Neighbourhoods

How does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past?

Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours, Cheek by jowl, which I’ve already referred to a couple of times, is packed with little anecdotes of neighbour relations in England since the late medieval period. I’m left in awe of her achievement in accumulating so much absorbing evidence. The pace is sometimes a bit breathless as story follows story; and the author is never in a hurry to offer a theory or generalised conclusion from what she’s shared. But the style is very readable, laced with occasional dashes of light humour.

So come on Emily, we all want to know: how does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past? In spite of her general coyness as far as conclusions are concerned, this bit sounds pretty confident:

‘Active neighbouring has declined, but latent neighbouring has remained. Most neighbours still trust each other and will help out in an emergency. Who would want to return to traditional neighbouring, if that came with the hardship and lack of privacy that fostered it? Modern neighbouring has a different character because the context is different. We rely on neighbours less; we can be passive neighbours.’

Sounds about right to me, and it pretty much fits with other conclusions such as those of Mary Godfrey and her colleagues. My take on it would be something like this:

One form of neighbouring that has almost certainly declined is what we might call ‘negative neighbouring’ – a moral governing culture typically referred to now under the label ‘curtain-twitching,’ which had evolved to establish and reinforce norms, and those norms extended into gender, racial and other stereotypes.

Of course there are plenty of contemporary anecdotes about this form of neighbouring but I don’t think anyone is putting forward the argument that it is more prevalent and influential today than it was 60 years ago.

If we think of some forms of neighbourliness in more neutral terms – just knowing and recognising people whose help could be mobilised in time of need – it’s probably fair to say that the numbers of local people we know in this way have decreased. But that may not be at all critical if, as for most of us, the number of people we know whose help we can summon readily has not decreased. Even if some or many of our contacts are not going to be physically within reach in a home-based emergency, their power to engage appropriate neighbourly support may still be strong.

Finally, what about what I have called ‘supportive’ neighbouring, the sort of behaviour between co-residents in which people go just a fraction out of their way to be supportive and imply readiness to help in time of need, without transgressing the norms of privacy? I really have my doubts that this has declined to any great extent if at all.

Where Emily and I probably differ though is in the weight given to the welfare state as having ‘crowded out’ people’s readiness to offer support. It’s obvious that to some extent, formal services have taken over occasions such as childbirth when in the past neighbours were more or less forced to depend on each other. We’d expect that the nature of neighbouring would change as a consequence; but it wouldn’t necessarily have declined significantly.

My sense is that if neighbourliness really did decline over the past generation, then of all the contributory factors, the crowding out by the welfare state was not one of the most important. The availability of organised social care for those who needed it not only made life more liveable for millions, it probably had far less of an impact on positive neighbouring than did the availability and use of cars; television; new forms of housing; comparative wealth; population diversity; and a cohort of women in the labour market.

And so, as I wrote here:

‘The task is to understand how the notion of an enfolding community might be possible in an age of personal social networks with the looming challenge of living with difference, when there is less need to be neighbourly and few of us really have to be more than superficially friendly with our neighbours.’

I do believe that when residents connect through neighbourhood online networks, where those are collectively-oriented, the potential to resolve this challenge is significant.

Against that, as I’ve said before, investing in formal initiatives in order to generate local social connections may be of limited value, being back-to-front. Emily's pretty emphatic on this:

‘Good Neighbour societies are founded on a notion that organisation will bring about a return to traditional neighbourliness. It will not.’

So with all this in mind, I’m proposing a meeting about the past, present and future of neighbouring, in London in about a month’s time – just before the jubilee street party brouhaha swamps us all with romantic representations of community and soppy insistence on formal mechanisms as the key to revisiting a past golden age of neighbouring… More on that very soon.

Keeping ourselves to ourselves

So much of contemporary neighbouring is about noisiness, but this is about nosyness.

A survey reported as part of the Digital Switchover Help Scheme has found that for 27 per cent of the 2,000 respondents from across London, ‘fear of appearing nosey’ was the reason for keeping themselves to themselves. Disparaging terms like ‘curtain twitcher,’ ‘nosy parker,’ or 'sticky beak' have damaging cultural ramifications.

Fear of appearing nosey might be seen as a consequence of the way we emphasise privacy. We are not allowed to build or extend our houses if they allow us to see each other within. My house was built before such legal insistence, and fortunately a healthy relationship with our neighbours is reinforced by being able informally to keep an eye out for each other.

In the Netherlands, a curious culture of window dressing evolved through the late twentieth century, whereby it was frowned upon to use curtains or shutters, so homeowners would restrict what was visible internally through elaborate decoration (see 1989 article by Hernan Vera).

I’m reading Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours and finding various examples of intimate details shared unintentionally in previous ages, due to ‘the thinness of pre-modern walls’ – complicated no doubt by lower expectations of privacy.

The determination to avoid accusations of nosyness obviously reduces people’s availability to respond in time of need; and as soon as a critical mass of people with the same attitude has built up, it’s likely to have an impact on the other side of the equation, readiness to ask for help. This is one of the explanations for what Lilian Linders terms the 'request scruple'. As I noted a year ago, her research shows that this reluctance is more problematic than the assumed shortage in the supply of neighbourliness.

Dilemmas of interference in neighbouring are persistent unless you choose not to occupy your neighbourhood. Here’s my own example, after which I started to wonder if my neighbour thinks I'm nosy for having advised him that his downstairs window was open overnight in the rain.

 

Neighbourhood care groups

Neighbourhood care groups and organisations provide an astonishing social resource which seldom penetrates the policy-media consciousness. Some I know a little about, such as Brighton and Hove Neighbourhood Care Scheme, and Tower Hamlets Friends and Neighbours (where I was a trustee for a while). Now, thanks to Bernard Leach, erstwhile head of sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, I’ve been learning a little about a group which has been active in Chorlton, Manchester for 44 years.

Chorlton Good Neighbours (CGN) was established in 1967 by local people and has evolved to become a well-established charity offering a range of services to local older people. It currently has over 250 users and 70 volunteers. The group offers a range of practical support including transport and odd jobs for example; and various activities such as exercise classes, cooking sessions, and trips out.

CGN recently carried out their own research with a view to capturing the benefits that are generated by organising care collectively and providing a context for volunteers. The research was based on a survey which asked about levels of confidence to meet and socialise; health, well-being, independence and self-worth; sources of information and advice; sense of safety; and feelings of involvement. This exercise illustrates the great value in having high quality informal local arrangements for people in need of help and support. Take this quote for instance:

‘there is also a policy of ringing up people if for example, they don’t turn up for sessions they normally come to, or if a volunteer notices when delivering a newsletter that there is a lot of mail uncollected... We go the extra step, not just because it is the correct professional thing to do, but because volunteers and users know each other and care for each other.’

Or consider the chart below, which hints at the benefits felt from the range of activities run by the group:

The report suggests that:

‘Overall, the evidence base points to the conclusion that CGN’s activities do change users’ attitudes, lifestyles and their mental and physical wellbeing. It is reasonable to go on to conclude that such care services can lead to significant savings for both the NHS and the Local Authority’s Social Services…

Core activities such as home visits, wheelchair support, coffee morning, Sunday teas and day trips will remain at the heart of what we deliver as they provide a haven of friendship and support – neighbourliness – which enrich the lives of all those involved with Chorlton Good Neighbours.’

 For more details about the report, contact Bernard Leach – btleach { at } gmail.com.

Christenings and funerals

Striking story from Steph Jennings on Podnosh about Mosies, a resident of Handsworth in Birmingham, who is working with a group to help influence people who are stuck with the perception that joining a gang is their only option.

'The girls have babies and the boys shoot and stab each other. I’ve lost count of the amount of christenings and funerals I’ve been to but I’ve never been to a wedding that’s just not what we do.'

And Steph is right in observing that you're unlikely to get this kind of story or insight from the prescribed training session format. Semi-formal community-based occasions, like the social media surgeries Podnosh are involved in, are more likely to nurture the sense of camaraderie and ownership that stimulates a shared determination to bring about change.

 

 

Let there be strong networks

Here’s another report calling for policy to bolster social networks – this one is from the International Longevity Centre UK, Can localism work for older people in urban environments? In this case the call is ‘to strengthen interpersonal, intergenerational, and multigenerational networks, particularly in urban areas.’

This accumulating acknowledgement that our dependence on institutions has left us vulnerable, as a society, is not misplaced in my view. The echo is familiar, as is the echo of the echo. Network poverty was worthy of more research attention than it got in recent wealthier times. Now that we really need some data on it, I suspect we’re going to be leaning heavily on the RSA study because I’m not sure there’s a great deal else to go on.

So what does it mean, to a policymaker, this call to help strengthen social networks? How should policy respond?

I’d start with a requirement that local policies should avoid doing damage to existing local social networks, a bit like the duty to involve. Vicki Nash suggested something similar, ‘community proofing,’ some years ago.

It would mean for instance that a new supermarket or road widening or library closure could not be approved without an intelligible analysis of its impact on local social networks, an analysis that in turn would inform public consultation. It wouldn’t take us long to develop the methodology, once we had to. I’ve suggested before, the reason we don't have the methodology to demonstrate the social value of local amenities that stimulate social networks is because no political value has been placed on human processes that are informal and organic.

Will that change, with all these calls to strengthen networks? Is there the political will to acknowledge that local social interactions have value which plays out in, and profoundly affects the costs of, other social provision?

The requirement to avoid network damage does not have to be accompanied by a given standard of social network strength, to which all neighbourhoods should be expected to aspire. Wrong approach, don’t go there.

But yes it should set us thinking about other ways of enhancing informal interaction, for example through the design of local spaces and dwellings; placing more than crudely economic value on local third places; support for local online networks; policies that discourage unnecessary car use and encourage walking; promotion of the principle of local (walkable) services and local (walkable) schools… All these will seem eminently sensible, if they don’t already, once there is government-level recognition of the essential value of informal interactions and the local social networks that they represent.

All this has drawn me back to a book chapter I wrote on policy and local social relations, here, in which I noted that

‘social relationships in neighbourhoods are organic, requiring a healthy ecology that reflects informality and also requiring that most of the time formality keeps its distance.’

And in which I quoted Robert Ellikson’s observation that

‘…lawmakers who are unappreciative of the social conditions that foster informal cooperation are likely to create a world in which there is both more law and less order.’

 

 

Loneliness, isolation and social media

JRF have published a useful and clear literature and practice review for the Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness programme.

It's worth reiterating a few points. As I've noted before -

• loneliness is not the same as isolation - it's an unwelcome form of isolation which has social (and by extension economic) consequences;
• loneliness is not age-related (the Gulbenkian Campaign to End Loneliness is focused on people in old age, and I fear this serves to perpetuate the social dismissal of the issue among other age groups);
• loneliness is quite separate to the sense of belonging or not belonging to a place; and
• the way we address it could be influenced by the power of social media in strengthening and sustaining local connections.

There seems to be a widespread assumption that loneliness is increasing. The Mental Health Foundation's excellent report last year suggested as much but does not seem to confirm it. I think we should be alert but sceptical.

As it happens, with a little time to do some catching up over the past few days, I've managed to read one of Keith Hampton's recent papers, on the relationship of internet and mobile phone use to network size and diversity. Among the points made with characteristic thoroughness are the following:

• reports that social isolation has increased significantly in the USA since 1985 seem to have been exaggerated and in fact isolation may have declined; and
• there is no evidence that the use of internet or mobile phones diminishes the size or diversity of people's core networks. Specific uses of social media were found to have a positive relationship to network size and diversity.

The Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness programme includes a question about new media, but JRF's approach to technology has always been tentative, not to say reluctant. It would be good if they would grab the initiative in this case, and really open up the potential here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the evidence on local online channels gives us plenty to go on.

Previously:

• Local social ties have weakened, but where's the evidence?
• Loneliness and mental distress

 

'I need your help'

I wrote a few weeks ago about the 'request scruple' and people's willingness or unwillingness to ask for help. Now here's Amanda's engrossing tale of neighbouring from Boston, Mass. 'I need you to help me pick up my motha,' gasps the passer-by. I can easily see this one getting taken up by the neat but cringingly-yclept good gym.

For me it brought back memories of being in Boston for the marathon and for some seminars about neighbourhood relations at MIT, in 2003.

It also made me think about occasions when I've been approached for help by people on the fringes of my neighbourhood or theirs. Usually they're wholly trusting encounters, for example when as I was passing I was asked to go into a house not far away but outside my immediate neighbouhood, to help shut a window - the owner was away and their keyholding neighbour was anxious about security. I didn't know her but maybe she recognised me as a local, as a regular pedestrian hereabouts for many years.

One encounter not long ago rather nonplussed me, when I was asked when passing a bus-stop - the guy suddenly up so close I felt his breath on my face - for a pound. I asked what for, he said so he could buy a book in the charity shop.

The ‘request scruple’ and the demand for neighbourliness

Our society seems to be crying out with a perceived need to stimulate neighbourliness. The assumption is that the supply of neighbourliness in many residential populations is simply inadequate for the demand: people are not neighbourly enough, it seems, and the entire social structure is in jeopardy. The hunt is on to invent ways of stimulating neighbouring. So here's the Campaign to End Loneliness starting to capture ideas for instance, and we have one or two over on the 50 Ways site also. Is this the right approach?

Back in 2009 I had the privilege of editing the English language summary of a Dutch PhD thesis submitted by my friend Lilian Linders.

The study was about ‘the significance of proximity’ and looked at the nature of informal care at neighbourhood level. What Lilian found and describes is starting to excite the social welfare field in the Netherlands, and there are good reasons to reflect on her conclusions.

The research was carried out in a low income urban area, perceived as fairly cohesive in the traditional sense, with a population of about 2,400, clamped between an industrial zone and several highways. (I was driven close by last week, as it happens). Lilian speaks of ‘informal care’ in a very broad sense, she means I think the full range of informal support provided, including informal care and some very intimate tasks carried out by known co-residents repeatedly.

‘Apart from the willingness to help a neighbour, a plethora of problems like poverty, alcoholism, incest, disease, divorce, debts, domestic violence and loneliness was found. Therefore the dividing line between givers and receivers of informal care is blurred. The model is one of mutual aid.’

She found that most support was provided one-to-one, not on a collective (‘community’) basis, but simply because people knew each other. It had everything to do with trust at a personal level.

One of the things that Lilian latched onto, with keen insight, was the reticence in requesting neighbourly support. She calls this the ‘request scruple’ – a reluctance to ask for help. This contrasts sharply with the ‘support scruple’ – the reluctance to offer support.

Neighbours prefer social distance and are surprisingly reluctant to ask for support. Nonetheless, they do help each other, on an individual one-to-one basis, in personal and sometimes demanding and intimate circumstances.

The reluctance to ask for support extends to friends, acquaintances and family members, largely because of the fear of dependency and the social ideal of autonomy.

Lilian’s key finding is that the request scruple is far more of an impediment to informal care than is a shortage in the supply.

This helps to clarify the argument that informal care is not a consequence of neighbourhood cohesion: it doesn’t necessarily follow that if you have a cohesive neighbourhood, people will care for one another in time of need. That depends on personal relationships.

One last point. Lilian draws attention to the significance of mutual support between vulnerable people. This is a tidy example of the difference between the Dutch approach and the English. Big society thinking clobbers away at notions of charity and philanthropy, thinking those of us with some kind of surplus should be supporting those without. In the Netherlands, as I have been describing in recent posts, there is serious policy impetus behind the principle of informal care and mutual support.

You can see a clear English language presentation summary of Lilian’s work here.

Speaking to the study tour group last week, Lilian's colleague Rick Kwekkeboom had some important points to add, particularly around the invisibility of informal care. She noted that informal support only becomes visible when it is over-loaded. The role for formal services is to help people to care for one another and not get overburdened.

I don't see the request scruple as a peculiarly Dutch phenomenon. In the UK we could do with an approach to social support that acknowledges these nuances of mutual support, and is less obsessed with some kind of charitable or philanthropic motivation.

Previously:

Social networks and informal support

Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

Other posts tagged 'Informal support'

 

Mutual support and ‘primary care’

In Eindhoven the other day I had the privilege to meet co-ordinators of an extensive self-help network, hear about some of the ways in which the groups work, and gain insight into the importance of the experience for sufferers. There are about 80 mutual support groups in the network, covering a range of shareable problems including mental health, addiction, sexuality, and so on. One of the promotional leaflets proclaims:

‘Secretly, many tea parties are self-help support groups’.

Our discussion was framed by the broad social policy context of how a society provides care for its citizens; what are the responsibilities of individual and state, what is the role of the professional, and so on.

Someone mentioned ‘primary care’. What ironic language, in the circumstances. There we sat at a focal point for several hundred people who come together semi-formally to help themselves and others as fellow-sufferers to just about function, not disparaging professional care but claiming and reserving an independent space. And we were using the language that characterises part of the problem.

I suggested a while ago that most 'primary care' is self-administered by individuals or administered within households. It was suggested that perhaps that’s ‘zero care’. Fair enough. Listening to the members of the self help network, I thought, this is primary care.

So it would be helpful if the care system were re-oriented to acknowledge, structurally and constructively, the role that people themselves play in co-producing each others' health and care and quality of life. That would also be likely to save money, though not for the insurance and drug companies.

 

Social networks and informal support: the big shift for policy

It’s obvious that informal support and social networks can be critical to the way society looks after its members. When people can use their social networks to get support without going through formal agencies, there are social and economic benefits. Has the time finally come for this logic to be recognised in policy? (Image from Viil Lid).

I happen to think this is quite a big deal. I’m just back from an utterly absorbing study tour in the Netherlands, organised by my friend Jan Steyaert for researchers from the Centre for Social Justice in the UK. We were exploring policy issues around the changing nature of social care in the post-welfare society, and Eindhoven is replete with thought-provoking initiatives and articulate people who have been reflecting on the significant shifts implied for practitioners and citizens. I tagged along to make wonky observations in the background, a role to which I seem to be peculiarly suited.

The basis of lots of urgent fresh thinking is the 2007 Social Support Act (known as the Wmo) which requires a shift in care work and social work towards what is known as ‘welfare new style’. Of course, as in the UK and elsewhere, much of this is driven by the mismatch between increasing care costs and shrinking public funds; but here, unlike with big society, there is immediate and valuing recognition of people's pre-existing connections.

The main points that dominated discussion of Dutch care practice were these:

• Focus on the strengths and resources of the individual, not on their problems
• Map, stimulate and involve the individual’s social network as a key resource
• Emphasise collective rather than individual support solutions
• Use professional care is a ‘last resort’.

I think this is both radical and exemplary. Quite apart from the community development principle of bringing collective solutions into the frame, here we have at last got governmental justification for stimulating social networks, with policy makers pushing care agencies of all kinds to pay due attention to people’s social connections. For example, one disability adviser who visits people with particular needs begins with a conversation based on a simple social network mapping template. Expect to see rapid standardisation of social network mapping in the Dutch public sector.

No-one seemed to know how the idea came so marvellously to be given such primacy, but here it is. And the logic is straightforward. For a long time it has been apparent that formal care is too dominant, has unacknowledged negative effects, and is provided at unaffordable levels. Ergo, we need to recognise and invest in informal support; ergo, we need to emphasise and encourage social networks – especially at local level. Why has this not happened before or elsewhere? Is it because we don’t make measureable claims for the part played by social networks, because we can’t see the results? Is it because no budget gets attached to them, so no-one with influence wants to ‘own’ them? Incidentally, this is not about consigning professional care to insignificance, but about re-establishing an appropriate balance between formal and informal.

In theory the Wmo seems to use the term ‘informal care’ with reference mainly to long term intensive carers. But the term seemed also to be used to imply what we might call informal support, thus covering a broad spectrum from low-commitment, dip-in dip-out five minute neighbouring; through something regular perhaps like weekly shopping with or for a frail elderly person; to high-intensity 24x7 unpaid care for someone with physical disabilities. This breadth of meaning may reflect developments in thinking since the act, and would account for the emphasis on social networks.

One advice worker rationalised the process by saying that as a society,

‘We have to go back to normal and look after each other.’

And so philosophical and anthropological questions about ‘community’ get raised. On what scale and under what circumstances is it 'normal' to provide informal support to others? The nostalgic plea doesn’t work very well, I suggest: some people challenge the mythology of the close-knit community, others point to the downsides and the basis in necessity neighbouring, and so on. Against that, we need some basis on which to establish the levels of trust that can in turn give rise to useable network connections.

An acknowledged problem for the Dutch approach is that many people are reluctant to ask for support, to make claims on their social network, to invest in their social network or exploit it for such purposes. One observation we heard was that in some cases ‘the social network is broken’. Another story concerned an individual who appeared at first to have no appropriate sources of support, then when they went out onto the street with the social worker there was plenty of recognition by others and the individual acknowledged,

‘yes of course I have a network, but I didn’t want the network to know my situation’.

We heard about this on several occasions and in particular in the significant research of Lilian Linders – which I happen to know a little about and which I will describe in a separate post in the near future.

 

 

Informal volunteering continues to decline

I missed this when it came out a month ago but it's worth going back to. We now have Citizenship survey figures for informal volunteering for the first half of the present year (April - September) and the decline ought to be of real concern to policy makers.

Over a year ago I pointed out a five per cent decline within the space of a year. The proportion saying that they volunteer informally at least once per month is now down to 27 per cent; and once per year, 54 per cent. These compare with 37 per cent and 68 per cent respectively in the bumper year of 2005. I devised this chart from data supplied in Table 5 here.

I've suggested before that this trend might just be a bit critical in terms of care for older people. I'm writing this in the plush comfort of the night ferry (yes, free reliable wifi) on my way back from an insightful study visit to the Netherlands. Two intensive days of learning have clarified the argument for me sharply. The Dutch are well in front of us: their Social Support Act (2007) has led to a radical emphasis on informal support and social networks, which I want to cover in my next post.

Harvest, neighbourliness and altruism

I generally treat narratives of the decline of neighbouring with cautious respect. Here's a comment responding to a post on the global Irish Central site, raising a valid point about the impact of technology on local social relations, which I don't recall having heard before:

'When I visited Ireland as a child, saving the hay was a community event. The neighbors would pitch in and help each other. The mechanization of farming has removed that shared sense of community gained from helping one's neighbors.'

There's no doubt that community involvement in the economically-critical harvest applied in many countries over centuries. We think of Levin over-exerting himself with the serfs, in Anna Karenina. Excluding imaginative aristocrats, most of the participants in such scenes would have experienced intermittent mutual dependence which defined community for them. The basis was necessity neighbouring: individuals had self-interested motivation for co-operating with their neighbour (and coercive religious practices often did the rest). Failure to maximise the harvest, perhaps with too few hands available to bring it in before the weather changed, seriously threatened the chances of the whole village getting through the winter.

We might also ask about some of the oppressive social structures under which this sometimes tortuous labour was unavoidable (no apols for sounding momentarily marxist) - who was benefitting most from this skilled, physical, coordinated effort? - and therefore the conditions under which the mutual commitment that we call 'community' arose.

By all means we should reflect on the contrasts (and similarities) between local social relations in other societies and those that prevail today. But let's at least recognise that versions of 'community' which may have become scarce and and are now regretted, had their basis in motivations that were not necessarily altruistic, and in economics that were not necessarily inclusive.

The contemporary challenge might be expressed thus: how does neighbourliness and sense of community emerge in societies that lack identifiable, manifold mutual dependence?

 

Philanthropy, community action and 'economic activity'

In the debate at yesterday's launch of nef's paper on big society there was a lot of confusion about philanthropy, mutual aid and community action. Each of these at some point seemed to be implied by speakers and comments from the floor in using the short-hand but inadequate term 'charities' (or 'small charities'); and sometimes covered by the term 'volunteers'.

Each of these forms of involvement tries to compensate for the shortfall in formal support or otherwise complement the role of the state, and is assumed to be unpaid. However, they may differ very markedly - in political ideology for example and obviously in the degree to which they aspire to empower or in practice disempower. It's also obvious that they are unevenly distributed in localities across the country. As I've suggested before, in some places it will be relatively easy to mobilise philanthropic volunteering while in others it could prove very hard to sustain even the proudest tradition of mutual aid.

Guardian Society editor Patrick Butler was the only one to come close to unpacking this in his short talk, sending me back to a seminal paper by Gabriel Chanan called Taken for granted, published in 1991.

Taken for granted was important because it revealed the distinction between volunteering based on a philanthropic tradition (ie something which comes from the surplus that 'well-motivated people' donate to others who they see as less fortunate than themselves); and community action which arises from people's own life-support needs, being

occupied in looking after children, elderly people, sometimes people with disabilities, and in doing the whole range of unpaid work which is taken for granted in the running of society - cooking, shopping, cleaning, maintaining social networks, 'emotional housekeeping', protecting local interests and the many other forms of essential activity which we take for granted as the basis for our common existence.

Gabriel went much further, locating the cause of the confusion over the community and voluntary sectors in the economic value placed on unpaid work:

All this tends to confirm the conventional definition of economic activity and to reinforce the image of the 'inactive' half of the population as being passive dependents of the 'active' half.

Sounds sort-of familiar. Twenty years on, here we are contemplating a forced revision of that conventional definition of economic activity against a cacophony of complaints about the economically 'inactive'. It's not a good time to be blurring our understanding of the different agents who can bring about that revision.

Patrick Butler warned yesterday of the possibility that before too long

'many of the charities that the big society will rely on will be dead, dying or missing in action.'

This brings an urgency to the necessary examination of that word 'charities', and perhaps we have to move the big society emphasis away from philanthropy that disempowers, to mutual aid and community action that drives and makes possible the development of skills, confidence, trust, tolerance, co-production, and local economies that include caring.

 

What makes a neighbourhood network?

How do local connections between residents get fused into an effective communicative network that comes in time to underpin everything else that happens?

I got into an interesting discussion yesterday at Balsall Heath in Birmingham, where I was lucky enough to be picking up wisdom from people like Paul Slatter and Hannah Worth from Chamberlain Forum, Ben Lee from NANM, Elke Loeffler from Governance International, plus Dick Atkinson and the folk from the famous Balsall Heath Forum.

I'd heard and read plenty about Dick and about what had been achieved at Balsall Heath, and this was my first visit. It's a hugely reasuring place, unpretensiously displaying the commonsense of ordinary people getting stuff done locally.

But I wanted to know, how come? There are active street 'stewards' (with or without the title) in 15 sets of 3-4 streets. I liked Dick's remark that

'With a bit of support and encouragement people do more than they think they can.'

This gives the forum a firm foundation of local people who are continually ferreting away at issues. OK let's be clear: we're talking about unpaid, unelected active local citizens, who 'have emerged out of street life' (Dick's words) in numbers that are sufficient to cover an area with a population of 14,000, loosely linked through neighbourhood management and an elected forum. According to the website

There are 22 residents groups, and 70 Street Stewards. So the whole neighbourhood is covered. Everyone knows someone and the sense of mutual self-help is fostered.

So I'm slightly enviously think about why this hasn't quite happened in Shipley, where I've tried to help out every so often over the years. Having a resident-employed resident, Abdullah, who supports the street stewards and takes some of the pressure off them, must make a difference. He tells us about the advantages of living in the neighbourhood where you work - you get a better response, people don't think you have a hidden agenda: 'they don't see me as a threat'.

And this can be very proactive work. We heard a story of two residents doorknocking because of an eyesore front garden, to discover a man on his own who badly needed, and was given, support.

But none of this, nor the recorded history of Balsall Heath Forum, quite explains how local networks grow and strengthen in some places and not in others. Informality is obviously crucial. But how come the initial connections, presumably between a few willing, motivated, slightly uncertain folk, have ramified and come to underpin a significant amount of what can be done now without the clumsy machinery of the city's formal services?

We didn't come up with an explanation, but I certainly came away with a clearer sense of the fundamental significance of an informal communication network in driving social change at neighbourhood level. For sure, if I'd been shown a unique ingredient I wouldn't have trusted it anyway.

Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

The amount of emotional or instrumental support that you receive from your social network, and the amount that you give, can be calculated and represented on a reciprocity scale.

So you might give a lot of practical help to others and not need much yourself at the moment, scoring positively for instrumental reciprocity. You could have been going through a hard time and be needing more emotional support than you've been able to offer others, scoring negatively for emotional reciprocity.

Back in 1992, as I've been reading, some Dutch researchers plotted these scales for a large sample of older people. As we'd expect, instrumental support given decreases sharply with age. The researchers found that instrumental reciprocity began to decrease at the age of 64, echoing that rather crummy Beatles song.

More interestingly, they identified a turning point, where a relative surplus of instrumental support given changes into a relative deficit, at approximately the age of 66. Of course, you can expect your social network to decrease in size as you get older, and your reciprocity scale will also be affected by living in a care home where most of your instrumental needs are going to be catered for. The research seems to suggest that a sizeable minority of older people do deliberately seek to increase the amount of emotional support they give as their ability to provide instrumental support declines.

Unfortunately, as a society we're not very good at providing contexts for emotional support, so that too many older people experience a sense of dependence rather than interdependence, submerged below the hoizontal line in the graph.

I'm hoping there has been some follow up to this research: I've not found it yet, but would be keen to learn of it.

van Tilburg et al. Flow of support. In: Living arrangements and social networks of older adults, VU University Press, 1995.

Nutrition and community meals

Recently I've been building a wiki on neighbourhood support for older people, to try and focus information and understanding on this crassly-overlooked issue. I'll open it soon, but meanwhile if you're interested in contributing please get in touch.

Here's the sort of thing that goes into the pot, so to speak: ILC-UK have published a paper by Lisa Wilson on Personalisation, nutrition and the role of community meals. It notes that there is a strong underlying economic argument for supporting older people to remain independent and in their own homes, and for ensuring good nutritional status. It begins with a striking statistic:

'There are currently more people in the UK receiving meals in their own home than there are older people in care homes.'

Hence one of the main arguments:

'Meal provision and access to food must be considered a core part of social care packages and meals must be provided to at risk groups, not just to those who have reached the point of being unable to manage themselves.'

Unannounced visits: family, friends, salespeople

I remember my old mum used to delight in an unannounced visit, if I happened to be out for a long run or nearby with some time to spare. Many of us live highly-organised lives now though, and we have our technologies to check ahead for convenience. We don't do surprises. Saga recently published results from the Saga Populus Panel survey of over-50s, in which they asked about unexpected visitors popping in.

The unsolicited attention of salespeople (nowadays they always start by telling you 'it's alright, I'm not going to try to sell you anything...') is always unfortunate as someone who works at home and my sense is that the practice has increased noticeably in the recession. Thirteen per cent of panel respondents say it happens 'often' and the proportion is higher (17%) in the over-75 age group.

But the figures for family (35%) and friends (36%) are encouraging. The regional differences (eg family in London, 25%; in Northern Ireland, 49%) are stark if unsurprising.

The survey also asked how well people know their neighbours. Here too the figures are interesting, with just 1% in all age groups and all socio-economic groups saying that they 'don't know them at all'. (See my previous tentative conclusion that for the general population, about 5% of us have no contact with our neighbours).

According to the Saga Populus Panel data, about one third of over-50s say they know their neighbours well 'and often socialise together', while 64% say 'we talk and say hello sometimes'. For those over 75, the proportion who say they know their neighbours well and socialise is a stomping 44%.

I note that this was an online survey: does this mean the sample is biassed towards people who are more communicative?

Informal volunteering

Here's the trend in informal volunteering in England, which I flagged up last October. Just something to keep an eye on.

Source.

Informal local support in severe weather

Two cheers for CLG who have rushed out a short document called Volunteering and neighbourliness: helping out in severe weather.

It's an odd mixture of advice about hypothermia and frostbite, some useful suggestions from Volunteering England, and encouragement to 'call in regularly on elderly friends, neighbours and relatives to see if they need help staying warm or getting provisions'.

It feels like some of the content should be on posters in shops, banks and post offices etc; some belongs in press releases so that local newspapers and other sources reproduce it; and some might even belong in leaflets for more general distribution.

Perhaps it's also worth thinking about a more considered version in advance of the next cold snap. Things like neighbours placing a home delivery order with a supermarket for an older person who may not have internet access; thinking about the welfare of their pets, which often worries them; walking in the house with an older neighbour - up and down the hall to get a bit of exercise can be very important. And CLG could be thinking about getting messages like these out through hyperlocal sites: by next winter please.

Informal care and older people: time for a campaign?

News of the year? The importance of neighbourly informal support for older people has been recognised in the Department of Health. From yesterday's press release:

With many older people living alone and more than 180,000 saying they have gone for a whole week without speaking to friends, family or neighbours, Care Service Minister Phil Hope is asking the public to make a New Year’s resolution to visit older neighbours more often.

Social interaction can protect older people’s mental health, helping to do their shopping will prevent falls and injury and keeping an eye on their health will stop them developing serious health problems and ending up in hospital.

What are the chances of this recognition being turned into some kind of strategic initiative, exploring ways of both stimulating and measuring levels of informal support (without booby award schemes for innovation, please) and promoting interdependence?

A year ago we had the results of some work on meaningful interaction (admittedly it all went quiet from the moment of publication). But against that, I have not forgotten that older people were short-changed in the report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

Would a change of government help? Will the recession cause people to revert to a more localised way of life? At the risk of seeming naively bubbly at the start of a new year, would anyone care to join me in working out what is needed under the broad heading of a campaign?

Previously: Copenhagen for the ageing crisis

A Copenhagen for the ageing crisis?

Short moan. This past couple of years I've been at quite a few events about social policy and older people, and on each occasion conscientiously made a point from the floor about the ageing population and the looming crisis of informal care. I've written to people in think tanks and the Guardian and so on, and blogged about it. Policy concerning older people in this country is largely concerned with pensions and benefits, and those themes dominate the debates and the thinking.

Back in July I sounded more patient, referring to

'the simmering question of quite when policy will get hold of the issue of informal social care and start to do something about it. Given the difficulty I had in getting the ageing agencies interested in neighbouring I'm not sure where the impetus is going to come from.'

Just for reference and as an indicator, the recent government consultation on the Ageing Strategy had just two questions in the section (ch.8) on communities and neighbourhoods:

Q9. When you stopped driving, what helped you stay mobile and active in your community? What options would have helped?

Q10. We want to improve attitudes towards ageing across society. What more could be done to challenge outdated stereotypes and tackle negative perceptions about being old? Can you share good examples of where this is already happening in your local community?

I'd feel even more disillusioned if it weren't for the fact that in the Netherlands they're doing something about it, running several pilot projects on how to stimulate informal support at local level, and I'm lucky enough to be involved in that work. In the UK, policy blindness to this growing crisis is a disgrace.

End of moan, for the time being, because here's Jackie Ashley in the Guardian with more influence, arguing that 'It could be as serious a threat as climate change, yet so far politicians have barely considered what needs to be done about our ageing population.'

How long will the politicians leave it before any Copenhagen-style twelfth hour consideration, I wonder?