Taking Power Back: Response by Simon Parker

This post is the latest in the series debating Simon Parker’s recent book ‘Taking Power Back‘. The debate began with an outline by Simon of the main argument of his book, followed by a response by Jonathan Davies and Adrian Bua from CURA. In this post Simon highlights areas where our thoughts overlap and diverge. If you are interested in contributing to the debate further please email adrian.bua@dmu.ac.uk.

The striking thing about Jonathan and Adrian’s article is how much we agree on the fundamentals. We are clear that Britain’s mix of the big central state and free market economics has not delivered on its promises. And I think we broadly agree that a politics of commonism – the creation of a vastly expanded realm of self-help, mutual aid and social enterprise – represents a credible and desirable way to secure social progress in new times.

The challenge I have been posed is less about the ‘what’ and more about the ‘how’. Jonathan and Adrian are right to ask how we get from a world where power and assets are overwhelmingly enclosed by the state and market, to one in which commoning becomes, well, commonplace. They argue that far from encouraging mutual aid, the British state is more often engaged in expanding the reach of profitable activity while simultaneously choking off the social sector through austerity. Is my vision of the creative commons not pure idealism without some sort of struggle against the power of capital?

One of the challenges I face in answering this is that I am deeply suspicious of top down, structural change. I do not have some kind of Marxian revolution in my back pocket. They tend to end badly. Instead, I think commonism will emerge from decentralised trial and error in the real world. But I accept the charge that my bottom-up approach runs slap bang into some very big and ugly vested interests in both the state and the business world. The commons is not the strongest force in society, but where I differ from Jonathan and Adrian is that I think this might already be starting to change.

My first reason for hope is that commoning is already starting to grow in the midst of the very neoliberalism Jonathan and Adrian decry. Take, for instance, the 25% boom in the number of co-ops over the three years from 2010, or the 10% growth in community businesses over 2015. These organisations are generally not old-school charities funded by grants, but organisations which use their community roots and freedom from shareholder demands to develop innovative business models in response to local needs and demands.

My second reason for optimism is the fact that the economy is starting to change in ways which might favour commoning. I am hardly the first person to point to the rise of automation, which has the potential to destroy a vast number of jobs without replacing all of them. This reduction in paid labour is a horror for the old Labour movement, but when you think about it a world with fewer of what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’ is hardly a bad thing.  Imagine more people, with more free time and vastly cheaper goods and services, searching for more meaning in their lives.

My third reason for hope is that I can already see some of the institutional changes that might help to unlock a world of commonism. The first plank in my agenda is a universal basic income, both to manage the economic consequences of automation and to liberate people to pursue more meaning free from the demands of paid labour. This is the key policy change which would turn a dystopian world of mass unemployment into a world where work became more like play (and the commons is the perfect space to play in).

I think we need a new public service architecture which actively encourages commoning. This means city-level social investment funds which can support the early stages of commons-based organisations, governed by the public, private and commons sectors to ensure that the money flows towards their shared priorities. Local authorities and others need to direct their commissioning to spotting and scaling up the parts of the commons that work best.

My response to the question of how we grow the strength of the commons is to transform the role of government into growing and protecting the realm of mutual aid. This will help to grow a strong and independent domain of community ownership. My answer to austerity is that a smaller state might be a good thing as long as we also have a smaller private sector and much more social activity in-between them. Commonism is not a utopian project, but a practical route through which ordinary people can adapt their lives to a changing economic context.

Simon Parker is director of the New Local Government Network and a leading expert in public policy, public services and government.

Reclaiming Local Democracy: Ines Newman

In this post Ines Newman describes the argument of her recent book “Reclaiming local democracy: a progressive future for local government“. Ines argues against the market fundamentalism informing the changes in British local government since the 1980’s, outlines an ethical framework to guide decision making by local politicians and argues for a vibrant, and genuine, participatory democracy.

Local government has become increasingly dominated by what George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz and others have called ‘market fundamentalism’. It was Nicholas Ridley (then Environment Secretary with responsibility for local government) who proposed in 1988 that the local state should be an ‘enabler’. Councillors should meet once a year to hand out contracts to the private sector. New Labour furthered this approach, suggesting that ‘community leadership’ and ‘place-shaping’ were the new roles and local authorities should not get distracted by service delivery. This could be left to managers with pressure to perform to targets set by central government. Finally, the Coalition Government has argued that local government should not deliver any services directly but should ‘be excellent and open commissioners of those services which cannot be devolved to individuals and communities.’

In my book, Reclaiming Local Democracy: A progressive future for local government, I argue that the impact of all this has been negative in three ways.   Firstly there is a confused focus on ‘what works’, with limited consideration of the question ‘works for whom?’ The focus is usually on symptoms rather than causes and decision-making is technocratic, concentrating on efficiency and cost.

Secondly, there has been increased marketisation of public services. Michael Sandel has argued that in the USA you can currently buy most things, from prison-cell upgrades to your doctor’s mobile phone number. Market values have come to play a greater and greater role in social life, corroding the way we value public goods, and increasing inequality.

These consequences lead to the third problem:  a growing lack of trust in representative democracy. If decision-making is technocratic and public goods no different from private goods, what is the role of the councillor? ‘Politics’ becomes a dirty word. Instead we are taught to value ‘hard working’ individuals or volunteers, ‘ordinary people’ who do not need public services.

To turn this around, I have argued that local government needs to reignite an interest in political and ethical questions and support participative democracy.

In the book, I draw on political philosophy to argue that local authorities have an obligation to tackle injustice. I develop an ethical framework in the form of a set of eight principles that can be used to interrogate a policy to see if it would shift society from’ how things are ‘to how they ought to be’. The book contains many examples- from fairness commissions to support for new universal free school meals- showing the way local authorities can operationalise these principles.

Localism is a hollow concept. You will always need strong central government to tackle inequality. So the issue is not about devolving minor powers with limited funding. It is about opening up central government to the influence of joint campaigns run by local councillors with their constituents. This would help to reclaim democracy. It requires councillors to promote active citizens and participative democracy and, with their communities, to seek to influence the national agenda, so as to achieve progressive change.

These are profoundly different approaches to local government and have many implications which are discussed further in the book. The enabling council sees its role as ‘smart commissioning’ and reducing cost and in this process undermines an understanding of public goods, community and democracy. The ethical and democratic local authority is focussed outwards, listening to the voices of those who are usually not heard and discussing with their constituents how to make a better world. These processes cement an understanding of citizenship and the common good and make it possible to start to struggle to reclaim local democracy.

Ines Newman is an Honorary Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Department for Politics and Public Policy at DMU and a core member of the CURA team. Ines is a leading expert in local government and public policy and a trustee of the Paddington Development Trust

The Visible Hand: George Osborne and the Labour Market

CURA’s Professor Phil Almond writes about contradictions in  labour market policy that are apparent in the government’s March 2016 budget.

George Osborne’s Budget appears to have been a much less successful exercise in fostering hegemony than his immediate post-election efforts. This is perhaps unsurprising given the contradictions involved in the joint pursuit of austerian governance, traditional Conservative clientelism, and the attempt to manage Conservative Party tensions on Europe through the mechanism of a referendum on European Union membership at a juncture where populist anti-elite pressures of varying political stripes are widespread and growing.

To an employment relations researcher like myself, contradictions are particularly evident in the labour market sphere. In particular, it is worth thinking about the relations between the legislative attack on trade union freedom of the Trade Union Bill (which coincidentally sustained non-fundamental, but non-trivial damage in the House of Lords on the the day of the budget), the National Living Wage, the continued confusion around the introduction of an Apprenticeship Levy, and the wider approach to political economy of the current government.

Of these, the Trade Union Bill is the simplest to decipher, representing as it does a straightforward continuity with Thatcherism. Nobody with experience of the 1980s and 1990s history of regulation of industrial relations would be particularly surprised that a Conservative government would pursue such policies. In industrial relations terms – ignoring for the time being the obvious partisan attack on Labour Party funding – most commentary seems to have concentrated on the increased balloting thresholds for strike action, and to a lesser extent on the issue of trade union facility time. Important as these are, it is regrettable that the proposal to lift the ban on using agency workers to replace permanent staff during strikes, which represents a fundamental challenge to the right to strike as understood in ILO conventions, has not taken greater prominence in the debates on and opposition to the Bill.

The National Living Wage and Apprenticeship Levy, however, need somewhat more thinking about. Having worked as a researcher on wage protection at the time that the National Minimum Wage was proposed and introduced by the first Blair government, and witnessed the extent of Thatcherite-Conservative opposition to the “interference” in the labour market that statutory wage protection represents, it is clear that Osborne represents something of a departure here from Keith Joseph.

Readers of this blog presumably do not require an employment relations academic to point out that the current upgrading of the minimum wage does not represent a progressive policy, coming as it does in the context of a shrinking of the benefits system that of course is profoundly regressive. It is also worth noting in passing the “National Living Wage” is nothing of the kind – any basic or minimum income level, however calculated, clearly has to be expressed on a weekly or monthly basis. Very obviously, if sustenance comes from waged labour, then an hourly rate is only as good as the multiplier of how many hours of work are paid for. Given those at the bottom of the labour market are generally on marginal part-time or zero-hours contracts, a vocabulary of “living” wage is not appropriate. That George Osborne is prepared to use this language as part of a hegemonic strategy is one thing, but those in favour of redistribution to the working poor should not.

Nonetheless, proposing non-trivial increases to minimum wages, in the context of austerian governance, does represent something of a change of thinking as to how the right goes about shrinking the state. The Thatcherite position of avoiding ‘constraints’ on employers in order to encourage the free market to clear has morphed into a position where the over-riding imperative is that the poor are not sustained by the state, even if this involves what a previous generation of Conservatives would have termed “interference” in labour markets. Whether George Osborne is a convert to established social democratic arguments that increasing minimum wages has positive effects on productivity is unclear. Still, to some extent, austerity seems to have trumped the “old school” brand of neo-liberalism of the Thatcher/Major era.

This is also the case with the apprenticeship levy; essentially, a pay-bill tax on large employers to be dedicated to apprenticeship training, sweetened in the Budget by a government top-up. How this will work, in particular what the resources raised will be used for in an, at-best, confusing system of initial vocational training, is unclear. However, some of the motives are not dissimilar to the minimum wage increase; vocational training needs to be improved, and the state does not want to bear the financial or coordination costs, notwithstanding the exceptionally poor degree of coordination between firms on skills and training in the UK. It is worth noting that in my conversations with practitioners aiming to attract foreign direct investment to the UK, it is clear that the idea of a levy has a substantial degree of opposition from mobile firms, including many that do require advanced skills. Again, while individual labour market policies need to be looked at within the context of the overall political economy and distributional policies of the government, it remains interesting that the Osborne strategy does in places require a fairly visible hand.

Phil Almond is Professor of Comparative Employment Relations at DMU, a member of CURA and CROWE, a DMU-based research group on organisations, work and employment.

Book Review: What a Waste – Outsourcing and how it Goes Wrong

In this book review, CURAs Dr. Heather Connolly shares her thoughts on the recent book by Researchers at Manchester Capitalism “What a Waste”. This blog was originally published on the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute’s website.

With increasing numbers of failures and fiascos of outsourced contracts hitting the headlines, the question ‘when will governments ever learn?’ springs readily to mind.  A hard-hitting new book, by researchers at CRESC/Manchester Capitalism, entitled What a Waste: Outsourcing and how it goes wrong have criticised the ‘disastrous’ practice of UK government outsourcing, but argue that the failures and fiascos are effectively pre-designed.  The authors state that ‘there is an overall logic to the process which costs citizens because outsourcing is what happens at the intersection between the political convenience of the (central state) and the opportunism of outsourcing companies and investors’. Outsourcing allows the shift of blame to private sector providers, and government abdicates responsibility for providing underfunded services and ‘toxic activities’ (border control, for example) in favour of private firms with poor management control.

‘The franchise state which exists to award and monitor contracts at the same time strips itself of institutional resources and intelligence previously used to deliver goods and services.  As outsourcing proceeds, the (central and local) state is increasingly disabled in that it no longer has the capability to deliver public services.’

This situation means that giant contractors and the state become bound together in a form of co-dependence and when it goes wrong the blame can easily be laid on outsourcing contractors or the individual public servants who wrote the contract, rather than the government.  Contracts typically cover mundane activities which too often allow profit taking at the expense of the tax payer and the workforce by outsourcers who do not make capital investment or take market risk.

In the last few months there have been a number of failures and fiascos in public sector outsourcing contracts.  In December 2015 a £160m contract between Cornwall County Council and corporate giant BT was scrapped following a High Court ruling.  The 10-year deal, signed in March 2013, was for BT to run IT, human resources and other services for the council. BT tried to fight the Council’s decision to end the contract after only two years but a ruling was made against them stating BT did not provide ‘the service it had promised to the standard it had promised’.  Again in December 2015 an £800million older people’s care contract in Cambridgeshire ended after just eight months because it was ‘no longer financially sustainable’.  These are some of the more ‘mundane’ failures that tend to slip under the radar, not to mention some of the more controversial outsourcing fiascos such as the recent G4S ‘red doors’ for refugees in Middlesbrough or the Clearsprings ‘coloured bands’ for asylum seekers in Cardiff.

What a Waste points out that there have been various experiments around outsourcing in local councils, notably in Birmingham and Barnet.  Barnet was labelled ‘easyCouncil’ by critics that complained services resembled low-cost, no frills airlines such as easyJet.  Other councils, such as Essex, Southampton City, Suffolk and Staffordshire have also taken up the outsourcing model.  However, as they allude to in the book, Northampton County Council (NCC) is taking the process a step further by transferring 3,850 of its 4,000 employees to 4 new dividend-paying service providers which would deliver all the council’s services, including social care for the elderly.  The Chief Executive is pushing through with plans to begin outsourcing the services in a move which he says will make a £148m saving by 2020, though some fear the plan is a step towards privatisation.  Under EU Procurement Law these contracts will have to go out to tender after 3 years, so fears of effective privatisation are well-founded.

The ‘commission-only’ model being adopted by NCC is likely to be increasingly replicated in Conservative-controlled shires and urban areas.  The fact that there is no real reflection as to how these activities will function under this ‘next generation’ council model is evidence to support many of the arguments in What a Waste.

‘The democratic tragedy of the franchise state is that today’s mainstream politicians are not protesting (or even examining) the outcomes of outsourcing but are planning to grant ever more local monopolies from which organised money can take profits (in many cases without the capital investment or revenue risk which legitimate capitalist profit)’.

In a context of austerity, TINA (There Is No Alternative) is brought to the fore in discussions around the need for cuts to local services, and therefore resistance feels muted.  The authors argue that there is an urgent need for resistance around outsourcing as it is spreading though to sectors which should remain under some form of state control:

‘the failure of politicians and policy makers to protest outsourcing has become an urgent matter because the state has outsourced or is now outsourcing services which are part of what we call the ‘foundational economy’ in health, adult care, welfare and security.  Many of these services are or will be used by most families or individuals because the foundational economy is the basis of material security and the infrastructure of civilised life for the whole population’.

The authors of What a Waste argue that government outsourcing should be curbed by politically agreed prohibitions on outsourcing which is not in the public interest.  In an interview for the book one of the authors, Professor Karel Williams, put forward three principles for public sector outsourcing: firstly, no large scale outsourcing in local government where officers and members do not have the expertise to negotiate contracts; secondly, no outsourcing of ‘politically toxic’ services like border controls because government should take responsibility for what it does; and thirdly, no total outsourcing of any important service like provision of care homes because the public sector needs its own expertise.  It seems unlikely that the current government will take heed of any of these principles.

What this book does not offer is a comprehensive strategy for resistance and the ways in which organised groups against outsourcing can fight the plans.  Past experience shows that even where campaigns have had wide levels of support and have made small gains, they have not been sufficient to block major outsourcing plans from going ahead.  A strategy of resistance needs a co-ordinated approach involving multiple groups which means drawing on the different sources of power both in and outside workplaces, organising in the community and through media campaigning and political lobbying.  Two key challenges for building resistance are first, the willingness to act, particularly among local government workers, where a culture of fear may be developed around whose job is ‘at risk’ as a result of outsourcing.  Second, with such campaigns comes the question about the alternatives to outsourcing.  Labour branded its approach to running Lambeth as the ‘John Lewis’ council operating on the basis of mutual and co-operative values. Is this the ‘least worst’ alternative that could be fought for at a local level?

Dr Heather Connolly is Senior Lecturer at the Leicester Business School at DMU, and a core member of the CURA team.

Taking Power Back: Review by CURA

Professor Jonathan Davies and Dr Adrian Bua from CURA respond to Simon Parker’s  previous  blog where he explained the argument of his recent book ‘Taking Power Back‘. This blog will be followed over the next few weeks with a reply by Simon.

Taking Power Back is written as a provocation – a manifesto for change – at a moment when the ruthlessly centralising tradition of British politics is under greater critical scrutiny than ever before. As Simon Parker explains in his blog post, current levels of centralisation in British politics are unsustainable and the call for radical decentralisation, driven by the social action of place-based individuals and communities is timely.  Moreover, Simon argues that with the end of austerity nowhere in sight, the halcyon days of the welfare state are in any case well and truly over. Something has to be done.

Simon’s alternative is encapsulated in the idea of ‘commonism’, a new kind of society based on self-help and mutual aid enabled by a more local, relational and supportive state, rather than the over-bearing centralised behemoth developed since the post war era. Simon thinks that we are moving into a conjuncture more favourable to commonism, as experiments proliferate and the state slowly and reluctantly begins to show awareness of its limitations. In his analysis, the push for devolution and localism is more than a mere straw in the wind.   The wave of city deals, with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority at the forefront (which Simon discusses at length) signals an opportunity to develop the ‘commonist’ agenda and forge a path to a more decentralised and democratic polity.  Taking Power Back is at once resolutely pragmatic and visionary.  Commonism is not communism, a system that envisions the entire system of production, distribution and exchange socialised and democratised.  Rather, the practices of commoning sit in a nebulous and uneasy relationship with state and market.  It rests tacitly on re-working the classic state-market-civil society triad.

However, preoccupation with the critique of statism means the triad is never adequately discussed.  For example, Simon is very reticent about markets, corporations and economic crises. Contemporary political economy tells us that states and markets are deeply inter-dependent. Much of what states do in the 21st century is about extending the reach of the profit economy.  Take austerity, a policy regime Simon tends to take for granted: it undermines the resources of localism in ways that seem destined to shrivel the commons.  First, we know that cuts in state funding drive local community organisations to the wall.  Second, government contracts are deeply biased towards corporate contractors and large extra-local civil society organisations (the so-called “primes”), and against local organisations.  Third, austerity welfare and its extraordinarily punitive sanctioning regime so envelops and bureaucratises the lives of millions of unemployed and working poor citizens, that it is hard to envisage them finding the time or cognitive space to do any volunteering or commoning.

These deeply reactionary trends arguably diminish the space for commoning, but perhaps more importantly they point to a huge oversight in Simon’s analysis.  Taking Power Back will not be accomplished by going with the flow, it can only be a deeply conflictual process oriented to reversing malign trends in our society – the expansion of markets and corporations, the boa-constrictor of state regulation and the predatory character of civil society “primes”, all of which conspire to corrode the local and the democratic. Simon’s call for a universal wage (or basic income) to unlock commoning capacity is an acceptance that sharpening inequalities need to be addressed.  Yet, it is hard to see how this can be accomplished without, at the very least, reversing austerity and in the process taking on recalcitrant interests throughout the state, market and corporatised civil society sectors.

Viewed through this lens, the current devolution and localism agendas are deeply problematic, accentuating anti-democratic developments antithetical to ‘commonism’.

Simon acknowledges the anti-democratic manner in which “Devo Manc” was accomplished – a deal struck between local and central state elites. Moreover, greater local responsibility for allocating a shrinking budget presided over by boosterist metro-mayors is no basis for a flourishing municipal commons, particularly under a grossly punitive benefits regime over which the centre exercises an iron grip. This is compounded by declining standards in what researchers at ‘Manchester Capitalism’ have called the ‘foundational economy’. This consists precisely of those businesses and services to meet the basic needs that are the bread and butter of ‘commonism’, yet, the foundational is increasingly beset by casualised work, and operates as a cash cow for big business.

As Simon recognises, under capitalism, technological innovation and productivity do not usher in a world of leisure. They rather concentrate power in the hands of techno-elites and shrink the labour market.  Nowhere is the dystopian character of the digital age clearer than in San Francisco, where the predatory elites of Silicon Valley make the city unliveable for working class people and complain at having to look at the human refuse left in their wake.

We live in a world of confected scarcity (austerity) and ever-rising inequality in a highly precarious global economic conjuncture. Simon is right that a flourishing commons depends on greater equality, in a world of plenty.  But there is a vast gap between our world and the world of the Morrisonian commons.  Taking Power Back offers a welcome stimulus to those thinking about how a better world might come into being. Simon’s wager is that examples of commoning in action can be pedagogic in the sense of showcasing the virtues of “commonism” to all, at a time when elites seem a little more aware of their limitations.  Our concern is that these are not the most powerful trends in our society. It is hard to see the pursuit of social justice as anything other than an elemental struggle in the 21st century, without which new political economies of solidarity will remain confined to the margins.

Professor Jonathan Davies is director and Dr Adrian Bua a core member of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity

Taking Power Back: Simon Parker

We are pleased to launch our book debates series with this blog by Simon Parker. Simon sets out the argument of his recent book ‘Taking Power Back’, where he makes the case for ‘commonism’ – a radical form of democratic decentralisation. Following this post, CURA members Professor Jonathan Davies and Dr Adrian Bua will share their thoughts on Simon’s work, after which Simon will publish a reply to our team’s commentary.

The British state stands poised at a moment of profound change. Caught between the demands of an ageing population and a limited public willingness to pay more tax, public services are under pressure as never before. Institutions from local government to the NHS are finding that their existing models of provision cannot cope with the strain. Something has to give.

Despite our self-image as swashbuckling Anglo-Saxon capitalists, the British are actually fairly statist. Until recently we had a large, highly centralised government machine which we expected to deliver the same outcomes to everyone across the country. We tend to see the world in terms of the market and state, without very much in between. The fact that both of these leviathans have let us down very badly in the recent past explains our national distrust of institutions.

And yet there is something in between state and market – a space for social activity that many people call ‘the commons’. Over the past decade or so we have seen this space being steadily filled by a remarkable flourishing of cooperatives and social enterprises. In my book, Taking Power Back, I argue that this vibrant realm of do-it-yourself social justice is vital to the way we should understand the future of government. We can already see examples of it in action. In my book I describe how initiatives in the UK and beyond such as Occupy Sandy, the extraordinary people-powered disaster relief operation in post-hurricane New York, are building on, and organising, people power to meet their needs and improve lives – without relying on the market or state action

The trends which the World Economic Forum bundles together in its concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will turbo-charge the commons over the next decade or two. This is partly because new technology is making it easier than ever to start to up small social organisations. The overhead costs of creating a company are falling, while the potential to create innovative networked business models is rising. The increasing automation of our jobs may create a world in which we spend less time working creating increased opportunities to transfer effort out of the realm of paid work and into the creative sphere of the commons.

It seems entirely credible that the space vacated by a retreating state could be filled at least partially by a surge in the creative commons. I the book I make the case for two very big changes that can facilitate this transition. First, we will need to support the commons by introducing a universal basic income, compensating people for the automation of work and giving them the time to contribute. Second, we need to radically devolve political power so it is closer citizens, giving individuals the opportunities and capacity they need to help build the civic commons in the places where they live.

It is a huge challenge, but the prize is a radical renewal of government and democracy, in Britain and beyond.

Simon Parker is director of the New Local Government Network and a leading expert in public policy, public services and government.

PhD Opportunity at CURA: Securitisation in Urban Policy Making

CURA are delighted to offer a PhD scholarship on Securitisation in Urban Policy Making. The scholarship is available for up to three years full-time study starting October 2016 and provides a bursary of £14,296 PA in addition to University tuition fees. It is available to UK or EU students who are suitably qualified and have outstanding potential as a researcher. Deadline for applications is 29th March 2016.

In offering this scholarship the University aims to further develop its proven research strengths in urban governance, austerity and crises. It is an excellent opportunity for a candidate of exceptional promise to contribute to a stimulating, world-class research environment. The post holder will be contributing to CURA’s interest in crisis and securitisaton in urban policy-making. Interested candidates need to submit a 1500-word proposal addressing one or more of the following issues:

• Are subnational levels of government impacted by national security policy and what are the implications for urban governance?

• How do different ‘modes of governance’ incorporate coercive strategies in urban policy-making process?

• What power relations are developed between state and non-state actors in the securitisation of urban public policy?

• To what extent do community cultural practices infuse meaning to government practices in contexts of violence and insecurity?

Proposals with a focus on countries in Europe and/or the Americas will be preferred, but proposals conducting research in other world regions will be considered.

For a more detailed description of the scholarship, the subject area at DMU and an application pack follow this link. Completed applications should be returned by 29th March 2016 with two supporting references and an academic transcript. Applications are invited from UK or EU students with a Master’s degree or a good first degree (First, 2:1 or equivalent) in a relevant subject. Please quote ref: DMU Research Scholarships 2016: BAL FB1.

Please direct academic queries to Dr Valeria Guarneros-Meza on +44 (0)116 2577038 or by email on valeria.guarneros@dmu.ac.uk. For administrative queries contact Morgan Erdlenbruch at Morgan.Erdlenbruch@dmu.ac.uk

Application deadlinePlease quote ref: DMU Research Scholarships 2016: BAL FB1.

Learning lessons: we need to encourage more policy sharing and less innovation

Sophie Wilson from the Institute for Government argues that there is too much focus on innovation in public services, and the we should focus more on learning from, and expanding, ‘what works’.

We all like new things. Whether it’s the latest gadget or an app to switch your heating on remotely, innovations are exciting. And this is no different in public services. Countless innovation funds and piloting programmes encourage local areas to develop and test ideas ranging from government initiatives such as the Transformation Challenge Awards through to programmes led by the voluntary sector like those available to social entrepreneurs from UnLtd. Without funding for early stage ideas you don’t get things off the ground.

So while there’s no denying the importance of trying and testing new approaches to public services; the emphasis on innovation over duplication means local areas may risk repeating the same mistakes or focusing resources on challenges that have already been solved elsewhere. This is something picked up on in the Institute for Government’s paper Joining up public services around local, citizen needs  which highlighted how a limited sharing of ‘what works’ in different circumstances can mean that the lessons from effective practices are rarely built upon (see p.12). Barbara Young, formerly chief executive of Diabetes UK, has also consistently argued the need for more plagiarism in the voluntary sector. In this way, encouraging more areas to copy instead of create could be a route to efficiency savings as well as better services for citizens.

Blunt replication of programmes or strategies from one local area into another is unlikely to be the solution to the challenges facing public services today. However, there are opportunities in increasing the diffusion of effective programmes through the sharing of innovations, ideas and practice, and the subsequent adoption or adaption of these ideas in a new local area. It is unlikely that a programme can, or should, be scaled up and rolled out across the country in exactly the same way. Local areas are different and public services should be able to cater for this diversity as recognised by the Government and its devolution agenda. But, greater sharing between local areas around how they can implement a new programme, the barriers and enablers to doing this, the resources and capabilities needed, as well as links to useful contacts could help areas to shortcut parts of their design process and help to save time and money. Context matters. Nevertheless, applying what we already know and adapting this with a new environment in mind can support local areas to build upon existing practice and avoid reinventing the wheel.

In fact, local areas are already doing this; whether getting ideas from conferences, participating in professional networks like SOLACE, or independently setting up visits to areas that appear to be doing something interesting. But, this is not yet something that systematically occurs across local government; whether because of a distinct professional culture or cultures, transport links, misaligned incentives, a lack of time or one of a myriad of other factors.

In response, the Institute for Government are starting to think about how to encourage greater sharing of practice between local areas. This has begun with a look at some of the intermediary programmes and organisations that connect local areas with each other or with interesting practice and ideas such as the LGA peer challenges, the Audit Commission or the seven What Works Centres. We want to understand what limits local areas from sharing more frequently, and increase attention on the diffusion process itself as an important, under recognised means of supporting areas as they redesign or recommission services.

As is often pointed out, devolution provides an opportunity to innovate by designing services around local, citizen needs. But increasing localisation also increases the importance of finding effective ways of sharing practice between local areas to make sure learning spreads throughout the country. This is especially important in the context of tightening budgets and increasing demands. Copying from your neighbour may have been frowned upon in the classroom, but it is an essential part of designing a smarter state.

Sophie Wilson is a researcher at the Institute for Government. If you’re interested in hearing more or contributing to the research she is involved in, take a look at the IfG’s project page or get in touch with her at sophie.wilson@instituteforgovernment.org.uk