Neighbourhoods

Decline in informal volunteering: time for a network solution?

The latest topic reports from the 2007-2008 citizenship survey have been published, one on race, religion and equalities, and this one on volunteering which shows a 2% overall drop in regular informal volunteering and a 5% decrease among young people.

Informal volunteering covers things like giving advice, transporting or escorting someone, keeping in touch with someone, doing shopping, collecting pension, writing letters, filling in forms and so on.

Back in October we had the headlines for the first quarter of 2009 which revealed an overall 5% decline among adults volunteering informally 'at least once in the 12 months prior to interview.' I note that the latest release is from pre-recession data.

As I wrote in October, I fear this 5% statistic is a tiny marker of a major social problem. I wonder how policy is going to respond?

Comparable decline in formal volunteering might bring specific investment through the volunteering agencies: but who assumes responsibility for promoting informal volunteering? Whose desk does this problem land on? The general erosion of informal interaction at neighbourhood level has worrying implications, because it’s the invisible foundation of many other social benefits we ought to be able to take for granted. We co-produce safety in our own neighbourhoods just as we co-produce our own health and the socialisation of our children. It would be nice to think we also co-provide the dignified ageing of our elders. We can't do that if fewer and fewer people are informally helping each other out.

In some ways perhaps it's as well if there isn't a policy in-tray for this issue, because policy makers tend to reach for their favourite organisations and in my view it's not an issue for organisations but for network-based initiatives. Someone said to me the other day that there is a local authority that seems to think Fix My Street is theirs in some sense: it's so successful that they don't realise it's not their organisation's product - a result of hierarchical organisational decision-making, which is the only form of behaviour they understand. How do we come up with a Fix My Street type solution to the decline in informal support?

One answer might be Talk About Local, which is promoting local social blogging. Since it's not an explicit purpose of the project, it might not be fair to measure the impact on informal volunteering over time in areas where Talk About Local has generated activity, but it would be interesting.

Up the wrong tree? Social exclusion in the network society

Yesterday, absorbed in that well-known activity of looking for something else, I happened across a book chapter on 'income inequality and the information society'. It argues that poor people stand to be excluded from the information society by being priced out of commercial information services,

'and left with an impoverished and over-stretched system of public provision which is increasingly unable to meet their needs.'

The second bit resonates at least, and it's a curious little discovery just after a colleague and I had a meeting in a borough which has challenging levels of poverty and low levels of technology use.

The author was the much-respected Graham Murdock and the chapter appeared in Excluding the poor, published in 1986 by the Child Poverty Action Group (still listed on their publications page).

It's a good example of the thinking at the time around what was called 'information poverty' and concerns over the levels of exclusion that would result from these things called computers, telecomms and databases. I was involved in a lot of the debates at the time and we thought the threats were very real.

But they did not really emerge. It's hard to say how much of that is down to the refreshing initiatives taken by the incoming Labour government in 1997. Perhaps it was even down to the influence on those policies of people like Graham Murdock. Or were we all just wrong about information use and poverty? Britain did indeed become information-intensive, but we stopped hearing arguments about the widespread denial of access to information for people in poverty.

Then we started to see adverts on the London tube with the mysterious letters 'www'. Around 1999-2000 I served on a government task group tasked to consider 'access to IT'. Suddenly the issue was about people on low incomes getting their hands on the technology which provided access to the information they weren't otherwise being denied. Then came an insistence in some quarters that people on low incomes weren't participating in this tech-binge because the diet wasn't to their taste, ie there wasn't enough content of the right kind.

This was accompanied and then succeeded by efforts to promote a more empowering, less philanthropical approach, which would necessarily mean stimulating self-publishing. Oh and then something called web 2.0 came along, and behold, before long people did publish stuff themselves. (See, in this respect, my thoughts about where local websites fit into this history).

So where are people on low-incomes in all this now? Sorted? If it wasn't about access to information sources; and it's clearly not about appropriate content if it ever was; and for all the rhetoric about 'digital divide' it's no longer significantly about access to the kit or connections; is there still a sense in which people who experience exclusion are constrained in their use of information and communication technology to address their own circumstances? Yes there is, as I and my colleague heard clearly while we sat in a town hall the other day learning about the difficulties of bringing social media to certain culturally self-excluding groups.

We were told about an area comprising mainly white working class families after the collapse of a dominant industry, where the dependency culture is deeply embedded, racist tension is high and levels of motivation to overcome disadvantage are very low.

The neutering effects of this culture are profoundly damaging. I think the central point is this: workers feel that people self-exclude from contexts of dialogue and engagement, so there is little advancement of thinking and no empowerment. This means that the openness of social media may be a non-starter.

From his study of contributions to neighbourhood email lists, Keith Hampton concludes firmly that a significant proportion of people in disadvantaged localities in north America are online and participating in discussions; and also that those contributions afford the formation of collective efficacy in ways that other media do not. This evidence is hugely valuable, but it still leaves us in the UK with a lot of people in low-income areas, who have a connection and spend time online, but are unwilling to participate in digital conversations with others or to engage with agencies online.

Perhaps in time, once again it will come to be seen that we've been barking up the wrong tree, but how do we identify the right one? I'm not aware of any studies at local level, since those I was involved in a few years ago, that are involving people on low incomes themselves in exploring the answers to these questions. I'd be keen to hear of any, cos that's what we need.

Civic health and social impact

Yesterday we had another government public service modernisation strategy, Frontline First, which contains a couple of very interesting ideas likely to attract attention. In 2010 government says it will:

• Build a stronger civic society and give communities more say in shaping public services. We will map civic health in every community through a new Civil Health Index, transfer more public assets to the third sector, and develop new ways of providing capital to civic society organisations - such as through a new social investment wholesale bank and piloting Social Impact Bonds.

The idea of social impact bonds is to reward social investors for work that reduces future social costs.

Social Impact Bonds seek to drive significant non-government investment into addressing the causes of deep-rooted social problems with returns generated from a proportion of the related reduction in spending on acute services. The ambition is to create positive government spending cycles that enable significant tax payer savings through improved social outcomes. (Social Finance report).

There's no detail about the proposal for a Civic Health Index in the UK and an annual Civic Health report. It sounds a bit like an idea I had about 8 years ago for a local community index. Maybe that will follow in time.

Frontline first press release.

Behaviour change and conversations

There are still sceptics about the role of policy in influencing what people do on a day-to-day basis, but I suspect there are far more people who simply don't believe that individuals can be persuaded to modify behaviour pro-socially. Yet policy has surely always sought to change behaviour (like smoking, drinking, driving, oh and thinking of course, there's an example occurs to me). In a post-welfare society under the gathering clouds of climate change, it's kinda priority.

So London's Capital Ambition programme developed a guide to options for public agencies, and LocalGov.uk has a recent article on some of the approaches being taken, 'from nudge theory through behavioural economics to approaches based on values, persuasion and deliberation.' It's written by Gillian Norton and Paul Martin, both Chief Execs of London Boroughs.

If you disregard the inevitable unreflective use of the C word for a moment, it's reassuringly positive:

'The way forward isn’t about trickery or manipulation, and it cannot be achieved by frightening or controlling people. We need serious conversations within and with our communities to win support for changes we all agree are necessary.'

The bit that will get missed out, as usual, is the 'conversations within,' ie everyday local interactions that take place irrespective of what officers are doing. What the article is up against is the fact that it's still hard to get people in positions of power to think in terms of enabling something to happen that doesn't involve them. Hopefully local online networks will bring this about anyway, but a little support from councils wouldn't go amiss.

House swap: the policy

Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps, the man whose very name sounds like a third sector funding crisis, has announced that under a Tory government every family living in social housing "will have the chance to move around the country by exchanging their home for another one". (Sources: Regen & Renewal, New Start).

'A Tory government would set up a national database that would enable social tenants to find alternative accommodation anywhere in the country.'

Maybe don't knock it just yet - it could have some positive consequences for use of housing stock. Moves are surely more likely to be local than regional or national; but some cases could get singed by eg inflammable family tensions over child-care versus employment opportunities, being further from extended families, reluctance to change schools and so on.

If I knew more about the contemporary stream of tacky television programmes, I might just be suspicious that the idea occurred to someone in a Tory think-bowl without their even having to move from their own sofa. That's what we need, a government that is frugal on its own development costs and lets the broadcast media do what it's good at.

A simple guide to Qualitative Easing

The BBC's Robert Peston, the man who makes the financial news sound like a Roald Dahl story, believes that the macro-economic policy of quantitative easing is not working.

As a service to readers, this blog now offers an easy guide to the little-known alternative micro-social policy of qualitative easing.

Qualitative easing is the government's strategy of floating-off prosocial behaviour by reducing the rate of interest that services actually take in people, thereby 'artificially' increasing the amount of mutual support in the market.

With the index of mutual support having dropped for three successive quarters, and government guilt levels thought to be at an all-time low, the minister for social capital had to move quickly to bolster the reciprocity sector if the social economy was not to go into melt-down.

What does that mean for the ordinary tax-payer? [Pestonian smirk: 'I have a brilliantly-clear answer to this question, dummy, which is why I raise it rhetorically now. So listen meekly...'] Let's assume that a local neighbourhood absorbs X hours of unpaid work per week, augmented by Y hours of local service delivery.

Now, some residents are retired people who had uninterrupted careers followed by enormous pensions, and have established a market in which narrow world views can be traded in for high status. They have no need for Y since they have expensive health insurance. They are now Daily Mail readers who are preoccupied mainly with liquid assets and having two 4 x 4s in the driveway. They provide advice to the government. Lots of it.

The precise value of X is vulnerable to the proportion of lone elderly people in tower blocks, which is decreasing at a rate of thirty-six feet per second per second (a four feet increase over the established laws of physics); plus there's a 35% added-single-mother-syndrome-effect, equivalent to the square on the other side of the estate, so of course a typical Neighbourhood Mutual Support and Internal Care Demand Ratio is volatile at the best of times. Although X and Y have an influence on each other, Y decreases according to quite different economic laws, mainly to do with spending money on things like nuclear submarines, and making payments to people with gambling addiction problems who happen to work for banks.

This means that if, say, a single mother or a lone older person goes to market with a basket of long term needs including food, shelter, and support, their chances of being qualitatively eased out of it completely have been increased by a factor of between today and tomorrow.

In the past, residents would have bought assets from the government in the form of promises, in return for votes. With the complete collapse of this primitive economy, it's not yet clear what effect the increased pressure on unpaid care will have. But what makes qualitative easing so clever is the way it leaves prosocial behaviour to look after itself.

Empowerment, evaluation and the C word again

When I worked at Community Development Foundation I tried for years and failed miserably to stop my colleagues and others abusing the C word, or using it uncritically at best. Now my old buddy Gabriel Chanan has written for the South West Foundation a characteristically clear guide to empowerment and evaluation in which he recognises that it's not just authorities and professionals at national level who do this:

Community activists and workers, who do understand the internal dynamics of local people’s relationships, are often equally guilty of fudging the use of the word community. They are inclined to designate the small numbers of people and community groups they work with as ‘the community’, because these are the people closest to them, and to ignore the question of how to establish whether the views and experiences of these small clusters of people do or don’t reflect the views and experiences of the numerical majority.

With some notable exceptions, most evaluations and project descriptions in this field start off by describing problems affecting a whole locality and end up by describing the actions of a small group, without ever checking back to see what difference this made to the whole locality, or indeed if the project’s existence was even known to most residents. The active group or project is described as ‘the community’, and its career is then taken as automatically indicative of the state of the whole locality.

This is good stuff not least because more people will take notice of a Gabriel text than of me mumbling on about it. The document explores how the national indicators might get reconciled with local experience,

- using both government indicators and project-based methods together;
- linking the official indicators to small-scale local experience
- extracting lessons from evaluation to improve practice.

Checkout Gabriel's parallel paper on making the business case for community empowerment.

Previously:
The C word has a companion
Not the last word on the C word

Local area data

The data from the national indicator set provides useful material for prioritising and monitoring progress on quality of life issues, as the Place survey headlines show.

But the geographical scale is set at the highest tier, so the Commission for Rural Communities has set up an interesting initiative to help make the reporting of quality of life outcomes more local. They say that around two-thirds of the data used by the national indicator set is available at a more local level, typically for districts but sometimes for neighbourhoods.

More here.

Faith schools and cohesion

It puzzles me that people continue to defend faith schools, which to me are one of the most awkward embedded obstacles to cohesion in our society. Politically, they are going to take a lot of digging out and the present government's approach has not been promising.

Signs are that the Institute of Community Cohesion may be starting to charge the debate up a bit. Ted Cantle apparently has reported a little more critically on their effect (report not yet visible on the iCoCo site, which tends to be a bit sluggish).

Peter Hall draws attention to it and offers some interesting reflections here on Regen and Renewal:

'Many parents want their children to be educated in diverse schools, but get alarmed if there's a sudden surge in the numbers of one particular group. Their reaction could be crudely caricatured as "white flight" - and, almost inevitably, that was the headline to the newspaper stories on the report. But, ironically, their motivation is almost the reverse of the popular connotation of that term: rather than leaving for a white monoculture, they are seeking a school with greater diversity...'

According to Hall, Cantle remains adamant that faith schools in places such as Blackburn, with their large Muslim populations, remain "a source of division which have to be overcome".

Social exclusion across the life course

The Social Exclusion Task Force in the Cabinet Office has published some important material from its work on 'Understanding the Risks of Social Exclusion Across the Life Course'.

It includes significant new emphasis on people of working age without dependent children. In terms of their perceived detachment from neighbourhood life, it's an important group to know more about.

I have two thoughts about the key findings (listed below). (i) What do they show that was not found in the Social Exclusion Unit's initial studies in 1998-2000, and the work of John Hills and co. at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion over the years?

(ii) By way of partial answer, the most interesting key findings are the last two, because they refer to older people, consistently overlooked in the policy effort over the past ten years. Among the risk markers identified for older people were those

'who had very infrequent contact with others, low social support, and felt that they don’t belong in the area where they lived.'

There's some emphasis on the social impact of becoming widowed, although my recollection from research a few years ago is that it's a negative impact for men, but tends to be positive for women (Perren et al 2004).

These findings point again 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.

Key findings from the research

• There are a small number of families who experience persistent and chronic social exclusion – the study suggests 4% to 7%. (Some sleight of pen here - I agree it's a small percentage: but it's not a small number).

• Families experiencing complex problems were more likely to be lone parent families, have four or more children, have a younger mother, have a mother from a Black ethnic group, live in rented accommodation and in the most deprived areas.

• Higher self esteem in adolescence is a protective factor against disadvantage in young adulthood.

• The proportion of young people most at risk of exclusion fell from 21% to 16% over the period 2001/02 to 2005/06.

• Events such as becoming employed and finding a partner reduce the risk of falling into social exclusion.

• The research highlights the importance of responding to the needs of working age adults without dependent children.

• Working age adults without dependent children who are older, unemployed or inactive, living alone, have few educational qualifications, and are renting their homes have a higher risk of exclusion.

• Around 5% of older people had multiple risk markers of social exclusion, including poor access to services and transport, physically inactivity, fear of their local area after dark, low social support, and poor general and emotional health. Older people in this group were likely to be aged 80 and older, have no qualifications, and live alone.

• Good health and social support can protect older people from becoming socially excluded, whereas becoming divorced or widowed significantly increases an older person’s risk of exclusion.

How local is local? Why the Wirral Inquiry matters

Yesterday and today I put in a couple of appearances at the biennial conference of CILIP (the organisation formerly known, more sensibly, as the Library Association). There are two handy little contrasts which have sustained my interest in public libraries from the community development perspective over the years.

One is the old nicety that a library is a resource that is 'based in the community but not community-based'. Personally I'm fine with that - local people don't have to have direct ownership over all their resources and services, that would not make sense (what would community-based road planning look like?). And I don't regard central policies aimed at pumping community engagement values into the public library sector as any kind of attempt to 'get round' this.

The second, which I covered in a short talk yesterday, is the reflection that community development depends on an anti-professional ethos, which needs defending; whereas librarianship (in the UK at least) appears to struggle with an over-professional ethos, which needs examining. What I was arguing for was more attention to the values that might underpin public library work, and less preoccupation with status.

It happens that I've been asked to prepare a policy statement on community development for CILIP, so I took the opportunity to catch up with the CEO Bob McKee who I knew, from his work in Solihull in the 1990s, as someone who genuinely understands and believes in CD. Bob reminded me of the Wirral Inquiry: following heavily-criticised announcements of local library closures by Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council, the Inquiry will report soon to the Secretary of State on "whether the Council's plans are consistent with their statutory duty to provide a 'comprehensive and efficient' library service."

Bob's blog post from the Inquiry helps explain why this is such an important case. It's not just about belated attempts to define 'comprehensive and efficient'. The process opens up much-needed discussion about localness as part of that definition.

To be sure, we could have fewer small local libraries and depend on more large central collections. The national health service went through this kind of transformation, building huge hospitals, and had to invent health centres to compensate. The economic argument is doubtless persuasive in its own terms and for many people the trade-off is not problematic.

But it would mean saying goodbye to pretensions of being a local community resource, and it would undoubtedly privilege the privileged while punishing the less well-off. Accessibility is the key.

If people have to take an awkward bus-ride or cross a busy road and walk a couple of miles to reach a larger library, there are all sorts of reasons why they might not. One is the sense of belonging and the lost association of a familiar resource with their neighbourhood. The MORI report that I blogged yesterday says that 'A sense of belonging and personal connections are vitally important to satisfaction with areas', so you'd expect this to be recognised by the officers and councillors of the Wirral.

And when I say that 'the economic argument is doubtless persuasive in its own terms' it's another reminder that we've been irresponsibly rubbish at demonstrating the social value of our public resources. Which takes us back to 'community impact assessments' and the development of social return on investment.

The Inquiry reports later this month and some statements emphasising the local significance of access to public resources would be welcome. It might help with other debates such as that around local post offices and pubs. Since the Inquiry is being led by Sue Charteris, Founder Director of Shared Intelligence which established the National Association for Neighbourhood Management perhaps there are grounds for optimism.

The pic is from a mapping exercise that I ran with Martin Dudley for Bradford Libraries a few years ago.

Local services and priorities matter

I'm never quite sure about Ipsos MORI. The last event of theirs that I managed to get into featured the Home Secretary among the speakers, security was high, and there was some strange interference on my phone when I tried to use it just before the start.

Nah, sure there's nothing in that. Nor in the fact that they wouldn't give me a place at the launch of their Local report recently. Still, the next time one of their researchers came to the door (the second in a couple of weeks) and didn't offer any interesting reflections on neighbourhoods I decided I didn't have time for his questions. (And as noted here in passing, they don't always do good stuff).

Anyway here's what the MORI folk have done with the existing place survey data, augmented with some other stuff they got their hands on, and there are interesting messages put forward:

• Local services really matter to a sense of place: satisfaction with local services seems to be strongly related to overall views of the area and other key outcomes.

• Taking visible action on local priorities is vital. The more people feel that their priorities drive local improvement, the better perceptions are of local public service providers.

• There are clear signs that the biggest impact on perceptions of influence would not be actions that involve a small number of people very deeply, but rather better communications that reach a much wider group.

• There is a clear theme around seeking out views and acting as a result of seeking those views. This is particularly pertinent to crime and antisocial behaviour. The areas that are seen as doing best are those also proactively looking for feedback.

• The feeling that local people treat each other with respect, and, related to this, that parents have good disciplinary control over their children, come out as important to a number of key outcomes. A focus on young people and family/parental support seems likely to yield particular dividends in resident satisfaction.

Do we need people asking if we need community?

At the time of its construction in the 1960s the chief architect of Milton Keynes described Melvin Webber, proponent of the notion of 'community without propinquity', as the father of the city. Hurrah, they cried.

Subsequent experience there and in similar places suggests that community without propinquity is quite different to, and does not compensate for local community. It's also apparent that many people really struggle without local support to the point where they may need help reinventing 'community' because policies imposed on them have stifled it.

The RSA has an event in London next Tuesday (fully booked) asking 'Do people need community anymore?' I'm wondering if Liam Byrne might offer some insights into whether or not government policy will finally pick up on the importance of informal care. Byrne is Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and presumably has some awareness of the economic implications of not recognising the importance of local informal support.

Over on the Connected Communities blog, Steve Broome invites questions for the speakers, so this is what I sent:

Supportive neighbourliness is still widely practised. Recent work in the UK and Netherlands suggests that the practice of local community support is still strong but more individualised than in the past. Fewer people are doing more of society’s local social work.

Unfortunately informal care is crassly overlooked in policy. In a post-welfare society we can’t afford for this to continue. The reluctance to ask for support appears to be critical. So what policies would the speakers put forward that would stimulate informal support and care at neighbourhood level?

Promoting neighbourliness: communi-tea time in Knowsley

We've no way of knowing if neighbourliness has declined, although I think it's what we'd expect when we consider changes in the conditions under which it appears to thrive. But the essence of neighbouring is informality: and how do you promote that and nurture it in a bureaucratised public sector?

It's a question that crops up here occasionally - echoing a chapter I wrote about 'formalising the informal' in policy here, in turn echoing a question posed most clearly by Philip Abrams writing about neighbourhood care some years ago:

'How does one organise to promote lack of organisation?'

Not impressed? Well maybe the use of the word 'central' in the following quote, from Barbara Misztal's book on informality, will persuade you:

'the fine-tuning of informality and formality is central to the creation of social trust.'

Good neighbour schemes of various kinds have been tried, tweaked and tested over the years. Generally, I suspect they've had more success than they've been credited with, especially among housing associations. Unlike Neighbourhood Watch, as far as I'm aware good neighbour schemes have no central resource, co-ordination or funding. Neighbourhood Watch works on the basis of distrust: perhaps that tells us something about the policy-orientation.

Now here's an approach that attempts the kind of light-touch nudging of behaviour that we can expect will characterise much social policy from now on: all smiles please for Knowsley Council's playful campaign to stimulate local social interaction, including a mock news broadcast about a tea shortage threatening community spirit across the borough.

The message, says Adam Patterson on the New Start blog, is

'get together with your neighbours, share a cup of tea, get to know each other and help create a friendlier community.'

 

Empowerment: but what about forces working in the other direction?

A couple of days before the captain jumped ship, the department for Communities and Local Government published a systematic review of the evidence on Empowering communities to influence local decision making.

There's a distinguished collection of researchers behind it, who point out that the community empowerment agenda is still in a nascent stage. But I worry that policy is only looking in one direction.

Local practitioners are a crucially important resource in developing this agenda and bringing it towards fruition.

It is important that government clarify the objectives of empowerment and give a sustained commitment to an agenda that may take a while deliver notable successes.

These simple messages imply the need for developing accessible, inclusive and facilitated strategies for empowerment. The community and voluntary sector and specifically community development techniques have an important role to play here.

The research identifies criteria that drive and define empowerment across six specific mechanisms - asset transfer, citizen governance, e-participation, participatory budgeting, petitions, and redress. There are two summaries - a short and a less-short - and it's useful stuff.

What bothers me is that government consistently and unproductively takes a mechanical approach to cultural problems. Much of our official culture is blindly disempowering, often in the misguided name of detached professionalism. Yes, getting these mechanisms right will make a difference, but what about all the embedded forces working in the other direction?

Last week I attended a meeting run by a division of a social services department, with nine or ten professionals around the table and three 'ordinary citizens'. It was a breathtaking demonstration of apparently unintentional disempowerment: the way the entrance of the citizens into the room was preceded by secret session about them; how one of them was told to keep quiet as she was 'not part of the process'; the lack of welcome or explanation of process; the negative body language; the turning away as they left; the 'wait outside please' to be followed by a communicated 'decision', which itself in turn was unclear; the failure to thank them for coming or to recognise their expertise or commitment.

These were neutral residents who were trying to help with certain social problems. How would the structures of disempowerment be cranked up for people who were perceived guilty of some misdemeanour, I wondered.

Such processes coagulate around bureaucracies, and even working across disciplines the participants fail to notice what has happened to the way they treat human beings. It all contributes to a terribly constraining culture of disempowerment all around us. Could we please have a policy initiative designed to crack some of this open?

Consensus, community, and cultural capital

I’ve been gathering some thoughts for a session on empowerment and participation with some MA students at Staffordshire Uni this week, which has sent me back to Jacqui Karn’s excellent book Narratives of neglect. Fearful that I wouldn't do it justice, I failed to blog it at the time; but here are some belated thoughts based around some of my notes, covering two main themes: consensus and community; and cultural capital.

The book is an exploration of the processes of participation and governance in the regeneration of a Manchester estate. No-one I’ve mentioned it to in the participation field seems to have read it, which is a shame, because it's packed with insights.

I come at Karn’s analysis from the viewpoint that, from the time of the initial neighbourhood governance proposals, the government’s empowerment agenda was predicated on unrealistic assumptions that community could be construed to mean consensus.

Problems arise where consensus is not apparent; or, being assumed, appears to be threatened. The idea of ‘moral community’ which characterised the Blair years requires practitioners to pursue consensus at all costs. In this context, as Karn puts it, ‘community is in essence constituted as unproblematic,’ and participatory practices constitute ‘the community’ as those who participate constructively, cooperatively and reasonably within the process.

Those who do not adhere to the assumptions of what is best for the community are labelled as ungovernable and subject to demonising mechanisms that exclude them. Groups come to be categorised in terms of governability, which in turn legitimises coercion.

‘This dual, contractual emphasis on encouraging compliance with a latent community and the control of an ungovernable minority legitimises the use of state agencies’ coercive powers against the “irresponsible.”’

Consensus becomes a question of ensuring (or even guaranteeing) similarity rather than recognising and working with difference. In my view this is an important point for understanding how the engagement agenda might fuse with the cohesion agenda.

The second key theme refreshes some of my own recent thinking about the lack of attention paid to cultural capital. Karn stressed the way power was reflected in the language and knowledge that participants brought to the process she described. She found that

‘The dominance of professional language and knowledge undermined residents’ position both in the partnerships and amongst fellow residents as they so clearly lacked the capital at stake in the process to be able to exert an authoritative voice.’

Karn argues that the professionals in the context she studied tended to conceive of the community as in close contact and united. She adds that they tend ‘to present their knowledge of local problems and solutions as incontestable.’

‘The power dynamics created by this difference in the knowledge claims of participants are particularly important in establishing that the capital at stake in this field is not social capital but cultural.’

Karn, J. (2007). Narratives of neglect: community, regeneration and the governance of security. Cullompton, Willan.

 

 

Lifetime neighbourhoods in recession: what about people?

A couple weeks ago I was at a debate organised by the International Longevity Centre (ILC-UK) on the lifetime neighbourhoods agenda in the current economic climate. ILC have published a collection of essays to reassert the importance of this agenda, which is based on what in my view was one of the best government policy papers of recent years, written by Ed Harding.

The debate covered all the hardware stuff thoroughly - all the issues around building, planning, mixed use, transport connections and so on. Discussants understandably put a lot of effort into emphasising the need to keep a focus on quality environments. The mantra of 'the flight to quality' was served up for the converted to repeat, to strengthen our determination not to let present underfunding give rise to shoddy construction and uninhabitable townscapes in the future. Quite right too.

But we badly needed a perspective on local social relations to make these prospects of lifetime neighbourhoods seem worth realising. Understanding how to make mixed use neighbourhoods function in an ageing and diversifying society is already challenging us desperately. We don't invest properly in intergenerational work or community development, while continuing to plan new settlements apparently without thought for local amenities Will lifetime neighbourhoods be another agenda which gets stripped down simply to those things the accountants know how to measure? - bricks, heating, journeys...?

Well, maybe not. Absent on the day but present in the published volume, up pops JRF's John Low with a solid essay which I strongly recommend. He reminds us that there are good reasons to expect that deprived neighbourhoods will decline faster than more affluent ones and that 'housing solutions alone will not solve the multiple problems that beset our worst neighbourhoods'.

Of course financial cuts are threatened all over the public, voluntary and community sectors. But here, with my emphasis added, are three 'rays of hope' offered by John Low:

• Community empowerment has risen steadily up the agenda of all political parties, including a plethora of initiatives from the current administration in England. Especially in local authorities that have taken this seriously, good practice is reasonably well embedded and may prove harder to cut. Also, as suggested above, localised and affordable neighbourhood management approaches seem very much the best bet for ‘recession proofing’ deprived areas; and such initiatives need underpinning with good community work.

• Over the last 10-15 years independent voluntary and community sector bodies have increased their national profile and collective voice. This too may help to act as a brake on cuts. We should also not forget that many development trusts, churches, other faith groups, councils for voluntary service and schools are playing key roles in supporting neighbourhoods. Everything possible should be done in the present climate to sustain their work.

• Finally, although institutions are often criticised as having poor memories, the serious social disorders that broke out in the 80’s and 90’s in a number of very deprived areas will not have been forgotten. Nobody will want a repeat of these, and his fear could act as a strong disincentive to paring down services and funds, in such neighbourhoods, to the very bone: and as an encouragement, on the contrary, to retaining a range of low level but effective services in these areas.

Coming round

This blog was in a coma for five days - medical report from Typepad still awaited - so for once I will succumb to the temptation just to offer quick links to some good stuff going on.

What works in enabling cross-community interactions? Perspectives on good policy and practice. This is a paper by Andrew Orton for CLG as part of their work on meaningful interaction. It matters because it's about small-scale community activity and informal connections gradually getting some of the policy attention that is needed.

Dancing with Down syndrome - Hildy Gottlieb links to a striking video to remind us to keep pushing back at the Culture of Can’t.

The Eden Project has launched (more quietly than expected; one suspects there is some tense politics in the background) The Big Lunch - street parties everywhere on 19 July.

'The day after the Big Lunch, people will walk down their street and know someone in most windows.'

Paul Evans shows there's even benefit in a human being of the right calibre travelling to Miami, by coming back with knowledge about Mixed ink, which looks like a sweet way of stimulating civic involvement.

Helen Milner and colleagues have set up a blog on digital engagement (which I applaud) with an invitation to write yet another manifesto (which I don't). Manifestos (manifesti?) have a role, but it's usually to do with the process of structuring action around pricniples and surely we've come further than that. Maybe we should (a) dig out the three or four previous manifesto attempts in this country and be familiar with them, together with the recommendations of the shelf-and-a-half or reports that got generated (unh, mea culpa); and (b) assess what impact they had.

Julian Dobson quite rightly calls for more thought about the over-excited bashing of public sector language ('jargon'). The Local Government Association have got all lathered on this; or rather, I suspect, in New Labour style they are following some assumptions of popular media fancy. Reminded me of my wee challenge to the Plain English Mafia.

BeLocal: citizen empowerment through digital media

I'm involved in a new initiative to try and help maximise the potential of digital media for community engagement. In recent weeks I've been working with Simon Grice, Steven Feldman and Hugh Flouch (Harringay Online) to set up BeLocal Consulting, starting with a series of workshops. Here's the blurb:

BeLocal Consulting contributes to the community empowerment agenda by helping local authorities, community groups and citizens to exploit digital media around community issues.

With a combination of expertise in community development, new media and service management, we help local authorities through the following process:

1. Understanding the issues
2. Establishing partnerships and building a strategy
3. Supporting implementation of the strategy
4. Assessment and review.

The workshops are planned to take place as follows:

• 30 April 2009, London
• 6 May, Bristol
• 7 May, Birmingham
• 13 May, Leeds.

More details.

The naming and shaming game

Back in January I reflected at some length on the government's plans to 'name and shame' offenders who have been convicted in local courts.

Patrick Wintour, in a measured article, reports in today's Guardian that Ministers are looking at 'controversial plans' to distribute leaflets in neighbourhoods as part of this inititiative. I'm afraid it does suggest a degree of political desperation.

We (and the government, how could I forget them) should note in particular the huge and staring-in-the-face-obvious potential for these measures to amplify local social divisions, rather than stimulate cohesion.

I'm not sure if I can put it more simply than this: they won't work. And apart from anything else, the plans are a wretchedly unthinking dismissal of the professionalism and commitment of probation workers who do so much to help offenders recover and re-establish themselves. 

Something else - Wintour notes:

'Ministers recognise that the demise of local court reporting, due to cuts in local media journalism, has ended one source of communicating the effectiveness of the courts.'

Uh, have they heard of neighbourhood online networks? Happily, communication in neighbourhoods does not necessarily stop just because the economics of one medium becomes prohibitive.

People still have ways of finding things out, and with systems like Harringay Online (I know, I've mentioned it before, but it continues to amaze me) residents communicate more and more. Perhaps 'communicating the effectiveness of the courts' could be one of several reasons why government should invest in local online nets. Please.

Why pubs need the CIA

This morning to ippr for a seminar on the future of community pubs, meaning pubs that predominantly serve their surrounding community. Rick Muir at ippr has been working with CAMRA to research the decline of community pubs, the social implications, and the policy options. The ratio of pubs to people fell from 1:201 in 1871, to 1:761 in 1971. It's gone on falling: 39 pubs are closing each week.

We could rehearse the reasons but they're not hard to list. It's critical not just as an issue for local economies, but also as an issue of local cohesion and the health of social networks.

In ippr's survey, pubs scored highest as the local places where people meet others from different backgrounds. The community pub is widely seen as a great social leveller, although it was acknowledged that they can be exclusive. It's still a somewhat gendered institution with faith and age exclusions.

Apparently the average pub raises £3,000 per year for charitable causes. A lot of business is transacted in pubs, they're essential meeting places for numerous local groups. Unlike supermarkets, which encourage less convivial drinking, pubs tend to put money back into their local economy.

And tradition matters to people - the sense of continuity and authenticity matters, the resistance to homogeneity and anonymity. People call it 'character'.

CAMRA's Mike Brenner raised the question of defining what is meant by a well-run community pub. So right, let's have a debate that generates awareness, understanding and motivation. It's apparent that pubs could be run as community interest companies, let's get a model that recognises their social role instead of regarding it as coincidental.

I took the opportunty to bang the drum for the idea of Community Impact Assessments (CIAs). I just want to see a robust methodology using social network analysis so that we can demonstrate the social impact of significant changes at local level (like road changes, large developments, provision of amenities etc). I've thumped out this rhythm often enough before (eg) and I feel that if we'd started work on it years ago, we might not have got into the mess we're now in with post offices.

Apart from anything else, having and using an accepted device to demonstrate 'community impact' could create an incentive within the pub industry to make a contribution to local community cohesion.

One of the MPs present said that it 'would help massively'. A ministerial adviser followed up with a call for the think tanks to get together and sort it out - which sounds either naive or ironic, given the way think-tanks behave, but encouraging, because I've been suggesting this for some years with understandably have less influence.

I propose to try and get a few folk around a flip chart and see what can be teased out of their brains.

Four types of deprived neighbourhood

It's theory time. Here's the new typology of low-income neighbourhoods, based on the dynamics of household mobility.

The overall level of mobility in Britain is about 11% per year, and it's mainly a function of the age structure of neighbourhoods and the life-cycle stage of households. Brian Robson and colleagues at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies in Manchester have proposed and tested a model of four types of deprived neighbourhood:

• Transit areas are deprived neighbourhoods in which most in-movers come from less deprived areas and most out-movers go to less deprived areas.
• In Escalator areas, most of the in-movers come from areas that are equally or more deprived, so that the neighbourhood becomes part of a continuous onward-and-upward progression through the housing and labour markets.
• Gentrifier areas are ones in which there is a degree of social improvement since most in-movers come from less deprived areas and most out-movers go to similarly or more deprived areas.
• Isolate areas represent neighbourhoods in which households come from and move to areas that are equally or more deprived. Hence they can be seen as neighbourhoods that are associated with a degree of entrapment of poor households who are unable to break out of living in deprived areas.

The report, published by CLG last week, draws particular attention to Isolate areas:

Isolate areas may provide the strongest case for comprehensive policy intervention to improve the prospects of all households since the areas are unlikely to improve without intervention.

In Isolate areas, especially those whose adjacent areas are also deprived... the opportunities for residents are likely to be more restricted and... the net result of in-flows and outflows is unlikely to lead to ‘natural’ improvement in the stock of households.

Also, the authors note that deprived neighbourhoods which are surrounded by other deprived areas could face greater problems and present more challenging contexts than those that are adjacent to more prosperous areas. In the latter, local opportunities – for employment, for access to higher-performing schools, etc – are likely to be markedly greater.

Informal influences on local social capital

I love these little coincidences. This afternoon I was sitting in the final plenary at an international conference on community cohesion run by the British Council and iCoCo in Manchester. Just before Runnymede Trust director Rob Berkeley stood up to speak, an email from Communities and Local Government plopped into my mailbox offering figures released from the 2008-09 Citizenship Survey:

'76 per cent of people feel that they strongly belong to their neighbourhood with 81 per cent of people satisfied with their local area as a place to live.'

Presumably unaware of this news, although quite possibly already informed about some of the survey findings, Rob reflected quietly on the need to bring some refinement to the evaluation and measurement of cohesion and belonging:

'I live in south London. If my neighbours don't break down the door, I think we're getting on pretty well. In a rural village, if someone doesn't turn up to the fete, their neighbours might think relations have completely broken down. We do need to think about the different ways people think about belonging.'

This echoes a point I made in my own presentation yesterday, consolidating a strong sub-theme of the conference, which was best expressed in a comment by Haroon Saad, director of QeC-Eran (Quartiers en Crise). First, in his presentation, he observed that:

'Intercultural dialogue is taking place on Facebook' (I think he meant social media in general) 'and what's significant is that it's dissociated from institutions.'

Then in a discussion about how agencies were still trying to deal with tensions between local factions in Northern Ireland, Haroon said:

'What organisations are doing pales into insignificance compared with what's going on in the informal sector.'

And that's it: sooner or later policy makers and cohesion practitioners are going to have to get to grips with informal social relations, because everything else we do is not enough. Ciara Wells, deputy director of CLG's Communities and Faiths Division, spoke on Wednesday about the ongoing work on meaningful interaction. Substituting for one of her colleagues, I followed it up with some points about neighbourliness, home zones and neighbourhood online networks, contrasted with reflections on the slightly more organised, formal occasions of street parties and living library.

Devices like steet parties and living library justifiably generate a lot of interest, because they legitimise conversations that otherwise probably would not take place. But ultimately they're artificially constructed occasions, and however transformational the experiences they stimulate, it's hard to see how they can trump all the informal influences on local social capital.

I very much welcome CLG's commitment to further work on meaningful interaction, and I hope it will be seen as an opportunity to develop some more nuanced understandings of the sense of belonging, the importance of trivial encounters, and the value of social networks.

Previously:

On superficial neighbourhood relations

Enter the official local handyman

Sipson may or may not be a community

I don't want to hear people banging on about how cosy and convivial is the village of Sipson.

The village is in the news because a brain-free decision by the UK government today means that if appeals fail, it will be buried under Heathrow's proposed third runway. (The decision ultimately could be close to suicidal for this government because the opposition is bound to attract votes for vowing to reverse the decision if elected).

I like what the BBC have done here in bringing the views of local people to the foreground, and I've been listening to radio reports where, with an echo of doom, residents celebrate the existing sense of community. I came across a note on London RIP from an apprentice reporter whose patch included Sipson in the 1980s:

Just a few fields away from the airport, the villages then were bucolic dots on the very edge of London. Old (Harmondsworth boasts a 11th century church and ancient barn) and surprisingly quiet (no detention centre there then), they coexisted uneasily with the airport – which was much resented by old-timers for apparently never having had planning permission in the first place. It started off as an airstrip in World War One and just growed and growed.

My job involved spending hours tramping around the villages to find news stories to fill the paper every week. This was a truly epic struggle. Cat up tree was big news in Sipson and Harmondsworth at the time.

The debate has polarised around environmental concerns and national economic competitiveness. But there are other axes, particularly the line beyond which broader national priorities can trump local community concerns, or indeed individual private rights. In Sipson there is a man in his 90s who refuses to move: I wish him many more years in his chosen, legitimate place.

And I hope that confrontational anti-expansion campaigners with global perspectives will show due respect for the residents' own, locally-focussed campaign. People live here, and don't you forget it.

But the emphasis on Sipson as a cheerful, close-knit village bothers me, because it seems to imply that without this sense of community, verifiable by visiting journalists, the place - and the people who live there - wouldn't matter. But it would, as long as people wanted to live there.

The image is by Stephen Hird for Reuters and I found it here.

Social media and local democracy

Paul Evans is forging towards a clearer understanding of how we use social media to contribute to local democracy, not just for citizens but also for councillors. He notes that there's plenty of welcome effort going into freeing-up central and local government datasets for re-use, but 'making data available to clever techies so that they use it in mashups is all very well'.

What about the more qualitative data? The pamphlets that make arguments - the kind of things that politicians really do get overloaded with?

What seems to be needed, he suggests, is for local government to find a way of motivating citizens' groups 'to survey all of the policy information on a given subject and to discuss it in an eavesdroppable way'. What will make a difference is being able to evaluate public policy options. Which may mean

finding local co-ordinators to establish policy discussion groups - using collaborative filtering media to identify information of interest, isolate the useful data, and present it in a way that local councillors can use it.

What this seems to amount to is acknowledging more voices while encouraging them to cluster. Democracy will change with us as we go.

Older people in rural areas

The Social Exclusion Task Force (SETF) in the Cabinet Office has put out a call for evidence for a short study on older people in rural areas. They seek evidence of good practice and innovation related to:

• Social inclusion and participation
• Improving health and well-being
• Supporting older people to live independently
• The provision of transport.

Neighbourly relations play an under-appreciated part in all four. Deadline for contributions 30 January 2009.

Try a little MSI

Communities and Local Government today published guidance on 'meaningful social interaction,' reassuringly sub-titled 'How encouraging positive relationships between people can help build community cohesion'.

It needs to be seen in the context of the work and recommendations of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, and more broadly of the debate on how policy can influence behaviour.

I happen to think this is an under-appreciated topic and deserves more policy attention, and more media attention, than it gets. And to be fair, the document also deserved a bit of copy-editing: that might have helped avoid the feeling that this theme is given a relatively low priority in a tiny corner of a huge government department.

Here's my quick take on it for the Joe Public blog.

 

Vote 'stocks' while local villains last

Patrick Wintour reports in yesterday's Guardian that the government is preparing a green paper which may allow local people to vote on what form of punishment is handed out to convicted criminals in their neighbourhood. This would apply to low-level crimes such as disorderly conduct. (Daily Mail coverage here).

It does have the unfortunate feel of government by the miserable standards of contemporary broadcasting. As I understand it, a broadcast programme can have expert judges dismissing a comic-but-flat-footed celebrity in a televised dancing competition to the resounding displeasure of millions, who then overturn the decision by the power of popular vote. Be sure the message did not go unnoticed in Whitehall.

Maybe it's just one of those 'test-the-water' ideas which policy makers dribble from time to time, to see if anyone's paying attention. But it has its justification in Louise Casey's review of community engagement in the justice system, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.

I note also that the green paper will be published (this spring) by the Ministry of Justice, not by the Home Office; and that Communities Secretary Hazel Blears is said to be supportive. So it may well come to pass in some form.

Watch out for the option of online voting to spice it up. A few moments thought about just who would be motivated to review thoroughly the available evidence in any given local case and make a judgement on it, should be enough to shiver the spine a little. The potential for amplifying local social divisions, rather than stimulating cohesion, is not trivial. It could force people to 'take more of an interest in local issues' (and is this the best way to achieve that objective?) or more likely it could lead to more people withdrawing from local affairs in despair.

But let's say a senior civil servant, having worked hard promoting this policy measure, is making their way home one evening in spring. Turning the corner of their home street they are accosted by a local person coming out of a pub.

Believing themselves under attack and lashing out, the official's elbow strikes the other's head (who, your honour, was just asking for a light). Down he goes, striking his head against the kerb. Blood on the pinstripes, sirens in the night, intensive care, incensed relatives and furious friends who, ah, happen to live nearby. The case comes to court: the official is found to have acted with unreasonable violence. Invited to decide on the punishment, how do local people vote? Would you be ready to accept the outcome yourself?

Wintour writes in the Guardian:

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that she favoured local people being given a much clearer choice in deciding what form of community punishment is imposed in their neighbourhood.

['Community punishment'? What does that mean?]

Smith told the Guardian it was wrong that Casey, former head of the Respect unit, was not retained in the Home Office but was moved to the Children's Department soon after Gordon Brown became prime minister. As a result the government lost focus on antisocial behaviour, Smith argues.

Three separate points strike me, to do with the misguided respect agenda, understandings of the role of expertise in governance, and the historical precedent for locally-meted punishment.

(i) The government ought to refocus on civil relations, but it was right to drop the Respect agenda. It was a half-baked set of policies which used disrespect, through an emphasis on shaming, to promote a peculiarly partial approach to civil relations. In particular, it completely failed even to acknowledge that our society is riddled with sanctioned disrespectful behaviour on the part of 'respectable' citizens. More, if more is needed, in chapter 1 of this.

(ii) In three or four presentations last year I used a slide about the three roles in governance, emphasising the need for a balance of influence between elected representative, citizen, and public sector officer. I expressed the concern, which seems to be recognised by people I've spoken to, that most of us emerge from our education system with a feeble understanding of the role of officers (expertise) in local democracy - how important their expertise is in areas too specialised for most of the rest of us to follow.

Broadly speaking, this lack of understanding is reinforced by our popular media. They bash our public services at every opportunity and central government stifles support - for social workers, teachers, probation workers and many others trying to compensate for all sorts of social shortfall.

If this new initiative erodes the ability of the courts to apply their expertise - for instance, in an understanding of research which explains the effects of different punishments in different circumstances - it could be diminishing democracy, not enhancing it. And as one of the commentators on Comment is free puts it:

surely we vote for people who then represent us -

not vote for people who then say "i can't be bothered - YOU do it"

Oh yes and there's that irritating little point (picked up recently by Paul Evans over on Local Democracy) that it's not unheard-of for the public to be wrong.

(iii) Sometime last year I got interested in the system of gebuurten developed in medieval european cities of Belgium and the Netherlands. These were neighbourhood associations and in Ghent each covered an average of 45-50 households. All adult inhabitants were full members of their gebuurte, regardless of their wealth or social status. Heads of households elected a 'dean' who could exact punishment through fines for a wide range of offences related to anti-social behaviour and community norms.

The deans' role was to keep peace and order. They carried out a form of locally-accountable justice, and the system survived in cities like Ghent and Leuven for something like 500 years. I hope to be able to research the geburrten in more detail in future, because I suspect they point to an achieved equilibrium in terms of maintaining local involvement in justice. I'm particularly curious about one possible implication, suggesting that neighbourhood online networks might function most effectively if they include a governance role.

Meanwhile, back to the future: I'm not at all averse to this government exploring as far as it can the limits of local involvement in public services, in fact I applaud that. But I would rather they did so with a better record of having listened when arguments built up against them.

Previously (selected):
Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

Respect agenda dissolves in self-parody

Young people, respect and uniforms.

 

Enter the official local handyman: but at what cost?

When I go on about informal roles in neighbourhoods compared to formal services, I sometimes get the impression that people think I've invented some weird distinction that takes a bit of getting used to.

Well here's a nice example. The government is to make over £30m available to local authorities across England to help them develop or expand their local handyman services for older people - where a 'trusted handyman in a van' can be identified and will come round to do odd jobs for a set fee. Press release.

This is for things like fitting a grab rail, clearing a gutter, fixing a fence or a bit of stair carpet that catches a trailing foot. It's a lot of money, but it's very laudable to have such a scheme, don't you think?

But who was asking how such jobs got done in the past? By members of the family, neighbours, or neighbours' family - Mrs Whatsit's son visits her every other Sunday and he could find ten minutes to pop round and check the fuse on that lamp for you. 'And anything else you want doing while I'm here m'dear?'

One of the examples I cited in my book was of mixed gender friendships among lone older people, in which the female neighbour cooked a meal and the male neighbour reciprocated by doing gardening or odd jobs.

That was how things got done and how they still get done in many neighbourhoods of course. And it works partly because trust is built-in to the existing relationships, so it doesn't have to be pre-negotiated externally by an official agency, as with this scheme, at far greater cost.

There are at least three important elements at play here: reciprocity (including the relation between self-respect and being able to pay someone for a job), trust, and independence. When we introduce a formal service of this kind we might be supporting older people's ability to remain independent, but we shift the reciprocity relationship from a blurred informal arrangement based on an ongoing relationship to an unambiguous economic one; and we require trust to be pre-negotiated by an official agency on the citizen's behalf.

Of course, the family and neighbour contacts aren't always there, and there has to be a formal service to compensate where local social networks are inadequate. But before we extend such a compensating device uniformly across society, maybe we should be doing two things thoroughly.

First, exploring the ways in which informal support might be strengthened so that formal services are needed less. A good example would be for government to invest in older people's mutual support schemes - it doesn't, presumably because policy makers cannot get their heads round informal roles. £30m would go a long way.

Secondly, we should be thinking more deeply about the possible damage a formal scheme like the handyman service might do - eg by leaving neighbourhood roles to atrophy in a stifled ecology of local relations. If you want an example of how this happens, consider the way we outsource our responsibility for keeping an eye out for children, by having high fences and surveillance cameras around school premises.

Formal services have their place, but government can't complain that informal relationships are withering if they keep inventing schemes that systematically and predictably devalue them.

A new class equality duty?

According to Regen.net, 10 Downing Street is considering a duty on public bodies to address inequalities created by class divides. The suggestion was put forward today by Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Obviously there will be raging debates in arriving at definitions and distinctions, but this could be radical policy-making in action. Class-related issues like parental occupation and postcode are stronger predictors of life chances than race and gender.

Against the digital divide industry: of champions and charters

Yesterday I found meself in the second half of a consultation meeting in Birmingham about the government's 'digital inclusion plan.'

I tiptoed into a breakout session that felt painfully like going back ten years in time. People with jobs and desks, some in suits and ties, were talking about social exclusion as if it was a broken-down truck that needed shifting out of the way.

I was hearing suggestions that had been dealt with in so many exercises from the mid-nineties on, many of which I took part in, offering lessons that policy-makers persistently overlook even though they funded them. I touched gently on some of those issues recently.

The first Blair government was to be applauded for the directness with which knotty issues of social exclusion were confronted, and by 2002 I thought there was clarity of understanding of the complexities of exclusion, especially around network poverty and low cultural capital.

But by 2004 it became clear that a digital divide industry had become firmly established, stimulated to some degree by a few well-intentioned consultants, but most vigorously by those who had an interest in expanding their market by ensuring that the focus remained on the technology, not on exclusion. It's difficult to know how much damage those people have done, but it's not trivial.

This morally and intellectually suspect appetite was misguidedly fed by government under various headings containing the word 'digital,' and long before I moved on from Citizens Online earlier this year I had been asking (much to the irritation of my fellow trustees I fear) why we had not made much impact on exclusion in spite of all the dosh sloshing around.

So there I sat yesterday with the answer to that question very apparent. People talked about a 'digital inclusion charter' and the role of a 'high profile digital inclusion champion', flagged up in my view utterly pointlessly for this Government of Celebritisation by the minister for same. (Apparently in all seriousness, people were suggesting what are known as 'television personalities' for the role).

Here's my view, FWIW. If there is to be a 'digital inclusion champion' it should be someone who experiences exclusion. The role should not be about 'digital': it's a social agenda (how obvious is that, how basic do we have to make these points?)

Before there is such a thing as a charter, a diverse group of people who experience exclusion needs to be brought together, empowered, supported and skilled as necessary, but not prescribed. And perhaps one of the first things they might consider is whether or not a charter is an appropriate use of time and energy. Celebritising the exercise is only worthy of contempt.

There's going to be a lot more poverty around in the next ten years and it's profoundly depressing to think that the government has just got as far as talking about an Action Plan and a Charter for Digital Inclusion. The previous generation got further, guys.

What would a digitally inclusive society look like? We won't get near answering that until we look up from the debates about fibre and twitter and champions, and engage in a mature and meaningful way with people who experience exclusion.

Local services on one site

The government is to establish a new fund of at least £200 million to support the co-location of services - schools, nurseries, health and other family services all on one site.

I'm often calling for policy measures to have risk assessments of potential damage to local social networks, so it's good to think this sort of initiative would come out positive. I can see how it could make a very significant difference in neighbourhoods, if it genuinely happens at local level.

But if it means that some local services get aggregated into a hyperservice several miles further away (the old cottage hospital vs county hospital scenario) it could have very negative effects.

There's also a commitment to legislate to ensure that local services – including schools, health services and the police – work together to improve outcomes for children and young people. (Thinks... why is legislation necessary?...)

Children's Plan: one year on.

Via Children & Young People Now.

Empowerment and community development

There's a timely and well-written CDF short paper on community development and empowerment published recently. It pays more attention than I expected to informal relations and cultural change, and concludes:

Empowerment can reach higher into decision-making procedures: setting agendas, raising aspirations and ensuring that the channels for communication and influencing between community members and their representatives, even at the topmost tiers, are accessible and acknowledged as legitimate aspects of the democratic culture. Community development practice aims to embed these structures and understanding into everyday democracy so that everyone knows how they can influence decisions as individual citizens but, more importantly, through collective approaches involving learning, dialogue and negotiation.

Empowerment: some nuances

Following my note yesterday about representation and participation, Regen and Renewal reports some comments on the empowerment white paper made by Vince Taylor, head of strategic economic development at Sunderland City Council. He suggests that the empowerment plan could prove ineffective because 'few people are interested in playing an active role in their communities':

'The white paper focused too much on imposing the Government's view of empowerment on communities, rather than considering how people may want to be engaged.'

Not new, but valid as far as it goes: the Ipsos-MORI report on empowerment based on New Deal for Communities data noted:

‘While there is a clear push from the government towards increasing community empowerment, the extent to which people want this is far less clear cut. The evidence suggests a spectrum of interest, with only a very small minority at one end who want to be actively involved, a larger minority at the other end who have no interest at all, with most in the middle.’

Yes, most people just want to have a say or to know they can influence things if they choose to. But low levels of motivation could at least partly be explained by the fact that most of us have grown up with habitual detached indifference on the part of authorities towards us - indeed systematised discouragement of seeking to influence.

My take on this is that empowerment is not a constant commodity, but reflects its cultural context: it is capable of being increased. It's the cultural context which should be the subject of change - putting it crudely, with the objective that it should not be seen as exceptional to want to have influence on decision-making processes; nor exceptional, for those with decisions to make, to want to involve those affected.

I'd also tender the heresy that community development is not necessarily the sole essential ingedient in the mix. CD promotes empowerment among other things through involvement. Involvement is not the only source of an increased feeling of influence or of the sense of power. However, by promoting collective involvement, CD is likely to multiply that sense of increased influence more powerfully than anything else.

To my shame I never got round to spending time on it before, but it happens that this morning I sought-out and read the CLG definition of community empowerment (page 12 here) which, er, needs a bit of work:

'Community empowerment is the giving of confidence, skills and power to communities to shape and influence what public bodies do for or with them.’

'Giving'? What about the confidence and skills that residents already have but which is overlooked or stifled? I don't like to be too picky, but definitions need a bit more thought than appears to have been spent on this. Why not just say ‘bestowing our largesse on the peasants’ and be done with it?

Yes, it is about power, but increasingly I'm wondering whether 'empowerment' - presented as feeling one is able to influence - is really the best approach to bring about the necessary cultural shift.

Hugh Butcher offered some thoughts of lasting validity on the CLG empowerment discussion forum a year ago:

'the Action plan seems to lack a recognition of the multiple 'faces' of power - it focuses overwhelmingly on a) 'decision making' power and b) 'power-to' (building people's confidence, skills &c).  I would like to have seen more acknowledgement of: c) power to set agendas (the proposals in the Action Plan are 90% about responding to opportunities to 'engage' with those who have already set the agendas) and d) the power to shape the underlying assumptions (the taken-for-granted 'framing' assumptions, beliefs and values) which prompts the identification of particular kinds of agendas (and ignore others) in the first place.'

Confidence, engagement, and services

Last night to an Ipsos MORI event on 'Building confidence in the fight against crime', where I found myself surrounded by representatives of the criminal justice system (or the 'public justice system' as Louise Casey, the government adviser on All Things A Bit Dodgy, suggested it should be called).

MORI's messages about communication with residents, and the need for cultural change in police forces and local authorities to engage with people at neighbourhood level, seemed to be well-received.

But unfortunately, the discussion seemed entirely based on an assumption that confidence is a rational, mechanical and linear process: ask people what concerns them, give them some information, do something about what they've asked for, tell them you've done it, and bingo, problem solved. If that were so, expression of confidence in a service could be a reliable indicator and we'd have been using it for years.

But confidence is a fluid emotional process influenced by a wide range of factors, including health, mobility, housing, the quality of the public realm, family relationships, personal social networks, and so on. My level of confidence in the authorities' handling of anti-social behaviour could be influenced variably by any of these factors from one day to the next. We know this, which is why we talk about joined-up services.

There's a related point which helps us understand the limits of this approach. People are still talking about demonstrably unsuccessful traditional approaches to 'engagement' - door-knocking, newsletters, surveys, formal meetings called by the police or local authorities. And having had a conversation with the police authority in my county (noticeably absent last night) I have some sense of how shallow the understanding of community engagement can be.

It seems to me that few authorities think about finding ways to contribute through the existing processes and structures of local groups, to which residents are already committing time and energy. Nor, I suspect, is there much recognition of the barriers to informal communication between residents which would help information to circulate. Once again, police and local authorities are talking about certain tasks purely on their own terms - we organise the meeting, we run the meeting, you turn up, you tell us stuff when we ask you to.

Community engagement is a process whereby people who have something in common are involved collectively, together with a responsible agency, in influencing what happens to or around them. It is not a bureaucratic process and should not be approached with a bureaucratic mindset.

MORI: Closing the gaps: crime and public perceptions

Engaging communities: a review by Louise Casey

Postscript: JRF this morning has published a study of Public officials and community involvement in local services.

What have neighbourhoods got to do with designing-out crime?

Policy-makers still struggle to consider the local context of changes they would like to see. Here's the Home Office announcing new investment in designing-out crime, bringing industry, the public sector, designers and crime prevention experts and victims together. The programme is expected to come up with design-led ideas and develop 'solutions to a wide range of crime-related problems,' including:

• Schools – design solutions to reduce problems such as bullying, fighting and petty theft.

• ‘Hot’ products – innovations to make personal electronics more ‘crime-proof’.

• Housing - embedding design-led crime reducing approaches in the planning and construction of houses.

• Alcohol-related crime – to reduce the harm caused by alcohol-related criminal behaviour.
• Business crime – using design to minimise crimes such as shoplifting.

At least there's nothing there about graffiti; but what about neighbourhoods? Does the impact of local environment not impinge on the consciousness of those who set up this initiative?

My guess, and it's just a guess, is that initial discussions among officials may have included 'Neighbourhoods' as a heading but it was thought just too difficult, too political, or too inconclusive. A pity, because a new initiative which revisited the tensions between new urbanism and 'designing-out-crime,' while taking account of the new surveillance culture, recent experience of home zones, the Manual for Streets and so on, would have been welcome.

Involving local people in delivering local services

A few months ago I was talking to some senior people in local government and asked them what they and their citizens co-produced: not 'what service do you provide?' but what is it that results from the combination of that service and the involvement of local people? Yup, I got the quizzical silence I should have expected.

Well I don't have the right kind of robust optimism, but the people at nef do. Here's Josh-Ryan Collins in yesterday's Guardian finding a silver lining in the polluting combination of the recession and new labour's approach to the public sector as a competitive market.

He offers four examples of how authorities are beginning to support service models of co-production 'that deliver mutliple benefits in the short term, and build future resilience.' Such examples suggest

'how public bodies can create real value for people over time, instead of ruthlessly pursuing the shortsighted goals of bigger-is-better and more-for-less... These models acknowledge the importance of spending public money in ways that deliver social, environmental and economic benefits, assessing performance according to this "triple bottom line"... The challenge now is to turn the exception into the rule, moving beyond discredited market solutions to strengthen communities and economies, to build resilience locally, and to promote sustainable wellbeing.'

Meanwhile, eslewhere in the Guardian, David Clements takes a rather clumsy pot-shot at the government's 'communities' agenda. He's right to be concerned at 'the notion that democracy can be imposed by diktat', but I'd offer a couple of reflections:

(a) the sustainable communities bill was sponsored by a Tory MP, Nick Hurd, which might at least suggest broader recognition that the involvement of local people in the decision-making processes that affect them is long overdue; and

(b) there may be a lot of bad practice in community engagement but that does not invalidate the principle. We need to improve practice urgently before more cynicism spreads.

Previously: The public sector is in crisis.

Social inclusion and digital inclusion through community centres

I came up with this model of social inclusion through community centres while I was doing some work on social impact for UK Online last year.

It's based on the experience of workers using ICT and other resources to support residents in Shipley, West Yorkshire, and on interviews with residents themselves. The main point that it leads on to is that the ICT can fit more or less anywhere in the process, as a very significant accelerator; but it is not the fundamental requirement nor the main focus unless the individual makes it so.

I'm reminded of this by a recent flurry of interest in how to shape provision of ICT in low-income areas.

I first went to Shipley in about 1999, to find out about their pioneering online project which took ISDN connections from Shipley College into community centres to support basic skills courses. It was, and still is, high quality community-based learning, with sensitive support provided by committed and highly experienced community workers.

Around that time I was on one of the government's 'Policy Action Teams' ('PAT15' on 'access to IT') and the Shipley project was among a chosen few round the country which helped us understand the role of the technologies in the quality of life of people who experience exclusion. What they offered gave texture because we engaged local people to talk to us about it at their pace and in their terms.

Now the government has released several reports about 'digital inclusion' and the social impact of their strategic promotion of the technologies, and it makes a curious impression. The two I've looked at have clearly been expensive exercises, and together they provide an important new impetus to the agenda, acknowledging that the relation between social exclusion and digital exclusion is subtle and complex. But neither report seems to add much to what was known six or seven years ago.

For example, Ipsos MORI were commissioned for a research study on digital inclusion and social impact, and their report notes among the conclusions:

• Partnerships with local community groups and organisations were key in reaching the target audiences and delivering holistic provision addressing multiple issues

• Working with hard to reach audiences involves long-term relationships with partners and individuals

• Taking technology out to local, familiar and safe environments was essential to reach new audiences

• The flexibility to adapt the curriculum to participants' needs and interests was vital in engaging and holding their interest

• Informal peer to peer learning and formal volunteering were key to the sustainability of the projects, and to the progression and self-esteem of participants.

All very valuable points. All put across clearly in the early work carried out under the aegis of PAT 15, before 2002. In those days we didn't have the budget for large-scale systematic studies (I think the first report was done for £2,500) but we compensated by sounding-out our findings across the community sector.

And while the MORI report includes much-needed quantitative material, some of it is crying out for clarification. For example, Figure 12 ('Social interaction') includes responses to this question:

Which of these do you do ‘often’?
'Meet up with new friends' (38%)

There's no explanation of what is meant by meeting up with new friends. Call me old-fashoined, but surely you can't do that very often, because after a while they won't be 'new' friends anymore. But hey, I'm not an expensive consultancy company offering survey analysis, so what would I know (apart from the probability that MORI are not going to be proud of this hurried-looking document).

The second report, Community perspectives on digital inclusion, is wholly qualitative. It summarises 'insights and experiences from community and third sector organisations involved in initiatives aimed at opening up digital technologies to excluded communities.'

The categorisation of 'excluded communities' (not just the language) feels clumsy and insensitive. The framework is clear here though and the scope more ambitious. But again the refusal to build on what was known in the past is apparent. Take for example this recommendation for working with low-income households:

'fuse IT training with literacy classes and have skilled teachers who can teach both.'

In Shipley, they've been doing that for more or less ten years, word should have spread by now. 

Does this matter? Well, ask yourself what it's like if you lived somewhere like that. Researchers came in several years ago using public money, talked to you at length, went away, wrote a report to government, and nothing happened. I and others worked hard to get the findings onto the desks of officials and into policy. The college staff and community workers carried on slogging away doing outrageous hours trying to help people get connected and learn stuff and sort out their lives. They were often successful, but successes were followed by another cohort of tangled identities mingling-in. (And, going back to the graphic at the top of this post, the hardest thing was getting them through the door - many never made it).

Then another bunch of researchers start asking things - this time with more clout but less understanding of what are the personal and social forces that bring you to this community centre in this locality at this time. How much faith would you put in the general process of public policy and the specific intentions of the 'Digital Inclusion Strategy'?

Previously: Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres

Second homes

The level of homelessness in the UK is said to be among the highest in Europe, with more than four people per 1,000 estimated to be homeless. Meanwhile, in England, there are close to a quarter of a million second homes.

Quite apart from the curious morality of having what you don't need so someone else can go without, I can't see how, on balance, the practice of having more than one home is likely to have other than a negative effect on neighbourhood life in either location. It was described by George Monbiot in the Guardian a while ago as a 'vampire trade'. I would describe it as yet another example of the antisocial behaviour of the advantaged.

The National Housing and Planning Advice Unit has published a study of the evidence on the purchase and use of second homes, which suggests that

second home owners are high income earners with heads of household between 45 and 64 years of age. The most common household type is a couple with no dependent children.

But there are a lot of gaps in the evidence, it seems. For instance:

The impact of second homes on house prices and affordability is assumed but not proven.

And:

There is a lack of good quality evidence on the impact of second homes on local housing markets and local communities.

The authors state that there is a case for examining the positive as well as the negative impacts of second homes on local economies, housing markets and communities. Fair enough, let's have some research - oh and could we also please hear a sensible moral defence of this practice, if there is one?

The research design will be of great interest in lots of ways. I would very much like to see the measures used to assess impact on local social relations, and how they are weighted against economic impact.

Until that can be organised and funded, the commonsense arguments that in most cases it is (a) immoral and (b) socially damaging, ought to hold sway. We shouldn't need an economic recession to force acceptable prosocial behaviour from the wealthy.

Intergenerational disengagement

Does it matter if older people and young people don't communicate with each other?  The International Longevity Centre got funding for a survey on intergenerational relations and found that 55% of respondents of all ages think different generations find it difficult to communicate with each other.

Researcher James Lloyd also notes that:

Large numbers of people, including older people themselves, appear to regard social disengagement among older people with younger people as a natural part of ageing, as opposed to the result of social context and environment.

The report was launched last night, but with the new minister for work and pensions in the room, the discussion was nearly overwhelmed by calls around pensions and retirement age.

There was surprisingly little reflection on the neighbourhood as a primary context for intergenerational interaction - no mention, for instance, of the potential of street parties, nor any thinking about how the recession might affect household size and increase the extent to which we occupy our neighbourhoods to mutual benefit. Neighbourliness is of profound significance for older people and interaction with the younger people who live around them should be a natural part of that.

Nor among the necessary generalisations was there any recognition of the 'two youths' phenomenon - where as I've mentioned a few times we seem to have one category of young people more socialised, respectful, courteous and comfortable in the company of people from different backgrounds than any were when I worra lad; and another category more disenfranchised, bitter, and profoundly care-less than is healthy for any society. (I think this is known across la manche as les deux jeunesses. I know I will be corrected if I have that wrong).

James Lloyd rightly tries to stir up some policy thinking about intergenerational relations, but it seems to be hard going. We have an established body of practice, thanks to the Beth Johnson Foundation; and some belated recognition coming through in cohesion policy, with officials now earnestly acknowledging that cohesion is 'not just about race and faith...'

Next, I expect, we may see some recognition in policy of the most structural, visible options for promoting intergenerational interaction, such as breaking up housing segregation, and making it easier for older people to contribute to learning in schools.

But the last area to get attention, as always, will be informal interaction in the public realm, because it's so much less obvious how we do it.

One way to create a culture in which older people do not feel threatened by groups of kids hanging out, is if they happen to have spent time in each others' company occasionally and had the chance to identify some common ground or interests. A culture which increases the differences and denies opportunities to discover the commonalities is storing up problems.

Nanny's job

For an uneducated practitioner I read a lot of academic stuff, and for a while now I've been brewing some thoughts about academic commentary on various knotty social policy themes.

I can think of one or two papers on anti-social behaviour policies for instance which come across as ethically high-minded, without recognising the sheer bloody awkwardness of life on difficult estates and the need for some kind of policy framework to give people a chance of a decent life. Scholarly objectivity implies detachment, but sometimes at the cost of insight and pertinence.

Those thoughts may yet emerge elsewhere, but meanwhile I'm very glad I didn't miss this... In this week's Society Guardian, the ever-reliable Stewart Dakers offers a poised reflection on the relation between the protecting state and the status quo, 'which has historically exempted the strong from any but voluntary changes to their behaviour on behalf of the weak'.

'Nanny does make a difference, and it is on the mean streets of the real estate that you can see it happening. This is where humane civilisation is truly evolving, where the realities of cultural diversity, of social cohesion, of human tolerance are lived out. This is where the excluded get in, where immigrants find shelter, strangers establish themselves, the socially incompetent look for sanctuary, the economically disabled begin recovery, the cognitively and psychologically challenged get their breath back. But it would not happen without nanny.'

'Nanny's job is to ensure that the different are accommodated, the vulnerable protected, the incompetent supported... We need nanny and her rules to moderate the appetites of the powerful, to make sure that the front runners do not lose touch with the back markers. It's known as social justice.'

'What really works is localness'

Just been speaking to an old friend who works in a college and is battling with the performance management nonsense of the educational establishment. She told them from her decades of experience in offering and organising courses for people who experience social exclusion,

The only thing that really works is localness.

Meaning - local contacts, learning delivered through community centres, supported by community workers and local volunteers, with established and trusted partnerships between the college and local agencies. That's based on high calibre creative workers; plus conversations, lots of them, sometimes called networking.

Unfortunately, bureaucrats do not place value on apparently-purposeless conversation, because its effects can't easily be measured. Which may be why community education is slipping from crisis into oblivion.

My take, FWIW, is that over the last ten years, if we had taken 50% of the resources put into having people in suits going round telling everybody to measure things (while ignoring the messages coming from the case studies they commissioned), and invested it in providing local learning responding to local need, we could have transformed levels of basic adult education in this country. Sorry to whitter on about it again, but the legacy of managerialism is not going to be a happy one.

Previously: Shifting institutions

Older people and neighbouring

My wee text on Older people and neighbouring was launched at the House of Commons the other day, with the help of Age Concern England, Community Development Foundation, and the National Association for Neighbourhood Management.

We were there as guests of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Ageing, chaired by Eddie O'Hara MP (pictured here with John Grogan MP) who I knew years ago when he was chair of CDF Trustees. Special thanks to Martin Dudley for these pics.

Thinking about what I had to say on the day, and subsequently reflecting on the comments (especially from Alison Gilchrist, author of The well-connected community, seen here with co-discussant, Chris Gittins of Streets Alive) makes me think that perhaps the book's sub-title - 'an enfolding community' - is the idea that resonates  most strongly with people.

The work I did for the book clarified the extent to which older people tend to experience neighbouring as individualised, in contrast to the kind of 'enfolding' collective experience of neighbourliness that seems to have characterised their childhoods. In the narratives of decline so often recited on this theme, we have to take account of the remarkable stability in the early lives of that generation - childhoods described by dutch researcher Pearl Dykstra as characterised by the greatest uniformity ever. The rapid social changes that took place since those childhoods help to account for the sense of bewilderment and tendency to withdraw.

But of course this doesn't help us work out what is needed in policy or practice terms. I'm about to rush off to give a presentation to a Young Foundation seminar, as part of their Neighbourhood Action Network, where I'm hoping we'll start to develop some clearer practical ideas about how to stimulate neighbouring. More soon.

Not engaging but docking

Over on Podnosh Nick Booth has come up with a thought-provoking metaphor about council and government officials -

Officers are sincerely trying to picture interesting ways to approach the community, connect with it, create an airlock where they and the community can talk and then [get] back into their own orbiters, reseal the doors, flush out the airlocks and return to business.

Well right enough, I've encountered a few flushed-out airlocks in community meetings before now. Guess I just never realised their significance.

I'm with you so far Nick. And yes, I too worry that

the conversation is so often based on the assumption that ‘services’ are separate from the people they serve.

But being separate from is not the same as being irrelevant to. Nick worries that this view is perpetuated 'because services are rarely delivered by the community they are intended to serve.'

Well of course they're not, because services are the provision of something from beyond that which is immediately available. The rhetoric of 'community' (local people, interest group or category of people with a common need) providing services is often questionable in all sorts of ways. 'With local people'? - yes. 'By local people'? - not necessarily.

Maybe my feeble title allusion to Stevie Smith could come in handy. How do you know if someone with difficulties in their life is not waving but drowning? You need to know something about them, have some common bond, and/or be close enough to be able to make a judgement. You may also need to have the resources to take action, which helps explain how services come to be organised on an extra-local basis.

Part of the reason why services become detached has to do with the professionalising ethos, which tends to make it harder and harder for even the best-intentioned official to integrate what they're doing into everyday life at local level.

Still, Nick is definitely onto something, and I think it's the on-off, 9-5 nature of the connection between service provider and resident. (I'm resisting the temptation to explore the AC/DC metaphor here. Go ahead, if you think you're tough enough). The docking image resonates because it suggests an obscure imperialist power, with connotations of imposed dependency - a potentially colonising force landing to see what it can make of things, where the essential inequality of transactions is likely to be deepened, not re-negotiated and evened.

As an afterthought, I wonder about the effects of car-mentality. In my time I've undoubtedly covered more miles on foot and on two wheels than at the wheel of a car, and I'm often struck by the way that being cocooned in a moving metal box transforms people's attitudes towards others. I think we might be surprised at how the boxed separateness of modern mobility has come to influence relations by creating an on-off, inside/outside, connected/disconnected mindset. 'Docking' sums it up neatly.

Where relations between service provider and residents are engaged and functional, what is it that's different? How would we modify Nick's metaphor? It doesn't mean that staff have to live in the neighbourhood or that services have to be delivered by residents.

I think it means that services are developed with the involvement of local people in the decision-making processes, are constantly refined in relation to their responses, and that those responsible for providing them are familiar and welcome to those whose situation requires it.

If you're on a bike or on foot, you don't 'dock' to have a conversation with someone, client or neighbour. You're already where they happen to be.

Well-being and empowerment (updated)

This morning I interviewed someone who's been trying to implement a community engagement approach in her role helping to provide a local public service.

Sometimes it's hard to appreciate the gulf between the harried and hassled local practitioner, constantly adjusting to change, and the policy context beyond. Through a project I was involved in, a few months ago she suddenly appreciated that the thrust of government policy was in the same direction. Knowing this, my correspondent felt hugely empowered and given confidence to be more assertive in her organisation, thereby accelerating a change of attitude towards citizens.

Here's something else that will make just that sort of contribution. The Young Foundation's local well-being project, working with IDeA and the LSE, has published a report on practical empowerment initiatives in neighbourhoods, called Neighbourliness + empowerment = wellbeing: is there a formula for happy communities?

It argues that the right kind of work on 'neighbourhood and community empowerment' is likely to increase wellbeing in three key dimensions -

• By providing greater opportunities for residents to influence decisions affecting their neighbourhoods
• By facilitating regular contact between neighbours
• By helping residents gain the confidence to exercise control over local circumstances.

What the report seems to do really well is to distil some wishy-washy key contemporary social issues into focused practical points, and this paper looks like it could really give momentum to the efforts of local practitioners and local politicians who have been grappling with (or perhaps avoiding) All That Stuff about social capital, well-being, neighbourliness, involvement, democracy, responsibilisation and so on.

The report puts forward several case studies of empowerment 'done well' (from Manchester, South Tyneside and Hertfordshire) stressing the significance of the balance of control. Yup, it all comes down to mature understandings of the power issues.

But it's also the case that this is an institutional perspective on the issues - this comes across as an impressively crafted practical guide for local officers on trying to stimulate a greater sense of well-being at local level. I think we still need more work to bring local people's experience of such initiatives, and of initiatives they establish and run themselves, to the surface.

Postscript... Two other thoughts about the report.

It seems to have little to do with neighbourliness, which hardly gets mentioned because the scale of the activities and schemes described is well beyond what is likely to be most people's mental map of neighbourly interactions. Perhaps that's understandable from the practitioners' point of view: so is this another example of the appeal of the N word brought on by the exhaustion of the C word?

Much of what is described is good ol' fashioned community development, and the document marks the continued tension between that field of established practice and the trend to take bits of it and call it something else - which again might be fine, so long as the lessons and principles of community development are appreciated and taken into account.

The public sector is in crisis

This post has been a long time cooking and it just boiled over. The public sector in the UK is in crisis, and the politicians don't seem even to notice. Most people who live their lives locally don't realise how damaged their public services are by the professional poverty of new Labour managerialism.

I listen to lots of people in the public sector, particularly teachers, nursery staff, library staff, regeneration workers and social services staff, and various others. In the last six months I've heard many more wretched stories of managerialist stupidity and brainless recruitment processes than could be accounted for under normal conditions.

Why is so much public sector recruitment outsourced to companies that haven't got a clue about the roles in question and manifestly don't care? I hear almost routinely of contradictions in job descriptions, of the removal of professionals from contact with clients, of people with experience being condemned for not following some procedure invented to protect its inventor. Headteachers who don't teach and hospital managers who couldn't handle a nose bleed. I hear of a nurse with 26 years experience not being allowed to carry out an injection until her new manager has seen her do it. This is about those without competence asserting power over people in service.

The stories accumulate to describe a social poisoning. New Labour has presided over a treacherous and insidious campaign against skilled work with people - the contemptuous treatment of teachers providing a notorious example. I'm not saying all public sector workers were always enviably competent: I'm saying the managerialist frameworks within which they're expected to work are disastrous.

Why are so many people of calibre leaving public services, the vacuum being filled by laughably self-important people who have chosen to waste resources accumulating qualifications in management? It makes no sense. I've met intelligent, sensitive and capable people who have felt that in order to progress in their careers, they had to do some management courses. Look at them now, preoccupied with procedures, the creativity and flair processed out of them, busy doing likewise unto others. These people spend a high proportion of their time away from their place of work doing 'continuous professional development.' Ah, right.

Meanwhile of course, the public sector (and the voluntary sector, come to that) is repeatedly reminded of the need to be more businesslike. That would be buinesslike as in, the Northern Rock Building Society, British Airways, or (god help us) Virgin, presumably. Which is how we get slight misjudgements like the London Olympic budget, I suppose.

Those who can, do. Those who cannot, invent procedures. Those who can't even invent procedures, it seems, end up in Human Resources. The lives of ordinary people at local level are impoverished as a consequence.

Like a lot of people who thought they belonged on the political left, I'm resigned to the need to see the back of this wretched government, and deeply apprehensive about what follows. But today, we have the welcome news that the Police Federation has voted to seek to assume the right to strike. Won't it be sweet if we see a revival of unionism in the slipstream of this particular response to high-handed management insensitivity?

Neighbouring and older people

My text about older people and neighbouring will be published shortly by Community Development Foundation.

There will be a launch, or to put it more technically, an excuse to gather and guzzle, at Shared Intelligence in London on Tuesday 27 May 2008, which happens to be National (wait, make that European) Neighbours Day. (Thanks to Ben Lee from the National Neighbourhood Management Network for providing the venue).

Speakers include David Sillito from BBC News, Chris Gittins from Streets Alive, and Ryan Campbell from Age Concern England. If you'd like to come along, please register as places are limited. Further information is here.

Cohesion and inequalities

'I do not think you can get community cohesion unless you tackle the basic inequalities at the same time... I do not think it is possible to have cohesion where you have got such a stark set of differences between people competing in the same area. Part of cohesion and part of the original definition of cohesion was to tackle inequalities at the same time... I do not see them as being two different things. Of course, if you do tackle some of the inequalities, then the chances are that people are going to end up in the same workplace and are going to interact with each other. They are going to end up at universities and in schools in order to interact. The process of measuring inequalities means that you are also maximising the opportunities for people to relate to each other as well on an equal footing.'

Ted Cantle, Institute of Community Cohesion, speaking to the communities and local government committee on community cohesion and migration, 25 February 2008, uncorrected transcript.

Death to the springy chicken!

To the RSA last night for a debate on 'home is where we start from' organised with the Family and Parenting Institute and chaired by Polly Toynbee.

And thank you Sarah Gaventa of CabeSpace, for a clear and passionate articulation of the arguments some of us have been trying to make about children and play in the neighbourhood: 'kids have to get out of playgrounds' she said, adding a well-aimed swipe at the obsession with safe play equipment - 'death to the springy chicken!'

Because there are some confusions over what is being argued here - see for instance some of the comments posted in response to this BBC piece - it's maybe worth making the point that children's imaginations are not the problem.

What I see as the problem is the government-led, adult-endorsed preoccupation with ordering and controlling childhood. Of course kids can have fun on a springy chicken/parrot/hippo/whale/dolphin; but designed, controlled environments to the exclusion of genuine adventure and the discovery of risk, are not desirable in the long term.

(In theory, you can hear the RSA debate here, but I couldn't get any life out of it).

Play in the street: a straw poll and a doodle

Society Guardian tomorrow is running some comments on the government's play strategy which has been published for consultation. (My two euros-worth on JoePublic. More here). Trying to get a handle on the issues, I did two things.

First, I ran a straw poll among contacts to see what they thought was the single biggest obstacle stopping children from playing in the streets. I got 22 responses, not all easily categorised but with eleven people saying cars or traffic and seven referring to parental concerns or perceptions. Some people made the reasonable point that in their areas, children and young people do occupy the streets.

While the responses were coming in, I tried roughly to flowchart the parental decision-making process to see if doing so would bring any clarity to the issues.

I don't pretend to be any good at logical or sequential thinking, and I've no experience at doing flowcharts in theory or in practice. I do have experience, albeit some years since, of taking decisions to do with my children's play.

My doodle proceeds through questions about the weather (issues around screen-based entertainment if the children stay in); do they have friends to play out with? In view? Safe spaces? If there are safe spaces, are they in the street or segregated?

At the bottom I scribbled 'Too much traffic?' and a subsidiary question, too seldom raised: 'Too many cars?'

I noted John Adams, in a letter in yesterday's Guardian, claiming that:

'Since Labour came to power the country's motor vehicle population has increased by almost 8 million. To provide just one parking space for each of these extra vehicles would require a car park equivalent to a new motorway stretching from London to Edinburgh - 90 lanes wide.'

Nope, can't get me head round that. I scribbled on:

'Invent fold-away car.'
'Stomp all over them.'
'Wait for policy to confront car lobby.'

Further suggestions welcome.