Neighbourhoods

Selective localism

The government’s localism champion, Eric Pickles, appears to have the support of the High Court for his anti-localist decision that the residents of the village of Kings Cliffe should put up with having radioactive waste dumped in the vicinity.

According to a Public Service article published just now,

'The case was seen as an example of how the government may speak of encouraging localism in one breath but in the next force communities to accept decisions that they have opposed through democratic means.'

Some of the background here. Kings Cliffe Wastewatchers site is here.

Sooner or later, those who got over-excited about localism were bound to have to face up to the fact that some decisions affecting localities have to be taken at levels beyond the most local. It didn’t seem to occur to Mr Pickles and his advisors though, so we get the rhetoric of localism when it suits them but not when it doesn’t. I hope it turns out that the government has picked a bad example here.

Remember the welfare system?

What can politicians do about their own lack of popularity? Quite reasonably the BBC is taking a look at political cynicism, but it's a bit of a struggle when the leader of the UK opposition reveals the thinking to which he is prepared to commit the Labour Party. According a PA press release this morning, Mr Miliband will say in his party conference speech that

'councils should give priority in allocating scarce social housing to people who work and contribute to their communities over benefit claimants and trouble tenants.'

'Benefit claimants?' You mean, there are people who have needs and the state is supporting them? How did that happen?

Listen, Ed, if you have a problem with people claiming benefit, why not just go the whole way and say you'll scrap the welfare system?

Believe it or not, there are many people claiming benefits who make huge contributions to local quality of life, through community action, caring, neighbourliness and informal support as well as volunteering, which would put the efforts of most politicians to shame.

 

Persuasive people and awkward social issues

There's a lot of rumour flying around about Emma Harrison and I'm not sure I trust much of it. But because she's rich, I'm afraid she has to be subject to exactly the same prejudice that I apply to all rich people.

Emma is allegedly a multimillionaire who allegedly knows how to relate to families which have no-one in employment, and persuade them into work. She's a godsend then for millionaire members of government who grasp things more readily, shall we say, when they are articulated by other millionaires. Her plan is by no means foolish: it involves training 'champions' to engage with such families, apparently in an openly coercive manner, if I can put it like that.

Her company A4E, with government funding (ah you knew I'd mention that didn't you) isn't trying to do community development, it's trying to hit the 'problem' of families without employment, through persuasion. But of course a family without employment is not a single issue, it's a complex mess of tangled, knotted, social and bureaucratic confusions. Oh well never mind that. Maybe we're wrong, and these folk just need a good talking to from a successful entrepreneur.

Many people will only have heard about Emma through an embarassingly inept interview by Justin Webb on the Today programme last week. I must admit I squirmed. If you want to know more, keep an eye on Watching A4E.

Now here's an excellent, penetrating post by Mark Gamsu which tries to get at the gap between the awkward touchy-feely complexities of community development and the apparent crisp simplifications of Emma Harrison's approach. Do try to read it if you can spare five minutes.

I've seen similar tensions created many times over the years, by very articulate persuasive people who grotesquely over-simplify a set of complex social issues - objectifying the victims in the process - and for that very reason attract the attention of politicians. And funding. (I'd like to say at this point 'You know who you are!' But they don't of course).

One day it might really work, then we'll all be in for a shock.

Cohesion and disturbance

Could this just be coincidence? Research carried out for Regeneration & renewal by Experian, reported here, shows that '71 per cent of riots occurred in local authority districts ranked in the bottom 10 per cent for social cohesion.'

In most of the areas people who have been trying to make a difference will be disheartened by conclusions like this, although my recollection of the Experian Mosaic system is that it is surprisingly specific.

According to the article, we're talking about

'some of the most disconnected communities in the country'.

That's 'disconnected' in terms of local social relations; maybe not in terms of the reportedly heavy use of Blackberry Messenger by a small proportion. And probably not at all connected in terms of the kinds of social capital we know can be generated by online neighbourhood networks.

Say, here's an idea. Why don't we invent some shared ways of bringing people together at local level to stimulate cohesion and involvement, and help people to influence the decision-making processes that affect them? We could call it, oh I don't know, something like 'community development', how does that sound?

It could be exactly the sort of thing the government would be interested in supporting, especially since it's a lot less expensive than having disconnected communities.

The suspension of civilisation: disturbances in England, August 2011

So what have we learned?

‘My clothes stank of smoke and I wanted to weep with rage at a society that has disenfranchised so many for so long while brainwashing several generations of children to want, want, want.’ (Hayley Matthews, Guardian, 10 August 2011) 

1. The past week’s disorders in English cities involved a range of different behaviours – collective protest, rioting, wanton violence, vandalism, arson, intimidation, theft, opportunistic looting, and organised looting. A wide range of people of different ages, backgrounds and ethnicities were involved. So it’s obviously rash to generalise. But that wouldn’t stop the dominant broadcast media and politicians from insisting on doing so. TV presenters have been taking it in turns to ask ‘Who’s to blame?’ As if it were a quiz question. The bland insistence on over-simplifying complex issues is irresponsible and contributes to the problem.

2. It’s perverse that anyone seeking to understand what has happened should feel the need to use phrases like ‘I’m not excusing’ or ‘not condoning, but...’. (Will Davies has some words about this). The Kneejerk Right got lathered up quickly in confounding explanation and excuse. They’re best ignored until they’ve worked this bit out.

And really, is it too much to ask, for the sake of a healthy polity, that more of those on the right might have made some contribution to the discussion of context and understanding, instead of stamping their feet with the predictable apoplectic response of defiant property-owners, visibly salivating at the prospect of locking people up and blaming parents? For the first few days, nothing but blunt mentalities offering crunch responses. It would have been refreshing to have a few voices from the right showing readiness to think about social issues beyond the principles of condemnation and punishment.

3. Those who were rioting and looting showed complete contempt for moral standards. In this respect, sadly, they can be compared directly with numerous parliamentarians; some very influential bankers; various motley journalists and newspaper editors; an undisclosed number of senior police officers; a sparkling array of corporate executives; empty celebrities (like Russell ‘bang pregnant’ Brand - inexplicably given airspace on this topic by the Guardian the other day); and a scary number of catholic priests.

What was shocking about the rioters and looters was that apparently they didn’t pretend to have moral standards. In this respect they differed from the above.

It might also be noted that most of them had little or no power or influence in society, nor, in most cases, much prospect of that. Again, in this respect they differed from the above.

4. Sadly, determined to be an international embarassment, our prime minister jumped straight into the ‘simple criminality’ camp. Pointlessly appointing a US supercop for obscure reasons was a masterstroke. Not just an undisguised insult to the police – it should go down really well with the community development workers, community activists and youth workers who could help him and his out-of-depth Home Secretary to understand what things are like at local level. Nice one Dave.

5. I want to make a point about wildness. One interpretation of the tensions of social behaviour is that people have to be encouraged away from selfishness. This argument sees selfishness as a fundamental human attribute (which may have been necessary, for the earlier survival of the species); and the behavioural norms, coercive processes and institutions of society have evolved to keep the selfish impulse in check. Government is impossible unless most citizens exercise self-discipline; it depends on encouraging people to control their own behaviours. From time to time wildness bursts through, and we are forced to do a bit of maintenance on our social processes. The best source I know of, for thinking about violent irrational behaviour, is an absorbing work by Mattijs van de Port, Gypsies, wars and other instances of the wild, which I have referred to previously. To adapt slightly what I wrote then:

‘those of us who try to pronounce on [these events] simply from a position of civilised comfort, seem to do so with pitifully inadequate appreciation of the thirst for sensation, the seduction of chaos, the persistence of the primitive, what van de Port calls 'the choice of irrationality,' the comforting adoption of the barbaric, the suspension of civilisation, 'an affinity with some pre-cultural state,' the impermanence of our own truths and values.’

6. It seems to be the case that many young people were involved in the disturbances. The debate has lacked not only appreciation of wildness but also reference to young people’s need to disrupt things. That is what young people do: get used to it. A responsible society will find ways to help this process take place creatively and without negative consequences – in sporting encounter, in adventure, in semi-formal flexible environments like youth centres, by giving young people space without obsessive surveillance or devious assimilation. What chance is there now that our society’s neurotic control-freakery towards young people can be cured?

7. And so, a week on, we come to the usual strident calls for more responsible parenting and the perennial determination to ‘improve’ or ‘repair’ social connections at neighbourhood level.

About six years ago a bloke called Blair launched a policy initiative around the theme of ‘respect’. I pulled together contributions from some calibre people I happened to know and edited a book called Respect in the neighbourhood, which looked at various aspects of local social relations and civil behaviour. Very few people seem to have taken any notice of it, which I suppose is mildly disappointing, because the questions we addressed keep coming up. What strikes me by way of explanation, is the likelihood that most people think they already know what needs to be known about local social relations. They don’t want telling; especially if the answer isn’t simple.

 

Call me old fashioned, but maybe nostalgia isn't the only problem

Here's a curiosity. Ryan Shorthouse in Prospect magazine has a go at both Philip Blond (Red Toryism) and Maurice Glasman (Blue Labour - you still with me?) for their 'nostalgia for a "golden age" of British communities'. Quite right too. 

[Start of short Kev rant, partly lifted from a forthcoming paper] The contemporary media-political rhetoric is partly problematic because it finds 'community' historically still within reach, through the living-memory images from the nostalgia industry. (I often think we would gain greater insight discussing the assumed decline of neighbourliness in early modern England). Our politicians and journalists invite us to do penance before the curling monochrome prints of streets where doors were always left open and everyone knew everyone. The problem is not that this mythology is entirely misleading – it isn’t, not entirely - but that it is packaged as universally flawless, implicitly recoverable, and key to the resolution of expensive problems of social policy. For politicians and political commentators to peddle this rhetoric uncritically is either ignorant or disingenuous. [Rant ends].

Perversely, Shorthouse ends his article by claiming that market forces and private capital

'could sustain and improve public services that people rely on. Revitalised community life will only really come from improving the skills of individuals: boosting education levels and improving employability, for instance.'

Well, and one or two other things we can all think of. A reliable economy would help, one that is not held to ransom by the Tories' dear friends in the financial sector and rescued at the cost of public services that are used by people who happen to be below their lofty field of vision. Meanwhile we all have to be patient while the current experiment in 'progressive conservatism' demonstrates quite how education levels and employability will be boosted by cutting education funding and closing libraries.

Call me old fashioned, but I too think that it's in society's interests for people to associate more, and more pro-socially, at local level. But we're not likely to achieve that with the current vicious assault on the public realm or by decimating services that people need just to give them the strength to reflect on their own circumstances.

 

The neutering of community development?

It’s fair to say that a vacuum was created by the recent abrupt ending of government funding to the likes of Community Development Foundation, Community Development Exchange, and Urban Forum. From slightly to one side (the usual angle) it appears as if the Big Lottery Fund’s People Powered Change programme is swelling within that vacuum.

People Powered Change is the over-arching theme for Big’s investments in England. It encompasses a range of approaches to support and develop community action. The banner signals an intention to stimulate and facilitate local efforts to improve the quality of life in neighbourhoods, using information and various tools to multiply the benefits of community-based initiatives.

Of course, the government’s hands-off approach is unsurprising. But at a PPC event on Monday I was struck by the picture of Jim Diers and Cormac Russell from Nurture Development, at the door of No.10 Downing Street. I have no doubt that their presentation would have been inspiring and thought-provoking. Jim spoke at an event I co-organised with Shared Intelligence last year: we already know how powerfully he conveys the value and impact of community action.

As I wrote in a piece for the Guardian’s voluntary sector network, Cormac and Jim promote asset based community development (ABCD). This was heavily reinforced at the PPC meeting and it seems to fit sweetly with Big’s approach. So the question is not just whether it is enough for PPC to dominate the vacuum left by the weakening of key funded community development agencies (and to be fair I'm sure Big would welcome more agencies with clout alongside them, in that space); we should also take note that the dominant ethos is a particular brand of CD.

So what? Quite rightly, ABCD places great emphasis on the strengths, skills and resources - the assets - that exist at local level. But to do so, it seems to have to imply that established community development works from a deficit model – over-emphasising the negatives like crime, poor housing, poor health and anti-social behaviour, especially forces external to the neighbourhood. There is a strong sense that, for instance, community action should not be complaining about environmental injustice or the local fallout from a trashed economy and depleted public services. Echoes of ‘moaning minnies’?

I would argue, first, that all decent community development is asset based, not deficit based; and secondly, that there are real dangers in appearing to dismiss those who challenge external negative influences, especially at a time when we do not have strong, influential agencies promoting other CD values like equalities and genuine empowerment. I wrote:

'Good community development practice doesn't over-emphasise disadvantage and injustice; but it isn't seduced into ignoring it, and it also has the robust courage to challenge the causes. In lieu of experienced agencies promoting these values, let's hope they get reflected in the People Powered Change programme.'

I welcome the positive implications of these guys crossing the threshold of No.10 and potentially influencing thinking in there, cos that is needed. But for all the symbolism, it’s not so much a massive moment for social policy as a good time to do some thinking about the way genuine CD - let's call it 'total community development' - could be very effectively hushed.

It’s just possible that government would like to see lots of community action where people do not recognise that some of their problems are externally-determined and are the consequence of unequal and unfair policies. This is how that could come about.

 

Neighbouring in low income neighbourhoods

The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University has published the final report of their study of low income neighbourhoods.

It’s an important body of work, mainly qualitative and thus sitting most obviously alongside Anne Power’s City survivors as a source of stories and quotes.

At the same time, JRF have published a paper prepared by some of the researchers and based on the same study, which looks at current social policies and assesses their potential impact on residents living in the neighbourhoods studied. The paper explores some of the underlying assumptions in the new policy agenda. (Summary here).

It’s a smart move, let’s hope this latter paper has some impact. The key message seems to be this:

There was little evidence in the research of any fault line between ‘cohesive’ and ‘broken’ communities, of places somehow set apart from ‘the rest of us’. Place still matters and, as a rule, neighbourhood mattered most to people where both the economic legacy and future prospects for their community were least favourable.

The authors stress the role of social housing -

neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of social housing often provided households with an island of stability in an ocean of turbulence (not least in the jobs market).

They go on to ask,

what happens to those communities that are facing structural economic weakness but where countervailing systems of mutual support and resilience have also become attenuated over time – those at the end of the economic line – if the opportunities for economic growth lie elsewhere?

As far as neighbouring is concerned, two familiar points are re-confirmed: that neighbouring is not the same as friendship; and not everyone wants to invest in neighbourliness. But there is one pertinent point that is very well-made in the main research report, concerning the extent to which so many people on low-incomes are both time-poor and cash-poor.

This point needs making with research to back it up, because policy too often implies that people in poverty have time on their hands while worthier citizens are busy driving the economy and bringing up more worthy citizens. Lack of time and energy constrains people’s ability to get involved in co-production or civic action or in strengthening their social networks. Here’s one quote that illustrates the way in which this plays out in neighbourhood relations:

No I don’t want to be going round for cups of tea and that kind of thing... I think it’s important to say hello and recognise each other but… there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to socialise with the people I socialise with, family and friends as it is… and it’s just trying to find time to do the laundry and keep the house tidy as well as everything else.

And finally while I remember it, for the record, there’s one point in one of the research papers which doesn’t seem to have made it into the final report, concerning the negative effect of declined neighbourly overtures:

I tried to make friends with these neighbours but they won’t so I left it at that so basically. I don’t know anybody in this street unless somebody dies and ‘oh her name was Mary’ or something… it’s not like you would go out and knock on the neighbour’s door and say ‘hello can I borrow a cup of sugar’. I even started that when I first come over here, I cook and I would take plate of samosas or whatever to the neighbours and so I stopped and I just keep to myself….people keep to themselves, they don’t have the time… I think people are busy, they don’t want to get involved, they don’t want to bother, because I’ve got two neighbours here, they’re both the same, don’t want to know. So I gave up.

I’m reminded of a very similar sense that Toby Gale and I got from talking to refugees and asylum seekers (case study 3) for the Manchester neighbourliness review.

The silencing of the unanswered voice is probably quite prevalent, if we did but know it, and obviously damaging. How might it be countered? Thinking up lots of formal devices like street parties is only a partial solution at best, not just because not everyone is comfortable with them but also because they overplay expectations of neighbouring and try to coerce us into chumminess, whether false or not. So we have to fall back on all the old key drivers like design, occupation of streets, locality of services and amenities, limited churn, and so on. Oh, and neighbourhood online channels of course.

Let there be strong networks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in which I quoted Robert Ellikson’s observation that

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

 

 

The assault on the public

When I was in France recently I was a bit shocked at the prevalence of private beaches, in a country which I had thought took liberté and égalité seriously.

Perhaps it will get as bad in the UK before long. I vaguely recall, but cannot find evidence of, an early Thatcher attempt or threat to sell stretches of the British coastline.

And I've been wondering, what will it take eventually to spark a serious debate about the nature of 'public' in this country?

The government's determined assault on what is public encompasses a scary disinterest in formal care services for vulnerable people; spiteful bullying contempt (especially from here) for local-elected bodies almost by definition; the washing of hands on policy for public libraries; the idea of selling off nature reserves; and the outrageous attempt to sell off publicly-owned woodland.

And we have a London borough apparently serious about charging children to use an adventure playground. That should get rid of the riff-raff. I daresay there are plenty of similar examples, as the Haves seek to drive home their advantage and accentuate what Geoff Mulgan described as the 'evident imbalance between private affluence and public poverty.'

The other day I was in a London square where I was told that you weren't allowed there if you were wearing overalls. Presumably if a worker is needed to fix something, he or she has to be brought in behind screens or under cover of darkness: the leisure of the wealthy should not be spoiled by the risk of catching sight of hoi-polloi. It was, presumably, pseudo-public space - privately owned, the developer having extracted from the local authority pretty much whatever they wanted in return for providing pavements and conditional access. Bless them, the London Assembly recently published a report which

'identifies a number of concerns relating to the shift in the ownership and management of public spaces from local authorities to developers, and recommends solutions.'

But last month's BBC programme about the street without services suggested to me that there is a lot to be done before people will join up the evidence of these various little skirmishes and recognise them as a war. How late is too late?

 

 

Local monitoring of public services

A BBC programme has exposed appalling maltreatment in a care home and led to arrests. It has also led to instant apologies from the public agency funded to monitor service quality and respond to complaints. The Care Quality Commission failed in precisely what it is there for; while the BBC went above and beyond the duty of a public service broadcaster, and not for the first time has done the work of another public agency.

The current model doesn't seem brilliant. Might there be a different future for the public funding of regulation? Inspection and investigation in all kinds of public services requires expertise, of course, and that is not going to change. But as citizens become more media-empowered and can readily feed into the major media providers if necessary, is there a case for more local citizen teams to play a role alongside subject experts in monitoring publicly-funded local services?

To some extent we do this already, for example in policing, but it's usually on a traditional committee-based model, attracting only a certain kind of commitment. I'm thinking of something a bit more likely to involve people from a range of backgrounds, something open and rewarding, like the Young Inspectors programme; and something that can really exploit the inexpensive transparency of local online channels. Just as we are expected as citizens to be available for jury service, should we not also expect to contribute directly to the maintenance of standards in our local services?


 

Student housing and neighbourhoods

Concentrations of students inevitably alter the natural ecology of neighbourhoods, because they contribute to a-typically high rates of churn. In some respects the effect is doubtless beneficial and in others it won't be.

Length of residence, on its own, can be misleading as an indicator of neighbourhood quality of life. But the usual assumption is that people who are not expecting to stay for long in a neighbourhood are generally least likely to invest in relations with their neighbours. The higher the proportion of these 'under-investors,' the more likely that there is a negative effect on neighbourhood quality of life.

If you're a student in this situation, you can over-compensate for the comparatively small capital investment you are making in the locality in all sorts of ways - helping with shopping, baby-sitting, odd-jobs etc for neighbours, and generally being considerate of course. But you have to do so proactively, or live with the perception that you are not 'pulling your weight'. Universities tend to take seriously their relations with their towns and cities, but I'm not aware that they do much to encourage students to consider neighbourhood social relations.

So is it best to let the market dictate, or should councils have policies to minimise the extent to which students in houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) are concentrated in any given area?

Oxford City Council has announced a threshold of 20 per cent of houses in any 100 metre stretch of residential street, for all new houses for student tenants. (They do not have the power to reduce the existing percentage in a street if it's already higher than that). I can't see it catching on, but it will be interesting if it does.

For a theory of the neighbourhood based on economic principles of transaction costs and property rights, see a paper called 'The nature of the neighbourhood' by Chris Webster in Urban studies, December 2003 (subscription).

Webster notes in passing that:

'Owner-occupiers and long-term tenants have an economic incentive to deploy private resources in investments that yield collective neighbourhood benefits. Neighbourhoods characterised by short-term tenancies — such as student quarters, inner-urban high-density rental areas and some types of social housing — require institutional structures that provide incentives to act with restraint in the use of common resources and that encourage investment.'

 

Power and policy

Toby Blume on 'community rights':

"The greatest concern I have about the introduction of the community rights, is also my biggest fear about the whole Big Society agenda... that government seems to have very little concern about how they are taken up by different groups. Despite Big Society’s strong language on ‘placing power in the hands of those who lack it’, there is little evidence to suggest that government wishes to actually do anything about this. If you accept that power is unequal and some groups are less powerful than others (as ‘those who lack it’ suggests), then surely you must take steps to ensure that specific effort is directed to the less powerful. I cannot believe that anyone with a modicum of intellectual capability can assume that this inequality will be addressed simply by giving everybody (the powerful and the non-powerful) the same opportunity and letting them get on with it. That is patently absurd as ‘any fule kno’ (as Molesworth would say), as the powerful are, by definition, better equipped to take advantage."

 

 

What are councils for?

Why do taxpayers invest in services like education which don't help people to understand why taxpayers should invest in services?

Uncritical and uninformed condemnation of the notion of state services funded through taxation is so embedded in our society and heavily reinforced by our media, it comes as a surprise to find even a public sector broadcaster taking steps to redress the balance.

The beeb went to a street in Preston, withdrew council services for six weeks and reimbursed people with their council tax. The programme involved quite a lot of interference, juggling with the logic of relations between different public services, economies of scale, the need for expertise and adherence to the law, and so forth. The result, The street that cut everything, can be seen here for a few more days.

I will pass over the trampled ethics of powerfully invasive forces, like television and all its accoutrements, provoking disagreements between neighbours.

One of the more easy-going of the televised residents observed,'you don't realise how dark it is, do you, when you turn the lights out'. The turning-off of street lights was an eye-opener, you might say. And it helps to keep the metaphors simple. On the whole, what happened was that people came to realise the point of paying for, and the complexity of, public services, some more readily than others. The woman who says at the outset, with regard to her council tax, 'I just can't see any value for money' completely revises her opinion at the end.

Behind that, there were curiosities, like the single mother insisting 'I'm not used to relying on anybody' without acknowledging that the state support she receives might just count.

With creaky logic, although the council 'doesn't exist', the programme makers require residents to invest in other council services by volunteering their time. So we see two neighbours cleaning city centre public toilets with the poignant observation,

"If you wanna use 'em you should be prepared to clean 'em."

And why not? What is to stop us organising a rota so that council money is saved and we all contribute to the maintenance of such an essential public resource? Pragmatic democracy, anyone? The big society theorists may have been missing a trick. Start with the bogs. Has anyone done the arithmetic I wonder? Depending on population obviously, it might be a duty you'd have to carry out a couple of hours in a year. Not quite the same as jury service I know but the idea's there.

John Crace in the Guardian suggests the programme helps to explain why 'the big society is probably a doomed project':

'However much people might talk up their community credentials, when given the financial choice most are only really happy to pay for the services they believe they benefit from directly and not for those they might one day need or are required by the more vulnerable. So a civilised society depends on a state which removes that choice.'

That seems a little cynical to me. The programme summarised a social experiment, and we saw plenty of evidence of mutual support and the recognition that people have differing needs for support at different times of their lives. On the whole it avoided trivialising the issues, which is more than can be said for some of the big society rhetoric.

For me the irony is always that we invest through our taxes in an education system which leaves so few people equipped to reflect on these issues. Wouldn't it be a good idea if we all as citizens emerged from the education system appreciating the reasons for democratic structures used to take decisions on public services?

 

 

Behaviour change, my arse

Well here's a little entertainment. Matthew Taylor, for whom I have enormous respect but who in my opinion is visibly in the wrong place, takes issue with Dave Clements on the Joe Public blog for the way he challenges 'nudge theory' and the whole morally-suspect 'behaviour change' approach promoted by what is still known as the 'government'. He describes Dave's post as a 'predictably tendentious and intellectually second rate contribution'.

Well ok, the post looks a little hurried and not as well under-pinned by supportable assertions as we might like, but hey, it's Joe Public. And all credit to Dave for putting his hand up to challenge the snide 'behaviour change' rhetoric. I'd like to extend the challenge to some of the piffle about 'innovation' that comes out of our tired, wretchedly tired, think tanks.

I really don't care about intellectual rates, whatever they are, and I doubt that Dave does either. What I'd like to hear of is some thinking about what comes after the think-tanks, partly because some of them seem to be running on empty, and partly because as a consequence there's a serious danger of this government doing yet more of its own thinking. How scary is that?

About a year ago, before I took this stab at the lamentable pomposity of the RSA, I wrote that:

'Part of the difficulty is that many London-based suits don't speak to people who have the dirt of estate life under their fingernails, unless for a photoshoot and through an interpreter. They meet together in London events to problematise the issue as 'out there', thus ensuring that they do not see themselves as part of it.

'One of the consequences is that any action to be taken becomes the subject of organisational management (control) rather than local networked response.'

I don't think that's far from the point that Dave Clements is making. Because these policy approaches have too arbitrary or fanciful a connection with the reality of so many people's lives, it's hard for them to be anything but coercive.

I see no sign of this state of affairs improving, and 'behaviour change' and the fashionable rhetoric about getting ordinary people to 'learn to innovate' etc seems to confirm that decline. Perhaps the time is right to hear the regal opinion of Jim Royle: 'innovation my arse'.

Whoops, I think I just slipped a few more places in the intellectual ratings.

What chance of some policy on second homes?

Shelter reminds us that 'there is a drastic shortage of housing in England'. There are approximately 252,000 second homes in England, and 288,000 long term private empty homes. Second homes are largely concentrated in attractive rural and coastal locations (including Cornwall and the south west, Norfolk, and Cumbria) plus the City of London. Beyond this regional trend, they are very much localised, with properties clustered in particular villages or neighbourhoods.

Shelter have published a new policy briefing which notes that evidence is mixed as to the impact that second homes have on local communities and housing markets, but

'Local authorities have limited tools available to mitigate any negative impacts.'

The paper notes that private empty homes could make a contribution to meeting housing need:

However, they are not spatially concentrated in the areas of greatest housing need and local authorities face challenges both in getting empty homes back into use and preventing homes from falling empty.

Among the recommendations:

• Council tax subsidies for empty and second home owners, which reward underuse of stock, should be abolished
• Councils should be allowed to charge higher rates of tax for unused stock and use the revenue raised to fund housing development.

Hands up who expects this government to grab this one with all four hands?

Localism and equalities: dark age ahead

Over recent months I've been party to a few conversations about threats to the equalities and rights agenda posed by public service cuts and the coalition government's apparent enthusiasm for throwing out safeguards.

An example came up just the other day, with Children's Minister Tim Loughton quoted as saying that 'it is a "nonsense" that some carers have to get permission for everyday activities such as haircuts or sleepovers'. Yes but no. In many circumstances it's highly desirable that the parents of a child in care are encouraged to retain responsibility for precisely these kinds of decisions. As a foster carer there are definitely cases in which that is what I would want to happen, in the interests of the child, however awkward it may seem.

Only bureaucrats benefit from excessive regulation, but when you start looking at why some safeguards are in place there are usually minority interests at stake. It's depressing to have a minister of government showing such a nuance-free disregard for the rights and needs of parents.

I got onto this because I've been reflecting on the latest paper from the International Longevity Centre, on localism and neighbourhoods. Authors Dylan Kneale and David Sinclair argue that

'The Localism Bill should include greater safeguards to ensure that the rights of marginalised or minority populations to access a full range of amenities and services locally are protected.'

They go on to call for

'a joined-up approach among bodies representing minority and marginalised groups to research and lobby for changes in the way spending cuts affect marginalised populations.'

I didn't realise that it's well over four years since the ILC published their excellent paper on lifetime neighbourhoods - no less insightful or important now.

The present document is an update to that thinking, in a less sympathetic political context where for example we no longer have CABE to defend and promote good quality design of neighbourhoods, and instead we have the bizarre and nasty government fad of bashing planners and the planning system.

Dark age ahead, as Jane Jacobs foretold.

So remind me, what was the problem with multiculturalism?

I'm a month late getting to it, but am more than happy to draw attention belatedly to this tidy post about multi-culturalism by the dependable Rob Berkeley.

If like me you've been suspicious as to why people of influence have been trying to put the boot into multiculturalism, it's worth a read. Or even if you haven't. As he notes, the term simply means

'the existence and recognition of different identities in a shared political space within a framework of human rights.'

Ah, maybe that's why our leaders don't like it? Doh, it's about power, innit. Berkeley notes:

'Mr Cameron may find that policies that:

    • Remove the poor from housing in affluent areas;

    • Deter students from poorer backgrounds from entering university;

    • Create constituencies that disenfranchise the third of black and Asian people not on the electoral register;

    • Increase youth unemployment (which is already double that of white communities for Pakistani youth); or

    • Increase tension between black and Asian young people and the police

…do not help in creating meaningful or positive contact between people from different backgrounds. Similarly, a patchy commitment to human rights, whether votes for prisoners, detention of children and the suggestion last week from Policy Exchange that we withdraw from the European Convention, cannot help in establishing what core values we expect from each other and our relationship with the state.'

Welfare reform: the impact on neighbourhoods

Via Children and Young People Now, I pick up news that the excellent Child Poverty Action Group is relentlessly fighting the corner. CPAG has launched a legal challenge to the government's controversial welfare and housing benefit reforms.

No-one can really have been surprised that this government came up with measures to segregate, corral and punish the people they despise for being poor. CPAG chief exec Alison Garnham is quoted:

'It is not right that families living in certain areas, especially larger families, are punished and pushed aside while parts of Britain become enclaves for the privileged.

'Children will be forced to move away from schools, friends, neighbourhoods and family. For some this may include moving away from another parent, most often their dad.'

I hope this one doesn't fade quickly: a thorough, well-publicised challenge to expose systematic social injustice will be welcome.

Social networks and informal support: the big shift for policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Informal volunteering continues to decline

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

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

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

This is more like localism: a thousand flowers

I’m not really interested in service-oriented models of localism. A resident’s view of being local tends to look different to that of a service provider. It's curious for example how policy has appropriated the word 'neighbourhood' in the last five years or so, to refer to a locality with typically a population of several thousand inhabitants.

Now suddenly there are programmes of linked officially-approved local initiatives working on an area basis around the country. The Big Local Trust is helping to get things going in an initial tranche of 50 areas. Today NESTA announced sixteen local projects as part of the 'Neighbourhood Challenge' (Yes I know, the language. I expressed some doubts about the attitudes back in October). And in the next few days we should learn a little about how the government’s ‘community organisers’ scheme is to work (previously 5,000 of them: now, er, 500. Well done Dave, what’s a dropped zero here and there?) (Whether such a scheme is needed is another matter of course).

It’s reassuring to think that these projects, legitimated by policy, will bring momentum to the age-old task of articulating localism from a local resident’s perspective.

If we ask what’s new here, I think it’s that ‘bottom-up rhetoric’ – the language of local people taking action over local issues – is legitimated. In this sense some of our leaders are right: the shadow of government has dominated the local ecology and stifled growth.

Now we all have permission to have conversations in policy contexts that acknowledge, even celebrate, the validity of the most local approach. As if no-one had been trying to have such conversations ever before. Now it’s fashionable. Of course, some agencies will continue to try to discredit those voices, out of habit, misunderstanding and addiction to power, but they already sound out of touch.

So what about those localities where people haven’t had a sniff of these funding awards, and where residents haven’t had encouragement from their local authority to test empowerment, or haven’t managed to galvanise enough interest among others around them? What about those places where community groups may not have the resources to access and absorb the lessons from the fortunate funded few?

There will as usual be inflated expectations about how the lessons from these large-scale programmes will be transferred. By all means the experience should be bottled, and disseminated in accessible form. But let’s not adopt a template mentality which implies that success is so readily replicable.

In my experience, the awkward obstacles to community development are usually relationship problems, not about the mechanics of how you do this or that.

Which is why the present culture change is so important. Worthy ambitions to transfer lessons and clone processes from one locality to another won’t be fulfilled. Community development is not carpentry; it's more like nurturing an ecology. Sometimes you need to leave things alone, sometimes you need to root things out or cut them back.

And now that it's legitimate to challenge the dismissive dominant top-down culture, light and air can get through to the smallest shoots, and they may have space to flourish.

 

 

 

Over here: big society. And over here: funding cuts

Here (from about 53 mins) is Philip Blond on R4 last night telling us that big society has to be separated from the public sector cuts agenda:

'they're not related and they come from different places.'

Today we have the leader of Liverpool City Council withdrawing the city's involvement as one of the four national pilot areas for big society schemes, because government cuts have threatened the future of many voluntary organisations, hence jeopardising, entirely predictably, activities carried out under the aegis of big society:

'How can the city council support the big society and its aim to help communities do more for themselves when we will have to cut the lifeline to hundreds of these vital and worthwhile groups?'

In the past week or so I've run two workshops with voluntary sector organisations in a crisis context. These are rugged organisations accustomed to working on the edge, they don't squeal easily; but this crisis is different. And these are people who have put passion, energy, values and skills into developing services for people in need - the kinds of people for whom the government shows contemptuous indifference.

You can try telling them that what they're doing is a crucial, valued part of big society. And/or you can try telling them that no no, the big society ethos (polite coughing) is not at all related to the public sector funding cuts. It's ok, go ahead, you won't get howls of derision or abuse.

They won't take you that seriously. Because the part of big society rhetoric that is meaningful - like the importance of association and 'community' - they already know, they're already familiar with it, most of them are expert at it. The rest is perceived as vacuous and, believe it or not, they're a bit busy right now.

Nor are you likely to hear people suggesting that this government might just be making the effects of the financial crisis considerably worse than is justifiable, and effecting cuts in a vindictive and unequal way. Most spotted that some time ago and are reconciled to it. There's stuff to do. Sorry, the conceptual separation of economics from cultural change will have to wait.

Community and archeaology: streets and people

Here's a sound idea neatly presented, the Streets Museum, tracing lost streets of Salford. Apparently over 1500 streets have been demolished in central Salford in the past fifty years. (Why?)

'We focus on  our lost cultural and architectural heritage, which are intricately related. We gather together fragments of the past, placing them in active spaces of dialogue and encouraging social networking between fragmented families.'

Presumably what this could lead onto is a redefinition of 'lost' and some archiving of the way many streets have changed from being community places to spaces reserved for privatised mobility. And from there, hopefully, to more widespread recognition of the social damage caused by the loss of streets.

But don't expect much soon - remember we have a government that pretends, laughably, that there has been a 'war on motorists' which in brain-free populist mode it wants to 'end'.

Smuggled into the new year blur was this press release announcing the abolition of parking space limits for new homes and guidance encouraging higher parking charges. More evidence of rampant anti-social policy to put the charming rhetoric of big society into perspective.

Eric Pickles, monstrous epitome of the disposable generation

I remember my mother expressing disgust at the amount of unnecessary packaging that came with the shopping she brought home to feed the family. This would have been in the late sixties or early 1970s (I know, not much has improved).

And I recall my dad explaining the concept of built-in obsolescence in manufacture; that would have been some years before. I grew up in a comparatively affluent social system in which people were expected to just throw things away if they were surplus or didn’t work properly. The consequences of disposing of stuff were not something anyone needed to concern themselves with.

The principles here are, first, that the tax-paying citizen has the right to consume whatever they want to if they have legally acquired it, and dispose of it whenever they want (this principle is sometimes called 'america'); and secondly, they have the right to fiercely condemn their council for not going along with this culture in every respect, and cleaning up after them (this principle is sometimes called 'the daily mail').

Now this monstrous culture has grown large, bloated and out of control. How ironic that, as Janet Street-Porter points out, we have a Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government who seems to be obsessed with wheelie bins, at a time when some of us would like him to be pre-occupied with helping to maintain services like elder care, youth work, child care, bus services and libraries:

'Pickles has ordered councils to make huge cuts to balance their budgets. You would hope services that are of particular benefit to the elderly and vulnerable such as mobile libraries, meals on wheels, and home help for the infirm and disabled might be protected. You'd hope that Sure Start nursery centres for the young, which enable lower-income mothers to go out to work, might be ring-fenced. But you'd be wrong – charities say 250 are set to close. In the mad world of Eric Pickles, the wheelie bin is king, more important than library books, local transport and childcare.'

Mr Pickles epitomises a culture which believes that because some parts of the public sector are malfunctioning, they should be thrown away. Apparently the consequences of that wanton and irresponsible disposal are not something he need concern himself with. It’s deeply unfortunate that such a person has any power at all, considering the social damage already being caused. The question is, how soon will the built-in obsolescence in this political approach begin to take effect?

 

A divisive localism

I think I'm not the only commentator who has remained neither inspired nor gobsmacked by the publication of the Localism Bill.

This is partly because so much of it was thoroughly trailed beforehand, and partly because, well, it doesn't seem to be nearly as radical as we had been led to believe. Shades of the Empowerment white paper a few years ago. Perhaps that is why the gloomy news about funding arrangements for local councils was released at the same time.

I will be most curious about CLG's 'barrier-busting' initiative, described as follows:

'Some local authorities want to deliver public services in new ways. Others are keen to do new things, such as invest in small-scale green energy. And volunteers, community groups and social enterprises of many kinds would like to play a bigger role in local life.

But sometimes barriers get in the way. Red tape, rules and regulations stop people putting good ideas into action. Not only is this frustrating – it means that local people miss out.

The barrier busting team is here to help. We want to help you get things done for your local community.'

Of course, you have to go through a few bureaucratic processes to make your case, and rightly so. I'm only going to say this once: don't let me catch you putting in a request to the barrier-busters to bust their own barriers, ok?

Meanwhile, there was more interest in the published information about cuts to local council funding. Ben Toombs over on the RSA Projects blog notes that 'councils with the most deprived residents seem to be facing the deepest cuts precisely because their residents are the least affluent.'

'I think there is plenty to suggest that in practice ... the empowering effect of the Bill will be weakest in the very areas where cuts are to be deepest. If this is the case, the effect of the Bill is likely to be to widen the gap between communities, not narrow it.'

Indeed. So no surprises there either. I may be wrong about the radical impact of the Localism Bill, but I don't think Ben is wrong about the effect of the cuts on those who are least able to deal with them. These cuts are doing what cuts do: they divide.

How the government is encouraging people to get more involved in politics

Some observations on yesterday's news. It's about information, poverty and power.

First, I was struck by the extent to which the government's bullying of the BBC has pushed it to the right. BBC TV coverage of events in Westminster was almost devoid of any attempt to analyse why protestors were angry. The BBC has become afraid to say anything that might upset the authorities. Luckily for them, they had a couple of over-paid celebrities to get excited about. (Incidentally, it obviously wasn't just students, there were other citizens protesting. It suits the establishment to explain the protests as just young people being over-exuberant).

I'm perplexed though at the lack of attention paid to the abandonment of education maintenance allowance (EMA), which is a proven way of supporting young people from low income families who want to stay in education. Secretary of State Vince Cable described EMA as 'enormously wasteful'. Well, it helps poor people with the objective of trying to equalise opportunity, so why would this government want to fund it? The arrogance and complacency seem impregnable. And they're surprised that people are angry.

We don't get many opportunities to be proud to be British (and frankly I don't look for them) but yesterday sort-of counts. While Wikileaks has left most of America apparently supine in acceptance of the arrogant stupidity of its bullying powermongers, in London people have come out and shown the politicians and authorities that their stupidity is unacceptable. I use the word 'unacceptable' because the Haves have been queuing up to use that word with reference to yesterday's street performances. And I use the word 'stupidity' with reference to leaders in the US and UK who have completely failed to grasp the role of new communications media in these confrontations. It's laughable how the establishment feels that the old hierarchies built on hierarchical communication systems (most obviously the bible and the pulpit, but by extension the analog divide generally) can still be depended on to keep people in their places.

Yes, the old question 'why do we have such stupid people in power?' applies as forcefully as ever, but it's gratifying that ethical hacking globally, and the use of google maps to outwit the police in central London, are exposing the powermongers' attempts to deny social justice.

One of the tenets of community development is that nothing succeeds like adversity, and this is shown to apply at the national scale. Sometimes in community development we are disappointed at people's reluctance to get worked up about things; sometimes we are taken by surprise at the vehemence of the response. I count myself among those who have been surprised, and refreshed, at the sudden and fierce discovery of readiness to take political action. It has value which is increasing in proportion to the declining credibility of those in government.

 

'Local solutions to local problems'?

Weather's turning cold, time for a precautionary draught of Kev's Traditional Grumpy Old Cynicism.

Among the happy-clappy mantras trotted out so readily in the present policy context is this one: 'local solutions to local problems'. As with 'there is no money' and 'we're all in this together', all a politician has to do is regurgitate this and shake a few hands, and apparently-intelligent beings fold away like reeds before the prow.

I observe that a lot of poverty that can be witnessed today is experienced as a local problem, well it would be wouldn't it, to which people are not able to find a local solution. Cos there's this thing called the economy, and it doesn't simply operate at the local level.

Or you might not like to think about poverty, so let's take transport. Major roads affect traffic flows indirectly causing damage in local areas, which sometimes local people are powerless to do much about. There may be a regional solution, but often not a local one. And so on.

It's not a new observation, even on this blog. Five years ago I posted some thoughts on neighbourhood governance after a meeting at which the point was made that residents in a given locality have to be able to intervene at levels other than their own. And I noted that people were uncomfortable with the requirement to have neighbourhood boundaries defined in order to ensure representation and therefore accountability.

Well well, plus ca change. The recent Local growth white paper includes the idea for 'neighbourhood plans' - around boundaries that the government doesn't want to have the responsibility for deciding. Here at para 3.9 is the stated intention of

giving every neighbourhood the chance to shape its own development through the creation of neighbourhood plans, which will give local communities greater flexibility and the freedom to bring forward more development than set out in the local authority plan.

'The freedom to bring forward more development'? Who are these people comprising 'neighbourhoods' who are so determined to surround themselves with more development? Could there be a connection with this point made by Domenic Donatantonio on the Planning blog? -

in a bid to scythe through red tape, the government has said it will provide incentives to ensure that local communities benefit from development, raising the dangerous spectre of cash payments to buy off frustrated neighbours.

And here's Huw Morris on Planning daily in the second of two provocative articles (the previous one is here):

For planners, the big number from the big society will come with the onset of neighbourhood plans. The final bill for these as yet unproven tools depends on the size and shape of each authority.

However, the cost of producing each neighbourhood plan is likely to be at least £30,000, while some commentators put it at closer to £80,000. Another estimate puts the number of rural and urban neighbourhoods affected by the localism bill at 18,000.

Even on the most conservative estimates, this suggests £540 million will be needed to secure national coverage. At a stroke, planning could be transformed from an income stream into a big spending service.

If such figures are plucked out of the air, this is inevitable. The government has failed to offer any kind of cost-benefit analysis of its proposals. However worthy the principles and visions of a particular policy, such a lacuna in an age of austerity is staggering. It is just the type of oversight that leads to unintended and damaging consequences.

I submit that there's been some naive policy thinking which will lead to tears. It's not helped by thinking of 'communities' as some kind of 'here's-one-I-prepared-earlier' consensus, nor by pretending that local problems are necessarily going to have local solutions.

To me, it makes sense to invest in community development that is geared to helping people work towards consensus in decision-making contexts in the respected and respectful company of professionals; and also to equalise genuine participation, co-design and co-delivery through the area and regional forums that will remain necessary in order for people to have a say in decisions on a wider geographical scale than the neighbourhood.

 

Philanthropy, community action and 'economic activity'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Butler warned yesterday of the possibility that before too long

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

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

 

Big soc, good soc?

I took part in a debate, ‘Is the big society the good society?’ yesterday at the Battle of Ideas, alongside Councillor Steve Reed and Jim Panton.

 
Here’s a tidied up summary of what I said.

I see big society as a brand, which wraps together some general motherhood-and-apple-pie progressive ideas about the citizen and state with which few of us would disagree. I don’t imply that it’s empty or necessarily misleading or corrupt. I think it’s a smart piece of idea-management and I’m curious as to how Labour party thinkers are feeling, since they had most of the components – including smaller state, according to one persuasive view yesterday - but failed to put them together into a package.

The key effect of the branding process is to have got people talking about broad cultural change in a positive way. There’s a great deal to be said for that, although the debate has probably not been as extensive beyond Westminster as those within shouting distance might like to believe.

I offered some quick points by way of critique, beginning by referring to the point quoted by Will Davies that we live in a society ‘in which massive gains are privatised and massive losses are socialised’. The financial crisis illustrates why this is so stupid. Big society doesn't even address it.

Much of what is described in big society rhetoric implies consensus within localities by use of the C word. It’s as if the country is parcelled into neatly delimited neighbourhoods, populated by like-minded people who are ready to reach agreement on what needs to be done, and who have the time and energy to get on and do it. It’s not healthy that we have politicians who are so ready to elide the realities of life at local level that they see ‘communities’ as unified structures, there to be consulted and acted upon. It’s patronising to people to expect or require them all to think and act alike. (I’m indebted here to Jeremy Brent).

I like the idea that big society is not about trying to do more with less, it’s about doing more with more – the extra energy resulting from galvanising civic involvement. That’s powerful and it's what community development does.

So will this new civic energy be evenly distributed? No. Some localities will continue to experience a shortfall. Do we have the strategies for dealing with that unevenness? Not as far as I’m aware. Is it even recognised at policy level? Not as far as I’m aware.

Again, within localities, the distribution of civic power and the new influence over resources will be uneven. Because communities are not cohesive units constructed for the convenience of politicians, sense of community in a given place tends to be dominated by some groups to the exclusion of others – adults denying space and audience to young people being the classic example. That phenomenon is likely to be accentuated under big society.

I offered a few thoughts about the proposed army of 5,000 community organisers - the leading of the five thousand as I call it. I suggested a few days ago that the notion of community organising under big society is going to be pretty much value-free. That bothers me a little. The values that underpin community development aren't just chantable mantras: you have to live and breathe them or you will be found out, I promise you.

Big society presents new permissions in citizens’ relations with local government. It seems to give residents explicit permission to bash council officers for not doing what they want them to do; but it also gives officers permission to say, ‘well ok if that’s what you want, go do it yourself’.

My view (expressed previously) is that ‘rolling back the state’ polarises those for whom it will be alright and those for whom it won’t be. Those who experience exclusion start with no options. I think it is false to imply that by making the state smaller you will automatically reveal a big society.

Everyone will have examples of community sector initiatives under threat. I offered an example of a local resource centre I know which has a reputation for the work it does far beyond the town it serves. They receive a grant of £8k from the council, and like a lot of such grant recipients they get bullied in subtle or overt ways by their council. Because they’re smart with SROI, they can show that they generate £86k of services. I’d take that, wouldn’t you? They are now being faced with a 50% or 100% cut in their grant.

So what I want to ask is this: how are people expected to react as they see their own community sector initiatives, developed over years of unrecognised and unrewarded effort, with lessons absorbed, experience shared and efficiencies gained - initiatives which apparently are consistent with big society principles - being wiped out by public sector funding cuts?

I fear we are going to see a stark division between those localities where new civic energy is going to emerge, and those where people are exhausted and energy is depleted. No prizes for guessing the class divide that represents.

 

Big - but not society

Does Small State seem any clearer after the Spending Review?

This article by Anushka Asthana and Toby Helm, in yesterday's Observer has sharpened the focus on one particular point, which is that a key political sleight has been to get working class people to condemn the workless poor. With the notion of hoi polloi solidarity now exploded (not with a bang but a whimper), the Haves can sit down and tuck in without fear of interruption from the rabble at their gates.

In truth this process has surely been gathering for decades, thanks in no small part to the decimation of trade unionism and the influence of a shameless press; but what the economic crisis has done is to give it a perverse logical justification. The authors note:

'polls suggested substantial support for the assault on benefits. Focus groups had told the chancellor they wanted welfare not cut but shredded.'

And they quote the chief exec of one homeless charity:

'People have looked down on those out of work for a long time. So when you ask them what to cut – police? They say no. Schools? No. NHS? No. The armed services? No – but welfare, who is going to lobby for that?'

And so it comes down to povertyism, the fact that for some reason many people despise those who are poor, seek excuses for their negative attitude towards them, and support policies that punish people for being in poverty. Some of our media and some of our politicians do the rest, with distasteful zeal.

The brand managers are working away at Big Society. Big it may be, but it doesn't look like it will be representative of an inclusive society.

Rural areas: small state, big needs

The other day the Commission for Rural Communities published a report on 'the economic conditions for organisations contributing to the Big Society in rural England'. It tries to say nice things about Big Society, although the previous day the government had announced that the CRC is being abolished anyway. Can't have been easy finalising the text with that news looming.

The report makes clear that conditions in some marginalised rural localities are not expected to get any better in the foreseeable. Respondents in the study on which it is based said that, among other things, they would like

The government to understand that the Big Society, although cost efficient, is not cost free and that some communities do not have the capacity to get involved. Ongoing and long term funding as well as professional support is still needed to carry on delivering their services and taking on additional responsibilities.

Here's a sample comment from within the report illustrating how economices of scale could impact (from Remploy, another state-funded agency, whose future is apparently still 'under consideration'):

'As contracts are cancelled and niche programmes disappear the economics of high volume delivery do not lend themselves to specific delivery within the rural communities... Rural communities are deemed the areas of acceptable attrition as the funding cuts bite and providers are asked to deliver more volume outcomes for less.'

A historical moment for community development?

So today it has been announced that Community Development Foundation 'will cease to operate as a public body as of 31st March 2011.' It will continue as a charity. There have doubtless been numerous discussions of the news in a context that acknowledges, first, that CDF had become primarily an agency for disbursing government funds, and their market collapsed; and secondly that in focusing on that role the organisation quickly lost its claim in many people's eyes to be an expert CD agency.

I received the news electronically while sat in a Big Lottery meeting about community organising - ironically, in groupwork discussing communication issues in relation to community organising. I was only able to attend a couple of hours of the meeting but some thoughts struck me then about the nature of this historical moment for CD.

The moment is partly defined by being a few days away from a hugely influential government spending review; partly by the rhetoric of Big Society and its call for millions of people to plunge joyfully into enticing, tranquil pools of community action - hopefully not discovering that there are vicious political eddies and currents, and corrosive contamination beneath the surface, god forbid; and partly by the unfinished business of the empowerment of local groups in determining what happens on their patch.

Today Big Lottery brought together some expertise and experience with a view to informing their future funding programmes. I found three related things to bother me.

First, one speaker, explaining her part as an externally-funded, imported 'community champion', said that her role included challenging 'the negative attitudes of doubters and spoilers'. Meaning, I fear, this: if someone externally appointed comes into your neighbourhood and drives a programme of action with high expectations that you will go along with it, and you choose to raise concerns about the process, then your response is unwelcome and you are likely to be labelled as a doubter or spoiler at best and ungovernable at worst. The process will ride over you AND it will still be called community development. (I may have wrongly interpreted this specific case but it's hardly unheard-of). The easy dismissal of counter views can be very disempowering.

Secondly, I'm bothered about the coercion of people in the community development process. The morality of coercion is not trivial and must be acknlowledged. One of the best community workers I ever met admitted yes, we do coerce people. Because life is short, and you make a judgement about what would be in their best interests, and there isn't always time to wait for them and work with them to appreciate the options...

There is a flurry of urgent interest in community organising to compensate for an economy that has failed its public sector; and we risk losing our appreciation of the nuances of how and on what terms people decide to get involved. We risk finding ourselves in a value-free zone of community action which discourages contestation of issues.

And finally - very briefly cos I feel like a broken record on this - persistent repetition of the C word does not mean that a bunch of people who happen to live in the same area necessarily constitute a 'community', nor should the unreflective use of that word be allowed to imply consensus without challenge. Enough on that.

Government is encouraging community development but has stopped funding what was previously its expert CD agency. The meaning of this moment may turn out to be that community development must come of age, by insisting on its values, being honest about the difficult nuances required when encouraging local people to participate, and not denying the realities of conflict and disagreement.

 

The first aid approach to community safety: views of a tourist in wonkdom

Ben Rogers in yesterday's Guardian:

'Strengthening civility and neighbourhoods is important, but the police have only a minor role to play. Other things – the way places are designed, traffic is managed and the public realm is maintained; the character of shops and local public services, the provision of activities for young people – are just as important as anything the police can do.'

(Most of these and more were covered in Respect in the neighbourhood)

'Some figures have a particularly important role to play in maintaining local social order – park keepers, estate managers, shop keepers. But the capacity of a community or neighbourhood as a whole to help police itself is also crucial.'

The role played here by citzen-run neighbourhood websites should not be missed: our research suggests that where they exist they are greatly valued residents and agencies for the way they facilitate the maintenance of local order. He then goes on to talk about a first aid approach to community safety -

'training people beyond the police to deal with antisocial behaviour... People can be taught how to read a situation so they know when it is appropriate and safe to intervene, and when to call the police. They can be shown how to protect themselves and others from attack. And they can be given mediation and conflict resolution skills. As with first aid, this training should be available to anyone who wants it.'

It's the next step in the logic of co-production. I can see benefits and attractions. But it would be the next step in the formalisation of informal neighbourhood life: like Neighbourhood Watch, it's formalising relations on a basis of distrust, rather than trust.

Starting from trust of course is far harder. As some of the comments insist, there needs to be a better appreciation shown for the realities of living with the threat of the kind of anti-social behaviour that does require policing. Rogers leaves himself wide open to exactly this kind of reponse:

'Can someone arrange for the author to leave cloud-cuckoo land or whichever magical land of dreams he inhabits and demonstrate his idea on one of our estates? The last time I saw some yobs dismantling a bus shelter they had an overexcited pit bull with them. As I didn't know dogspeak for 'Calm down bro. Let's talk through the issues', I left them too it.'

Or this:

'We need proper policing to deal with louts, and not some Big Society codswallop.'

I know what Ben is trying to say, but that comment resonates with me because I have a strong sense of what people experience and their desperation at ever getting a response from policy. It's not good enough to say that ASB is not out of control, because the same people go on experiencing it and have done for a very long time.

'Not out of control' reads 'hasn't yet spread to middle class areas'.

The intention behind the first aid approach to community safety is to address lower level incivility; but there's a real problem in distinguishing unstable behaviour that might be just boisterousness, but could tip unpredictably in an instant into drug-fed random violence.

After 20 odd years (some of them very odd) on the fringes of Westminster and working with people from various think-tanks, still feeling like a tourist in wonkdom, I'm convinced of this: sometimes it doesn't matter how good the idea is, what you don't do is publish it in the Guardian saying 'here's a policy suggestion: we could try doing this to people'.

 

 

How bad will it get before people get really angry?

A man known as the deputy prime minister, which you'd have thought was a responsible job calling for intelligence, a sense of perspective and the ability to reflect in a balanced way on important issues, has been quoted as saying that it is not the role of the state "to compensate the poor for their predicament".

I feel chilled. The further these people go with their superior, complacent and condescending attitudes, the nearer we get to something very confrontational and potentially violent.

Minister helps to create safe, tolerant and inclusive communities

We have a Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who leads a team of ministers with the following responsibilities:

• creating safe, tolerant and inclusive communities
• building better homes and neighbourhoods
• promoting strong and accountable local government
• improving local services and environment
• regenerating and investing in our towns, cities and regions.

The Planning blog has an entertaining slant on Mr Pickles's splendid achievements since coming to office, including of course the crucial identification of the need for a portrait of the queen at CLG headquarters and the crowd-pleasing requirement to have English county flags displayed outside the building.

Among the comments, this one will hardly seem eccentric:

'I’m trying to give this government a chance but I’m running out of patience. Why is this pickled egg arsing about with flags and pictures of the queen!!??'

Well all politicians get a little flak from time to time. What worries me is that he's probably doing his best.

You are not obliged to say anything

According to the Guardian the president of the Police Superintendents' Association is to tell ministers that police should be protected from public sector cuts because otherwise how can they ensure protection from civil unrest that arises from social and industrial tension?

Ensure protection for whom, exactly? The way the coalition is behaving, there won't be too many folk to protect against the mounting outrage. (Just as an aside, I spoke to a council worker today who had been told that their right to claim travel costs between council sites, which currently she manages judiciously by bus and train, is to be wiped out. So from now on it's 'I'm walking, I'll be about three and a half hours'. There's efficiency for you. The interesting question is, how much of this sort of treatment will people take? Will public sector workers soon have to pay for telephone calls and office furniture? Then the electricity, water and so on? The buildings? Should this principle be applied to members of parliament perhaps? No it shouldn't, it's nonsense).

Of course the police are there to protect our leaders, we mustn't forget that. But as one comment to the Guardian article notes,

'They can always get the army in to beat up the police if they protest.'

The police protesting is an entertaining prospect, and it may not all be posturing and positioning. Because we don't like to get excited in this country, this could all take a little time. We don't do rebellion, certainly not revolution; but we can get quite cross sometimes. Keep your eye on the few months leading up to the 2012 Olympics.

Equality and saving

I feel gloomy about the future of equalities in the UK. In recent months I've heard several stories of distorted job recruitment processes which suggest that much of the hard work done in the eighties and nineties to equalise opportunity in our society might now be vulnerable to selfish value-free indifference.

But given that having money is now such a dominant motif in so much private and public conversation, it makes sense to pay some attention to poverty and the notion of saving. Assets matter: the wealthiest half of households holds 91 per cent of the UK’s total wealth, while the other half has the remaining 9 per cent. That's not healthy. I learned this from a new report from ResPublica on 'creating a new civic savings platform for young people'.

This issue is a bit like Big Society: I can see it makes sense to talk about encouraging a culture of sensible saving for people in poverty (just as it's reassuring to hear that government recognises the importance of local community action); but wouldn't it have helped if those in positions of power had demonstrated some competence in financial management themselves (just as it would have helped if they'd had some kind of track record in appreciating local efforts at co-production)? A refreshingly sharp reflection on the mess our leaders have got us in comes from Karel Williams, via Will Davies:

'Any society in which massive gains are privatised and massive losses are socialised is one which is suffering from a problem of predatory elites.'

Here's how the ResPublica report's authors, Phillip Blond and Sandra Gruescu, present the argument:

'Too many Britons are trapped in a world of welfare and low wages, where owning little, they can change even less. And with minimal prospect of advancement for them or their children, it often appears as if we are creating and expanding a new servile class progressively and aggressively cut off from the world of assets and opportunity. These are the conditions that incubate the debt disease that has captured our culture (both public and private) and allowed our citizens to mortgage their futures and make fictional all their hopes and aspirations.

'Without assets, opportunity seldom knocks – wealth is what allows people to access opportunity and to advance up the social ladder. Locking people out of wealth and access to assets condemns them to debt serfdom where they must borrow to make ends meet and where futures are consumed by the demands of the present. If we are to create a genuinely free and fair society, then the language of equality and opportunity has to be matched by some chance of economic equity and some way that ordinary people can build a real stake in the world.'

 

 

Bigging-up the local

Public sector funding cuts and the Big Society rhetoric, taken together as they must be, seem to be about weakening local government while strengthening citizen involvement and influence in the resulting vacuum.

Is it the expectation that most of the increased involvement and co-production will happen at local authority level rather than at neighbourhood level? I’m not sure we know enough about the differences, but it’s fair to say that a huge amount of informal co-production has always gone on at neighbourhood level, overlooked by and sometimes in spite of government policy.

Once within the local authority area, it’s curious how policy doesn’t seem to have much purchase, the closer it gets to your home. I’m referring to what I tend to call the neighbourhood (in my case just fourteen units): sometimes called the micro-neighbourhood, or in the seminal Shaping neighbourhoods by Hugh Barton and colleagues, the ‘home patch’ (population 20-200).

I have no idea whether that will change in the months and years after the forthcoming Localism Bill, but don’t be surprised if this is where a lot of harsh skirmishes get fought out and where the weak will be abandoned. As public services begin to wither, localities will start to vary enormously according to the amount of self-investment they manage to mobilise. This will be a real challenge for the ways in which we address inequalities.

There are no clues in the CLG ‘structural reform plan’ as to the varied nature of ‘local’. Under the objective ‘Make localism and the Big Society part of everyday life – by increasing accountability’ (para 4.5) the government plan mentions promoting power to ‘community groups’. But unfortunately the subheadings make no further mention of such groups. [Pity the busy officials, we don’t know how many, at their desks, drafting away. Dang, what did I do with those community groups? Dunno, they were there a moment ago. Oh well]. Community groups tend to take their justification from the larger neighbourhood or district, and have impact at the most local level, so it maybe matters that they are kept in the equation.

Traditionally of course, policy works at a scale where its impact is at the wider area level – through transport, policing, planning, health services, environmental services and so on. These services are then expected to reach down into the neighbourhood, and of course some do, to great effect, or they interact with community sector agencies which do so. But often they fail to get near. Will the new localism manage to get closer?

Some of the language can be deceptive. Take ‘safer neighbourhood teams’, part of the extended happy family of policing. While the officers are active in various neighbourhoods they may not come from any of them, and have to work at establishing connections with residents. Or take the misnomer of ‘primary care’. I think it was Marilyn Waring who countered that most primary care is delivered by mothers in the home. I would argue that most primary care is delivered by individuals to themselves or their families. For sure, there is a consistently identifiable level of health care – including community nursing - which comes before the level where we travel 2.5 miles to the nearest clinic.

So the new politics of Small State requires a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes the local. We could start with a better appreciation of the levels and kinds of co-production that take place within the micro-neighbourhood, the better to be able to compensate for the partial disintegration of wider ‘neighbourhood’ services.

As an aside concerning what happens at the most local level, where residents construct much of the narrative of their everyday lives - I’ve just read an interesting paper by John Hipp (Social networks, 32, 2010) on how social distance between residents in the nearest ten units affects perceptions of disorder. His study suggests that

‘it is micro-neighborhoods with two cohesive subgroups containing minimal social distance within them and a large amount of social distance between them [that] have the lowest level of commonly perceived social disorder.’

If nothing else, this highlights the fact that not only are neighbourhoods not as cohesive as policy would like them to be, they probably function better not being too cohesive (residents being better equipped to foster weak ties with the broader neighbourhood). Policy needs to get away from the lazy equation of ‘community’ with local authority area or sub-district: the Localism Bill would seem to be a good time to do some of the necessary thinking.

 

We’re not all in this together

I’ve been thinking about Big Society as a cluster of three overlapping themes: smaller state, localism, and co-production.

For me localism means the celebration of local assets and a concern for local solutions to local problems. It should not mean abandoning local people to regional or national problems – such as a shortage of affordable housing for example.

From the community development perspective, the emphasis on localism and co-production are overdue and more than welcome. The only theme that’s problematic is the first one, ‘smaller state’. To outsiders, CD sometimes shifts in a slippery way between an emphasis on self-help or mutual aid on the one hand, and insistence on state services to support those most in need on the other; so maybe it’s not surprising that there has not been a coherent response. Of course, it isn’t a question of shifting: both are needed.

Unfortunately, ‘rolling back the state’ polarises those for whom it will be alright and those for whom it won’t be. People who experience exclusion start with no options. In recent weeks the Rollers Back have shown that their understanding of this may be in need of rolling forwards.

And the danger for the folk behind BS is in implying that by making the state smaller you will automatically reveal a big society that was there all along. In many places that surely is the case: but not everywhere, and the least they can do is show some human recognition that that is the case. Some people – far more I suspect than our policymakers seem ready to believe - still lack a Small Society and will be the more vulnerable without organised support.

Last week a social worker told me that in his office the staffing level was 50% before cuts and their pay has been frozen.

In the context of savage cuts to public sector spending it’s politically convenient to imply that ‘we’re all in this together’. That’s just devious. We’re not all in this together. Some are poncing about with Pimms on the upper deck while some are clinging desperately to the sides, and many detached are screaming from the rising waters. Responsible politicians would acknowledge that, then do something about it.

Little moral pillowfight

Last week's BBC R4 Moral Maze programme on Big Society featured a kind of moral pillow fight with Michael Portillo, Melanie Philips, Matthew Taylor, and Claire Fox trying to score points without choking on clouds of intellectual feathers.

Community activist Silla Carron was given the chance to set the scene and did so with a welcome unpretentiousness. But Big Soc is an unwieldy cluster of concepts and the conversation was bounced from all directions with issues like welfare dependency and the crowding out hypothesis, the perceived failure of redistributive policies, class-differences in volunteering, and so on.

Claire Fox's concern that the state might be micro-managing us made it seem like she was lashing out with the left while coshing herself with the right. Her interpretation of Big Society is that it means the state setting up baby-sitting networks and telling us to organise street parties - 'somebody else organising us to be neighbourly'.

One of the witnesses, Mark Littlewood, was concerned that BS does not go far enough in 'getting away from the idea that the state bestows on us;' but Nick Pearce was 'sceptical of the claim that if the state is strong, communities are weak.' You'd expect Phillip Blond to be a formidable opponent in this arena. He noted that the state as provider is a bankrupt model and argued for economic decentralisation and 'budgetary capturing for the poor'; but the soft furnishing was mostly thrashed about elsewhere. All good clean fun though you can be sure.

Mathew Taylor pointed out that we are not all equally able to contribute to this new moral culture, and argued gently that 'voluntary efforts work best when you have an effective state'. He too dodged most of the buffeting. Portillo meanwhile appeared to try and clobber everyone with some kind of intellectual mattress whose weight he seemed unable to lift until, at the end, he brought the house down by referring to Margaret Thatcher as a guru. This was even more unworthy than hearing Melanie Phillips matronise us thus: 'there are people who are not religious who are good people.' Why that's so wise and reassuring ma'am.

Thanks to Ben Lee for the headsup.

Overselling Big Society

What Big Society needs at this stage is quiet accumulation. It definitely didn't need over-earnest overselling, but these folk don't do subtlety. Not smart. Thanks to my old friend Martin for drawing my attention to these suggestions for David Cameron as he stomps on the foot-pump at the Flat Tyre of Society, including:

'What with all the wossnames of the modern world and that, and what with me now apparently having to stay on at work until at least six months after I actually die of old age, Time is definately a factor here...

'...stop passing the responsibility onto us, and keep it for yourself - after all, a few people all said that you can have it earlier this year. It was May. I know that for an actual fact 'cos I saw it on the telly. Stop pretending it's the blitz at that we should all just jolly well roll our sleeves up an muck in, there's a good chap. I mean - yes, say hullo to the neighbours and don't actually spit at anyone, but - I've got to teach geography or something at a hand-made school now, have I?'

Nudging neighbouring from research towards policy

Friday saw the launch of Gumtree's research into the 'state of neighbourhoods,' carried out by Fresh Minds and trailed here. I'm told that the data will be made available and when anything comes up I'll point to it. The NANM's Ben Lee chaired a small gathering of a fascinating mix of invitees, for a wide-ranging discussion about the implications of the findings, how they shape up alongside other knowledge, and what contribution can be made by a company like Gumtree.

To recap briefly on the context: the well-publicised recent Co-Ops research claimed a substantial decline in neighbourliness in the UK over the past 28 years. The Gumtree study seems to challenge that: 59 per cent of their respondents said that they had 'tried to be more neighbourly' in the last 18 months.

I don't think I care particularly if neighbourliness has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same, unless that means something. Logically I'd expect it to have gone down a little (if measured using some base index that would have to be a few decades old) until about 18 months ago, when we began to hear echoes of new (or rather refreshed) social values in response to climate change, the recognised shambles of Thatcherism, and the exposed hollow morality of small clusters of bankers and of members of parliament.

I'm more interested in understanding historical changes in what we expect neighbourhood relations to do for us (hence my questioning of the usefulness of an outdated base definition). For instance, increasingly more of us satisfy more of our emotional and communicative needs remotely, using technologies; and at the same time, many more of us are living in single-person households, so there are fewer causes of connection with neighbours than there might have been previously, and we need to put more thought into devices which allow appropriate encounters. This doesn't mean neighbouring has to be formalised in any sense: attempts to do that, eg through 'good neighbour' agreements, are going to have limited impact at best. So what is the role for policy?

Neighbouring matters to policy because the neighbourhood is the default environment for socialisation; it's still the locus of response to urgent need for many situations and for mobilisation against perceived local threats; and it's a natural nursery for the development of prosocial behaviour. If people don't learn and practice civil behaviour and respect in their immediate surroundings, it's that much harder to accomplish elsewhere.

But policy struggles to do more than declaim against the perceived absence of neighbourliness - meaning, negative social phenomena perceived to be in part the consequence of weak and fractured local connections. Policy neither recognises the contribution that neighbouring makes as a platform for collaborative behaviour, nor finds ways to stimulate it. The vague sense resonating in policy over the past ten years and now in Big Society, that there's something important about the local context, is still way out of focus. For example, policy does little to counter planning and transport decisions and behaviours that are anti-neighbourly; or to strengthen the localness of schools in ways that might help to provide young people with local friendships and obviate the need for backseat lifestyles.

The main message from the Gumtree study is that people want to be more neighbourly: the researchers point to a clear 'appetite for deeper connections'. There seems to be a latent interest in being prosocial, which could be turned into momentum if we can contrive the right sort of policy nudge.

Among the key points discussed at the debate on Friday were these four which I feel are well worth capturing:

• why is it often seen as unusual to take an interest in one's locality? (Is this just the historical knock-on of reinforced gender divisions, whereby parenting, housework and neighbouring were socially designated as so unimportant that only women could be expected to do them, and what men did in distance offices was far more important? Or is there something more to this, to do with physical mobility and territory, the use of cars and our reluctance to occupy our neighbourhoods?)
• how do we stimulate neighbourly support for older people to help them to age in place? (Plenty on this blog on this theme already)
• how do we make neighbourhoods more neighbourly for young people?
• the overlap between formal civic involvement (like being on a decision-making committee) and informal connectedness at neighbourhood level (people who are good at looking out for others) is often weak; so initiatives to encourage neighbouring probably need to be thought-through quite separately from programmes to stimulate volunteering (without ignoring common lessons of course).

The Big Nudge: can it accommodate awkwardness?

Yesterday I shuffled from a meeting with someone working on Big Society, to an event about how to get citizens involved in public policy. This latter was the launch of findings from the 'Rediscovering the civic' project run by the universities of Southampton and Manchester, known as 'nudge-nudge, think-think' because of the experiments exploring the effect of policies which 'nudge' people into prosocial behaviour, and those which encourage people to think through the issues in the hope of prosocial consequences.

Inevitably, set in the heart of Whitehall with an array of learned speakers, the debate was at a high level of generality while acknowledging the significance of the political moment. Combined with the preceding meeting, it's helped to clarify for me quite where Big Soc fits and what it might mean.

First, the suspicion that the thinking behind Big Society has been based on a shallow appreciation of the realities of the community sector have been confirmed. That can be remedied, perhaps is being remedied (well, they invited me along for a chat!).

Second, we are all starting to see more clearly where it has come from, historically. Take these two quotes, via former Blair advisers, which are going the rounds:

(i) Matthew Taylor referring I believe to a Norwegian journalist who pointed out that Labour's failure was a failure of public mobilisation, having campaigns like child poverty that should have been public campaigns which they turned into technocratic exercises. Can't argue with that. (You can? Go on then).

(ii) Attributed to David Halpern, something like this - 'we're not trying to do more with less. We're trying to do more with more, and that comes from the social fabric'. I've heard this discussion elsewhere, when people say the Big Soc is just what we were trying to do before... Yes, at local level it can certainly look like that. But wouldn't it have helped if new Labour managerialism, and all the arrogance of previous administrations (not that much different), had been supportive instead of so often obstructive and (to pick up a point made by Sue Goss yesterday) infantilising? To put it another way, did previous administrations culturally stifle public involvement? To me these are little insights which can help measure the change to a new context.

Third, insights from Phillip Blond of ResPublica, revealing the centrality of nudge to Big Society. He said that nudge is a modern way of referring to tradition or tacit knowledge, which has become derided and devalued in recent decades.

'Tradition is already a pre-selection of how we should live. Nudge is about group behaviour.'

For Blond, it seems that the Big Society is about restoring the public value of tradition, of accepted shared forms of collective life. Neither De Tocqueville nor Putnam got mentioned, which I suspect is a good thing: whatever is being invented here, it's more than US-style bowling together, because of the political niceties.

Still, association is key in Blond's view:

'There's almost no context in which association is not part of the determinative answer. And yet we do not have the conceptual architecture to make association desirable, to help it happen.'

Don't we? He spoke about making this happen around the issues that people care about 'in their communities', proceeding to an immaculate if not quite intentional definition of community development, without mentioning 'community development'.

But, fourthly, Michael Saward challenged Blond's 'unitarian' interpretation of good citizenship as uncontroversial and universally accepted. That may be unfair, I can't say, but it gets back to a central problem for the Big Society which Saward himself had raised at the outset of yesterday's discussion:

'Will awkward citizens be welcome in the Big Society?'

I've raised this question here in a different way myself: what does BS mean for the local activist who is moved to confront social injustice, not just for the cakestall mafia? When street reps in Shipley talk to me about the tensions between being a 'good citizen' (reporting disorder, keeping an eye out for drug drops, liaising with agencies etc) and campaigning to become empowered and overcome inequalities (activism in the local political arena), it feels like Big Society is not ready to provide the frameworks for that activism, to accommodate awkwardness.

Yesterday's material helps me visualise Big Society as one big nudge towards prosocial action, and I have no problem with that. But if and when Big Society does recognise the need to engage at the level of social justice, it will need to do so in a way that does not feel to local activists like assimilation or an attempt to neutralise whatever frustration, anger, resentment, bitterness they may be feeling.

Starting to bring some reality to BS

Sound and entertaining comments from Alastair Tibbitt, Development Manager for Greener Leith, after attending yesterday's Downing Street launch of Big Society:

"if we're to see a new civic revival then we'll need an investment in old school community development, adult education and a real commitment to making more local government information accessible and understandable. Without this, it will be hard to sustain that army of 'community organisers.'"

'Small state, big society' is obviously the right idea: so do it properly

Hey, I just came across this fascinating document from the early years of new Labour, developing its ideas 'to give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.'

Remember when this was novel?

'We will radically reform the planning system to give neighbourhoods far more ability to determine the shape of the places in which their inhabitants live.'

Or this?

'We will take a range of measures to encourage volunteering and involvement in social action...'

Oh you'd guessed, I was lying, actually it's from the Cabinet Office Building the Big Society document, released today. In publishing terms it's shoddy, in content terms it's underwhelming.

I'm sorry for the run of negative posts recently, but I find this paper weak on one level because it's reasonable to expect Cabinet Office documents to show some sense of authority. They could start by having a statement of origin and a date of publication. This looks like an internal memo intended to motivate the back office staff.

As to content, we already know there are old ideas like community involvement in planning, but there are some new ideas, or rather reaffirmation of ideas presented before the election, like making regular community involvement a key element of civil service staff appraisals. (Can I just ask, who's going to find that a particularly laudable policy measure? Yes ok The Daily Mail. Anyone else?)

And the defenders of the faith will miss the point and condemn anyone and everyone who criticises this document for sour negativity, because we're all supposed to get behind the Big Society and do our bit for the country. This is a movement which has been created by people who are mostly wealthy, educated, empowered and influential, to encourage others who are not, to become active in the collective interest - overlooking minor questions of social justice, and swearing by a high proportion of ideas that were given a run-out over the past ten years of a previous government.

Forgive us our scepticism. 'Small state, Big Society' is obviously the right idea. Pssst: we already knew that. So do it properly, start with the folk who've been doing it for a long time against the odds.

There's more amusement for those of us watching the unseemly jostling for position around new faces in power. Take this comment from the CEO of NCVO, quoted by New Start magazine:

'Many may mock this new term – civil society.'

Eh? The chief exec of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations thinks 'civil society' is a new term. What does that tell you about the state of civil society?

Have we seen the last of target obsession in the public sector?

With the passing of new Labour have we seen the end of its wretched managerialism? I don't tend to keep a secret of my contempt for target-obsessed management approaches and the massive damage they have done to the public sector in this country. I've experienced it first hand in a government-funded organisation.

Housing, benefits, social services, education, health, you name it, there have been problems created for ordinary people when they should be solved, and billions of pounds wasted.

Now I've found (thanks for the link Alison) someone far wiser who has clarified perfectly what's been going on and why it's so damaging. In this recorded talk, which I urge you to watch and learn from, John Seddon, author of Systems thinking in the public sector, puts the boot into what he calls 'target obsession disorder':

'Targets and all other arbitrary measures make your systems worse. Always.'

'You create a de facto purpose and distort method...'

'Our public services should be local, not national...'

Seddon refers to all the public services mentioned above and brings a refreshing, knowledgable commonsense to the criticism of what he calls 'policy-based evidence'. Great stuff.

Will neighbourhood management fit into new social policies?

Another day, another government. You know how it is - wake up, a cabinet's been formed, eyewatering public sector cuts in the air, wonder what's up for neighbourhood management? Pottered along to the National Association for Neighbourhood Management conference, along with about sixty other folk. Probably all of us (with the exception of one of the speakers, who shall remain nameless) had years of experience of co-production and were sensitised to its nuances, and led by NANM we co-produced an absorbing event.

We heard two nicely complementary presentations from Gerry Stoker and Steve Broome. Gerry spoke about the Manchester Uni / Southampton Uni research into changing civic behaviour, which has come to be known as the 'Nudge-nudge, think-think' project because of the way it contrasts two ways for policy to influence what we do. Meself, I just think there's a massive policy conspiracy to get me to see things in that framework.

Steve Broome offered the first update I've heard on the RSA's connecting communities project which has been carrying out social network analysis in the New Cross area of south London. They've been rather coy about what's been happening but suddenly here's a whole lot of data which, Steve says, will help us understand 'the total set of connections and possibilities within a community'. Drilling down you can appreciate where the strong and weak points might be, and  you can help people to recognise and exploit their network position. Apparently

'people who value neighbourliness are more likely to be in the core of the network.'

This will be worth examining closely. At least two pieces of work that I'm aware of have suggested that there may not be a strong connection between neighbouring and community activity. The project report is expected in about 6 weeks' time, and Steve said the data will be made available online. Hopefully the kind of work they've done will be inexpensively replicable, and we'll begin to see constructive ways of exploiting the knowledge gained, eg in finding ways to support older people to age in place.

This is the place to offer a note of tribute to two street reps from Shipley, Sue and Arthur Kenworthy, who made the journey down to London to have an input to the two workshops I ran. When a number of practitioners are gathered together in a room, there's nothing like having the experience of local people to draw on. Sue and Arthur are a couple of residents trying to make a little bit of difference in their neighbourhood: they exemplify the barely-recognised efforts of thousands, but yesterday their thoughts and experience were listened to and valued.

So will neighbourhood management fit into new social policies? We  seem to be watching a rapid shift from what I call transactional government - characterised by treating the citizen as compliant consumer of state services who has to struggle for their entitlements - to what Geoff Mulgan has called relational government, characterised by involvement in decisions, co-production and conversational democracy. Am I being over-optimistic?

An argument resonating at yesterday's conference was that we can't afford not to invest in NM. A few weeks back on the NANM blog, Ben Lee put it like this:

'The coming weeks and months will be a crucial time for all of us. On the one hand there is more support and hard evidence than we’ve ever had for the principles of neighbourhood action, localism and empowering citizens through co-delivery. But while some local agencies hold their nerve and take considered decisions about radical devolved service models, others are already taking rushed decisions to reduce or cancel ‘pilot’ programmes - flying in the face of evidence.

We believe local practitioners and community activists need to be taking the best evidence and achievments of neighbourhood working to the heart of the debates about cuts.'

A vibrant civil society

Shortly after my last post left this desk, I came across this quote from a political party manifesto:

A vibrant civil society
We believe that enterprises in the mutual and cooperative sector have an important role to play in the provision of local services, from health to education, from leisure to care for the vulnerable. As democratic, not-for-profit organisations, they can help to involve local people in shaping the services they want, unleash creativity and innovation, create jobs and provide new services – especially in neighbourhoods where traditional services have failed local people in the past.

Any guesses? I shall be awarding points, and what do points mean? That's right, points mean sod-all. (Authors of the 2005 Labour Party manifesto are prohibited).

Is Big Society hiding behind civil society?

I understand that tomorrow's Sunday Times will publish a letter signed by 'social entrepreneurs and others from the voluntary and community sector in supporting the role of civil society', by which they mean, the Big Society version of it. After a bit of rumouring during the week, the letter was published yesterday by Social Enterprise (quickly picked up by David Wilcox).

It's pretty disappointing. It deals with some objections to which the authors (I don't mean the signatories necessarily; it's not hard to see where the text originated) feel they can respond, which are well within the comfort zone.

SE says:

The letter states that campaigners have been taken aback by the opposition in the press and elsewhere to the role citizens can play in our country, partly generated by pre-election discussions on such areas as the ‘Big Society’.

How could anyone disagree with the need for a healthy civil society? But some less straightforward questions have been raised here and there, which don't get any kind of recognition or response in the letter. We're invited to vote for motherhood and apple pie.

Having got it slightly wrong first go (eg unashamedly top-down, too closely associated with a political party, too detached from the political reality of community action) the folk behind BS needed to take a step back. There are (or at least there were, up until now) plenty of people ready to help them with their thinking, out of goodwill or perhaps self-interest. But with this letter they may just be compounding their problems. There's no need to defend civil society guys, it's not under attack: it's the Big Society that people wanted to ask about. Come on out.

Publishing this a few days before the election will simply confirm people in their distrust of the close association with the Conservative party. Leaking the letter to test the reaction, gosh there's a new trick, compounds the sense that it's not quite sincere.

And it doesn't take a major effort of recollection to reflect on the very serious and painful struggles that many people in the community sector (not civil society volunteers nor social entrepreneurs in their own terms, but local people with dirt under their fingernails) went through under the last tory administration.

Previously:

Big Society is being watched

Let's hear it for neighbourhood groups: Conservative party launch of the Big Society