Local Government

Designing in Collaboration: Challenges for the new Combined Authorities

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Max Lempriere and Vivien Lowndes

At a workshop hosted in December 2015 by City-REDI, INLOGOV, The Public Services Academy at the University of Birmingham practitioners and academics from the world of local government came together to share experiences on the current Combined Authorities and city-region devolution agenda. In the fifth of a series of posts Max Lempriere and Vivien Lowndes reflect on the day’s major talking points.

The raison d’être of Combined Authorities is to foster collaboration amongst neighbouring local authorities in a time of limited resources, fiscal restraint and ‘wicked issues’. The goal is to stimulate economic growth through better integrating transport, business support and skills development at the sub-regional level.  Alongside the growth agenda, combined authorities are considering their potential role in public service transformation, especially in relation to health and social care.  Combined authorities are also an opportunity to express local identities and challenge London-centric policymaking through, for example, the development of the Northern Powerhouse or Midlands Engine.

By pooling resources, local authorities can avoid duplication and, share staff, expertise and ideas – and risks. This kind of ‘public-public’ partnership can lay the groundwork for the Combined Authority, but collaboration needs to goes far wider to include a range of organisations from the public, private and civil society sectors.  Indeed, the three Local Enterprise Partnerships in the West Midlands will be full members of the new combined authority.  So it isn’t just the case that constituent local authorities need to collaborate. Indeed, the more diverse the range of organisations involved, the greater the potential in terms of gaining insight.   And engaging with civil society groups holds the promise not just of leveraging expertise and capacity, but also of enhancing citizen involvement in local decision making.  Since the Greater Manchester Combined Authority was given budgetary control over local NHS spending (February 2015), this has necessitated collaboration between local council leaders, health and social care providers, clinical commissioning groups, and a range of patient and community bodies.

There is considerable scope for local Universities to play an important collaborative role in the devolution agenda.  Supporting the new combined authorities will require bringing together those who create and apply knowledge within different sectors.  Universities can make available an evidence base to support economic development activities, but also to inform new collaborative governance arrangements themselves.  Universities themselves have a strong incentive to engage proactively in knowledge transfer, given the Treasury’s insistence that research must be able to show demonstrable ‘impact’.  Universities can also play an ‘honest broker’ role in convening opportunities among relevant parties, as is happening in the current move to establish a Midlands Engine to rival (or complement) the Northern Powerhouse.

Despite these opportunities, collaboration is deeply challenging. It requires the fostering of an environment in which the needs of the Combined Authority as a whole are put before those of individual local authorities. This is a difficult task, especially when organisations have been used to having executive sway over their own actions.   Rather than seeking ‘competitive advantage’, organisations need to focus on the potential gains from ‘collaborative advantage’.  In a nutshell, this offers individual organisations the chance to achieve outcomes that they wouldn’t have been able to accomplish on their own.  In fact, they may not even have thought of them!  The aim is not just to improve the delivery of existing services, but to re-imagine what local government might offer a locality through collaborative working.  Entirely new visions, and ways of working, could arise out of the process of collaboration.

New forms of leadership are important in fostering collaboration. Different skills and personal qualities are required, in comparison with leading a single organization.  Research shows that, whatever structures and procedures are put in place, it is often ‘special people’ who make the difference.  Such individuals may not be in the most senior positions, but they demonstrate the ability to bring different groups together, build trust and foster creativity, identify and harness the added value from collaboration, and maximize learning.  Typical personal skills are sociability, pragmatism, personal resilience and a sense of humour!  Collaboration is more than a list of email addresses or skype contacts.  Face-to-face contact and practical step-by-step objectives are crucial.  We all know these sorts of natural collaborators when we meet them.  Talent-spotting for these skills is an urgent task for councils considering secondments to the new combined authorities, or new collaborative roles at council level.  Nurturing new collaborative champions is a responsibility for all partners, as is ensuring that we all learn from those to whom collaboration comes more naturally.   We can’t create these ‘special people’, but we can foster environments in which they flourish – and are rewarded.  How many performance management agreements, or appraisal systems, take account of collaborative as well as organizational achievements?

While new directly elected mayors will head up the major combined authorities, and act as important points of accountability, they won’t provide a substitute for a network of committed ‘boundary spanners’ on the ground.  What they can do is provide the overall vision for their locality, providing a clear answer to the question: What is devolution for?  Mayors can also champion particular forms of collaborative behaviour that put the interests of the locality before that of any individual organization, and also prioritises engagement with residents, communities and local businesses.

Collaboration needs to be the DNA of the new combined authorities.  A commitment to collaboration needs to inform the design of all the new roles, structures and processes.   Collaboration needs to be designed-in from the start.  The goal should be the integration rather than the simple aggregation, of governance capacities within the locality.

This series of workshops is being supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Local Government Association and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE) and is led by Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV and SOLACE’s Research Facilitator for Local Government.

 

 lempriere

Max Lempriere is a final year PhD researcher at the Institute for Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include institutional design, local government policy making, devolution, urban planning and sustainable development.

Vivien Lowndes photo

Professor Vivien Lowndes is involved in research, teaching and knowledge transfer on local governance and public services. She is particular interested in partnerships, citizen participation, and gender issues. Currently Vivien is working on the development of Combined Authorities in the context of devolution, local government responses to austerity, Police and Crime Commissioners’ gender policies, and the use of evidence in migration policy. With colleagues at INLOGOV, she is also engaged in comparative research analysing innovative governance institutions in the UK and Brazil.

INLOGOV-facilitated Hull Commission receives media, business and community endorsement for its final report

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Daniel Goodwin, Senior Associate Fellow

The Hull Commission’s final report was published on 13th January 2016 and was widely reported in regional media. The independent Commission, which was facilitated by INLOGOV, said that a fresh joint approach to economic development and local government organisation is needed in Hull and the East Riding. It found that Hull and the East Riding are interconnected and should seek a fresh way forward together and that the two areas often pull in different directions when they should be managed as one system. A new outward looking approach is needed if the area as a whole is to make the most of the opportunities available from devolution and the Northern Powerhouse.

The Commission was asked to review the effects of the existing boundary on the city and sub-region. The existing boundary has the effect of making Hull look like a small city of 256,000, with up to 240,000 people and 2,700 businesses left out of the picture. Given the real size of its travel to work area and economy ‘Greater Hull’ should be considered as being a city of around 500,000. The boundary significantly skews not only statistics and the way the area is perceived but works against the ability of the city and sub-region to function effectively as a single economic unit.

One possible way forward would be to move the boundary further into the East Riding. However, the Commission took the view that this would be highly unpopular, could well make the remainder of the East Riding unviable and, in any case, is probably impossible under current Boundary Commission rules.

The Commission therefore concluded that the only logical solution to the boundary issue would be to merge the two local authorities. This would make it far easier to join up economic development and infrastructure strategies and develop more effective arrangements for health and social care commissioning. Furthermore, complete removal of the boundary would achieve a political balance and overcome some of the reasons behind public opposition to redrawing it. The Commission also noted the political realities that make this logical solution a probable non-starter in the immediate future, and the need to take account of the rapidly developing Government agenda on devolution and the Northern Powerhouse.

The Commission was required to consider ways in which local government in Hull and the East Riding might better meet the goals of being effective, efficient and accountable. The devolution agenda has moved very swiftly, yet Hull and the East Riding are still not part of devolved arrangements such as those in Greater Manchester and the Sheffield City Region, pooling expertise on growth and infrastructure, with greater powers to make positive change happen. The Commission considered that this must be urgently addressed.

Furthermore, with the Northern Powerhouse and Enterprise Zone developments in mind, the Commission believes that there is a powerful case for a Combined Authority based on the Humber, providing focus for the development of the economy, distribution networks, infrastructure and environmental matters centred on it. It found that political animosities have stood in the way of progress on this option in the recent past. If at all possible they should be addressed and the possibility of a Humber Combined Authority brought back onto the table. The Commission considered that that appropriate consultation with business and a full public debate would make it possible and reflected this in its recommendations.

The Commission heard that there is a possibility that Hull will become a partner, without the East Riding, in the West Yorkshire Combined Authority. It considered this to be a poor outcome because it neglects the economic significance of the Humber, leaves Hull as a small, junior partner and cements the boundary problem further. It also heard that the East Riding is in active discussions with North Yorkshire and York about a North Yorkshire Combined Authority. This would present a similarly poor outcome because it would take the “Greater Hull” business rates with it into a different pool, splitting the economic development and infrastructure planning further away from Hull. Given all the above, the Commission concluded that Hull and the East Riding must be managed as one system, not two. This would provide the area with a much more powerful voice in any Combined Authority arrangements. This view was endorsed by 30 leaders from business, public and community sectors who met to discuss the report. The group was very supportive of the Commission’s concern to support the economic opportunities of the Humber and to ensure that Hull and the East Riding stay together in any future devolved arrangements.

There was also concern not only that the area should in future look outward to the national and international stage but also that local community identity should be respected, whilst ensuring that the Humber develops positively for all who live work and study here.

There was real concern that Yorkshire as a whole is missing out by not coming to an agreement with government about future devolution arrangements. The group wanted local politicians to exhibit a greater sense of urgency and to work together to resolve a positive way forward.

Further information and links to sources may be found through the Commission’s pages on INLOGOV’s website at: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/government-society/departments/local-government-studies/research/hull-commission.aspx

 

Know your local Councillor Photographs - St Albans - May 2008

Daniel has worked in local government for over 30 years in a range of councils and was previously Executive Director of Finance and Policy at the Local Government Association and Chief Executive of St Albans City & District Council. He is an INLOGOV Senior Associate Fellow, contributing to thinking, learning and action in local leadership and services, the wider public sector and beyond. Daniel has a Masters in Public Administration from Warwick Business School and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

You say ringfencing, I say earmarking: those billions of local authority ‘hoarded’ reserves

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Chris Game

A welcome feature of Communities and Local Government Secretary Greg Clark’s early months in office were his obvious efforts to be less interventionist and provocatively critical of local government than his predecessor, Eric Pickles. It’s not taken long, though, for it to become clear that he’s not that cuddly, and that the ghost of Pickles Past still haunts the DCLG’s Marsham Street corridors.

In early October (though largely ignored until recently by the UK media), in a party conference-pandering move straight from the Pickles playbook, Clark enthusiastically endorsed the Government’s plan to amend pensions regulations and procurement guidelines – the aim being to ban councils declining on ethical grounds to invest in or trade with companies involved, for instance, in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco products, and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

So, come November’s Spending Review, it was more disappointing than surprising to hear the Communities Secretary not so much echo as anticipate George Osborne’s injunctions to local authorities to make good their grant losses by drawing on the billions of revenue reserves they’d built up – precisely as Eric Pickles was wont to do each budget-making season.

Indeed, the DCLG furnished the Chancellor – and, of course, the media – with what he deemed the convincing evidence of councils’ ability to do so, in the form of updated revenue expenditure and financing statistics (pp. 12-13, Table 6).  “Today’s figures show how they are well placed to … play their part in dealing with the deficit …, with local authorities holding £22.5 billion in non-ringfenced reserves – up 170% in real terms over the last 15 years. Now is the time to make efficient use of their assets and resources to provide the services local people want to see.” (my emphasis).

It was noticeable that Clark used neither of the inflammatory H-words – in contrast to Pickles, who in such situations was unable to stop himself sneering at the ‘hypocrisy’ of councils pleading poverty as they annually ‘hoarded’ their billions of cash reserves. But then he didn’t need to; Pickles’ media-training is by now well embedded, certainly in the tabloids.

Council reserves 1

The BBC was a touch more restrained, but statistically, at least in the East of England, about as useful as a punctured condom. “Councils across the East of England are sitting on reserves of £470m, a BBC East investigation has found”. Which might have been fleetingly interesting, had the ‘councils’ not comprised an apparently arbitrary selection of “all unitary, county and district authorities” from the East of England region and beyond, and had the figures borne any close correspondence to those just released by the DCLG, on which the ‘investigation’ claimed to be based.

Normally, none of this slapdashery would matter much, apart from irritating any viewers who resent being manipulated into being outraged at some scary big numbers and alleged mismanagement that they have no means of judging for themselves. In this case, though, it came to the attention of Councillor David Finch, Conservative Leader of Essex County Council, who understandably took the whole thing quite personally and proceeded ‘do a Hudspeth’.

INLOGOV blog readers may recall my recent account of the revealing correspondence between David Cameron and Ian Hudspeth, Conservative Leader of the PM’s own Oxfordshire County Council, in which the latter patiently and at length put the PM right on a number of misunderstandings he’d revealed about the county’s financial management and indeed about the impact of his own government’s policies. I sub-titled the exchange ‘the gift that keeps on giving’ and, although this wasn’t the form I anticipated a further instalment taking, it certainly fits the bill.

C’llr Finch had been one of numerous council leaders, in addition to the Local Government Association (LGA) itself, who protested back in November that:

“Whitehall should not be dictating how we should be managing our finances and reserves. Holding reserves is simply prudent and effective financial management and is done to ensure that in the event of an emergency or a major incident we can react without impacting other services.”

Politically if not personally, the Essex leader must have had a trying Christmas, not least through local MPs and their constituents having gained the impression that swilling around County Hall was not floodwater, as elsewhere in the country, but oodles of revenue reserves. He therefore wrote Cameron a three-page letter – described on his blog as ‘polite’ and by others as ‘hard-hitting’ and ‘scathing’ – setting out for the PM a few home truths. There were details of the council’s past savings, future enforced cuts, and ongoing budget pressures, but you sensed that, even more than these specifics, what really irked C’llr Finch was the flak he’d had to take about the council’s alleged reserves:

“I continue to be alarmed at central government misunderstanding, or even ignorance, about council reserves. Essex MPs have been told by the DCLG that the council is sitting on £300million of unringfenced reserves. We actually only have about £60million. The reality is we have just 23 days of available funding in our general reserve.” (my emphasis)

Like Hudspeth in Oxfordshire, the Essex leader is concerned more broadly about what he terms the “giant disconnect emerging between central government and local government” concerning local financial management (my emphasis). But the reserves issue has specific figures attached – a £240 million gap is a big misunderstanding by any standards – which means that the Essex section of the relevant DCLG table enables us to work out what’s probably been going on.

Council reserves 2

It would seem that the DCLG failed properly to explain, or the MPs failed to grasp, that, near-synonymous though the terms ‘ringfenced’ and ‘earmarked’ may be in any everyday conversation in which they may happen to appear, in local finance lingo they are fundamentally different. The DCLG distinguishes between local authorities’ ringfenced reserves, allocated specifically to schools or public health (though not housing, which is completely separate), and non-ringfenced, which are the rest.

Large local authorities especially, however, earmark often a large proportion of their non-ringfenced (sometimes labelled ‘usable’) reserves for a range of different but particular purposes. Like any prudent budgeter, they set money aside for future spending, rather than having to find it all when it suddenly becomes due by the end of the month. Common earmarked reserves are for financing future capital investment and major repairs, for PFI (Private Finance Initiative) payments on long-term projects, to cover claims made under a council’s self-insurance arrangements, to enable future savings targets to be delivered, and, not least in recent years, to safeguard against future years’ grant funding reductions.

The non-earmarked remainder – under one-fifth in Essex CC’s case – goes into the council’s General Fund, or C’llr Finch’s ‘general reserve’, which will be used to balance the budget if it’s overspent at the end of the year, but, in the meantime and more topically, will be used to pay for sudden and large cost pressures – like damage caused by exceptionally severe weather conditions.

David Cameron, who either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about these not terribly subtle ringfencing and earmarking distinctions, seems happy to fire off petulant and factually inaccurate letters to his County Council leader, and to have his MPs similarly badger their own councils.

Clark’s case, though, is different. He certainly does understand, not least because a CIPFA survey of local authority reserves only last summer spelt out the message in detailed clarity. The numerous “recent changes in local authority funding have significantly increased the level of risk being managed by local authorities” (p.2). The radical transformations in service provision on which ministers are so keen have major one-off costs, including redundancy costs, that have to be budgeted for (p.3). “Using reserves purely to support ongoing expenditure merely postpones the need for cuts and makes those cuts more difficult to deliver when needed …” (p.4).

Council reserves 3

Above all, there were the statistical findings of the CIPFA survey – that, almost precisely reflecting the situation in Essex, nearly four-fifths of councils’ reserves were not being either mindlessly or politically ‘hoarded’, but were already earmarked for specific, and often Government-created, purposes. To accuse ministers of ‘going native’ is almost a ‘Yes, Minister’ cliché and in Clark’s case probably unfair, but he certainly doesn’t seem as cuddly today as he did six months ago.

 

Chris Game - pic

Chris Game 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.

What’s the value of loyalty?

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV

In a week in which Jeremy Corbyn has sacked a Shadow Cabinet member and the party spokesman on Europe for ‘disloyalty’ and David Cameron has announced he’ll allow his Cabinet to actively campaign against his desired outcome in the referendum on EU membership – I am moved to ponder the meaning and value of loyalty.

These musings have been prompted by the spectacle of the someone who has made a career of being a maverick requiring unswerving and unquestioning loyalty from his team.

Loyalty is widely perceived as a virtue. It seems to embody resilience, consistency and selflessness and to bring with it an aura of warmth derived from a sense of togetherness and mutual trust. Beneath that soft and fluffy exterior, loyalty drives and maintains very complex political and organizational machinery. That is demonstrated loyalty is withdrawn by followers which not only renders leaders powerless but also delivers a profound and negative judgment on their fitness for leadership. David Cameron’s decision not to enforce the traditional expectations of collective Cabinet responsibilities may be viewed as preemptive measure to avoid that that judgment being delivered on his leadership in relation to the EU issue. The extent to which he has been threatened into making such a move suggests that the followers, not the leader, have set the collective standards of loyalty – and that they are very low.

Leaders who inspires loyalty gain not only the warm glow of approval from their followers but also significant extensions to their power and influence. This may be through benign mechanisms such as the creation of a compelling vision but the extension of power through loyalty can have a darker side. The loyal fixer or enforcer who says and does nasty things to achieve the leader’s goals while protecting the leader from responsibility for the damage caused is part of the standard dramatis personae of both local and national politics.

Clearly, loyalty can be both a force for good or ill. Blind or unquestioning loyalty is has been a contributing factor in failures in leadership, governance and decision making in many types of organization – including governments.   If leaders surround themselves with loyal supporters, who will ask the difficult questions? Who will put principle before loyalty and argue for what they believe to be right even if it runs counter to the beliefs and wishes of the leader?

Are our expectation of loyalty in politics unreasonably high? Is loyalty to an individual leader, an idea, or a political party, based on deeply rooted, or even visceral emotions, governing the thoughts and behaviours of the loyal or is it the balance remaining when self-interest has been set off against the interests of a group, in the contested space between ideology and pragmatism?

Does this concession simply demonstrate that loyalty in politics is, of necessity, conditional on there being sufficient congruence between the leader and the followers? Is it possible, or even desirable for politicians to be unconditionally loyal to a leader, a party or an idea?

Perhaps the answer lies is not in loyalty but consistency? If Jeremy Corbyn made a career of being a principled maverick, defying the party whip on hundreds of occasions, then he can hardly demand that his followers give him the unswerving and even unquestioning loyalty he so vocally denied his leaders in the past. David Cameron set out a clear expectation of Cabinet unity on the ‘in-out’ referendum last year. This year he has relieved his Cabinet colleagues of that responsibility. Both, though their inconsistency, have devalued the currency of loyalty and both are likely to suffer negative consequences – not least in the damage to their personal reputations.

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.

Learning by Doing in Combined Authorities

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Maximilian Lempriere

At a workshop hosted in early November by INLOGOV, City-REDI and The Public Services Academy at the University of Birmingham practitioners and academics from the world of local government came together to share experiences on the current Combined Authorities and city-region devolution agenda. In the third of a series of posts Max Lempriere, a doctoral researcher studying the formation of combined authorities, reflects on the days major talking points. 

 Policy makers may dislike ambiguity and flexibility, but devolution to Combined Authorities brings with it a fair degree of both. There are so many questions that will only be answered as the result of experience and so many variations in configuration, governance and circumstances between Combined Authorities that no progress could be made without it.  The ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ is up for negotiation on a localised basis, bringing both benefits and pitfalls. The question is, then, how can we ensure that we maximise the benefits but avoid the pitfalls?

The precise answer to that question is unknown – a pitfall in itself – but leaders in all Combined Authorities need to be willing to look, listen and learn from their own experience and that of others if they are to strike the right balance. Combined Authority leaders need to be willing and able to share and learn from best practice, whether internal or external.

When looking to other Combined Authorities they must remain sensitive to local contexts. Compare those in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, for example. The latter has historic, clearly defined and coterminous economic and political geographies that lend themselves well to the Combined Authority model, whereas the former has a less clearly defined economic geography and lacks congruence when it comes to political geography. Learning to co-ordinate, collaborate and muddle-through across Combined Authorities is no easy task when there are such differences between them, especially if the implications of actions aren’t immediately clear. Their innovative nature and the variety of contexts in which they are found means that any initial institutional design will only ever be ‘good-enough’.

As a result there will have to be a fair degree of ‘learning by doing’, where the formal and informal rules of the game emerge as decision makers tackle different  challenges and obstacles.

However, precise institutional arrangements, devolved powers and funding responsibilities differ from one Combined Authority to another, reflecting as they do local economic and political geographies. The Mayor in Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, for example, will have more powers over housing that their counterpart in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, in another example, is currently the only Combined Authority to have autonomy over its £6bn share of NHS spending. Understanding common ground for mutual learning will therefore be difficult because it doesn’t just require political and managerial leaders to think in terms of what works but – perhaps more importantly –  what doesn’t work when translated into different  contexts. The danger, as increasingly seems to be the case, is that Combined Authorities look at what the Greater Manchester Combined Authority is doing well and try emulate that.

This kind of learning doesn’t just need to occur within or between Combined Authorities themselves. Central government must be willing and able to learn from experience on the ground, whilst remaining sensitive to local contexts. Learning from past Combined Authority successes and failures should feed not just into designs for future authorities but should form the basis of continuous, on-going institutional reform – a similar process of ‘muddling through’ and respecting ‘good-enough’ design – to fine-tune existing devolution arrangements to ensure maximum public and added value. Central Government has certainly showed a willingness to look, listen and learn itself in the case of the GMCA – shown in ongoing rounds of devolution deals, the latest of which was announced in the Chancellor’s Autumn Spending Review in November 2015. The challenge is to make sure it does so with other Combined Authorities in a way that respects their successes and failures on their own merits and avoids using the GMCA as a ‘yard-stick’ against which to judge.

An effective way to encourage these kind of local and multi-level learning processes is to incorporate them into the institutional design in the first instance. Formal arrangements to encourage inter and intra-institutional feedback – whether through scrutiny arrangements, joint workshops or regular meetings of officials – can play a crucial role in facilitating feedback and fostering a culture that encourages learning, experimentation and innovation.

But how to overcome the challenges of learning across differing contexts and geographies? Part of the work that INLOGOV, City-REDI and others have been doing is directed towards understanding both the successes and the difficulties experienced by Combined Authorities with a sensitivity to local contexts. Academic insight and the application of theory to practice have potentially crucial roles in cross-border learning of this kind. Situating information-providers and independent assessors within the institutional arrangement will allow decision makers to see more clearly points of mutual comparison.

Practitioners should be willing to learn, be sensitive to what is and isn’t possible in different contexts and embrace ambiguity. Combined Authorities are flexible and incomplete. How we work towards completeness depends on our willingness to learn from mistakes, appreciate best practice and recognise that it may not always be the best idea to copy Manchester.

This series of workshops is being supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Local Government Association and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE) and is led by Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV and SOLACE’s Research Facilitator for Local Government.

lempriere

Max Lempriere is a final year PhD researcher at the Institute for Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include institutional design, local government policy making, devolution, urban planning and sustainable development.

Being able to say ‘I’m sorry’ is a sign of strength – not of weakness

/ inlogov / 1 Comment

Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV

Yesterday was a remarkable day in many ways. We heard a passionate but thoughtful debate in the House of Commons.  There wasn’t much of the usual ‘yah boo’ and name calling. Some very good speeches, including by Margaret Becket and Hilary Benn reminded us of the power of argument.  They also reminded me that, while there is so much to criticize in the way this country is led, I am lucky to live in a democracy where a Prime Minister cannot rely on positional power but who needs to persuade MPs both of the moral and strategic arguments for the things he wants to do. In spite of the common perception of MPs as powerless lobby fodder, it was clear yesterday that many were demonstrably acting according to their consciences, led by their reason. In many ways it was a good day for democracy, respect for differing opinions and the exercise of collective leadership.

In other ways yesterday demonstrated some of the ways in which passion, conscience and reason can be subverted to justify the worst possible behaviour.  The problem of bullying, of all sorts of people, in all walks of life, has become part of our understanding of how the world works. Perhaps the word ‘bully’ has lost some of its power because we have applied it so often to such a wide range of behaviours.  Maybe we should move away from the generic to the specific and talk about the terrible psychological damage done by ‘insults’, ‘assaults’ and ‘attacks’.  The old saying ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’ is the opposite of the truth. Sometimes words hurt because they exclude – ‘you aren’t one of us’, they vilify – ‘you are one of them’ or they threaten – damage to reputations and careers.

We often look to leaders to set standards, to model good behaviour and hold bullies to account. It’s hard for them to do that when they indulge in that sort of behaviour themselves or fail to deal with it in others.  Jeremy Corbyn seems to me to be a gentle, principled man but some of his more extremely left wing colleagues are using his popular support to justify criminal behaviour.  To what extent is this his responsibility?  He is the leader of his party so it’s absolutely his responsibility. Modelling good behaviour is a necessary but not sufficient element of effective  leadership. Action is also required.  If Jeremy Corbyn’s sins are of omission, David Cameron’s are definitely of commission. His words about ‘terrorist sympathisers’ makes him a bully because he was seeking both to exclude and to vilify.  We’d find that behaviour reprehensible in a child in the the playground and it is utterly unacceptable in the holder of the highest political office.

However, leaders are only human. Everyone makes mistakes under pressure, even leaders.  Its what they do then that indicates the extent to which they are really good leaders.  Willingness to admit mistakes and to apologise for them demonstrates self-knowledge and humility and those are very attractive attributes in a leader. If someone says they were wrong, we’ll trust them next time they tell us they really are right. If someone tells us they are sorry when they are in the wrong we’ll trust them next time they say they really are in the right.

Refusal to admit mistakes or to apologise for them undermines our trust in leaders. It also give followers a clear message ‘Look at me…I bullied and I got away with it. You can bully and get away with it too’. Nice work Mr Cameron. You won the vote but you diminished your moral authority. Moral authority is the currency of leadership and you’ve squandered yours in support of a vote you would have won anyway. Will that be remembered long after we’ve finished bombing in Syria?

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.