is worth supporting. I was very heartened to read in another blog about the continuing success of the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain which has increased its enployment in the last 20 years from 20,000 to 90,000.
I remember visiting Mondragon in 1990 in an endeavour to bring its lessons back to Scotland.