How can the 21st century public servant survive an era of perma-austerity?

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Catherine Mangan

We are launching the first theme from our 21st Century Public Servant project – the need to survive a seemingly unending period of austerity – to coincide with the Local Government Association conference, where austerity is a central theme.

Our research with local government and other public service delivery organisations found that ‘perma-austerity’ is both inhibiting and catalysing change, as organisations struggle to balance short-term cost-cutting and redundancies with a strategic vision for change.

In our interviews with people working in public service delivery and in national stakeholder organisations (more details on research design are here) some talked about the current ‘narrative of doom’ is preventing progress – some talked about a sense of loss and grief for the past; with organisations paralysed by the impact of the cuts, and unable to provide a new vision to work towards. As one put it, ‘No message of hope – leadership is putting council into survival mode by the language they’re using. Nobody is planning for post austerity.’ One interviewee spoke about the effect of losing large numbers of staff: ‘You hear the language of loss everywhere. I get affected by it.’

Although interviewees accepted that the financial context offered opportunities for doing things differently, some commented on the challenge of moving forward whilst dealing with the reality of the impact of large scale redundancies: ‘The cuts are forcing us to confront change. In public service, change doesn’t necessarily happen unless there is a crisis or a disaster, or it happens very slowly. But think tanks and consultancies can find it exciting, for them it’s a massive playground. We have to remind them that people are losing their jobs, services are being cut. There has to be a balance.’ Others commented that the enormity of the challenge needs to be recognized and responded to: ‘It’s not salami slicing because you wouldn’t have salami that big, it’s hacking things off. It’s about rethinking the role of the state in light of the changing economy, technology, the changing ways that people live their lives. The cuts are so big that we have to confront the questions we have been putting off: what is a library service, what is a leisure service?’

The biggest shift being driven by austerity is developing a different relationship with citizens: ‘We won’t have the money so we will have to focus on the enabling and facilitating, enabling the rest of community to do it.’ As one interviewee put it: ‘You can only get so far by being a supply side mechanic, cutting and slicing. You need a better sense of what your people are like, who they are, what their networks are, how they can do more not for themselves but how they can be more a part of the value that you create about what you do as a council.’

However another interviewee described the difficulties she encountered in reconciling the austerity agenda with more relational ways of working: ‘There is a complicated tension between the desire on the one hand for efficiency and rational processes versus the expectations and needs of customers which is more relational and focused on the personal and local. We are expected to do both, to move to the more relational in the government’s commitment to localisation and neighbourhoods. But elsewhere we are moving to customer relationship management and call centres. You phone or visit a call centre, pick up a ticket, it’s not a holistic relationship with the person on the other end of the phone.’

The 21st century public servant will have to ‘find a way through that knot’.

Portrait of OPM staff member

Catherine Mangan is a Senior Fellow at INLOGOV.  Her interests include public sector re-design, outcomes based commissioning and behaviour change.  Prior to joining INLOGOV she managed the organisational development and change work for a not-for-profit consultancy, specialising in supporting local government; and has also worked for the Local Government Association, and as Deputy Director of the County Councils Network.  She specialises in adult social care, children’s services and partnerships.

21st century public servant: the discussion phase

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Catherine Needham

After nine months of researching the 21st Century Public Servant, we are today formally starting the discussion phase of the project. We have undertaken a literature review, we have spoken to over 40 people working in public services in public, private and voluntary sector bodies, and to national stakeholder organisations. From that we have identified key themes of what it means to be a 21st Century public servant which we will be blogging about over the next few months.

We begin this week with a focus on ‘perma-austerity’ which is the key contextual factor for public services, and a major theme at this week’s Local Government Association conference. As well as sharing the findings of our research we will have guest blogs from people working in and close to public services about ways to address the challenges of austerity.

A clear finding from the interviews we’ve done is that there is no unified vision of the future of public services and the people who work to deliver them. The future will be messy and tentative, with paradoxes being managed and lived with rather than solved. In the same spirit we don’t feel we have come up with the answers in this project, but rather with a series of themes that we want to test out with you. If you feel inspired to blog or comment that’s great.

We will be discussing the themes at the IPPR today, beginning a series of project events. You can also come along to the Inlogov stall at the LGA conference to find out more.

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Catherine Needham is Reader in Public Policy and Public Management at the Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, and is developing research around public service reform and policy innovation. Her recent work has focused on co-production and personalization, examining how those approaches are interpreted and applied in frontline practice. Her most recent book, published by the Policy Press in 2011, is entitled, Personalising Public Services: Understanding the Personalisation Narrative. Follow Catherine on Twitter: @DrCNeedham.

What happened to the NOC councils after the May elections: a moan and a puff

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Chris Game

‘Five Days in May’: the time it took in 1940 for Churchill to manoeuvre the War Cabinet into a five-year World War, in 2010 to form Britain’s first post-war peacetime coalition – and in 2014 for Tower Hamlets LBC to announce its local election results. OK, I’ve exaggerated – it was actually 119 hours after the polls closed, so only 4.96 days, but still not good, even discounting the malpractice allegations.

However, as in all competitive contests nowadays, there are positives to be quarried. First, as a mayoral authority, Tower Hamlets’ key result, announced a mere 28 hours after the polls closed, was the re-election of Mayor Lutfur Rahman. And here’s the second positive: in TH that key result is effectively the outcome. Once you know the mayor and his party (Tower Hamlets First), you know the politics of the administration – just as with a majority party in a non-mayoral council.

My first moan, therefore, in the grumbly part of this blog, is less about TH’s dilatoriness than about that of too many of the 30-odd councils whose results were reported in the media as NOC – No Overall Control, and where, from the parties’ seat totals, we couldn’t deduce or guess the eventual outcome.

The BBC’s Vote 2014 table is an example of what happens nationally. It’s authoritative up to a point, listing the parties’ seat numbers and net gains or losses. But then, right at the bottom, after all the parties, the Independents,  and even the council-less, member-less Socialists, we have No Overall Control 32 (8 net gains). And, of course, it’s still there, six weeks later and possibly in perpetuity – the media’s limited interest in local elections having completely evaporated after the horse race bit.

However it’s used, NOC is an unsatisfactory term – conjuring up, for the highly-strung, alarming images of packs of out-of-control, newly elected councillors roaming the streets wreaking who knows what havoc, for apparently the next four years. It’s more seriously misleading too, as noted recently by Democratic Audit (DA), the blog run by the LSE’s Public Policy Group. NOC gives no hint that a perfectly conventional governing administration will be formed, probably within days, but signifies only that no single party has a majority of council seats.

Moreover, in excluding from the lists of councils gained and lost those in which a party has the largest, but minority, share of councillors, it distorts the parties’ true performances – this year at the expense of the Conservatives and Lib Dems. Their councils ‘won’ would increase respectively by a third (41 to 58) and a half (6 to 9), if their NOC councils were added, compared to Labour’s barely 10% increase (82 to 91).

But Democratic Audit’s greater concerns are with the bigger democratic picture, with the lazy NOC label as but one of a whole catalogue of ways in which all of us – and particularly the civically disengaged young people politicians claim to be so concerned about – are kept lamentably under-informed about all aspects of local elections.

This is the crucial point, and it stems, like so much else, from the huge difference in the public and media attention paid to national and local government. Given the pre-election scaremongering in 2010 about the dire consequences of a hung parliament – from a run on the pound to more or less the end of western civilisation – there was immense pressure on the leading players to come up with something that could be sold to us as at least short- and optimistically medium-term ‘Control’.  So we were informed of this outcome, the Coalition Agreement, almost literally within an hour of its settlement.

In local government, all too often, we’re never officially told of the outcome – not even the residents and electors of the NOC councils themselves – as was highlighted this year not just by DA, but also by Local Government Chronicle editor, Nick Golding. During its local elections coverage, LGC monitored councils’ and local newspaper websites – with not just disparate and depressing, but often downright ‘incomprehensible’, findings. It was disappointing, suggested Golding, if “perhaps unsurprising … that some newspapers buried their coverage or failed to work out how individual results could change the political complexion of an authority”.

“What was incomprehensible was the failure of many authorities to highlight their polls. Many council homepages made no reference to the elections and hid elections news in obscure corners; many seemed incapable of promptly posting the results for each ward or revealing how their chamber’s political make-up was changing as a result. Others seemed to think it was the job of someone else to tweet results.”

Of all the defining characteristics of local authorities, the one that most differentiates them from the other local bodies with whom they increasingly work, and that gives them their unique legitimacy, authority and accountability, is surely their direct election. As Golding exhorts:

“Local elections are therefore a big deal. Councils should do everything in their power both to generate excitement about the poll and ensure people know their representatives’ identity. Such tasks are not gimmicks – they are essential components of serving as place leaders. If councils cannot show an interest in their own elections, it is hard to see why their residents should.”

‘Everything in their power’!  Yes, indeed, but let’s at least start by eliminating the ‘incomprehensible’. What Golding and I find truly incomprehensible is why scores of councils should CHOOSE NOT to announce – on the home page of their websites and at the earliest opportunity – the overall result of their local elections; PLUS how, within a single click, voters and residents can find their own ward results – vote totals and percentages, turnouts, and whether gained or retained – and the equivalent for the whole council.

Ultimately, though, even more important than results are outcomes. If one party has an overall majority of seats and will in all probability form a one-party administration, this too should be indicated – with, if felt necessary, the date of Annual Meeting at which this will be formally confirmed. And, for the NOC councils considered here, there should be some brief explanation of the implications of no one party having a majority, and again an indication of when the prevailing inconclusiveness will be resolved.

Right, grumbling mainly over; time, overdue, for a change of mode – from moan to puff. As ever with local government, some authorities already do these things exemplarily – one example cited in the INLOGOV Briefing Paper for which this blog is a promotional puff, being West Lancashire BC, whose only two parties exited the elections with 27 seats each and facing a three-week hiatus until the council’s AGM. Prominently on the council’s website, within days, was a model holding statement of the “next step for the Borough’s political management structure”, explaining that the incumbent Conservative Mayor would have the casting vote at the Annual Meeting, and that therefore the new Mayor would probably be another Conservative, who in turn would have a casting vote in the determination of the Council Leader of a likely Conservative minority administration.

It was informative without appearing, given West Lancashire’s political culture, to compromise officers’ political neutrality; also predictively absolutely spot-on. It was, though, at the ‘helpful’ end of a really rather a long scale – at the other end of which were the councils who took several days even to post their election results, and those who still treat councillors’ party identifications as if they are Official Secrets, refusing to divulge even those of executive members until you go to their individual contact details.

Anyway, the thing is that such councils do exist and, to adapt the much parodied advert, I’ve crawled through their various hoops so that you don’t have to – if indeed it ever occurred to you to do so. Structured around the accompanying table, it provides in one place a record of the eventual outcomes of the elections in this year’s 30 NOC or hung councils (32 if you add  two mayoral authorities), and of how, particularly in some of the more noteworthy cases, these outcomes emerged.

2014 Election results table

Let me conclude, then, with one summary and one taster paragraph. Single-party minorities are undoubtedly the current NOC administration of choice, outnumbering 20 (13 Conservative, 6 Labour, 1 Lib Dem) to 10 two- or multi-party coalitions, the cause of the latter possibly having suffered from events at (the Palace of) Westminster. The coalitions, though, are striking for their almost Cleopatran infinite variety. The Lib Dems are involved in 8: 4 with Labour, 3 with Conservatives, and in Weymouth & Portland’s all-party administration with both. The Conservatives are involved in 6, Labour in 5, Independents, themselves of impressive variety, in 7, Greens in 1, and, depending on whom in Basildon you believe, UKIP in 1.

If there’s a positive by-product of having to ferret out from councils’ websites information that should be readily accessible, it must be the serendipity factor: you do occasionally come across quirky or gossipy stuff you didn’t previously know. Like, in alphabetical order, the new administration committed to getting on first-name terms with officers and staff (Brentwood); the political group whose acquisition of just one additional councillor necessitated a name change (Colchester); the city with probably the least love lost between its MP and council leader – of the same party (Peterborough); the council where UKIP took power from Labour and then gave it back again (Thurrock); the council whose first and only UKIP member is one Francis Drake (Weymouth & Portland); and finally, the council (some of) whose members seem least inhibited about confirming the public’s worst suspicions of politicians’ motives (Worcester).

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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.

Strengthening democracy and participation: routes to re-connection and engagement – a provocation

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Catherine Durose

This post is based on a provocation which I posed at INLOGOV’s recent Summer Symposium. It is an attempt to move on the conversation about engagement between local government, other public institutions, citizens and communities.

It is unlikely that anyone attending the Symposium – or indeed, probably reading the INLOGOV blog – has not had a conversation about either the desire or difficulty of re-connecting government and other public institutions with local communities and citizens. We may agree that this is an important conversation to have, but why is it one that we keep having? Why despite years of this issue being high on the policy agenda and the subject of so much academic research, why does it feel like little has changed?

A common response is that this lack of change is the fault of citizens: there is little appetite from citizens to engage, they are apathetic.

What is often neglected, is that apathy (which we could question in and of itself) is generative, it is a response to opportunities to participate which are often what Arnstein calls ‘empty rituals’ but it is also caused by a repeated undermining of citizens’ sense of agency and efficacy: as one activist said to me recently, ‘we felt we were being done to, over and over again’.

The reason that many of the attempts to ‘re-connect’ that come from local government feel stale, over- and misused, cynically applied, ineffective, and superficial; is because they often are, it is an appropriate reaction.

So how can we shift the conversation, using the words of Archon Fung, what are the ‘vision and grammar’ of alternative ways to re-connect: what are the principles and design that may move the conversation on a different way?

We may want to think about:

Vision…

  • Principles: how do we see democracy and accountability working in localism, it is about building consensus or allowing space for contesting power and creating alternatives? What are the underlying values that we are seeking to advance? What kind of world do we want to create?

Grammar…

  • Intermediaries (boundary spanners, civic entrepreneurs, community organisers, deliberative practitioners, active citizens, 21st century public servants): who are those individuals who are able to build ‘vital coalitions’ to make things happen and get things done in neighbourhoods and communities? How can we support and facilitate their work?
  • Organisational change: How can we challenge a culture in local government that often struggles to let go, where officers and members thinks they’re in charge, second guesses, patronises the public, but also to find a starting point for a conversation that resonates with people?
  • Institutional design: What are the democratic potentialities in institutional design? Do we need to start with a perfect design or can we work it out along the way? Can we mix, match and merge?
  • Tools: Can a different medium be a different message? Can using spatial or visualisation tools, geo-apps help to change the parameters of the conversation and let citizens shout a little louder?

How can we use these different ideas to go from the inspiring, yet marginal, to the ‘new normal’?

Related blogs from the Summer Symposium can be read here

 

duroseDr Catherine Durose is Senior Lecturer in INLOGOV and Director of Research for the SChool of Government and Society at the University of Birmingham.  She is co-author of the forthcoming book, ‘Re-thinking public policy: why co-production matters?’ for Policy Press.

 

 

 

Re-valuing The Public

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Teresa L. Córdova

When we are on the ground getting the policies implemented, or perhaps even making the policies, we focus on doing what we can get done. One of our first questions is, “what are the constraints, the limits of what is possible (or probable), given current fiscal conditions, regulatory structures, or political dynamics.” In focusing on getting done what is more likely in our power to influence, we might also make the decision to leave the more difficult – or nearly unattainable – goals behind. Working under conditions of limited government resources, our focus might be to accept the constraints of the “changing times” and focus our efforts on budgets, minimizing as much as we can, cuts to vital services. We might implement strategies for “efficiency,” introduce new technologies, or shift organizational structures. We work with what we got; we adapt; we innovate. As politician, as manager, as innovator, as activist, we act with the best of intentions. It makes sense; it is a way for good-minded people to be engaged, to contribute.

Does it also make sense to evaluate our choices to engage in these ways? Does it make sense to ask about the implications of given actions as to whether they contribute to solutions or unintentionally exacerbate the problems? How might our choices with respect to local governance, for example, strengthen or weaken our mechanisms to govern ourselves in ways that promote the collective good? Because if we look closer, we can make the connection between the conditions that exist at the level of local governance (i.e. insufficient revenue and decreasing ability to deliver) as part and parcel of the same set of dynamics that are creating disparities that threaten the foundational fabric of our communities.

Though we may be at the ground level attempting to sustain both the public sector and its value to local governance, we might remember that the cuts to public sector budgets didn’t just happen. There are economic interests that with their power have directed wealth to themselves through tax and regulatory policies – thus depleting the revenue base of the public while adding to its costs. The concentrated wealth does not however, make its way to job creation and shared benefits. Instead, anti-government rhetoric makes government itself the scapegoat and further erodes the public’s belief that government should be valued. All of this makes way, for the further privatization of government functions and policies that serve, not the public interest necessarily, but the drive for generating profit through the administration of those functions, e.g. prison industrial complex in the U.S.

Under conditions of our stewardship with its limited power, how might we sharpen our abilities to get at the root cause for the conditions we face, perhaps change, but at least not make worse? We might ask, does our approach to democracy and local governance strengthen the collective good or take us to the door of furthering the demise of the public sector, or more to the point – the public’s commitment to itself. Hopefully, the desire to salvage from what is possible does not deliver us deeper into the entrenched logic of furthering the concentration and centralization of power, decision-making and wealth. The choices that we make in how to address conditions of reduced revenue streams, new technology and pressures for privatization will either reinforce the very forces that create those conditions – or challenge them. We need to pay attention to our policy choices, their logical extension and their implications. Articulating values of the collective good, making way for multiple stakeholders, working in coalitions and partnering with citizen organizations are among the strategies that we can employ to re-create – and strengthen the public, for the public.

 

 

Teresa L. Córdova, Ph.D. is Professor in Urban Planning and Director of The Great Cities Institute, representing UIC’s Great Cities Initiative and commitment to its Urban Mission.  Professor Córdova is an applied theorist and political economist whose focus is community development and Latino Studies.  She approaches her work as a scholarship of engagement in which her research, pedagogy and service are integrated.  She studies the impacts of globalization on Latino communities with particular interest in global/local dynamics.  Throughout the span of her academic career, Professor Córdova has engaged with communities outside the university and is an expert in community/university partnerships.

Democracy in The Circle: a route to reconnection and engagement?

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Frank Hendriks

One of the theme’s at INLOGOV’s 2014 summer symposium is “Strengthening democracy and participation: routes to re-connection and engagement.” One of the possible routes is tellingly sketched in Dave Eggers’s recent novel The Circle (2013).

I will not try to summarize this rich, dystopian novel which is in the tradition of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, brimming with ideas as well as fears. The vision of democracy presented in The Circle is what I focus on here. It is called ‘demoxie’, and it might be a better prediction of future democracy than many theorists would think.

In the book, demoxie is quite typically introduced as a hitherto unthought-of ‘next step’ in a development process. It starts with the idea to make everyone with a Circle account automatically a registered voter. In the brave new world of The Circle, virtually everyone has such an account, as it is the merger of all other accounts. Think of Google, Twitter, Facebook, and all that coming together in one big company, with a monopoly on the internet and all connected data. One of the company founders, Bailey, first sees this as an opportunity to perfect electoral democracy, to close ‘the circle’ between electors and elected so to speak. “Now think,” he says at a company meeting, “if we can get closer to full participation in all elections (…) As we know here at the Circle, with full participation comes full knowledge. We know what Circlers want because we ask (…) if we observe the same model nationally, electorally, then we can get very close, I think, to 100 percent participation. One hundred percent democracy.”

There is applause, but the fatal heroine of the book, Mae Holland, has a brainwave and suggests to take the whole thing one step further. Why not oblige everyone to vote? “Everyone would agree that 100 percent participation is the ideal.” Until the requested vote has been cast, a circle account will simply be blocked. “And then we can take the temperature of everyone at any time.” The developers at the firm are so excited that within a week they have a beta version of what now is called ‘demoxie’ – “It’s democracy with your voice, and your moxie. And it’s coming soon.” The first try-out question is “Should we have more veggie options at lunch?” In no time the demoxie result appears: “75% of respondents want more veggie options. More veggie options will be provided.” The company’s founders are excited, they want more of these direct votations and promise to implement the majority ‘moxie’ within a day. Demoxie would be the best shot at ‘pure’, direct democracy the world ever had.

Is this unreal ‘science-fiction’, completely detached from our world? I don’t think so. Like everything in The Circle, demoxie is a radical extrapolation of developments already visible. It’s actually quite close to what the Five Star Movement, one of Italy’s biggest parties nowadays, envision. It’s very close to what pirate parties around the world call ‘liquid feedback’ – heeding the voice of constituencies on a permanent basis, feeding it back directly to political processes at hand. It’s an extrapolation of consumer polls, internet surveys, facebook counts, and the like, now with the promise of swift take-up, and response rates that can hardly be ignored.

I see ‘demoxie’ as a radicalized version of what I call, less poetically, ‘voter democracy’. I tried to give it due attention in my book ‘Vital Democracy’, but quite honestly it needs much more. Democratic theory is traditionally focused on the distinction between Westminster (indirectly-aggregative) and consensus (indirectly-integrative) democracy. More recently the attention has been extended to communicative and deliberative democracy of the directly-integrative type. Surely, these are routes to re-connection and engagement, and we should continue to study them. However, we should also realize that these routes are followed more often in theory than in practice. Democratic theorists are intrigued by experiments with mini-publics, deliberation days, and the like, but the wider public quite often just prefers to quickly vote, and see their votes aggregated directly and efficiently.

There is not only a popular pull in this direction, but also a strong technological push, which are two reasons to take this other, directly-aggregative, route to re-connection and engagement more seriously than we do. Because whether we like it or not as democratic theorists, it is here to stay and it is bound to grow.

COPYRIGHT WWW.TONTOEMEN.COM

Frank Hendriks is full professor and research director at the Tilburg School of Politics and Public Administration, and co-director of the Demos-Center for Better Governance and Citizenship at Tilburg University. His current research is focused on the design and quality of democratic governance – on political leadership and active citizenship, on public decision-making and participation, on reform and innovation in democratic institutions – at the level of the city and the state at large. Frank is also a Fellow at the Montesquieu Institute in the Hague and Visiting Fellow at St Edmunds College, Cambridge University.