Gordon Brown at the NLGN Annual Conference

I went to the NLGN annual conference today.  The star turn came from the Prime Minister in what was the first speech he has made during his premiership to a local government audience.  Gordon Brown’s theme was responding to the recession.  He emphasised the global nature of the economic crisis and the three key planks of the government’s response: 

• The bail out of the banks
• Providing real help to families and businesses
• Working with the banks to increase lending

The Prime Minister highlighted the government’s measures to minimise home repossessions and a new LGA commitment to double the number of apprenticeships in local government from 7,500 to 15,000.  He said the government remained committed to devolution despite the downturn and commented on how Local Area Agreements and Multiple Area Agreements are helping councils to promote economic development.

Housing, an issue that the Prime Minister is know to have a keen interest in, featured in the speech.  Gordon Brown seemed willing to consider a larger role for councils in helping to increase housing supply and said there would be more announcements on this. For further details see this Guardian article].

He also said that the Government would be looking to the Audit Commission to assess how councils are responding to the recession.  This raises the issue in my mind of how effective the Comprehensive Area Assessment model is likely to be in attempting to do this.

The speech was generally more focused on expounding the Government’s response to the financial crisis than really exploring local government’s contribution to mitigating its effects.  Barking and Dagenham was the only council that the Prime Minister mentioned in his speech and there was a noticeable lack of local government examples.

If Gordon Brown’s speech was slightly disappointing from the perspective of a local government practitioner, it did rather set the tone for the day.  The presentation I found most interesting was made by Victor Adebowale, chief executive of Turning Point. (I’m sure Lord Adebowale would be an excellent speaker at an EMT meeting). He spoke about the 88 most deprived neighbourhoods identified by the Social Exclusion Unit and said they were all places were public services were very active.  The issue wasn’t a lack of public service engagement but that for all the money being spent, positive outcomes aren’t being achieved.  The recession in so far as it means we are all on a burning platform, he suggested, presents a huge opportunity to get on with things.

Policy guidance and toolkits fall like snow and last as long, Lord Adebowale said. The key he argued is how do we create services that are understood and used?  He emphasised the gaps in perception in our ideas as providers of the services we deliver and the people they are aimed at.  Enabling people to access services, he argued, remains a key issue.

Lord Adebowale described a Connected Care project which he said had taken much longer to implement than was necessary because of public sector organisations’ fear of change and unwillingness to put the community at the heart of their thinking.  Councils, he suggested, need to become transformational leaders, capable of making effective partnership with whomever they need to.  The biggest demand of local government, he concluded, isn’t the recession; its quality leadership.

During the Q&A, Lord Adebowale said that he believed people are motivated primarily by seeing changes implemented, outcomes on the ground.  This was a theme picked up latter in an interesting session on community-led projects taking place in Islington where the LSP has a partnering arrangement with Groundwork.  The key message was that participation needs to be for a purpose.

Victor Adebowale’s presentation was followed by a discussion on innovation.  Sophia Parker a consultant working with Innovation Catalyst on a number of projects with Kent County Council suggested that local government commissions and designs imaginative initiatives but, unlike the private sector, too often stops at the point of implementation.

Perhaps there’s a danger in seeing innovation too much as something separate and complicated.  Having new ideas is a human trait after all and all of us at work and at home have ideas on how we can do things differently.  The key is giving scope for people to develop and share their ideas.  South Tyneside’s Deputy Chief Executive, Keith Harcus, described his authority’s ‘innovation days’ where they encourage creative thinking and then allocate Area Based Grant money to take the initiatives identified forward.

The conference ended with an interview with Hazel Blears followed by questions and answers.  She also suggested that the recession offers an opportunity for councils to do more innovative things and suggested that the CAA and LAA frameworks mean that councils enjoy the freedoms and flexibilities they need to do this.

The best way to make sure that things get done, the Secretary of State went on to say, is to make it a key line of enquiry in the CAA.  She quoted a couple of KLOE from the use of resources block.  Her argument would be that the CAA is now more focused on outcomes and so that while it may still be about ensuring compliance, that compliance is with the delivery of outcomes rather than processes.  But I think there remains a tension between the CAA regime and the kind of ‘transformational leadership’ that Lord Adebowale was calling for.

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Social Attitudes Survey

Yesterday the National Centre for Social Research published its annual social attitudes survey.  Amongst the results was that watching television remains Britain’s number one leisure activity.  91% of us watch several times a week and 74% watch every day.  Of the 74%, 23% say that they get no or not much enjoyment from watching tv.  It seems strange to spend time voluntarily each day doing something from which you derive little or no pleasure.  Looking for a positive spin, perhaps it means that there’s plenty of potential for councils to get people to engage.  The time we are spending not enjoying television could be spent shaping services and being co-producers!

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Behavioural change and the much mentioned brilliance

In his poem Love Songs in Age Philip Larkin writes about ‘that much mentioned brilliance, love’ promising to ‘solve, satisfy, and set unchangeably in order’.  With behavioural change fast becoming the hottest topic in local government, there might be a view that councils are over-reaching themselves.  In seeking to make a reality of our community leadership role and promote health and happiness, are we straying too far from our core responsibility of ensuring high quality value for money public services?  Are we trying to solve every social ill , satisfy every expectation and in creating sustainable communities, set everything in perfect order?

Earlier this week at a London Collaborative event, a number of London chief executives met to discuss among other things a pilot project focusing on encouraging behavioural change – specifically encouraging people to lead more active lifestyles.  Paul Martin made a presentation at the event about the project and I have posted his slides in the CoP’s library.  

Of course councils can’t make people lead more energetic lives – we don’t have enforcement powers (yet!) to compel couch potatoes from sofa to gym.  But in many ways this is the attraction of the behavioural change agenda.  It means that we must engage with our residents and see partnership working not just as something we do at an organisational level but as something that happens at a neighbourhood level with ‘real’ people.

‘Nudge’ by Robert Thaler and Cass Sunstein attracted a great deal of attention last year, with its theory of designing ‘choice environments’ that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families and society.  I guess a key issue for councils that want to take forward the behavioural change agenda is working out what the choice environment might look like say for promoting active lifestyles.  What are the nudges that might work?  Reward card schemes, one of the options being explored by London Collaborative, would clearly fall into the ‘nudge’ category.

Larkin wasn’t the most upbeat of characters, and Love Songs in Age concludes that love did not fulfil its promise in the past and ‘could not now’.  But I think councils are right to be ambitious and seek to tackle behavioural issues in a positive way.  It may be in less time than we think that the serious ramifications of a life spent tapping on a keyboard come home to roost…

In his poem Love Songs in Age Philip Larkin writes about ‘that much mentioned brilliance, love’ promising to ‘solve, satisfy, and set unchangeably in order’.  With behavioural change fast becoming the hottest topic in local government, there might be a view that councils are over-reaching themselves.  In seeking to make a reality of our community leadership role and promote health and happiness, are we straying too far from our core responsibility of ensuring high quality value for money public services?  Are we trying to solve every social ill , satisfy every expectation and in creating sustainable communities, set everything in perfect order?

Earlier this week at a London Collaborative event, a number of London chief executives met to discuss among other things a pilot project focusing on encouraging behavioural change – specifically encouraging people to lead more active lifestyles. 

Of course councils can’t make people lead more energetic lives – we don’t have enforcement powers (yet!) to compel couch potatoes from sofa to gym.  But in many ways this is the attraction of the behavioural change agenda.  It means that we must engage with our residents and see partnership working not just as something we do at an organisational level but as something that happens at a neighbourhood level with ‘real’ people.

‘Nudge’ by Robert Thaler and Cass Sunstein attracted a great deal of attention last year, with its theory of designing ‘choice environments’ that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families and society.  I guess a key issue for councils that want to take forward the behavioural change agenda is working out what the choice environment might look like say for promoting active lifestyles.  What are the nudges that might work?  Reward card schemes, one of the options being explored by London Collaborative, would clearly fall into the ‘nudge’ category.

Larkin wasn’t the most upbeat of characters, and Love Songs in Age concludes that love did not fulfil its promise in the past and ‘could not now’. But I think councils are right to be ambitious and seek to tackle behavioural issues in a positive way.  It may be in less time than we think that the serious ramifications of a life spent tapping on a keyboard come home to roost…

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Authenticity

I’ve been reading David Boyle’s book Authenticity which Neil Talbot kindly lent me.  David Boyle argues that there is a growing frustration with the artificiality of our lives and that whether it’s politics, food, shopping or relationships, more and more of us are craving authenticity.  In this context it was interesting to read Paul’s blog about the late Harold Pinter and how one of Pinter’s great achievements was to bring a realism to the stage which was quite new. 

David Boyle puts forward the following categorisation of authenticity:  

• virtual/fake
• fake real
• virtual real
• authentic.   

He gives McDonalds and on line relationships as examples of virtual/fake. 

Big Brother exemplifies ‘fake real‘. 

Starbucks and organic chocolate are classified as ‘fake real‘ and in the ‘authentic‘ camp, Boyle includes the Tate Modern (surely not!), natural childbirth (not the safest subject in the world for a man to voice opinions about), real ale and reading groups.  His take on authenticity suggests to me that this can be quite a subjective exercise. The things we like tend to be the things we think are real: foresty commission woods (fake); natural woodland (authentic); test match cricket (authentic) twenty 20 (fake).

That said, it is the twenty 20 games which increasingly subsidise test cricket; just as the ‘fake real’ Big Brother is Channel 4’s cash cow that enables it to make other more interesting programmes. 

But there are some practical suggestions in the book.  Boyle identifies 20 things which he says organisations can do to engender greater authenticity and it strikes me that many of them are applicable to local councils.  They include:

• put authenticity on your corporate agenda – it’s a dimension of our commitment to a greener borough;
• make it personal – the personalisation agenda;
• maximise human contact – there are lessons for us here as we seek to encourage people to migrate to cheaper channels and use machines to take their books from the library.  Boyle argues that human contact is the ‘driving force’ of authenticity;
• split the organisation – networking between smaller organisations rather than seeking to exercise control through large hierarchies (in our context, perhaps devolving decision making to local committees is analogous?)
• provide customers with a choice – an example from local government would be choice-based lettings
• create real places – as place shapers we can seek to build places that bustle with life
• encourage social innovation
• commit to culture
• do sweat the small stuff – Boyle argues if you want to make a real difference to people’s lives, it’s the little things that matter, to make a difference you have to deal directly with real people in real places.  The inference here for public sector organisations is that it’s not always about macro changes – structural re-organisations, brand new models of service delivery etc.  It might be a few simple measures taken to make the walk to the shops feel safer that has a bigger impact.

Some food for thought here as we look at refreshing our corporate plans.  If you want to find out more about David Boyle, check out his web site and blog.

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