Month: February 2014

The Big Society lasted 1000 days. Will we ever see ideas of its like again?

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Stephen Jeffares

The FT’s Chris Giles recently wrote:

“Mark Carney Bank of England governor, has signalled that his policy of linking interest rates to the unemployment rate [Forward Guidance] will be buried less than six months after its birth…his big idea for monetary policy has bitten the dust” (FT, 24 January 2014).

This is not the first time in the last year we have heard reports of “big ideas” “biting the dust”.  The same has been levelled at Cameron’s purported big idea in politics: The Big Society.  How funny that sounds just a few months after thousands of policy actors were deliberately inserting Big Society terminology into their strategies, job descriptions and articles. A friend who recently attended a meeting at CLG told me that the last remnants of the Big Society team have now left their posts; organisationally, at least, the Big Society is dead.

As the title suggests,  and in a new book, I argue that Big Society lasted around a 1,000 days.  That is rather neat, I admit.  Wayne Parsons has argued that you need a sensitive measuring device to understand the death and termination of public policies, but as a starting point you can think about newspaper citations.  Although a crude measure, this reveals the date when a policy idea first entered the public realm, the peak of discussion, and the point after which it is never uttered again.

It reminds me of Frazer’s description of how Saharan Tuareg tribes would up camp when somebody died, and never mention the deceased’s name ever again. Although government actors do not quite up camp, they shuffle around, renaming units and amending job titles, renewing websites and pulping documents.  As for the newspapers, for a while they write of the policy’s death, of u-turns, and discuss hints of decline (as in the article above); more important is to focus on the point where they stop mentioning it – that is when the idea is dead.  It is also a point in time seldom acknowledged.

So where does my 1,000 days come from?  Well, counting citations in British Broadsheet newspapers (see Figure 2.1) you can see that in 2008 there were no mentions of the Big Society, a few hundred in 2009, great excitement by 2011, and just over one mention a day in 2013.

jeffares

My prediction is that at some point in 2014 we will not speak of Big Society again – it will be the end.

But will we see anything on the scale of Big Society ever again? If Forward Guidance is anything to go by, it is quicker and easier than ever to discuss, endorse, but also critique and deride policy ideas. But it is also quicker and easier to coin and foster them too.

Some critics of the Big Society pointed to how many times it was relaunched, but like iPhones or Apps, we are in an age where we can release beta versions, test things out, get feedback and quickly offer updated bug fixes or new versions. We cannot measure the longevity of a policy idea by expectation alone – no, we can speculate about decline but it is not until the tribe up-sticks and moves to a new part of the desert, vowing never to mention its name again, that we can be sure that it is truly dead.

An earlier version of this blog appeared here 27 January 2014.

jeffares-stephen

Stephen Jeffares is a Lecturer based in INLOGOV. His fellowship focuses on the role of ideas in the policy process and implications for methods.  He is a specialist in Q methodology and other innovative methods to inform policy analysis. Stephen’s book, Interpreting Hashtag Politics: policy ideas in an era of social media, will be published by Palgrave in April 2014.  Preorder or follow @srjeffares

Who is in control of the sandbags?

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Philip Whiteman and Ian Briggs

The recent news that the Minister for the Environment, Owen Patterson, has visited flood torn Somerset and the Environment Agency, has had a bit of a tough time in the media. It has started to open up a few interesting questions and issues around who is actually accountable and who is responsible for flood response. Undoubtedly facing persistent flooding problems is deeply distressing for those affected and it is far from unreasonable to expect the response from the State to be swift, appropriate and well managed.

But who should respond and who has a say over what the local priorities are is perhaps a more complex question to answer. On further investigation it would appear that our system of local public administration has a few dark corners that are somewhat enlightening to explore.

One slightly dark corner that the media seems to have paid little attention to is the Local ‘Internal Drainage Board’ (IDB). What may come as a surprise to many, especially if you do not operate in a particularly high risk area, is that these IDBs are actually part of the complex firmament of democratically elected local bodies.

Internal Drainage Boards as local public organisations are specifically charged by legislation to supervise matters of water level management.  Whilst current powers are determined by the Land Drainage Acts of 1991 and its precursor of 1930, the antecedents of these curious bodies can be traced back to Henry II in 1297.   Not surprisingly, their boundaries are not coterminous with principal local authorities, but instead with water courses.

The 121 IDBs are distributed across the low lying areas of England and Wales, such as the Somerset Levels, Fens or Romney Marshes. Board members are elected by the IDB ratepayers and may sit alongside appointees.  Herein lies another oddity: each elector, usually an agricultural land holder, is awarded a number of votes related to the size of land holding or occupation – something rather reminiscent of voting rights pre- the 1832 Great Reform Act!  Whilst local authority members may sit as appointees, it is not remarkable to comment that control of IDBs holds little interest to political parties.

The very existence of the IDBs offers some interesting avenues to explore. One question that presents itself is around Government’s intention to respect that it is often the local community that holds local knowledge and solutions to problems existing within communities. Now, one can see that the Environment Agency itself has a few problems to deal with – it has not escaped media attention that the Agency is facing cuts at a time when the headline news is demonstrating that many local people are living with persistent flooding. Clearly one significant advantage of a large scale Agency is that it learns lessons from previous practice and can then make judgments as to the best way of dealing with problems. It can lay down standard operating processes and procedures and is in a position to balance a wide range of competing issues such as general environmental and ecological sustainability, whilst at the same time responding to social need.

However, if the flooding problems in the Somerset levels are allegedly a direct product of the failure to dredge rivers (and here we are not offering any opinion on that matter), should the decision be one that is taken locally or should it be one that conforms to a standard operating process? We have on one hand a body open to public scrutiny that is made up of local people and elected representatives who are resourced through a local precept taxation system and a national body that is answerable to citizens through national government. In this type of situation, very complex inter relationships develop between the principals and their agents!  This complexity is furthered by the addition of principal councils and DEFRA – who also have an interest in flood prevention policy and measures.

If, as we have seen through the introduction of locally elected Police and Crime Commissioners, government has an appetite for bringing public institutions closer to the people, then it may seem more than a little strange that in some of our most sensitive localities this argument over prioritisation is between Ministers, local people and a government agency. Perhaps we should look to promote a more visible role for the Local Drainage Board.

They are clearly important to local people in high risk areas, but with increasing pressure on local authorities to absorb ever increasing numbers of new houses and reports that new homes are being constructed on flood risk zones, we may need to think more deeply about how we manage this tension between control at a local level and the advantages of having a national response to such emergencies.

whiteman-philip

Philip Whiteman is a Lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies.  He has research interests in the impact of central government and regulators on the role, service delivery and performance of local government and other local bodies.  He is currently looking at developing a case for researching how guidance is an important instrument for steering local government over and above legislative instruments.

 

briggsIan Briggs is a Senior Fellow at INLOGOV, and sits on a rural Parish Council in Warwickshire. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

When will they ever learn?

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Catherine Staite

The news of the death of Pete Seeger has reminded me again of his old song ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ The line ‘oh when will they ever learn?’ has been running through my head since I saw an item on the local news about police officers and mental health professionals working together to prevent people with mental health problems ending up in police cells for want of the right support. ‘Good stuff!’ you might think.  Indeed it is  – but it is also profoundly depressing to hear such a venture being reported as ‘new’.

In 1993 I led a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary team, which diverted people with mental health problems and learning disabilities from custody.  The team included all the right skills and necessary statutory powers – a specialist social worker, two community psychiatric nurses, a senior probation officer and a police inspector.  We had the backing of all the chief officers and the team went wherever they were needed, the police station, the bridewell below the magistrates court and the remand and hospital wings of the local prison.

The approach was simple but effective. By bringing the right skills into the system at the right time, we were often able to help get the right decisions and find the right services. Within a year, the prison hospital wing was no longer full of prisoners with mental illness and learning disabilities. This was a time when the local mental hospital was being run down for closure, so it was no small feat. Of course, some of our clients were very disturbed and a small number were dangerous, or had committed very serious offences so they had to stay in prison or be moved to a secure hospital but at least we knew who they were and where they were.  We advocated for them. They were not dumped and forgotten.

We shared our learning and even wrote a book about our approach which was replicated and adapted all over the country. It was cheap and effective because it made better collective use of existing individual professional skills, capacity and powers and partner agencies’ budgets.  It was about reducing demand, reducing costs and reducing re-offending – but most of all it was about reducing risk and suffering.

‘What’s not to like?’ you might ask and you’d be right but, somehow or other, twenty years later, police officers and mental health nurses are re-embarking on the same journey. Is it because mental health services are still the “Cinderella’ – and their budgets have been cut even when the rest of the NHS has had increases in funding? Is it because we are still so ignorant and fearful about mental illness? Or is it because innovation is generated by enthusiasts on short-term funding so it doesn’t get mainstreamed or embedded? Perhaps it is all of the above.

Whatever the reason, our collective inability to use the available evidence to guide our thinking and to take shared professional and organizational responsibility for public policy challenges means we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes.

When will we ever learn?

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.