Town Hall or Whitehall Survey Results

Back in early October I posted a link to a survey seeking views about whether services should have democratic oversight at all and if so, whether that oversight should come at council, regional or national level.

I am very grateful to so many people for taking the time to complete the survey and I have put together the slide pack below which summarises the results. 

town hall or whitehall

While (as might be expected given most of the respondents are from the world of local government) there is a general sense that there are a number of public services where accountability should switch from Whitehall to townhalls, it’s a more mixed picture.

Significant numbers of respondents feel that a number of more administrative functions such as electoral registration, registration, managing car parks, housing benefits and council tax collection, don’t require democratic oversight at any level.  And for some of these services where respondents felt some kind of role for politicians was appropriate, a large number favoured it being at a national level.  There was also strong support for regional oversight of some services such as transport, emergency planning and waste disposal.

And when it comes to social care the survey suggests that most people continue to see an important role for national politicians.

My tentative conclusions?  Perhaps the debate about devolving power from central to local government tends to get stuck because:

• some things are better done at a regional level but in most parts of the country there are not regionally elected politicians
• belief in the need for national oversight of personal social services is strong and probably reflects our cultural belief in uniform outcomes (this was something the Lyons report highlighted that compared with other European states we seem to have less tolerance of regional variations)
• potentially councils could seek to move out of some of the more administrative functions they perform which might align with a stronger focus on councils as community leaders
• it would be interesting to run a similiar survey of elected representatives to see how their views match up

New fridge gadget – world saved

Christmas, the annual landfill bonanza, is upon us again and I’ve been looking through the Robert Dyas Christmas catalogue which I was given last week when I was buying some hoover bags. (I live life on the edge.)  The catalogue is full of ‘must have’ items such as a spinning fork for eating spaghetti, a water-resistant Glo Gnome, a solar robin which automatically illuminates at dusk and a Hannah Montana hot water bottle. 

My favourite item is this fridge recorder, which comes with three AA batteries and costs just £4.99.You record a message and then hear it every time you open the fridge door.  Every single time.  How fun is that!

Kenny Davern

Click on the picture to hear Kenny playing 'Travellin' All Alone'

I was delighted to see Kenny Davern’s album, The Hot Trio, amongst a list of the top one hundred jazz albums in last week’s Sunday Telegraph.  As I’ve pointed out before on this blog (see the limitations of list-making) I am not a huge fan of lists but I agree whole-heartedly with Martin Gayford’s description of Kenny Davern as the finest jazz clarinettist of the late twentieth century.

The heyday of the jazz clarinet was back in the late thirties and forties when Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw were huge stars.  With the ascendancy of bebop after the war, saxophones and trumpets become dominant and the clarinet became increasingly unfashionable.

But that didn’t deter Kenny Davern who was steeped in the history of jazz and was a great admirer amongst others of Pee Wee Russell and Irving Fazola.  I was fortunate enough to meet Kenny on two ocassions.  In the best traditions of jazz, he was a larger than life figure, a man of acerbic wit.  He took the time and trouble to write down for me the names of some of his favourite players and the records that I should check out.  He was delighted when I told him that I had a copy of his Hot Trio album and he took out from his pocket a photograph of the pianist on the record – Dick Wellstood – who was a life-long friend.

I remember one unfortunate punter requesting Moonglow, a tune that is synonymous with Benny Goodman.  Kenny played it but not before he made the point that he’d never aspired to play like Benny Goodman.  What he wanted was to sound like Kenny Davern – that is the challenge for every musician to find his or her own distinctive voice.

It was a challenge to which Kenny Davern was more than equal.  The jazz trumpeter, Warren Vaché, speaking shortly after Davern’s death a couple of years ago said, ”You could pick Kenny out on a record after two or three notes —like a hot knife going through butter.  His playing was edgy and cutting and virile and, at the same time, passionate and tender…”

If you’re not familiar with Kenny Davern’s music and you’d like to hear more, in addition to The Hot Trio, I’d also recommend Summit Reunion which he made in 1990 with Bob Wilber but any record upon which you see his name comes with a guarantee of enjoyment.

The Pushmi-pullyu approach to social reform

At least both heads are looking in the same direction

 The idea that there can be perfect congruence from the vision and aspirations of an organisation all the way through its various strategies and action plans to an individual employee’s objectives has always struck me as overly simplistic. In practice, the so called ‘golden thread’ tends to be as elusive as the golden medina.

In a similar way, I’ve never really been convinced of the delivery chain view of the world which sees a minister in Whitehall pressing a button and seamlessly through the mechanisms of national public service agreement targets, local area agreements and the rest, the desired outcome materialises on the ground.   Disappointingly, this idea of a simple causal relationship between interventions and outcomes has become hard wired into our regulatory frameworks.

I’m more attracted to models which recognise the complexity of the world in which public service organisations operate. In a fascinating article in Prospect, Left Brain, Right Brain, Matthew Taylor argues that the actions of the state need to combine ‘the push of reform with the pull of social meanings and connections.’

 This seems to me a more realistic way of seeing how the actions of organisations like councils must interplay with the values and social norms of communities.  We are all familiar with the initiatives which seemed eminently sensible on paper and when discussed amongst colleagues which proved to have no resonance when it came to implementation.

Matthew Taylor goes on to suggest that, ‘as the public sector enters a period of austerity, we need to remodel services around the goal of building individual and collective capacity. This means drawing on the best circumstances for the emergence of connectivity, self-control and altruism.’

Brave would be the council that said its three priorities were promoting connectivity, self-control and altruism. But it seems to me that we need to recognise that increasingly our role is about building capacity, embracing ‘the pull’ rather than focusing so much on pushing through our own provider-driven agendas.

President Obama and the web

I’m grateful to my colleague, Ben Unsworth, who gave me a copy of a briefing paper by Chris Quigley of Delib Ltd on how President Obama has been using the web to facilitate a more participative approach to governance. 

Chris explains how Open for Questions encouraged citizens to submit questions on line, via text or video, as well as to rate questions submitted by others.  President Obama then responded to the top questions via an online town hall meeting held at the White House and streamed live on line. Recovery Dialogue enabled the public to contribute their ideas on how to ensure transparency about the way funds provided through the Recovery Act are spent.  As Chris points out the Recovery Dialogue demonstrated a new way of running policy roundtable ideas-sharing events- it enabled 20,000 people to be involved in the policy-making process.

It seems to me that there are a number of things that we can learn from the approach that the Obama administration is taking.

1. the aim is to generate ideas and collaboration.  It is about participation not technology.  So, to take a current example from UK local government, if we want to encourage e-petitioning it needs to be because it’s an effective form of participation rather than because technology now enables us to do on-line what we’ve done for centuries off-line.

2. the way to do this is by trialing specific projects and learning from them.  There are always a lot of unknowns when it comes to participation so piloting different approaches for specific purposes makes sense.

3. if you get this right the rewards in terms of the extent and quality of the participation are high – much higher perhaps than could be achieved through more traditional mechanisms for the money involved.

4. we need to move on from our pre-occupation with surveys – there are other more participative ways of engaging residents in ongoing conversations about the key issues affecting local communities.

Rebranding the CAA

Rebranding exercises are always suggestive – you only have to think about Windscale’s rebirth as Sellafield.  Along similar lines, the Audit Commission looks to be trying to reposition the Comprehensive Area Assessment as oneplace (oneplace is onelowercaseword for this purpose.)  For sure, oneplace certainly sounds less clunky than Comprehensive Area Assessment which reeks of clipboard and classroom.  And there’s a certain logic in the name as CAA considers the broad spectrum of issues and performance in a locality rather than simply by organisation. 

But then again, isn’t there something rather Orwellian about this piece of rebranding?   The point of CAA is that it uses the same model to assess councils and their partners across the whole of England.  It draws upon the same national indicator set and through the same key lines of enquiry it seeks the same kind of evidence of outcomes.  The CAA is about consistency and uniformity because it is a national assessment tool.  Rather than oneplace, wouldn’t ‘anyplace’ be more to the point?

In praise of receptiveness

Like the teenagers we seek to influence, councils are only too susceptible to peer pressure. No sooner have we started to feel confident enough to say that we will no longer be hostage to targets than we all seem to be jumping collectively on the bandwagon of save, save, save.

And it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged within local government that a community of any description is in want of engagement. Despite research suggesting that levels of public participation have remained at about the same level since 1918, we are committed to suddenly coaxing large numbers of people out of their apparent indifference.

But rather than focusing on finding new ways in which the community can engage us, I believe the real issue is to make councils and other public institutions more receptive. Satisfaction from participation comes from feeling that you have effected change on an issue about which you care. So perhaps what we need more than e-petitions, citizen juries and the like, is a shift in mindset in public institutions – a readiness to admit mistakes and to act on feedback; receptivity rather than engagement. ‘Receptiveness,’ George Eliot wrote, is a rare and massive power like fortitude.’ It’s a power we could usefully tap into.

townhall or whitehall?

In the current financial climate this seems like a good time to be thinking about where public services are best carried out – by councils, by regional bodies or by central government.  Or maybe there are some things we do which don’t require the oversight of elected representatives at all?

When the media want a view on these questions, they turn to Tony Travers but it seems to me that the blogosphere is a good place to get views.  So, if you’ve ten minutes spare, please complete the short survey I’ve put together.

Click Here to take survey

As an added incentive, one randomly selected respondent will get a £20 HMV/Waterstones voucher.  I will share the results of the survey here.

Double Choice

Since Tony Blair’s departure from government, we seem to have heard much more about ‘voice’ (people power) than about ‘choice’ (enabling people to exercise preferences) as a way of driving improvement in public services.  In his speech today at the Labour Party Conference Gordon Brown used the word ‘choice’ more than 20 times but only in the sense of the choices that the government has made in tackling the recession.

I’ve been thinking about what the relationship might be between councils seeking to steer people to make smarter choices in terms of lifestyle decisions and the Blairite choice agenda – offering  a wider range of services into and out of which people can opt. Might there be a Double Choice agenda as well as a Double Devolution agenda?

In Crimes & Misdemeanours, Woody Allen’s take on Dostoevsky, he suggests that, ‘we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices.’  By extension you can see a community as being defined by the sum total of the choices we make collectively. 

If we live in communities where people are hostile towards each other, maybe that comes back to individual choices we make to act selfishly.  Was the behaviour of some MPs with regard to their expenses really so out of kilter with the wider values of our society?  And how many of us would choose to say ‘no’ to the bonuses on offer in the city if we were awarded them?  It seems to me that sometimes there are some double-standards at play in our media-fuelled moral outrage at the behaviour of other people.

‘Choice’ doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  Many of the decisions we make are influenced by other factors like affection, obligation and convention.  Moreover, some people given a situation are better equipped by ability and/or privilege to make advantageous choices.  That is why there remains a strong egalitarian challenge to choice – it exacerbates inequalities because those people who make the most of the choices available tend to be those who are best connected and able to work the system for their own ends.  Indeed, it can be argued that it’s the often patchily practised values of those same, sharp elbowed, people that lie at the heart of the behavioural change agenda. 

So extending choice is complex.  Choice may be a way of ensuring more effective and accountable services, and for sure supporting people to make more sustainable choices is in all of our long term interests.  But how best to make a reality of Double Choice so that the communities so defined are fairer, happier places where more people can fulfil their promise, remains a huge challenge.

Too much of a good thing

In a Work Foundation report, Public Value: The Next Steps in Public Service Reform, David Coats and Eleanor Passmore suggest that our pre-occupation with constant reform of public services may have its downsides.  They argue that,

‘the continued use of the language of reform has convinced the public that something is wrong. After all, ‘reform’ is usually needed to eliminate abuses, reduce inefficiencies or address other sources of inadequate performance. By creating the impression that public services demand a permanent revolution, ministers have lodged in the public mind the belief that public services are poor and that initiative overload has failed to resolve any of these problems.’

Reading Alan Milburn’s speech – Reforming public services – which he made at the start of September to the Eidos Institute in Brisbane, I felt that they may have a point.  In the speech, Alan Milburn talks about the ‘new problems’ politics must confront and then cites improving health, beating crime, regenerating communities and safeguarding the environment.  Of course none of these are remotely new but somehow we’ve become accustomed to the language in the speech, phrases like ‘propelling change’ ‘a different kind of state’ ‘a paradigm shift’ which creates this sense that it is only through constant reform that progress can be achieved.

Of course we need to challenge the status quo and try out new ideas and approaches but I wonder if sometimes we need to give reforms a chance to succeed before the next wave of changes. Has change become too much of a panacea?