The Equality Strategy released last week is to be welcomed. The real challenge is for the public sector to make it happen. By remarkable coincidence ‘Making it Happen’ is one of the core principles of the strategy.
The light touch pragmatic monitoring is especially welcome but must not be used by organisations to avoid full implementation.
Legislation cannot achieve a fairer Britain that can only be achieved by people caring.
This document sets out a new way of framing the responsibilities that Local Authorities and other public bodies have in relation to equality, diversity and cohesion. It is based on new thinking concerning identity and fairness. It seeks to reconcile these “specialist” agendas with the realities of managing large public sector organisations – and, in so doing, to produce better and more efficient results.
Fairness is central to the public sector’s role as it seeks to ensure that those in need get the support they require. It is both a moral imperative and a legal requirement. There is a compelling argument that the public are more interested in fairness than in favour: individuals are more concerned that public servants demonstrate fair (and accountable) decision making than that their own concerns are prioritised.
In order to organise itself, and how it should respond to the needs of its citizens and clients, the public sector has always categorised people. These categories can be powerful, in highlighting patterns of injustice and unfairness. But they can also be severely inhibiting, by imposing identities on people that just do not fit who they actually are and which consequently fail to understand what they actually need.
Britain is now diverse in more diverse ways than ever before. And, socially in the last decade, it is a changed country. So the equalities agenda needs to be refreshed; to be made more sophisticated; to become more relevant to the super-diversity and fluid identities which characterise the people of modern Britain. Existing equalities concepts, laws and vocabulary, which have proved useful in addressing gross challenges of prejudice and exclusion, have served us well in the past but need now to take account of the change they have brought about. They are now less suited to the new circumstances of a changed Britain and consequently they are less effective. In some cases they may even worsen the issues they are there to solve.
In addition disadvantage does not simply stem from single identities, even though people who ‘belong’ to certain groups may experience persistent bias. There is an emerging consensus that disadvantage is created by a convergence of circumstances.
Our analysis and the way we deliver services needs to take account of this more complex understanding.
The new Equalities Bill seeks to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations. It states the need for public authorities to have “due regard” to the needs of particular equalities strands or groups, and extends the existing six strands enshrined in law to a total of nine (adding gender reassignment, marriage/civil partnerships and pregnancy/maternity). It also makes local authorities responsible for addressing inequality resulting from social background.
In practice, these requirements reaffirm the need for an Equalities Impact Assessment (EIA) -like device in order to demonstrate that “due regard” of the needs of specific groups has been taken into account in the design and delivery of services.
However EIAs, based simply on predetermined groups (or a slavish adherence to the strands) only ever work at the gross or summary level. By demonstrating due regard across nine strands, a public authority can show compliance. It will not, through such a mechanism, demonstrate real responsiveness to the particular composition and dynamic of its population, nor the nuanced need of the individuals within it. It will tick boxes, but will it get to the heart of any problems?
Across public services, from healthcare to policing or education, there is strong recognition that we need to drop a standardised, centrally prescribed model of service provision in favour of personalisation; the shaping and coordination of the service provided to the citizen in response to that individual’s needs.
There is also an increased recognition that, alongside public services, social capital is key to addressing needs. In short, the more people connect with one another, the better their well-being (measureable in positive crime, health, economic, educational and other outcomes).
The personalisation agenda is potentially extremely powerful in addressing unfairness, as it allows us to fine tune support to the aspirations and needs of individuals. It does not sit neatly, however, with the existing mainstream equalities concepts, where service design is shaped centrally in response to crude categorisations (e.g. ethnicity). The personalisation agenda, which is still evolving in practice, needs to be underpinned by a more refined fairness framework to ensure that service design is genuinely able to respond to real vulnerabilities and opportunities for individuals.
If the state, locally or centrally, treats people in ways that we do not recognise as relevant to ourselves, we come to distrust it. If central or local government makes assumptions about us that bear little or no relation to our lives, we disregard it. If the state seeks representation on our behalf from “leaders” that we do not recognise, then we feel no part of the process. Typically this is seen in attempts by government to relate to “muslims”, or “BME communities”, but it is as true when applied to young men, for instance, or to the elderly. Public Services need to learn new ways to talk to us as individuals. How far does the current system of “consultation” serve only the formal needs of government and long established vested interests, rather than developing public service responsiveness in a dynamic way that matches the aspirations of individuals?
A more sophisticated approach to fairness and the ‘democracy’ of consultation is required: one that builds on Britain’s compromised, layered, muddled but robust governance system, but which allows for different models of involvement with, and responsiveness to, different cultural norms and the needs of individuals.
The existing equality framework is potentially expensive, allowing for the rather blunt assumption that, by virtue of a person’s belonging to a particular ethnic or religious group, that person needs additional support from the public purse or has a set of pre-determined needs
The trouble with the current equality framework is that while the principle is admirable – to recognise that certain groups of people suffer disadvantage disproportionately in certain circumstances – the effect is all to often to apply resources with a blunderbuss inaccurately aimed not at the problem but at the groups. This is very wasteful. Resources need to be more accurately focused. It also potentially leads to a reinforcing of the tensions between groups, as particular ethnic groups, for instance, are seen to receive more public support than others, regardless of the levels of individual need.
A more sophisticated approach, building on the emerging thinking associated with the personalisation approach, the convergence that causes disadvantage, and the progress made in the past period, focuses resources on the most needy, as defined by their circumstances rather than their broad categorisation, allowing for a more targeted and efficient service. At a time of immense pressure on the public purse, such focusing is necessary to avoid either unsustainable spending levels or resources being spread too thinly.
This more sophisticated approach calls for three elements. These are:
The vocabulary and logic with which a more sophisticated analysis of equality, diversity, and fairness can be progressed;
A set of methodologies, processes and mechanisms which recognise that the particular qualities of equality and diversity flow from local character and circumstance, and from existing organisational strengths/weaknesses;
An agreed process about how to reshape services to achieve the effectiveness, efficiency and focus.
Each area and each organisation is different. There can be no easy answers and no glib change manuals. Instead, the framework acts as a prompt and support for management, seeking to identify opportunities to improve customer service, institutional effectiveness and efficiency.
The public sector has, especially during this phase of the economic cycle, three over-riding aims. These can be summarised as:
Providing good service to the service user; and solving social problems effectively;
Connecting with the citizen; making decisions fairly and transparently; meeting legal and other compliance/assessment frameworks;
Stripping out unnecessary costs, improving value for money.
In implementing a more sophisticated approach to fairness, three distinct forms of identity need to be separated:
What the data show about the pattern of local people’s behaviours and needs (need).
How the individual chooses to categorise him or herself (individual);
How society categorises each of us (group).
The challenge for public service is to progress each of the three aims in ways which take account of, and respond to, the different forms of identity. The heart of the framework is therefore a cross referencing of the three aims with the three forms of identity. This produces a checklist of imperatives, which, the organisation or partnership can use to drive priorities and actions.
The core framework is a checklist of nine imperatives set out under the three aims. These should be used as the basis for assessing and improving the fairness of a location, partnership or organisation.
Aim A: Customer benefit
Support is prioritised for those whose need is greatest
Support is shaped by the involvement and the needs of the recipient
Managers focus as much on the quality of support relationships, particularly with the customer, as on process and target-based performance
Aim B: Institutional effectiveness
Management structures and performance measures are designed to encourage cross-functional cooperation in support of the customer
Consultative and accountability mechanisms are aligned with the ways the citizens see themselves
Systems are in place to ensure demonstrated compliance with equalities, human rights and cohesion standards/laws
Aim C: Efficiency
The way in which resources are used to address the requirements of the most in need is continually reviewed and improved
Minimal resources are expended on responding to unrepresentative lobbying groups/individuals
Throughout all services, there is an emphasis on preventing the escalation of problems, reducing dependency, and increasing community self-help
This brief document is part of a major piece of work on fairness and identity, led by Black Radley and Simon Fanshawe, and supported by a wide range of public sector organisations across the UK. The outputs from this work include networks of like minded organisations, at the most senior level, and methodologies to support the effective use of the framework. For more details, please contact Black Radley.
Coping with the cuts: a knee-jerk reduction in ‘non-core’ policing or time to embrace imagination and bravery?
Budget cuts are a certainty for the police. The question now is, how should they be implemented? Is there a way of reducing police resource which minimises the impact on front line effectiveness? Standard budget cutting approaches will not work: they tend to focus on cutting out “non-core” activities such as relationship or neighbourhood based approaches, reducing “non-essential” items, such as training budgets, and requiring managers to implement an across the board reduction by a given percentage.
All three approaches are potentially deeply damaging. Neighbourhood policing may look non-core from a senior management level, but it has been shown to be fundamental to the change in culture amongst communities which reduces crime in the first place. What could be more core to the policing role than to help design-out crime? A reduction in training budgets and other soft internal spends will undermine the ability of the officer on the street to respond with increasing sophistication to the challenges faced in contemporary policing, and will reduce the diversity of people within the force. And the management-driven, across the board reduction approach inevitably protects the management classes at the expense of the front line – after all turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
The domino effect
It’s not only police budgets which should interest the police. Across the wider public sector, if budgets are cut in the normal manner, the most in need with suffer the most. There will be an escalation in poverty, ill-health and social tension, particularly in our overcrowded and high maintenance urban areas. When inequality grows, particularly when the poorest get poorer, everybody suffers, even the rich – not least through increased levels of crime. If this coincides with a reduction in front line policing resourcing, our society will face a double whammy.
What we need instead is bravery and imagination. As a nation we are rightly concerned to ensure that our policing is of good quality. Over time, this has been translated into an emphasis on a command and control, hierarchical model of management, plus an audit trail process that requires hefty bureaucratic servicing. Both activities – management and paperwork – are expensive. We should be asking whether there are other forms of quality assurance that can be employed more effectively and more cheaply. Wikipedia uses the customer for quality control; academics use peer review; health professionals are kept in check by professional standards bodies: do these models offer an alternative approach for some facets of policing? Clearly the current approach is the only sensible way to approach some functions – rapid response activities, for instance – but not all.
A change of perspective
We should be looking to reduce the burden on police by reducing the number of things that are considered to be crimes. Though this is contentious, the stakes are high. We have to ask ourselves whether our drugs strategy has worked. Should we, as many drugs professionals will attest, stop treating drug use as a crime and start treating it as an illness? We could legitimise the production of narcotic drugs under licence and, by so doing, significantly increase the quality and safety of the substances, reducing the health and financial costs to users; and having a substantial impact on drug-related theft, prostitution and health problems.
We also need to cast out the false gods of planning which have dominated public sector activity for a decade or more. For some years, senior police officers have been struggling with the default planning approach taken in Local Strategic Partnerships. Typically, public sector plans for economic development, community safety and community cohesion, for example, are built by centralised big-brained people based on copious amounts of “objective” data, following exhaustive consultation with people who think similarly. By the time the plan is packaged and launched, it is often irrelevant, and may anyway have little connection with what actually happens on the ground.
Investing in social capital
If what we are interested in is a reduced burden on the public purse, greater well-being amongst local people, and – yes – the recapitalisation of poor people, then we should invest in social capital. We should be exploring new models for investing public and private sector cash in building social glue. It may be less easy to point at than a new hospital, but if brands can be valued on a corporate balance sheet, why can’t social capital? And we know that high social capital means low crime.
In short, there is a danger that this budget results in an underinvestment in the empowering themes that will deliver efficiency and fairness and lower crime rates. If it does fail in this way, we will see a medium to long-term rise in the social morbidities which cost the public purse so dear. We will only know whether we are eating the seedcorn when we see how the government departments react to the reductions in budget – with imagination or with the traditional protection of existing structures.
ENDS
Professor Peter Latchford, CEO of public sector fairness and effectiveness advisors, Black Radley
It was no great shock that the new Government should announce an independent review into child protection and social work services in England. The stamping out of serious neglect is a proper objective for any government, and should be pursued with real energy. But the question is how? – how should that objective be achieved? It is not immediately obvious that a review will help. Data collection, analysis, assessment, recommendations… these are the stuff of reviews. But will all this stuff make even the smallest difference? In a very real sense, we already know what the answer is.
The problem is that analysis alone is not enough. Plans are not enough. Commitment is not enough. Regular outbursts of public outrage and knee-jerk political responses are not enough. And finding someone to blame is not enough. What is needed is a response which will drive progress and make things tangibly better for the future, rather than just making us feel better for the short-term.
We are very good at apportioning blame. Every time a vicious case hits the headlines, the cry goes up, ‘Where did the system go wrong?’ This is followed shortly afterwards by an identification of process, management and individual failings. Often the conclusion of these discussions is a high profile sacking, or series of sackings, to appease those baying for blood, and an issuing of extensive guidelines to keep the replacements firmly on track.
But guess what? The constantly refreshed and increasingly rigorous guidelines and summary sackings just act to make the whole situation worse. Those charged with the protection of children and with other social services should be talented and enthusiastic people, but what intelligent person will be keen to study for a hated profession where professional and human judgement is considered to be of less importance than process compliance? Good people are paid to make good decisions, but under the constant glare of an intense spotlight even very competent and confident people can wither and adopt a stance of risk aversion in the name of survival. Why trust your judgement by leaving a child with their family when your job is safer if you bring the child into the potentially damaging world of state care?
This review habit we have – it is just one response to a problem, and not necessarily the best response. It is a response which deals in objectivity; in data; in words, submissions and generalized evidence. It struggles to deal with the life blood of good and bad decision making, on the ground, with families: charismatic and flawed individuals, intuitions and professional wisdom; fashionable dogma and human insight; office bullies, workload pressures, and systems that do not fit the task. It behaves as its recommended actions were things that exist in isolation of the people who have to enact them and the wider organisational context in which they operate. And, as a result, it too easily results in the accretion of even more bureaucratic weight on the backs of the front line, to the detriment of the families and the children they serve.
The review habit is part of a wider public sector orthodoxy. We live with a system which behaves as if public service challenges were engineering problems where perfection is possible, if only we could develop sufficiently fine controls. This perspective leads to an undermining of front line flexibility, prescriptive work systems, and risk aversion. It presupposes that all future eventualities can be predicted; that, as in the film Minority Report, the business of a social worker is to know that abuse will happen, and to step in before it does. It may even, in the short term, save lives by taking many children from their families, a tiny proportion of whom were real risks. But given free rein, it will result in significant levels of future social dysfunction, as the state is blamed by everybody for everything, and increasing numbers of children grow up outside of families.
We know that centrally defined process controls do not improve public service quality, and that what amount to public floggings undermine effective risk management. On the other hand, we know that properly developed front line workers, who take pride in their profession, and are supported by hands-on managers, get the best results. What we need is the rebirth of judgement: an empowerment of the people on the front line to use their training and experience to make the decisions they feel will improve the situation. We need to ensure that our professionals are well-trained; that their managers support, challenge and inspire them, rather than direct them.
We also know that a system which allows for this level of trust is always vulnerable. It can too easily be brought down by the actions of the inevitable bad penny. We therefore need to introduce a system for taking out the worst 10% every year, rather than trying to micro-manage all of them; that we all of us understand that we need these committed people to hold us together, and should show them our respect and thanks. Footballers who suffer a loss of form are dropped from the first team. Why should incompetent public service workers in life-critical roles be given any more latitude?
The Government has asked the right question: ‘what helps or hinders professionals from making the best judgements and interventions they can to protect a vulnerable child?’ I hope, this time, we have the courage to hear the right answer and to see it through.
-ends-