“Easy to use, supports group working, good reporting and comprehensive”.

Version 2.0 of the tool, fully compliant with the Equality Act 2010, will be available shortly.  www.impactequality.co.uk

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.

Interesting to note that the government did concede that it should have carried out equality impact assessments on the budget.  Hopefully this important assessment process will now get more backing from the public sector in order to deliver better services for all members of society.

The new book for public service heroes is published this week by Wingfast Publishing Ltd.   Available on Amazon, in bookshops, or directly from Black Radley.

“Politicians and administrators alike will benefit from this book, which gives a series of practical proposals, based on real-life examples, to improve public services… a significant contribution to helping us grapple succesfully with this complex and difficult issue.“ Damian Green MP

“Peter Latchford… is a master at illustrating the big idea with practical experience. This is truly inspiring guide to public service reform.” Simon Fanshawe, Author and Broadcaster

Would you build an igloo in Africa? The UK public sector spends billions every year doing the equivalent. Citizens do not get the support they need. Politicians of any stripe seem powerless in the face of the grinding leviathan machine that is the public service system. If you are an MP, a councillor, or a senior manager; if you manage public services or work on or with the front line, this book is for you. If you work in health, regeneration, housing, benefits, social services, education, enterprise support – any part of the public sector – it will help you see where the problems are, and how you can help take a lead in solving them.

Professor Peter Latchford, CEO of specialist consultants to the public sector Black Radley

The Prime Minister has described the concept of Big Society as: “… a guiding philosophy… a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control…[and where] … government [is] more accountable.” The objective is clear and correct, so the challenge is not to define ‘Big Society’, but how to achieve it. So how does political rhetoric become practical reality?

1. Foster the UK’s natural ability for enterprise

The UK has a proud history of enterprise, both individual and civic.  The Big Society concept should be about enterprise. It’s about getting things done; about citizens making the most of their lives; about bringing new vigour into the economic, social and civic life of the country and shaking off old habits.  Most of all, it’s a focus on finding new ways of building a better, more vibrant future.

2. Embrace a new way of thinking

The prevailing public sector mind set emphasises prescription and control.  It results in inflexible services, expensive management systems, and widespread disillusion.  We need new ways of thinking about service design and delivery, which allow error and risk into the system – and, as a consequence, better and leaner services.  To be enterprising is to be pragmatic.

3. Get comfortable with shared responsibility

Where everybody takes responsibility for playing their part, everyone’s well-being improves.  But to take responsibility, a person has to be free to decide.  If all decisions are taken for you, you are not fully responsible, you cannot be enterprising, and you will not flourish. At the heart of Big Society implementation must be the principle that public service decisions need to be taken as close as possible to the person they are there to support.

4. Recognise that there are different types of public service decision, each requiring a distinct approach

Involvement based services, where the users’ individual involvement in the decision around service delivery is as important to their well-being as is the service itself.  There are many examples.  Young people need to be involved in deciding what youth services they receive.  Mental health patients do better when involved in decisions about their own care.  Communities need to be involved in the development of local land use plans.  The service design and delivery should put an emphasis on the relationship with the user, and the users should be given collective responsibility for driving up service quality through peer group communication (akin to hotel ratings websites, or Wikipedia).

Joined up services, where the needs of the individual customer are complex and service alignment is as important as the functionality of one of the services.  A doctor may simply treat a child’s bruising, or she may work with social services, education, the police and others to establish whether there are wider issues of abuse and chaos in the household.  This joining up is not achieved by managers organising meetings.  It happens when front line folk are encouraged to have a strong sense of their professional values, and are given the space to make human connections with people in other disciplines.

Technical, where a specialist understanding, and infrastructure, is needed for the service to be provided. Service delivery should be tightly controlled in-line with a pre-defined specification based on an expert assessment of need. Quality will be maintained by a robust management process based on hard performance measures and benchmarks.  Most public servants know all about this approach – it is (wrongly) assumed to be the right model for all service management.  It is clearly crucial to how an appendix operation is conducted, or a sewage system introduced – but it is not the whole story.

Framework, where there are decisions to be made concerning priorities and resource allocations; where there are difficult choices between models of service delivery; and where robust responses are required to underperformance. Activities under this heading are principally political, and should put an emphasis on examining, evaluating and deciding on the balance between competing priorities. To achieve the fairness imperative, and to enhance the well-being of all our citizens, the key test is the extent to which focus is given to those most in need.  And quality control is through the democratic process.

Each service, or aspect of a service, can be categorised under one of these headings in line with how decisions should best be made about design and delivery.  These different types of decision need to be taken by different people, supported in very different ways.

5. Take a new approach to quality control

Service quality results from adopting the right approach to understanding the need; designing a suitable response; reporting on performance; responding to performance issues; and dealing with risk and failure. Currently, there is a tendency for UK public service planners and managers to give particular emphasis to the technical or managerial approach where, in many cases, this “systems paradigm” does not result in improved service levels or efficiency.  Public sector productivity has actually declined in recent years, with problems of service delivery failure commonplace.  There are alternative ways of ensuring good service quality, through market forces, professional standards, and peer review.

6. Drive efficiency through new perspectives

Efficiency results from measuring performance in the right way; allocating costs in the right way; using information to challenge delivery and drive innovation; recognising the wider and overlapping impact of different service areas; and seeing opportunities to invest and prevent, as well as to contain or cure.

Existing approaches to public sector efficiency tend to be too narrowly drawn with a crude “bangs per buck” philosophy based on the number of outputs achieved per pound spent.  This narrow measure has some management utility. But the best and most enterprising results can be achieved not by spend but by investment – particularly soft assets, like the strength of connections between people in a place.  It is a measureable fact that the stronger this “social capital”, the lower the crime, the better the educational, health and economic outcomes.  It is simpler and cheaper to prevent problems than to cure them.  Prevention requires investment in things that are known to work, before the problems arise

Again, the standard approach to efficiency/value for money may have application for decisions of a technical nature.  But to ensure better use of public funds, different perspectives are required for decisions of the other three types.

7. Focus on fairness

Fairness is not an additional burden on the public sector; it is why we have a public sector.  Delegated decision-making is central to the Big Society theme and the civic enterprise interpretation of it.  But delegated authority can lead to factional decision making and unfair consequences. It is therefore essential for the political decisions to include a fairness framework, ensuring that decisions, regardless of level, are taken in a way which maintains a sense of fairness, and accountability for fairness, across the public sector.

8. Bring it all together in a coherent way people can understand

The Black Radley approach to Big Society makes it clear that we have no ideological commitment to any particular model of service delivery. Indeed, we see that such a commitment would obstruct the enterprising spirit we want to encourage.

This approach offers new opportunities for existing service providers – be they private, public and non for profit – to demonstrate their effectiveness against the different service type headings.  The approach also presents an opportunity to the community itself, and to the not for profit organisations that spring from it, an opportunity to offer new business models for investing in social capital and at the “involvement-based” level of services.

This approach is also a challenge to ourselves, to the politicians, managers and front line staff, to engage better, to cooperate better, to manage better – or to get out of the way and let someone else do it more effectively.

9. Prepare to pay in the short term for long term savings

A stronger, fairer society is less dependent on public support, and prevention is not only better and more effective, it is also cheaper.

However, the process of changing to the new approach will not be without cost.  A variety of financial mechanisms must be utilised to support this radical new thinking, determined by the specific issue being addressed.  These include: releasing resources through cost cutting and targeting; releasing management and bureaucratic overhead by halving the number of targets, halving the number of managers, and emphasising quality control through professional standards and peer assessment; transferring assets to the community (for example, using buildings to act as a catalyst for greater voluntary activity, and allowing communities entrepreneurially to generate revenue to pay for mutual support, in a way public sector agencies cannot); prudential borrowing against future revenue streams (using loans to support place programmes to deliver improvements in educational outcomes/obesity/re-offending etc – and paying the loan repayments out of the reduced costs of future education/health/crime budgets); working with social enterprise, charities and the private sector to develop such prevention programmes, and helping them secure funding through, for instance, social impact bonds (where the return on the investors’ cash is paid if the programme achieves its objectives and is paid a results bonus from public funds) or charitable endowments.

10. Stay true to the four principles of Big Society implementation

Pragmatism. The Parent/Child attitude of the public sector towards the citizen obstructs a move towards the Adult/Adult approach which is needed.

Decisiveness. The worst 10% of performance in any service setting should be removed every year.  Public services are not a game, they have a direct effect on the life chances, well-being and even length of life of the citizen.  In the current financial climate, we should not tolerate freeloading.

Culture Change. The central intent should be to create catalysts for a culture change towards responsibility and enterprise by returning to the principle of absolute respect for people who get things done: in business, in the community, and in public service.

Governance. Devolving responsibility can lead to its abrogation. In order for the civic enterprise model to be successful, considerable emphasis must be put on the governance and accountability of any organisation that makes decisions on behalf of others, or delivers public services on behalf of the public purse.  Profit should be suppressed, but it should be transparent.

ends

Suffolk’s approach can work but it requires a different mindset from the start. The wider public sector is learning that the best and cheapest services are delivered by flexible front line professionals, with a strong commitment to their professional standards supported by enabling managers. The key question for Suffolk, if it wants effective and low cost services, is therefore principally about how it creates the conditions in which such an approach can flourish.  This is also the question for public services as a whole.

The answers to that question are not shaped by an outsourcing ideology. The answers are concerned with stripping out the ineffective control orthodoxy which results in too many targets, too much reporting, and a management hierarchy. They are concerned with finding alternative quality assurance methodologies – including, for instance, transparent peer review – and turning managers into out-of-the-office front line enablers.

They do also include working out the governance and ownership structures which would underpin this approach – but this is the main point: that form follows function. There is no one right answer. Neither keeping services in house, outsourcing to a social enterprise or not-for-profit, nor commissioning a private sector body is the right solution in all cases. And not all quangos should be set on the bonfire.  In the real world, all these options could be considered for all the public services under review. The choice of approach should be determined by two factors. The first is relationships and the second is change. The relationship questions are: which governance structure best enables us to strengthen the key relationships of this service – with customers, with our best professionals, and with key partners? And which structure best enables us to move on from the relationships which hold us back – with poor quality staff and managers, with self-serving pressure groups, with purveyors of ineffective orthodoxies? The change questions are: who shares our vision and has the enterprise and energy to drive it through? What structure would give them the support and incentives to which they would respond well?  And how do we manage the transition in a way which minimizes disruption?

This last point is critical and is too often overlooked.  It is, of course, partly about employment and the message sent to the economy as a whole if statements are made concerning radical changes which appear to threaten large numbers of jobs.  In practice, outsourcing alone is rarely about huge numbers of redundancies (how can it be? – someone still has to deliver the service), but it looks like it is.  And perception knocks confidence and in turn knocks the local economy.  A radical announcement in response to concerns about economic trends can actually lead to the negative outcome we wish to avoid.

There is a deeper point about what the public sector is for.  If we see public service as a vast machinery, churning out a variety of interventions, we will inevitably see management as being about control; and see the improvement and change process as being concerned with rapid re-engineering.  But if we recognise the reality – that the best public services happen only when there are strong relationships in place between client and professional, and across professional disciplines – then we must also see that the machine management analogy is simply counter-productive.  The hard truth about this “soft” reality is that centrally driven change programmes, such as wholesale outsourcing, can fundamentally undermine the trust and wisdom on which good public services are based.  Committed public servants become demoralised or distorted.  To quote from Nockford’s Leviathan, “treat me like machinery, I might just act like a hammer”.  This effect can be observed in any such “systematic” approach to change, not only via an outsourcing initiative.  Since the new service model will be delivered by substantially the same people who are currently in post, maintaining their key “soft“ assets (including relationships and sense of self-worth) is every bit as important as is the shape and ownership of the new arrangement.  Your apple tree might look better in your neighbour’s garden, but you had better be careful with its roots when you dig it up.

The private sector can be an imaginative and innovative partner for public service delivery.  Its focus on the bottom line means that the best businesses have learnt the lessons most public sector organisations would do well to copy: the avoidance status-oriented management structures; the importance of flexibility at the customer interface; and the need for continual redesign of the service itself.  But these benefits do not come automatically.  Indeed, many public sector commissioners of outsourcing have found (for instance, in IT, or in PFI) that their own desire for a detailed contract specification at the outset has tied them in to inflexible and inefficient service models.  A tightly specified service now can be an inefficient model in two years time.

Part of the answer may well be outsourcing but it is unlikely to be the whole answer. My fear is, as time passes and the gap grows between those who buy and those who know what the customers need, the approach will breed a whole new set of problems; producing increased costs and a devaluation of service levels to citizens.

The law requires most public bodies including central government to carry out an impact assessment to identify whether any decision might disadvantage people purely because they were from certain groups.  These groups include people with disabilities, people from different ethnic backgrounds or men and women.

Where there is a negative impact the government should have due regard to the need to modify the decision.  Due regard means that the government should balance the need to promote equality in proportion to its relevance.

Clearly the emergency budget decision is a major one for the activities the government funds.

Impact assessments are the process by which the government should identify and act on the need to modify decisions to have better regard to the need to promote equality.  An impact assessment comprises a number of stages including the collection and analysis of relevant data, assessment of the impacts upon people from the different groups, consideration of measures which might mitigate any adverse impact, publication of the results of the impact assessment and arrangements for monitoring for future adverse impact.

The Equality Act 2010 has tried to simplify the legislation which requires public bodies to conduct equality impact assessments although it is not yet clear how this will put into practice.

In our experience the equality impact assessment process is not carried rigorously by government and a whole host of other public sector agencies.  It does seem to be well policed and at times agencies appear to pay lip service to the requirements seen as a bureaucratic chore. It can be reframed in a more positive light of basic performance management.  An equality impact assessment asks two important questions.  Firstly, this decision, this policy this activity, how well does it meet the needs of these customer groups?  Secondly, what are we going to do about it?

If as Mrs May contends the emergency budget might have a disproportionate affect upon women, ethnic minorities, disabled and older people then clearly under the law there should be an equality impact assessment and it should have been published.

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.

2          Background

2.1       Fairness and Identity

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.

2.2       A Blunt Tool

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.

2.3       Legal Limitations: Compliance

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?

2.4       Public Sector Services and Responsiveness: Performance

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.

2.5       The Equality Overhead: Efficiency

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.

3          The Need

This more sophisticated approach calls for three elements.  These are:

• A new language of fairness and identity

The vocabulary and logic with which a more sophisticated analysis of equality, diversity, and fairness can be progressed;

• A recognition of the specific

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;

• Realistic change management

An agreed process about how to reshape services to achieve the effectiveness, efficiency and focus.

4          The Framework

4.1       Objective

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.

4.2       The Reshaping Challenge

The public sector has, especially during this phase of the economic cycle, three over-riding aims.  These can be summarised as:

• Customer benefit

Providing good service to the service user; and solving social problems effectively;

• Institutional effectiveness

Connecting with the citizen; making decisions fairly and transparently; meeting legal and other compliance/assessment frameworks;

• Greater efficiency

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:

• Analysed identities

What the data show about the pattern of local people’s behaviours and needs (need).

• Chosen identities

How the individual chooses to categorise him or herself (individual);

• Given identities

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.

4.3       The Nine Imperatives

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

• Imperative 1: TARGETED

Support is prioritised for those whose need is greatest

• Imperative 2: PERSONALISED

Support is shaped by the involvement and the needs of the recipient

• Imperative 3: RELATIONSHIP-BASED

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

• Imperative 4: ALIGNED

Management structures and performance measures are designed to encourage cross-functional cooperation in support of the customer

• Imperative 5: RESPONSIVE

Consultative and accountability mechanisms are aligned with the ways the citizens see themselves

• Imperative 6: COMPLIANT

Systems are in place to ensure demonstrated compliance with equalities, human rights and cohesion standards/laws

Aim C: Efficiency

• Imperative 7: IMPROVING

The way in which resources are used to address the requirements of the most in need is continually reviewed and improved

• Imperative 8: PROPORTIONATE

Minimal resources are expended on responding to unrepresentative lobbying groups/individuals

• Imperative 9: REDUCING

Throughout all services, there is an emphasis on preventing the escalation of problems, reducing dependency, and increasing community self-help

5          Implementation Support

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.

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

With everyone in the public sector resigned to the inevitable cuts in budgets and all the consequent threats to staff and services, there is a tendency for public servants to rush with their valuables to the bunkers – to protect core budgets and staff, as the budget storms blow.  The consequence is that the damage is done to those services and service users that are left behind.  And the risk we run is that the consequences are unfair: that the most needy suffer the most, and that social tensions and other problems go through the roof.  This is not, unlike the tornado, a natural and inevitable phenomenon.

Over the last few months, there have been many thousands of meetings across the country, nervously anticipating budget cuts, examining options, selecting preferred responses.  And few of those meetings will have show the required imagination and leadership.  As more information emerges from Whitehall concerning the actual cuts, it is predictable that the hatches will be battened down to protect the orthodox ideas of what is important, rather than on some of the better innovations that did start to emerge during more prosperous times.

In times of plenty, with considerable additional funding from government, many local authorities experimented with new services and new forms of service delivery.  These included neighbourhood management, town centre management and regeneration schemes, environmental wardens, job creation schemes, new affordable housing developments – some of which were highly effective.  The successful ones did not do things to people (“interventions”); they recognised that the most sustainable solutions come when you help people take charge for themselves.

The problem with these “softer” approaches is that the successes are less immediate, less easily attributed to the programme itself, and less easily photographed for the front pages.  They also don’t fit well with the masculine management orthodoxy of public services.  Though the results of this approach – call it empowerment, co-production, community development, social capital, or (if you will) Big Society – are extraordinary, they are not as easily managed and justified as a top-down masterplan or a new housing development.  So it is difficult to make the case for their continuation, even though the savings achieved, because they are all in the prevention game, are considerable.

These approaches, with the active support and leadership of local people, have been used to powerful effect in some of our most challenging settings: Lozells, Birmingham, for instance. This super-diverse area, home to people from 170 of the world’s 193 countries, has suffered from pronounced deprivation and social tension.  But in the last three years, during which time there has been a concerted effort to take this more responsive approach, the areas has seen a significant drop in crime rates and an increase in the attractiveness of the area, as measured by the relative rise in house prices.

But what can we do?  If the budgets have to be cut – which they probably do – then what alternative is there than to stop doing some things?

Well, the first thing to ensure is that we are stopping the right things, rather than those things which don’t sit well with the public sector comfort zone.  There is too much happening the way it does because that is the way we have always done it.  A brutal instrumentalism has not delivered results and must be replaced by a different, more relationship-oriented perspective.

And the second opportunity is to bring some innovative thinking to the way we do what we do.  This means getting away from an obsession with optimising our in-year cash revenue and capital spend, and realising that there are revenue and capital budgets out there which dwarf even Labour’s public spending.  I mean, of course, the whole voluntary and community economy which is not cash based, and the whole of the private sector economy, which is.  The real question for public budgets is, How can they help to optimise the effectiveness of these wider systems?  By freeing our public sector budgets from the constraints of the instrumentalist orthodoxy, we can spend smaller amounts on achieving more.  We could even call it “Big Society”. The following are some examples.

Adopt-a-service campaign – This can be part of a general mobilisation campaign.  Examples include neighbourhood managers, town centre managers, local libraries, park maintenance. Why not launch a campaign for public and business support to adopt some of these services? The recent campaign to secure the Staffordshire Hoard is a parallel example.

Set-up social enterprises – Instead of making staff redundant, why not use an equivalent expenditure to help them to set up social enterprises?  Some will fail, but will have picked up powerful skills and attitudes on the way.

Transfer assets on licence to voluntary and community groups to use them to attract private sector funding to develop housing and other amenities and generate income to pay for some local services.

We are still one of the wealthiest societies on earth.  We have learnt enough about human psychology and sociology to know that individual and general well-being (which is the purpose of public services) results not from cash but from a sense of purpose and from strong relationships.  Why don’t we use our cash to support those things?  The last place to find them is in the bunker.