Author: inlogov

Why sharing is the future: A public administration perspective on the mesh economy

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Tutik Rachmawati

It is common knowledge that in the study of public administration, initiatives for improving the performance of public organisations are very much borrowed from the private sector. In 1993, Osborne & Gaebler, for instance, established ten principles to reach entrepreneurial government. They offered ways to develop entrepreneurial, flexible and outcome-oriented organisations in the public sector.

Furthermore, the concept of New Public Management, which emphasises economic rationalism and private sector management practices, has also been adapted across nations. The implementation of information technology into business practices has also driven public organisations to launch e-government to transform the way they engage with citizens and business. Recently, under the ideas of entrepreneurial government and New Public Management, the duties of many public organisations have been commissioned to other parties, including in the private sector.

It can be argued that the principles of Mesh Economy can appropriately be applied in public organisation for several reasons. Firstly, the principle of partnership and other parties’ involvement. Strategic Commissioning in public organisations stresses the importance of partnership and involvement of other parties. It aims at reducing overlap and duplications, and further creating scope for efficiency and savings. This is an idea that is very much in line with Mesh Economy which highlights business operation through a collaborative approach to providing organisations with better ideas that then allows customers to receive flexible and more sustainable products and services.

Secondly, the principle of sustainability and the global anti-waste approach in the Mesh Economy is similar to the principle of sustainable management of services and assets demands in strategic commissioning. Strategic commissioning focuses on the quality and value for money – not necessarily at lowest cost- so that more is achieved with less in an environmentally friendly way.

Thirdly, consumer driven free economy in the Mesh Business is similar with co-production in strategic commissioning of public organisations. While the Mesh Business sends people recommendations and/or advertising messages based on their personal behavioural patterns, co-production service users know things that many professionals do not know – hence services can be produced more effectively. Co–production conceives the services users as active asset-holders rather than passive consumers. Therefore, both Mesh Business and Co-production empower and build trust in customers/consumers. Customers in Mesh Business build trust by disclosing personal behavioural patterns, while in co-production users, citizens, partners and voters build trust in the work of the public sector including the risks of losing the shared assets with other parties.

Sharing is the future business of private sector, and it will also be the future of public organisations as both share common characteristics. However, there are lessons to be learned for public organisations from the Mesh Economy.

Firstly, the mesh economy is based on strong relations with customers, as it is through more frequent contact with customers that a greater flow of customer data is produced which at the end makes the business successful by making more profit. Even though profit is not the raison d’être of the public organisation, it is still valid to have good relations with citizens. Public organisations also generate large amounts of citizen data which eventually will be useful to perfect the public organisation’s performance in providing public services. Public organisations need to learn from the Mesh Business on how to utilize the ongoing connections with citizens and to use citizen data constructively to serve citizens better.

Secondly is the issue of managing resources efficiently. The rule of thumb in mesh business is ‘ownership is out, access is in’. It means that mesh business can and does deploy assets they don’t own but can easily access. It is rightful for public organisations to apply this as the potential for efficiency and saving a huge amount of money is high. Learning from this will enable public organisations to channel their budget for the betterment of public service provision. Furthermore, as public organisations, governments and local governments suffer from financial burden, the need to share rather than buy and own is more appropriate.

Thirdly, public organisations will need to learn from the mesh economy on how to design a public services that is more resilient so that they could last longer even after multiple uses by different members or users. Every public service needs to meet the four criteria of mesh products: it should be durable (well-built and safe), flexible (accommodates different users), repairable (has standardized parts that allow easy repair) and sustainable (reduces natural resources waste).

To conclude, sharing as the core concept of the mesh economy should be applied in public organisation settings. Its core principles are needed for public entrepreneurs to level up public organisations’ performance.

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Tutik Rachmawati is a PhD student at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham, and is a Japan-Indonesian Presidential Scholarship Awardee. She has research interests in public entrepreneurship and local economic development.

This post previously appeared on Puzzle Minds.

It’s not Labour or the LGA who are out of touch. It’s you, Minister!

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Chris Game

Are you up to speed with your local finance jargon? If so, I wonder if you can explain the difference between a ‘widows tax’ and a ‘Bridget Jones tax’? No, it’s no use reaching for your £445 copy of the CIPFA Guide to Local Government Finance. The answer’s not in there. It’s the Conservative press you’re after, and specifically the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

Monday’s edition of the Mail (that’s Monday, 6th May) thought it would be fun to scare its Bank Holiday readers with the news that “Labour plots ‘Bridget Jones tax’: Party accused of demanding an end to council tax discounts for singletons”.

Evidently the rest of what we once called Fleet Street was out to lunch, because it wasn’t until Thursday 9th that the Telegraph caught up with the story, by which time it obviously had to invent its own slant: “Town halls seek to levy ‘widows tax’”.

They are of course exactly the same thing – and neither, as we’ll see, remotely qualifies as news. But let’s stay with the papers for a bit. The Mail’s story opened as follows:

“Labour has been accused of plotting a ‘Bridget Jones tax’ on singletons as its local authorities demand an end to council tax discounts for those living alone.
In a formal submission to ministers, the Local Government Association [LGA] is calling for the power to end the 25 per cent discount offered in recognition of the fact single people place fewer demands on local services.
More than seven million are thought to benefit from the discount, at a cost of around £2.7 billion a year.”

It’s an interesting bit of reporting. The basic story is broadly accurate. One proposal in the LGA’s 24-page submission to the Government’s June Spending Review does indeed call for “the full and unconstrained ability to vary locally all council tax discounts including the single person discount”. In fact, it’s a kind of ‘belt and braces’ demand, because it could be seen as already implicit in the LGA’s more comprehensive proposal for “the removal of restrictions on council tax, so that councils can determine with their communities the appropriate level of tax and be accountable through local elections for doing so”.

The interesting bit is that the LGA is Conservative-led and Conservative-controlled – the party having been in control of over half of all English and Welsh councils following last year’s local elections. The Chairman of the LGA is therefore Conservative – Sir Merrick Cockell, from the Royal, and very Conservative, Borough of Kensington & Chelsea – and the Conservatives are also the largest group on the Association’s Executive. It would represent quite a coup for the minority representation of Labour authorities, if they had been able to hijack almost certainly the single most important document the LGA will produce this year – were it true.

Having already implied that the LGA was Labour-run, there wasn’t any real need for the Mail to offer further explanation, but there was a rather limp mention of that all-purpose stand-by for bewildered journalists – their anonymous ‘sources’. In this case, the “sources claim the campaign to end the discount is being driven by Labour authorities including Liverpool, Sheffield, Islington and Exeter”.

“and Exeter”. Brilliant. The sources certainly earned their pay-off there: three of the oldest recidivists around, and then, out of the blue, Exeter, to add real authenticity. A council that last year set one of the lowest district council tax rates in the country – so low that this year it was specifically allowed by Ministers to increase its bills by £5. A dangerous trouble maker, if ever there was one.

But it was more than enough for Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, who not only ran with it, but suggested a name for what would have to be presented, of course, as a new tax: “There is clearly a well-orchestrated campaign being pushed forward by Labour councillors to target the most vulnerable. This is a Bridget Jones tax and shows how out of touch Labour are”.

Not, however, to quite the degree that his colleague, Brandon Lewis, appears to be. The Local Government Minister explained to the Daily Telegraph that it is in fact the LGA that “is completely out of touch by calling for stealthy council tax hikes – how strange they didn’t have the courage of their convictions to highlight this before election day.”

So let me get this straight. Our Conservative Minister would have liked it publicised, during the county council elections campaign, that the Conservative-led LGA was calling for stealthy council tax hikes? I find it a little surprising, but, if that was what he really, really wanted, he could have announced it himself – because the whole Spending Review submission – including, in bold type, the council tax discounts bid – had been produced back in March and had been in the public domain and available for every one of us to read throughout the campaign.

So which is it? Had he not read it, or forgotten it, or not realised its potential political exploitability? Whatever, I don’t think he’s in much of a position to make accusations about others being out of touch.

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Chris is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Bring back committees – all is forgiven!

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Andrew Coulson

Governance by Committees goes back to the origins of local government in the UK. It precedes the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 which created a legal framework whereby local government can only do what central government says it can do. It is the natural way to run an organisation. The boards of directors who run companies (or quangos) are committees. The trustees of a charity are a committee. A parliament is a committee – albeit a large and unwieldy one.

Of course not everyone on a committee is equal. The Chair has a unique position, with control of agendas, public relations, and often patronage. The secretary writes the minutes – with the subtle power to play up or play down some of what has happened. The treasurer controls the money, day to day.

Committees served local government well for at least 150 years. They were the envy of public administrators in many other parts of the world. Harold Laski promoted them, in 1935, as an extension of Athenian democracy – the advantages of a city-state running its own affairs. Forty five years later, George Jones saw them as “an essential element of a pluralist society” and a bulwark of countervailing power against an over-mighty centralising state. Thousands of councillors, over the years, learnt their trade in committees, listening to officials explaining what they wanted to do, and more experienced councillors asking questions, and having a real sense of ownership in the decisions that resulted.

Why then were committees in English local government so brusquely brushed away, to be replaced by directly elected mayors (the Labour government’s clearly preferred choice at the time) or cabinets and leaders? Why, in contrast, were they preserved, in emasculated form, in Development Control and Licensing Committees, and in councils representing populations of less than 85,000? And why are they now slowly coming back, under the liberating powers of the Localism Act, through which perhaps as many as 30 councils may have moved back to governance by committees by 2014?

By 2000 the system had, perhaps, grown out of control. The desire of councillors to be involved in every significant decision led to a proliferation of committees and subcommittees. Birmingham had more than 60. Many had delegated powers. They enabled small cliques of councillors to get things done, but many of them could not be described as open or democratic. This system also meant that cross-cutting matters (and most matters in local government are cross cutting to greater or lesser extent) went the rounds of several committees before a final decision was made – a slow and frustrating process, especially for officials. The system institutionalised silos – as each committee tenaciously defended its interests and its budgets. And it was often taken over by the party-group system, which ensured that almost all the important decisions were taken in private meetings of a political party before the official meetings in public.

It is sometimes said that committees were abolished because of Hilary Armstrong’s frustrations as a backbench member of the unwieldy and ineffective Education Committee of Durham County Council, on which she sat before becoming the MP who took the Local Government Act through the House of Commons. But it is also clear that much was wrong, that the system needed to be streamlined, and that it struggled in the new emerging world of partnerships and contracting out. F expressed in The Audit Commission summed up the frustrations in its 1990 pamphlet, We can’t go on meeting like this.

But the grass is not always greener on the other side of the hill. We can now see the limitations of mayors and cabinets. An over-concentration of power in a small number of hands, which may not be representative, or reflect the plurality of interests in something as complex as a city or county. A still confusing lack of clarity as to whether paid officials or politicians hold the real power. Weakness in standing up to bosses in London – and a creeping centralisation.

Above all, councillors are not content – especially backbench and Opposition councillors, who could make major contributions under the committee system but have almost no similar opportunities with cabinets or mayors.

And so the tide turned. The Localism Act enshrined a Conservative promise ahead of the 2010 election to give councils the chance to return to committee governance. There was no great rush – only four councils changed in 2012 (Nottinghamshire County, the London Borough of Sutton, Brighton and Hove, and South Gloucestershire). They brought in streamlined systems, with much power in the hands of Policy and Resources Committees or equivalent. These may involve little more than giving voting and speaking rights to Opposition councillors on what is still, effectively, a small cabinet or executive. But at least another 10 councils are likely to make the change at their 2013 Annual General Meetings. Others are talking about it or considering it.

INLOGOV is one of the few places that has been monitoring this change, and assisting councils to think through the issues – how to plan the detail to get the best out of a return to committees while avoiding the unsatisfactory practices that could be a problem in the past.

We have convened two workshops for councils or councillors considering making the change – and a third will take place on 27 June. Councillors and officers from councils which have changed will be present. We will not take a stand, that one system is right and the other wrong – it depends on the detail, and on local circumstances. But we will defend the right of councils to make the change, and to govern themselves as they think fit (in fact we would like to see a much wider set of systems open for consideration and experiment). If the previous workshops are anything to go by, the debate will be lively and extremely well informed.

To book a place at the workshop on 27th June, complete this booking form.

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Dr. Andrew Coulson is Lead Consultant on Overview and Scrutiny at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham, with wide experience of Overview and Scrutiny. He has recently launched one of the first assessed qualifications on the subject. His further research interests include partnerships and governance, economic and environmental strategies, and local government in Central and Eastern Europe.

Why don’t people vote?

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David Craven

In an event that could be completely predicted, last week’s local elections have seen an average turnout of between 30% and 35%, almost unchanged from last year’s. The now-traditional question of why people do not vote in local elections will be asked once again.

There is a stunning lack of knowledge about local politics. Almost nobody knows to which party their councillors belong, never mind their names. I asked a few people here in Birmingham, all of whom regularly vote in local elections, and most weren’t sure how often elections take place, how many candidates per ward there are, or even which party is in control of the city council. (The trick question was when I asked whether they planned to vote in this year’s election: there are no elections in Birmingham this year, but nobody knew this). This admittedly unscientific straw poll reinforces what is a common belief, that local elections simply aren’t important in most people’s minds, at least important enough for people to know things about them.

There are other posited explanations: a more mobile workforce means that people are less likely to take an interest in local politics; the fact that local politics is more widely considered to be corrupt or more wasteful than national politics; the safe-seat situation depressing the belief that a person’s vote actually counts for anything. Everyone has their own reasoning, and there have been many things written both in academia and in the media.

One way we can try to see whether these reasons are factors is by-elections. If people voted based on perceived importance of the elections then by-elections should see similar numbers of people turn out to vote: the reality is very different. It is rare for more people to vote in by-elections than in the previous general election, with only fourteen British by-elections having increased turnouts since 1945, compared with the same number of British by-elections taking place in the current parliament alone. In those latest elections, turnout was down by about 20% on the general election, bringing it to an average of 37.2%, a typical local election turnout in recent times. In case one thinks this is a fluke, turnout during the previous parliament in by-elections was down by 15% on the previous general election.

My personal theory is that it is media coverage, or rather the lack thereof, that influences whether people vote. Before a general election there is near-blanket coverage, ensuring that everyone knows about the election, knows when it is, and has some idea of what the main parties claim to want to do should they be elected. Before a local or European election, however, there is very little in the way of media coverage from the national television networks, the source of most of the nation’s news, and believed by people to be the most trustworthy. The local newspaper industry is dying quicker than the national newspaper industry, and local television is consistently unwanted (although that isn’t stopping the government from trying again, so there is no real help from these quarters. The national media are neither interested nor really able to focus on local issues, and these issues become marginalized. Faced with a dearth of information and a lack of interest from others, we stop considering local elections, European elections, by-elections, and so on, and they do not even register in our minds. This third of the population that votes in general elections but not local elections suffer from a kind of local disenfranchisement, where they do realize that they should vote, but the reasons seem to get lost when they need to vote for something that doesn’t appear in the headlines on TV.

I’ll finish with one more possible reason: what if the general election fills many people with a spirit of camaraderie, that the country is going out to choose a government? If that’s the reason that some people vote only in general elections, then it will be very difficult to convince them otherwise.

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David Craven is a Royal Society Research Fellow and Birmingham Fellow in the School of Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. His interests are primarily in mathematics, although branch out into chemistry and social choice theory.

UKIP exceeds expectations but what do the results tell us?

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Karin Bottom

It is now clear that UKIP exceeded most expectations in the local elections on May the 2nd, garnering around 26 per cent of the vote. Yet as the dust settles, we must now ask what these results mean? Of course, at this stage it is hard to be sure and a certain amount speculation is involved but one thing is clear, the mainstream has a fight on its hands.

To label UKIP’s support as mere articulation of protest is naive, simplistic and lazy. More to the point, the ‘protest label’ implies that any vote for parties outside the mainstream – whatever their hue – is pathologically wrong and requires correction: this is not healthy analysis. While a number of voters may well be sending a message to their usual party of choice or just the ‘big three’ in general, a proportion of the population does appear to support UKIP and what it stands for. The sentiments which underpin much of the party’s support are also hard for the mainstream to swallow, particularly on the left and though all three are beginning to see the bigger picture and respond, they can’t escape from the fact that they are all linked with the problems the country faces right now: Labour is seen as responsible while the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are denigrated for not reversing the situation. UKIP on the other hand claims to offer the electorate solutions and has no track record of failure, a very attractive quality which – given the right circumstances – can facilitate substantial success.

Yet, perhaps the most interesting questions concerning UKIP ask, what is it exactly? Is it a pressure group or is it a party? Hitherto labelled as a single issue organisation it has never shied away from its long-term key objective which is a retreat from the European Union. Recently though, it has expanded its arguments, rhetoric and goals. Initially marketing itself as a force for change, it now seems to hold a somewhat longer term view of its future.

Before the count was in, Farage’s discussion with Evan Davis on Radio 4’s Today Programme was particularly revealing when he when equated UKIP’s potential for bringing about change with that generated by the SDP’s success in the early 1980s. He argued that UKIP now has the capacity to be part of the political solution and this suggests that the party is developing in a new direction: indeed, the BBC’s Nick Robinson now argues that UKIP has made the transition from pressure group to political party. Only time will tell if this is the case but one thing is for sure, speculation and judgment of UKIP will only intensify.

Next year’s elections to the European Parliament and the 2015 General Election will certainly go some way in establishing the nature of UKIP and the type of organisation it really is; but in the meantime, its message is resonating with a sizeable proportion of the electorate and the mainstream is not sure what to do.

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Karin Bottom is Lecturer in British Politics and Research Methods at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham. Her core research areas comprise parties (particularly small and the BNP), party systems and party theory. She is particularly interested in concepts of relevance and how national level theories can be utilised at the sub-national level.

Elected Councillors: How much influence and power are they able to exercise?

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John Raine

What might we expect of the county councillors we elected yesterday? Will those elected be able to implement the various initiatives they have pledged in their campaigns? In this respect, we might reasonably be a tad sceptical for a number of reasons.

First, councils no longer occupy the core local policy-making role of previous times. Nowadays there is more emphasis on multi-agency partnering in local public policy-making so that key matters are often decided in conjunction with other local public, voluntary and private sector organisations. While this may be beneficial in ensuring more ‘joined up’ public services, without doubt it has weakened the power and influence of elected councillors.

Second, the ‘cabinet’ model, introduced a decade ago, under which an elite group of councillors lead on policy-making, has also disempowered other councillors. While some can be influential internally on scrutiny committees reviewing policy and holding the cabinet members to account, many others act mostly as ward representatives and without much opportunity at all to contribute to decision-making.

Third, many of the services are now provided as ‘shared services’ with neighbouring councils and other local public organisations; others have been contracted out or are tied up in long-term public-private-partnership arrangements. While this may have reduced costs, it has also become more difficult for individual councillors to be influential in relation to those services since any proposed changes have to be re-negotiated with other partners and may involve complex contractual issues that are expensive-to-unpick.

Fourth, the move by councils to establish front-line, multi-service, ‘customer contact centres’ and public websites that not only provide information but also allow the public to interact directly, e.g. reporting maintenance and other problems, has diluted the role of the councillor as conduit to getting matters remedied. Indeed, in the digital era of sophisticated telephony and CRM systems, the elected councillor may well be last to learn about the problems that previously they might have championed on behalf of the public.

Fifth, the on-going austere financial climate facing councils means that there are generally less resources for new initiatives unless there is the prospect of efficiency improvements and financial savings in return. Moreover, lack of money provides a convenient excuse for the political leadership and officers to say ‘no’ to other councillors whose ideas happen not to find favour.

Overall, then, one might conclude that, despite all the rhetoric from government about ‘localism’ and about the empowerment of councillors as community leaders, the power and influence of those we eleced yesterday to make a significant difference will unfortunately seem quite limited. But candidates for councillorship should not be deterred; ‘where there is a will there is a way’! And for those elected and with sufficient commitment and determination to confront the obstacles and to press their cases for change effectively, there is certainly much to be done to make councils work better and more for the benefit of those they represent.

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John Raine is Professor of Management in Criminal Justice at INLOGOV. He has been involved in criminal justice research, consultancy and teaching at Birmingham for some twenty-five years and has a strong track record of commissions for the Home Office, Lord Chancellor’s Department/Department for Constitutional Affairs/Ministry of Justice on aspects of policy and practice within the criminal (and civil) justice sectors.