Futures, fleetness of foot and assuredness of grip

Recent events such as the calls for evidence by the Commission on the future of Local Government (www.civicenterprise.gov.uk), together with the experience outlined in a previous blog of LocalGovCampNW have caused me to think a little more about what the future holds. How will local government look in the coming years, what can it do to influence its future and what it can do to regulate itself in order to secure reputational advantage? This post sets out to describe that landscape and proposes that instead of introducing a form of self-regulation or self-policing, the local government sector should look to accreditation as a more open and responsive way forward.

Looking to the future, there is a move towards pluralism in service delivery, through the imperatives of localism and personalisation. As I have said elsewhere, Local Government sits squarely at the intersection of all three sectors, public, private and voluntary, and will need to engage all three approaches in its future service delivery palette. Furthermore, the tendency in local government funding is away from central government grants and towards more locally determined funding sources, including a greater weight on the citizen themselves through service charging. This trend towards a more localised balance of income will have a critical impact on the relationship between central and local government, with regard both to functional control and weight of influence.

Such changes will also be reflected in local government’s approach to people and place. Overall resilience of the community will become a critical concern, with particular regard to securing economic stability, appropriate skills, community cohesion and capacity, and in particular addressing the linked challenges of public health and care of people in old age.

Further, there will be the emergence of new local and national policy positions which will depend on the interrelationship between policy development and events. The natural ebb and flow of politics will carry away and deposit legislative flotsam and jetsam and with luck the local government sector will be able to take the initiative and surf along the waves and build its own forward progress.

However any progress will depend on the sector being able to set a course which is attractive and comprehensible to the public and accepted as legitimate by central government. To do this, the sector needs to build its reputation, gaining improved confidence in its services and its political and community leadership. It also needs visibly to improve its responsiveness and employee productivity and in particular work out, urgently, how to better engage with technology. Thirdly, it needs to become far more able to engage directly and less defensively with the community and harness its capacity to help reduce service demand.

Two key factors will be critical to such a change. The development of effective sector-wide improvement frameworks and some form of sector regulation, in the effective absence of externally imposed national responses with the demise of teh Audit Commission. The Local Government Association has rightly taken sector responsibility for both. However its improvement offer is largely a legacy of the erstwhile Improvement and Development Agency, which now looks rather flabby and flaccid, and a new approach to self-regulation is yet to be developed.

The relationship between regulation and risk is an interesting one, for surely there should be one. Yet there has been little discussion to date on the subject other than articulation of a desire not to repeat previous systems of scoring councils which gained little public traction. Accordingly I would like to offer some simple thoughts which might help to take this discussion forward.

First, if there is to be some form of self generated regulation by local government, it should have regard to the varying levels of risk which pertain to different services in different places. At present, as a result of central government perceptions of public risk, Ofsted and the Care Quality Council have responsibility for inspection of services at the local level. It is likely that even if this could be devolved to local government some form of detailed inspection would be needed to give assurance that personal services to the most vulnerable would meet particular standards. However at the other extreme of place-based universal service, the public might well function as its own inspector, provided it knows what to expect.

For all services, there need to be simple criteria which set out what public expectations of local government should be, covering the range from local leadership to delivery and allowing people to determine whether they are in receipt of an acceptable level of service when balanced with the level of local taxation or other income generation.

Finally, I believe that we have leapt too easily to thoughts of self regulation or policing, where perhaps there might be more mileage in a framework which is based on sector-led accreditation, reflecting changes elsewhere. This would lead to a far more open, less prescriptive form of regulation. In the following diagram I have set out four types of regulation  based on an alternative mindset which the sector might adopt:

Such an accreditation framework would require a public statement of expectations of the sector by the sector and involve local government and its agencies in signing up to minimum standards by which to be judged rather than submitting to external inspection or policing. To provide further assurance there would be some expectation of risk-based inspection similar to current external regulation of the highest risk areas such as childrens services and adult social care, and there would need to be some form of clear separation of an accreditation function.

However, overall this could provide a framework which is fleet of foot and which could extend to, say, Bronze, Silver and Gold accreditations of different services when councils sign up to deliver them to levels above the basic expected standards. This would also enable an element of community choice and balance and also help to drive up standards differentially depending on the choices made.

Until recently the LGA’s work on sector self-regulation has been understandably dormant, given the level of change that the organisation has undergone. However with a new team coming into place I hope that debates within the sector might widen to include forward looking forms of sector-led improvement and assurance along the lines described here.

Smart workforce, brighter future, and recognising talent

I was extremely pleased last week when the new direction for the Local Government Association’s National Graduate Development Programme was set out in A brighter future . The email arrived in my in-box when I was still thinking about the previous weekend’s #LocalGovCampNW meet, the tangible enthusiasm of those attending, and their real wish to make a difference to the sector. I also had the pleasure of my regular all-staff briefings and an informal coffee session with a group of staff during the week. All three made me reflect that the NGDP refresh is much needed and that there is a further need to consider recognition of the skills of more established employees.

In a previous post, Graduates, I set out what I believe to be key criteria for the national scheme, which are broadly as follows:

• responding to employers’ needs
• ensuring an appreciation of political issues and approaches
• understanding the perspectives of the private, voluntary and public sectors
• promoting independent thinking and providing robust analytical challenge
• developing an understanding of context
• securing employability by developing relevant skill sets
• fostering lifelong learning and support networks between participants
• providing sufficient throughput to ensure critical mass
• maintaining efficiency and a positive impact on the sector
• affordable for organisations and individuals, with clear cost/ benefit appraisals

The new scheme looks set to be able to address many of the above and demand the support of councils across the country. We need to ensure that it can be a way of capturing the some of the energies of innovation that the sector’s people possess directing it at the challenges that we have as a sector and as individual organisations. As I mentioned in Change capacity and spark, few of us have to look far to find bright people doing interesting things and hopefully we can use the scheme to develop this in the next wave of employees coming through.

However I have a remaining question, which is what we can do to better recognise the achievements and abilities of existing staff, such as those I met last week, and encourage them to learn and develop to achieve recognised high standards. This links into thoughts on talent management, arising from reading this Ashridge paper Developing future leaders: The contribution of Talent Management which suggests that:

Talent management systems may yet have the potential to provide a rigour in defining business critical skills for an organisation, behaviours required now and in the future, and enable focused development for different talent segments.

Some of the professions within the sector have very clear schemes for continuing professional development, but this is far more incremental than what I have in mind, and the more general strengths of leadership, operations management, customer service and innovation have no formal focus. However I am keen to find and embed an effective way to identify and develop people who are already well into their careers and allowing them to blossom in perhaps unforeseen ways. Can we develop a simple system of talent recognition and assessment, which will help us to identify, develop and deploy existing ability and enthusiasm in the workforce in as exciting a way as the NGDP could work for new arrivals?

#LocalgovcampNW unconference in Preston 4th February 2012

Today I had my first experience of an unconference (1), having headed up to Preston for a day of discussions and networking from people working at the heart of Local Government, many in organisational development, service R&D and communication roles. A range of subjects were suggested and I decided to attend those on organisational culture change, digital inclusion and bringing organisations and communities together in co-production. Almost all of the twelve proposed subjects were interesting and potentially useful.

The session on culture change and occupying social media explored new ways of thinking about organisational culture in the digital age, and the question of how to ensure that public sector organisations get their message across using social media, rather than being afraid to do so.

Looking first at culture, I gained a very clear sense that there was a need for organisations to trust their staff to engage with the public more freely, using the full range of channels and including social media. There is a need to encourage challenge and risk taking within organisations, through what one presenter called disruptive and/or purposive innovation and positive deviancy, and to challenge the current way we do things. However concern was expressed that there is a risk that such change can be agenda or provider led.  There was also a question as to what the role of politicians should be in helping to foster and endorse such change.

Turning to councils’ social media presence, a parallel was drawn between these and other media. If councils are not ensuring that they have a presence and are addressing reputational questions then it will be done for them by others. However there are some interesting questions as to the role of employees. Should they be freed to engage with service users, for example by allowing front-line workers to let the public know that they have carried out a task or checked out a complaint? Why can’t our officers be operating in digital social space guiding discussion about services or promoting new initiatives? One council had gone further and withdrawn its traditional news release service, replacing it with a social media-based electronic newsroom, so that its message got to interested members of the public before press interpretations of it. Others talked about freeing up electronic conversations within the organisation and linking up the employee communities of interest across departments.

Participants thought that the identifiability of services is key because they engage with people in very different ways, as users, customers or citizens. It’s therefore not good enough just to have a single approach. They also felt that there would be an inevitable culture change as new forms and channels of engagement developed. A book that I have been reading The Social Organization provides very good coverage of some of the issues and, like those at Preston emphasises the need to engage with people where they are communicating, including places such as local neighbourhood websites and specific interest blogs, rather than wait for them to come to the council website. There was general agreement that it is a significant mistake to write a lengthy digital media strategy, and that it is more important to ensure that people feel that they can get on and use such channels in line with the values of the organisation.

However, whilst all of the above is helpful, I came away with a feeling that this debate has not yet managed to engage with matters concerning reputation and the political or community leadership life of local government. I think that work with elected members is needed to explore emerging communication channels and understand how they might change the debate.

I found the discussions on digital inclusion and co-production somewhat frustrating as they promised a lot but it was hard to get past a firm push towards a focus on social media as an end in itself rather than a means to an end. For example the debate on digital skills and literacies was illustrated with some problematic examples of adult education and provider capture and misunderstanding of what digital literacy actually is. Why teach people Powerpoint rather than how to access services using new channels? Possibly because the tutor can’t either?

So the focus of discussion ended up being mostly around either formal education methods or how to convert people to using social media, rather than the benefits to people of engaging with new access channels and how to give them access. I was very interested in exploring the question of assisted access for people through community networks, but also understanding risks to their privacy and the need for informed consent. Curiously, though, the session had an absence of numbers or a strategic overview of the extent of exclusion. I believe this carries a risk of policy development by assumption and that much more work is needed at the local level to develop community insight.

The session on co-production focused particularly on sharing delivery of services with users and other providers and started very well, including the wider social impact of co-production, with the riots clean-up cited as a good example. I would identify a number of forms of co-production, from encouraging service users to get involved in data-entry, through methods such as joint service design, planning for real, community take over of services, and community networks engaged in prevention, for example helping older people live independently in a community support network. However the discussion drifted away from such specifics and ended inconclusively, partly arising from a range of different understandings of the subject and why it might be useful or important.

As I left to get my train, there was a final session of flash presentations where participants could opt to raise a subject for a strictly time-limited three minute slot. This provided an interesting insight into people’s concerns and I would have liked to stay longer.

Overall, all the initial presentations were interesting and those that were more ad-hoc were actually the better for it. Some of the observations in the discussions were real gems, but some others were fool’s gold, and I felt that there is a danger of hijack of the air-time by single-issue evangelists and people who turn up with personal agendas. Perhaps I have too controlling a stance but I believe it is worthwhile considering how such interventions might be managed to provide a better experience for attendees. The lesson for me from the day was that there is work to be done by senior managers in helping the fantastic innovators I met to see how their work contributes to political and strategic priorities of local government and its partner organisations. I think this is a significant gap and I will be thinking about how better we might address it. As always, the chats in the break were just as helpful as the sessions themselves. So for me the day was definitely worthwhile, as always for the dogs that didn’t bark as much as those that did, and for the energy and enthusiastic welcome of the group.

 

(1) An unconference is a no agenda conference where the attendees self organise by agreeing to turn up at a particular venue, pitching a number of topics for workshops which the others then decide to attend. The following links, here, here and here, kindly supplied by Ken Eastwood, give a flavour.

Networked councils – thoughts on future strategy and tactics

I don’t normally write on the subject of web-based social networks because I don’t really claim to know much and it’s a tool not an outcome. However the last week or so has seen me reviewing the subject of local government’s relationship with the internet and social media for a talk (1). Some of the themes and issues it raised seemed to strike a chord with those present, so I thought I would give them a wider airing here.

Given the challenges that local government faces, social media used effectively could be an extremely important tool for improvement because they should help councils and community leaders interact with the public. They should also help citizens to avoid having to make use of many costly public services because they have information about how to access alternatives or work with providers to help themselves. Finally they should help the public to hold councils to account because of the availability of information.

This should be through customer engagement through transactional activities, user enablement through promotional materials and public transparency through information provision. However it is hard to see much evidence of this in real terms in many local government applications of social media technologies. We have just about managed to get our web sites to be on ‘send’ rather than as passive posters of information and we are far from being good at conversation with our public. Our services have yet to address personalisation across the business and we have yet to develop robust mechanisms for establishing the resource requirements for R&D in this area, let alone the resources needed for this aspect of the business going forward.

With high levels of internet access in some parts of the country we should be working harder at this. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 87% of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire households have internet access (Average 77% nationally), with 57% of the population having access to some form of social networking tool. With such a saturation of use, it must be possible to bridge what some call the digital divide with neighbourhood and community schemes to counter digital isolation and encourage enablement so that this can become the service access channel of choice for the sector. However we will have to be much better at listening as well as despatching information through digital channels and think hard about our councillors and staff and their development needs and ability to respond to these significant changes.

In many areas, there are community social networking resources which have overtaken council’s websites as the source of choice for news and gossip about what’s going on. The digitally enabled community want news and RSS feeds, responsive Twitter feeds and email subscriptions, and easy access to information. As a sector we are being left behind and will need to think hard about how we link into established networks.

Councillors in particular are polarising between those who are fully digitally enabled and using social media to have a public presence out of all proportion to the effort that such a profile would once have taken, and those who rely on the oldest methods of contact with their residents and risk being completely unresponsive and out of touch. Local government needs to think hard about how it responds to this, and political parties need to review how they develop candidates expectations of how to engage with citizens for the future.

Our staff are equally polarised, and there is a developing network of individuals who are widely connected through Twitter and blogs and increasingly popular and free ‘unconferences’ (2) who are giving this a lot of thought. The problem is that most senior managers are completely unaware that such thinking is going on and will initially struggle to understand it. Furthermore, whilst there are some great ideas coming forward they are developed outside of the political and strategic spheres and will require much further work to realise their potential.

There is some helpful guidance available however, and I have found the following to be extremely useful. Future Gov is a UK based think tank which has some great insights. For more general discussion on public sector social networking the Gartner foundation has some useful analysts and in particular Andrea DiMaio, who blogs regularly. He in turn assessed the material produced by the New Zealand Government as being extremely good, and I would agree. Follow this link for more details.

As I was writing up my presentation, I knew that there was a scrutiny committee going on at work. Sometimes I have watched from home on the webcast, where the papers are also available, but on this occasion I resisted the temptation. However I did have Twitter running and watched the posts coming up from one of our councillors on the questions he was about to ask. The meeting was holding another quasi-public agency, a rail company, to account for recent serious service problems. At the centre of part of the discussion was the lack of information that their staff have and can give, compared to the up to the minute information that their customers have on smartphones.

There is clearly no going back and the future development of social network use by public services is a key strategic issue. Accordingly in my talk I felt I could not provide many answers, but closed, as I do now, with these questions:

• How will our social media and information network strategy relate to corporate priorities and the understanding of politicians and staff?
• Who speaks for the organisation when social media is the channel? Who should?
• How do we address the increasing personal and organisational blurring of boundaries arising from blogs, Twitter etc?
• What is the overlap between vulnerable citizens and social network use, or unconnectedness? What are we going to do about it?
• How much resource do we need to put into various means of assisted access for people who are unconnected? What opportunities and risks emerge when we use some form of community engagement or sharing?

 

Notes

(1) I was asked to speak to the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and senior managers (SOLACE) Eastern Region meeting. The subject I was given was the Networked Councils section of last year’s SOLACE Communique, which was a pithy description of the SOLACE offer to the local government world. Many thanks to those present for their thoughts.

(2) See the upcoming #LocalGovCampNW at Preston and #localgov on Twitter or follow these links to Local Gov Camp and unconferences (Wikipedia)

Ten New Year challenges for local government

Ruminating over the year to come over the past few days I have been thinking about the range of challenges that local government faces in 2012. I was hesitating at turning this into a blog entry, but a number of contributions from others, and especially Anna Turley’s five hopes for local government, have prompted me to do so. For although Anna’s contribution comes from a particular political hue, and mine do not, I think that it her optimism is interesting and correct.

So I would like to add my own particular slant on this from my own perspective and suggest my top ten challenges for the sector, and most particularly for officer colleagues:

1. Support the council’s role as a political entity with democratic legitimacy
2. Enable the community to make itself heard and help politicians to voice local issues and concerns
3. Engage with political leaders, in the executive and opposition and listen carefully to their perspectives
4. Work ever harder to align policy priorities, budget and performance review
5. Develop and support your people’s skills and effectiveness (and your own) through your workforce strategy
6. Understand the vulnerable and those at greatest risk and work with them to address underlying need
7. Use the distinctiveness of place as a sword and a shield to help the area develop
8. Build outward linkages with local and national partners and don’t allow pressure to drive you to look only inward
9. Promote good scrutiny and use it with partners to help them engage effectively
10. Ensure that there is time to enjoy the job, and your home life because that’s what makes you creative

There are undoubtedly tens more, but these are at the core of my thoughts at present. They are general and apply to a range of current issues from addressing the implications of the Localism Act, to ensuring that the forthcoming Public Health changes are meaningful locally. They are rooted in my belief that the sector certainly needs to communicate its value more effectively to the public, and definitely needs to keep up a process of renewal and change, but does not need to be defensive or downbeat about what it contributes to the national picture.

Happy New Year all.

Distinctiveness of Districts: NLGN collection

On Tuesday I was delighted to speak at the launch of a new selection of essays on the distinctive contribution of District Councils, which the New Local Government Network published this week.

The collection is a positive statement of potential and sets out some interesting approaches to future challenges. I hope it will prove helpful to politicians and officers in District Councils working hard to reflect and support the needs of their communities and places.

It was very good to be asked to edit the collection and fascinating to reflect on the contributions. Many thanks to the following contributors:

Steve Atkinson
Cllr Neil Clarke
Cllr Julian Daly
Manjeet Gill
Cllr Robert Gordon
Cllr Tony Jackson
Ruth Marlow.
Liam Scott-Smith
Sandra Whiles

Thanks also to Simon Parker at NLGN and Emma Tucker at District Council’s Network for their work to make it happen.

Change, capacity and spark (MJ article)

(The following post was published in the MJ recently, for which acknowledgements)

I recently came across a statistic which made me think hard about workforce capacity and productivity. Apparently 0.5% of UK businesses have 250 or more employees. The majority of District Councils have hundreds more than that, yet we are regarded in government terms as small organisations. There is a line of conventional wisdom that goes further and says that District Councils are uneconomic and have serious capacity problems because they are too small. The smaller Unitary and County Councils increasingly have this challenge laid at their door too, because many of them will be left with smaller staff and a rump of services as they make significant changes to deflect financial pressures by outsourcing, creating new forms of service delivery and sharing with others.

With this in mind I have been thinking about how my organisation develops its innovative capacity and builds on a recent whole organisation restructure with longer term workforce planning. We designed the new organisation to meet high standards of customer care and intelligent use of service users’ and staff time. In the light of current challenges and constraints, productivity is key and attracting, developing and retaining talented people is vital. As the Leader of the Council recently said, we’d like to see an organisation of sparky people which, listening carefully to residents and partners and working effectively with them, is able to deliver excellence for the District

In common with many other parts of the public sector I do not have to look far to see the answer to this challenge within the staff team. Here are some examples: We sent four staff who are early in their career on the Young England and Wales programme and they came back buzzing from having been stretched to do things they thought they wouldn’t ever be able to do. We’re now looking to give them some projects to do as a team within the organisation. Another member of staff recently won a national graduate of the year prize, a credit not only to her hard work, but the learning environment within her team. However it’s most certainly not just a youth thing. We have older members of staff blossoming in new roles where we enabled them to get on and do things they’ve been wanting to do for years, others who joined us for their second career and are bringing new ways of doing things, and an established team of managers who wanted to work more effectively and so sought outside feedback on how to work better together.

A key strength of the organisation’s size is that we can communicate and learn from these examples quickly and effectively. Every one of these examples adds to our capacity and enables us to meet the challenges of change, and the willingness of our people to go the extra mile and make a real difference makes me proud. The key to future success is to develop workforce plans for the future that continue to build on this high energy and productivity. The capacity challenge exists for us all and we are all very good at agonising about the future, but there is a job to be done and our people want to do it. There may be strength in numbers, but particularly where innovation and nimbleness is called for capacity is much more than just size.

It’s the economy, so let’s not be stupid

This week’s announcements on the economy by George Osborne, whilst chilling, can hardly be a surprise to anyone given the trajectory of recent events world-wide and particularly in the Eurozone. Perhaps we could take a Micawberish view, in anticipation of Dickens bicentenary on 7th February, but that feels like too big a risk, particularly on this side of an economically cold Christmas.

With this in mind, I was struck today by the underlying theme of articles by Will Hutton (Sunday Observer) and Robert Watts (Sunday Telegraph), that of the need for a coherent vision for what future economic growth and survival might look like. For whilst Hutton predictably claims that Osborne et al are clueless, and Watts equally predictably asserts that there is an emergent vision, both are clear in their own ways that there needs to be a national agreement about vision and priorities.

I have also been thinking in the last week or so about what an intelligent local response to the challenge might look like, arising from a recent NLGN event on Local Government’s role in economic and social growth and the findings of Demos in its paper, Good growth, which concludes that:

…we now have an opportunity to respond to the recent economic crisis in a way that develops the type of economy that we want to see. We hope that by presenting this work in the context of the wellbeing debate we can sharpen the understanding of policy-makers on the various methodological and conceptual tools that are available to them as they seek to make progress in a way that is not only economically productive, but also socially and environmentally sustainable, and in tune with the wishes of the public.

In previous blog posts, as the extent of the economic crisis has revealed itself, I have reviewed a range of economic issues and questions as they relate to local communities and governance. The following also provides links to the posts: focusing on an area’s core economic offer and opportunities; rethinking the relationship with business as the taxation relationship change; exploring the relationship between economic sustainability and local culture; establishing local social care costs as a manageable overhead rather than a burden on the economy; seeking to create innovation in the public sector on the basis of what is affordable.

The simple foundation of this thinking is that we should take a strategic approach and consider together what sustainable growth might mean. That does not mean rigid five year plans which will only ever be over-prescriptive and aspirational, but it does mean taking a view at the local level which is more nuanced than simplistic responses to the market. Such an approach requires a strategic determination of economic direction which acknowledges the importance of geography, spatial policy, and demographics in setting a course for the future: Will the chosen economic direction address the longer-term, intergenerational implications of a decision’s impact on community and place? How will it contribute to quality of life and to social cohesion, both local and national? What does it do to address the three key  skills, wealth distribution and costs of social care, with their attendant future overheads? How will the various sectors join together to attain the right kind of growth for a given place?

These all have implications for the community dimension: How are we helping our communities to have a clear understanding of purpose? In the past some communities were very clear that trade, commerce or agriculture were at the core of their sustainability. Many have suffered from not being able to be nimble enough to recognise and adapt when global trade flows meant that this was no longer the case. Yet some are working hard to articulate just such a vision, Forward Swindon being a good example.

Whether it would be possible to set out such a clear purpose in the 21st Century is yet to be seen, however what is needed is an understanding of the determinants of capability, which are dependent on aspects such as culture and historical confidence, literacy and numeracy, advanced skill levels, the state of public health, the vibrancy of the third sector and the media profile of a place.

Whilst national government can help create the backdrop for all of the above, the drama takes place at the level of local economies and between them. It should be a key role of local government and other public sector actors to develop roles which bring them ever more closely together with the private and voluntary sectors. In this interplay, we need to address questions of opportunity and to take an entrepreneurial approach to the management of risk, rather than seeking to remove it. Vision, strategy and decisions need to be made together, in effective partnerships which are able to be both timely and considered in addressing key issues, and regulation of activities needs to be constructive, assertively contributing to the achievement of sustainable growth. The fostering of intelligent inquiry and an understanding of global flows are essential to ensure that this is achieved

Such an approach requires leadership, bravery, strategic alliances and a determined approach to governance which can make things happen. Whether or not there is a Mayor in place to engage with this, it is certainly arguable that this requires a mayoral approach to the needs and future of a place, which is not restricted simply to governmental functions. At present it is unclear whether the framework exists across the country to enable that to be achieved and the Government’s Local Enterprise Partnership initiative has yet to demonstrate its potential, with organisations such as the Centre for Local Economic Sustainability (CLES) fearful that the private sector will withdraw from LEPs in the absence of  resources and proven potential.

One of the most enjoyable parts of my year is an annual talk at the beginning of December for the local Chamber of Commerce. Last Thursday I put the following questions to them, because I think that answering them, for any place, is key to unlocking the conundrums outlined above:

1.  What does economic growth and sustainability mean in the context of our place?

2.  What does economic success look like for it and its people?

3.  How do we address capacity and capability in the community and the workforce?

4.  How do we identify the hard decisions that need to be taken, and take them together?

5.  As an economically resilient place, what is our responsibility to UK PLC, what should our district’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) response to this challenge be?

6.  How do we ensure that we engage with business to address local economic sustainability as the relationship between business rates and local tax spend is re-established?

And a question I did not ask: Is it inevitable that the next ten years is a ‘lost decade’ or could it be a foundation decade, rebalancing the economy and our communities for a healthier future? Without being stupidly optimistic, I think an intelligent approach is to try our hardest to make it the latter.

Video killed the radio star – a lesson in change for the public sector

An excellent discussion last Thursday evening with New Local Government Network people and other colleagues has me thinking about the nature of change and the extent of innovation that is required from the public sector. I will not go into detail, but I can generalise some of the tensions that were drawn out as they are common to many such discussions. I think these were between innovation for efficiency and quality of response, an evolutionary change, and disruptive innovation of approach to outcomes. The Victorian companies who sought to develop a better gas light, long after electric light was shown to be commercially viable were good examples of the former. A good example of the latter a few years ago would be Amazon, but is it now getting a little heavy and moving towards a similar inertia?

What is interesting about this tension is that the first is based firmly in a rational managerialism and is thus very attractive to bureaucracies. This approach focuses on inputs and processes and regards the challenges of the present as being one solely of prioritising and mitigating service cuts. It seeks to develop and evolve existing services and approaches, and perhaps finds politics an inconvenience or at best a tool for prioritising where the cuts will fall. I think that the clear risk for such an approach is that it is also one where expert or provider capture of public services can thrive and the journey forward is restricted within tramlines. The Total Quality movement was a good example of such evolutionary change.

However it’s clear to see that we will not get very far if this is the only approach we take to present challenges. Our communities will just see dwindling services and nothing new addressing the emerging challenges arising out of the present economic morass. So it is clear that a far more disruptive innovation (1) is needed. Such an approach needs to start with the outcomes needed if we are to meet the challenges that we face and prepare for a different future. A critical aspect of this approach is good resource planning, thinking about what we need to achieve and setting out to address this challenge, rather than focusing on cuts to an existing service catalogue. 

I believe that at the local level we need to focus our efforts on the following:

• Economic development and preparedness
• Community cohesion
• Capital infrastructure

None of these will flourish without imagination and resourcefulness, and they will not be the result of long-winded strategies. They require a range of completely new innovations based on local political thought, bravery and choice which is linked closely to the community. Officials need to be ready to help to nurture local democracy by helping parties to inspire existing politicians and develop a recruitment pipeline which attracts people who have a strong hinterland in their communities and the intellectual capacity to work with local partner organisations to develop fresh, unexpected ideas and a new understanding of the common good (2).

So with the proviso that decisions on the way forward are best made in the political sphere on the basis of a democratic mandate, here are a few examples of where such change is needed:

It will not be sufficient for people to switch to cheaper access channels within the service, for example in care of the elderly. We need to develop better ways of helping people to be part of the community and not need the service at all (or delay such need for as long as possible). This is not just because of cost, it’s also that the services are a second best response to basic human needs of engagement and community. How do we make that happen in a short enough time to have a real impact on budgets and enable real investment in further social care innovations?

For the sake of the national economy, we can’t go on relying solely on service and retail industries. We need to have things to make and sell. Yet most economic development interventions will do nothing for places which have manufacturing innovators working in networks from their homes or very small units and who have production pipelines based in many countries. They are either on the wrong scale or find it hard to comprehend the business environments that such companies work in. What would a disruptive approach to identifying such businesses and building self-supporting networks be?

Within our own staff, we need people who feel free to come up with unexpected ideas, people who are able to develop them and people who can then deliver them. Yet not only do we often remove money for initiatives from our budgets as one of the first of the cuts, closely followed by the training budget, but we also often expect the innovator to be the person that ends up being the deliverer, which is not necessarily their strength at all. How do we develop a staff development approach that builds on the huge energies that might be tapped by listening into the ‘unconference’/Barcamp movement and supporting rather than being suspicious of the suggestions for change that are coming from frontline staff?

Finally, the UK public sector is very much a creature of statute rather than constitution. So even though there are examples coming forward such as the general power of competence for local government, such small rafts of legislation are dwarfed by the supertankers of existing statute. To extend the metaphor further, the tide is going out and we risk running aground if we do not loosen ourselves from some of the existing legislative anchors and row off towards uncharted waters. How do we develop the means of cutting loose without harmful unintended consequences?

 

End notes:

(1) See this Wikipedia article for a good summary of disruptive innovation.

(2) As I wrote this, Moving by Bugge Wesseltoft was followed on iTunes by ‘Video killed the radio star’ by Buggles…simply a matter of alphabetical order, but need I say more?)

Evidence based policy vs policy based evidence

To the British Academy #BASAGE11 last Monday night for a fascinating panel debate on the question:

“How can Social Scientists and Government work together to strengthen public trust in scientific evidence?”

The question itself came in for considerable scrutiny, not surprising given the setting, and the debate focused closely on the question of evidence-based policy. Evan Davis chaired the evening.

I comment in this post because I think it is of current interest as we seek to help politicians develop effective policies in Local Government. Such activity is taking place in challenging circumstances where timely intervention and cost effective impact is of the essence.

The presentations highlighted some interesting tensions because the trust required to implement evidence-based policy making is not often direct public trust. It is political trust or government official trust sometimes and media trust almost always. Yet this was barely explored as I explain below.

As Jenny Dibden observed, what is needed to gain trust is a simple and sometimes simplistic expression of complex arguments and nuance. Yet the idea of a factual result from social research evidence is problematic because it results from a research question which itself is set in a social and political context.

Anthony Heath suggested that research for policy is unique because it is atheoretical and apolitical. I am certain that he is wrong. Where carried out within government, it may aim to be party politically neutral, but it emanates from within a civil service culture with its own political relationships and theoretical tensions.

Where research is carried out for political parties, or where perhaps policy draws on work by think tanks, it is most certainly going to have a view, no matter how ethically sound its execution. This brings us to the underlying purpose of policy research, do we believe it is there to direct policy formulation or guide its implementation?

Julian Huppert put this tension succinctly when he observed that any self-respecting academic will reject a hypothesis, but for a politician that’s a U-turn. As an MP with a background in science, he also thought that natural science and social science evidence and research are not so very far apart, in that they are almost equally imperfect! He was interested to consider whether what was really required was a trust in evidence in policy-making or was it rather a need for a way of dealing with nuance?

Alice Bell spoke of the importance of developing good communication of evidence and analysis, and the growing trend towards open data and networked wiki-research. For public policy research this presents huge opportunities to develop understanding where methodologies can be developed to change people from being research subjects to action research participants.

What struck me about the session was a lack of political analysis, exploration of the social science economy or discussion of its discourse. It seems obvious to me that the media are a key element in this equation, yet there was little discussion of either good or bad media interventions.

Clearly, the notion that policy can simply be developed by induction from neutral data is naïve, ‘what matters is what works’ is not a policy foundation, it is a sound-bite. It becomes a basis for policy when accompanied by ‘to achieve X instead of Y’. There is a policy process, the term in itself anticipates a debate.

The seductive aura of evidence-based policy is that it sounds like fact-based policy. However life is not like that because it is uncertain and requires the development of skill in policy judgement and the ability to engage in policy debate.

So my question would be how do we encourage good research based policy which is built upon effective engagement from the start with the public, politics and the media, whilst honestly acknowledging a tendentious stance?