Horse-meat in beefburgers? Who says we are over-regulated?

15/02/201315/02/2013 / inlogov / 1 Comment

John Raine

A recurrent theme of the political rhetoric from successive governments in recent times has been ‘deregulation’, ‘cutting bureaucracy and red-tape’. Indeed the notions of ‘Smaller Government’ and of ‘curbing the nanny state’ have been key elements in the present Coalition Government’s programme since the outset in 2010. But while perhaps politically canny to talk of ‘bonfires of regulations’ and sounding off about freeing individuals and businesses from the maize of red-tape and state bureaucracy, the reality, of course, is that governments mostly augment, rather than diminish, the ‘regulatory mountain’. And why not? After all, most of us would expect government to be acting in our collective interests to protect our health and wellbeing and to minimise our exposure to exploitation and harm. The making and enforcement of regulations is something government must surely do in fulfilling its legitimate and important ‘guardian’ role.

The last few days have brought shocking reminders of the consequences of regulatory failure. First the revelations of extraordinary lapses in public sector patient care and an awful catalogue of avoidable loss of life at Stafford hospital. Now an unfolding saga of trading standards breaches and food safety concerns in the wake of the discovery of horse meat in some of our supposed beef products. Exactly how long such fraud has been going on, and how widespread is the extent of contamination, remains to be seen. But, understandably, questions are already being asked about the role of the regulators – in health care, trading standards and food safety, and both at national and local levels. Could and should the malpractices have been identified earlier? Are the inspection processes sufficiently robust and reliable? At Stafford, we now know for sure that they were absolutely not; with the horsemeat scandal, we can presently only speculate, but given a scaling-down year-on-year in the intensity of regulatory inspection work generally, we might realistically suspect a similarly inadequate verdict.

That scaling-down trend – affecting both national regulatory bodies (e.g. the Health and Safety Executive, the Food Standards Agency and the Environment Agency), and local authority regulatory departments (e.g. for Trading Standards and Environmental Health) alike, has inevitably been fuelled by financial austerity and public sector budgetary parsimony. But it has also been justified (at least internally by the regulatory organisations themselves) by developments in risk assessment that have claimed legitimacy for more targeted inspection programmes. In essence, they have supported a shift from universally-applied regimes to approaches that focus on those particular activities and businesses where the consequences of serious harm (when things to go wrong) are greatest and/or where the track-record of compliance has been least impressive.

Rational-sounding though the idea of such risk-based regulation might sound, the recent scandals clearly bring into question their reliability in providing the level of public protection we might expect. Indeed, because of the scaling-down of inspection regimes, increasingly it seems, regulatory interventions depend less on the watchful eye of the inspector and much more on public reporting of problems or whistle-blowing. More and more, they follow, rather than anticipate, the harms that the regulatory regimes were originally instituted to prevent.

And there is a growing body of research to evidence and substantiate all this. Our own research (Raine and Lloyd, 2013), for example, conducted over the past three years on regulatory processes in local authorities of England and Wales, revealed a considerable transformation away from generally frequent, intensive and more or less universal inspection visits to local businesses to a regime that, for the vast majority of firms, is now characterised by infrequency, light-touch and selectivity. Indeed, our research also identified a significant shift from ‘inspection visits’ as the prime mode of regulatory oversight to ‘self-assessment/self-regulation’ – something that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the business sector in the UK has long advocated. Now, rather than the routine six-monthly, annual or biennial inspection, the typical business might perhaps expect to receive an occasional ‘self-completion/self-assessment questionnaire’ probably less frequently than annually – the value of which, in any case, would leave much to the conscientiousness and integrity of the respondent.

Even such ‘paper-based’ approaches to regulatory oversight seem, according to our research findings to be on the wane because of budgetary pressures. In the case, for example, of trading standards in one rural county that we looked at, the use of self-assessment questionnaires (that had been in use for some time for all businesses categorised as “low risk”) was suddenly cut in 2008 to apply to new businesses only – meaning that, since that year, less than seventy returns per year have been received from the county’s portfolio of several thousand businesses.

Moreover, the reality of this less intense form of regulatory oversight was only reinforced in findings from a survey we undertook of a sample of businesses in the same county, and from which we found that hardly more than a third of retail businesses (34 per cent) recalled contact with a Trading Standards official in the previous three years.

Of course such results tell us very little about the actual consequences (or key outcomes) of such scaling-down in regulatory inspection work – for example of the extent of non-compliance, loss of protection or harm caused. However, local regulators themselves reported to us on a sizeable increase in the incidence of ‘prima facie’ criminal breaches of Fair Trading legislation (by both “low and medium” risk businesses) over the same three year period, something they regarded to be a direct consequence of the lower-key regulatory approach. With reduced levels of face-to-face contact with businesses, they pointed out, there is simply less opportunity for regulators to observe the problems first-hand, to explain the importance of compliance with standards or to reinforce messages verbally to business managers about the potential consequences.

Might Stafford and the horsemeat scandals be just the tip of an iceberg? How concerned should we be about the scaling-down, if not abandonment of traditionally intensive regulatory inspection regimes? Probably there will be a range of views on such questions. But we surely can’t have it both ways; we can’t on the one hand grumble about ‘elf-n-safety’ red-tape and layers of governmental regulatory bureaucracy while, on the other, being shocked at further accounts, when finally uncovered, of abuses of standards, breaches of rules, injuries and worse.

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).

[i] Raine J W and H Lloyd (2013) Public Management Reform and the Regulation of Private Business: Risk-Driven, Customer-Centric and all Joined-Up? International Journal of Public Administration, forthcoming.

Prestatyn’s election farce and the busted petition process

13/02/2013 / inlogov / 1 Comment

Chris Game

Remember the 2000 US Presidential election, the seemingly endless Florida recounts, and how we mocked an electoral system that took 35 days to produce a winner? Well, it’s now over eight times as long – 287 days and counting – since last May’s Welsh local elections. Yet, with a tad less riding on the result, one of the winning candidates in Denbighshire County Council’s Prestatyn North ward has still to take his seat. And if that doesn’t signify a busted system, utterly unfit for purpose, it’s hard to imagine what might.

It’s a story that started as mildly amusing, passed through farcical around October, and is now just an all-round total embarrassment. It’s most easily understood by seeing the election result as announced by the Returning Officer (RO), from which you may also be able to guess the problem.

Source: Denbighshire County Council

Yes, one of the Conservative candidates and one of Labour’s have quite similar surnames, and, while many electors certainly will have split their three votes between candidates of different parties, a Labour-Conservative split result of these dimensions looks, to say the least, odd. It was. Without getting too nerdy, Pennington (Con) had been credited with a share of the votes of those who voted en bloc for all three Labour candidates, and Penlington (remember: L for Labour) with the rather smaller share of the ‘straight slate’ Conservative ballots. In electoral administration jargon, there was a screw-up.

At which point, I would say two things. First, such inept-but-innocent counting screw-ups happen more often, and with more significant consequences, than you might think. In Broxtowe (Notts) last year, the names of a Lib Dem husband and wife were transposed in copying them from the corresponding numbers list to the count summary sheet, and the wife was officially declared elected, despite polling 21 fewer votes than her now officially defeated husband.

Waltham Forest in 2010 managed a mix of Broxtowe and Prestatyn. In copying Labour’s en bloc votes, Labour’s three candidates each received 2,451 instead of 1,451 – sufficient to enable the party’s third-placed candidate to be elected, rather than the leading Lib Dem. And in a much publicised case in Birmingham’s Kingstanding ward in 2006, a BNP candidate was elected, having been gifted an extra 981 votes in a double-counting of all those ballot papers on which electors split their two votes between candidates of different parties.

With these Waltham Forest and Birmingham cases in mind, my second point is that the numbers of votes involved in these screw-ups can be not only large, but beyond the bounds of arithmetical possibility. The combined votes of all candidates – announced, it’s worth emphasising, by the ROs, after recounts rigorously scrutinised by candidates and agents of all parties – totalled respectively 1,397 and 2,367 more than would have been possible, even if every voter completing a ballot paper had used every vote available to them.

This is the bit that, to me anyway, passeth all understanding. Can candidates have so little idea of how the election’s gone that they’re not curious about why their vote is 50% higher than they might have expected? And how come none of these key actors involved in the counts could do even simple addition?

Whatever the explanation, once a candidate is declared elected, these essentially innocent administrative errors immediately become seriously costly. It might seem convenient, if an embarrassed RO were able publicly to admit that “Oops, I made a boo-boo. Can we all go back five minutes?” Sadly, election law and convention decree that this is not on. In the UK the only way to challenge a declared result is legally, and expensively, for a miffed candidate or elector to issue an election petition within three weeks of the election, pay the £465 fee, and also ‘give security’ for all relevant costs arising – up to £5,000 in a parliamentary election, £2,500 in a local. No security, no petition.

Here’s where the trouble starts and where fundamental reform is decades overdue. A robust procedure for challenging the result, whether on the grounds of innocent administrative error or deliberate fraudulent practice, is a vital part of any sound electoral system. It should have the attributes of ARTESSA, being accessible, rational, transparent, efficient, straightforward, swift and affordable. Our petition procedure today, little changed from that set out in the 1868 Parliamentary Elections Act to deal with bribery, treating, personation, undue influence and other corrupt practices, is none of these, as Prestatyn North’s hapless Paul Penlington is still discovering the hard way.

That there had been a substantial counting error was first realised apparently by the RO and Council Chief Executive. Labour, both candidate and party, were slow to protest – one suggested reason being that, without knowing the exact number of wrongly assigned votes, there was the real possibility of a correction letting in not Penlington, but the fourth-placed Mike German, a one-time Labour councillor before he defected to help form the Democratic Alliance of Wales – than whom even a usurping Conservative might be marginally preferable. Eventually, however, a petition was issued, to have the votes recounted and the result overturned.

Despite the Council having admitted from the outset its “fundamental error”, it still took until late July for the jury-less High Court to authorise a recount, and a further three months for that count to take place in, for some reason, London. Unhurried, certainly, but only now does the tale become truly incredible.

The result of a recount can only be officially announced and accepted by a special two-judge election court, which took nearly a further three months to convene – again in London. Only on January 23rd, therefore, were the correct figures finally declared – Penlington 606, Pennington 341 – and the original result overturned.

You wouldn’t, by now, expect the ruling to come into effect immediately, and of course it didn’t. The duly elected Councillor Penlington should, though, have taken his seat a week later – had former-Councillor Pennington not decided that the loss of his allowances would put his “livelihood at stake”, refused to give up his seat, and objected in writing to the court’s decision. Incidentally, legal costs, awarded against the Returning Officer, were estimated at this point to have passed £20,000, with the clock presumably still ticking.

There is so much wrong here that, even given the space, it would be hard to know where to start: the time, the cost, the arcane and detrimental procedures, the irrationality and inflexibility? Why the great rush to issue a petition, when the judicial process meanders as it pleases? Why can one elector challenge a parliamentary election, while four are required for a local election? Why can’t a Returning Officer or a political party initiate a petition? And so much more – most now thankfully documented in the Electoral Commission’s excellent report, Challenging Elections in the UK.

Prestatyn North may be just a quirky contemporary footnote, but it does illustrate one key aspect of the problem. The petition procedure was designed to deal with 19th Century corrupt practices in parliamentary elections. Its requirement today is to deal with 21st Century corrupt practices, and more frequently with innocent errors and administrative misjudgements, in local government elections – for which it is hopelessly ill-equipped.

There were 52 parliamentary petitions tried in 1868 alone, all dealing with alleged malpractice. Since 1929, however, there have been just 11, including six from Northern Ireland and three from the single constituency of Fermanagh & South Tyrone. They sometimes make headlines – the then Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s disqualification as a Peer in 1961, ex-Labour minister Phil Woolas’s disqualification in 2010 for making false statements about his Lib Dem opponent – but they’re rare.

Local government election petitions are not rare. Since 1997, at least 44 from principal councils have gone to trial, plenty more from town and parish councils, and still more have been withdrawn before trial, usually due to lack of funds. Of the 16 in the past five years, two (both subsequently withdrawn) claimed a candidate was disqualified to stand, and three alleged corrupt or illegal practices committed by or on behalf of a candidate.

The remaining 11 concerned actions by electoral officials: either administrative Prestatyn-type errors or process decisions causing the election not to have been conducted ‘substantially in accordance’ with the rules – actions, in short, wholly different from those with which petitions were designed to deal.

The Law Commission has embarked on a comprehensive review of electoral law, aimed ambitiously at collating and reforming the existing morass of primary and secondary legislation into something more coherent, and conceivably even a single modular UK Electoral Act. It’s still in its early stages, and its members may hope that when they eventually reach ‘Challenging the election result’, they’ll be almost there. The sorry saga of Prestatyn should remind them that they won’t be.

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.

Activating collective and individual co-production: Some policy implications

06/02/2013 / inlogov / 2 Comments

Tony Bovaird

Recently we have been publishing the findings of an in-depth statistical analysis of user and community co-production, based on responses to a survey of 5000 citizens in five EU countries in 2008, funded by the French Presidency of the EU. The design of this survey was informed by a series of focus groups and in-depth interviews in each of the five countries (conducted by the authors) with officers working in public services (in public, private and third sectors) and representatives of users and community groups. The findings from the qualitative element of this study were reported in Loeffler et al[i], while findings on collective co-production were published in Bovaird et al[ii] and on individual co-production in Parrado et al[iii].

The findings show that there are significant and intriguing differences between collective and individual co-production – for example, age is strongly positively correlated with individual co-production but negatively correlated (if not so strongly) with collective co-production. Again, woman are particularly likely to engage in individual co-production but gender is not related to collective co-production.

Does this matter? I think it does. Victor Pestoff has concluded that “services produced by a small group at the micro-level often imply more collective interaction than collective action”. This social interaction effect is particularly likely to promote the development of social capital, mutualism and reciprocity. He suggests that there are both individual and collective benefits found in collective self-help efforts that are not available to the single or solo individual volunteer and, by implication, to other ‘lone citizen co-producers’.

As interest in mobilising user and community co-production surges across OECD countries, this has important policy implications. If the public sector wishes to reap the potential benefits of collective co-production, then more imaginative and attractive ways will need to be found to convince a higher proportion of citizens to re-orient their co-production activities towards more collective action.

Three obvious avenues for policy development are suggested by our findings. First, our finding that younger people are more likely than older people to engage directly in collective co-production (although it is often masked for policy makers by the fact that they are much less likely to engage in individual co-production, the dominant form of co-production) suggests that programmes to increase collective co-production should be aimed at younger age groups and be very different in style and content from approaches which appeal to the majority of current co-producing citizens. Second, our findings demonstrate positive effects on co-production from well-regarded government information and consultation – this gives encouraging weight to initiatives which seek to engage citizens positively in civic affairs.

However, we found that the most important correlate of collective co-production is self-efficacy (even more strongly than with individual co-production). Our variable here is essentially ‘political self-efficacy’ – the feeling that individual action can have an impact upon political and social change, so we used the question: “How much of difference do you believe ordinary citizens can make … (to improving community safety, the environment, and health)”.

Identifying policies and initiatives which reinforce self-efficacy is therefore potentially attractive. Parallels from recent research in private sector services suggest that feelings of self-efficacy are likely to be encouraged by customising services to fit the circumstances of individual service users and then helping them to visualise and rehearse what it would be like to do things more closely with others – very much the approach that the personalisation agenda in UK social services has been practising in recent years. Furthermore, those who already have a high sense of self-efficacy may be particularly effective as mentors to raise this sense in those they mentor, indicating the power of peer support.

Of course, policy will generally seek to activate both kinds of co-production. This research simply sounds a warning: Don’t assume that this can be done by a single approach – it will almost certainly require quite separate strategies for individual and collective co-production.

Tony Bovaird is Professor of Public Management and Policy at INLOGOV. He worked in the UK Civil Service and several universities before moving to the University of Birmingham in 2006. He recently led the UK contribution to an EU project on user and community co-production of public services in five European countries, and is currently directing a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council on using ‘nudge’ techniques to influence individual service co-producers to participate in community co-production.

[i] Elke Loeffler, Salvador Parrado, Tony Bovaird, and Gregg Van Ryzin (2008), “If you want to go fast, walk alone. If you want to go far, walk together”: Citizens and the co-production of public services. Paris: French Ministry of the Treasury, Public Accounts and Civil Service, on behalf of the Presidency of the EU.

[ii] Tony Bovaird, Gregg G. Van Ryzin, Elke Loeffler and Salvador Parrado (2012), “Influences on collective co-production of public services: which citizens most participate in complex governance mechanisms?”, Paper presented to Seminar on Co-production: The State of the Art, Corvinus University, Budapest, 22-23 November.

[iii] Salvador Parrado, Gregg van Ryzin, Tony Bovaird and Elke Loeffler (2013), “Correlates of co-production: Evidence from a five-nation study of citizens”. International Public Management Journal (forthcoming).

Birmingham – second city’s acceptable, but second most unequal?

01/02/2013 / inlogov / 1 Comment

Chris Game

Google “Birmingham – Britain’s second city” and you get 110,000 results; for “Birmingham – Britain’s third city” just three – all ignorant, obviously prejudiced, or both. By contrast, “Manchester – Britain’s second city” gets 895 results, only just outscoring “Manchester – Britain’s third city” with 866. QED – unofficial as the title is, if there’s going to be a second city, it’s Birmingham. Simples!

Except it’s not – not if you live and work in Birmingham, anyway. In vox pops and even proper opinion polls, Manchester more often than not edges it – and, as you may sense from the opening paragraph, we can get ever so slightly defensive about it. Which is why, if we’re offered ‘second city’ status, we generally welcome it – if only to stick it to Manchester.

Second most unequal city, however, is altogether different; and second most unequal city in the second most unequal country in Europe sounds, to me anyway, awful. Yet statistically that’s what Birmingham is.

Latest evidence comes in Cities Outlook 2013, the annual report on the economic performance of UK cities by the urban policy think tank, Centre for Cities. Now in its sixth edition, Cities Outlook is wide-ranging and influential, having played a major part in promoting the key role of cities, and particularly city-regions, as drivers of economic growth and recovery.

For policy purposes, this city-region emphasis is understandable, but it does make the title, Cities Outlook, a bit misleading. For it’s not in fact a comparative survey of 64 UK cities and their respective local authorities, but of 64 things called PUAs – Primary Urban Areas, or the built-up areas of cities, which may cover a whole bunch of authorities.

It’s fine for studying trends over time, but less so for comparing, say, Coventry and Birmingham, because Coventry PUA is the city, with its population of 319,000, while Birmingham PUA includes Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton – and a population of 2.4 million. So you have to keep remembering: ‘Birmingham’ is actually Birmingham-plus.

Though entitled Cities Outlook 2013, the report’s data were collected back when we fondly imagined we were emerging from a mere double-dip recession, rather than slithering into a triple-dip one. The report assesses how its 64 city/PUA economies weathered the two dips, which in Birmingham’s case could be described as OK-ish. Not great; we’re in the half of cities more, rather than less, severely affected in both recession periods; but there are plenty of places that economically have had it much worse.

The trouble with OK-ish is that, while it may be mildly reassuring, hovering just below mid-table in any league doesn’t get you many headlines. So I tried looking for measures where Birmingham was near the top or bottom of a table.

In itself, of course, it’s easy. In any table measuring sheer quantity, Birmingham-plus is so large that it’s got to be right up there. Not surprisingly, we have the second highest population, second highest public and private sector employment, second largest housing stock, and second grossest CO2 emissions.

Not helpful. We need things measured in percentages or ratios – like inequality. Cities Outlook uses a proxy indicator for inequality, dividing its cities into neighbourhoods with average populations of 1,500 and counting the percentages of Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claimants in each neighbourhood. A city’s inequality is the gap between the neighbourhood with the highest JSA claimant percentage – assumed to be the poorest or most deprived – and that with the lowest.

In November 2012, the highest Birmingham-plus neighbourhood claimant rate was 24.1% and the lowest 0.4%, giving a gap of 23.7%, second only to Glasgow’s 25.4%. Obviously, there are other possible measures – household income, for example, or even personal wealth, as in last week’s other circumstantial inequality evidence, the Birmingham Post Rich List (see below). But JSA disparities are easier and less contentious. If you accept, as most statisticians do, their broad validity, Birmingham is currently the most economically unequal city in England, and second most unequal in the UK.

Though inequality isn’t directly related to size, large cities are almost bound to be more unequal than medium-sized and smaller ones, and six of the 10 largest cities are indeed among the 10 most unequal. London, though, was only 7th, Newcastle 9th, Manchester 13th and Liverpool 23rd, all with inequality gaps of less than 20 per cent. The truth is that, just as several of the smallest cities – Hastings, Gloucester, Ipswich – are by no means the most equal, the largest don’t have to be as unequal as some of them are.

And essentially the same is true of nations. There are numerous measures of national income inequalities, and, if you’re into visual aids, one of the most vivid depictions of Britain’s extreme economic inequality is that based on the regions into which, for statistical purposes, EU nations are divided: NUTS (Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics). The NUTS 3 level comprises ‘small regions’, the UK’s 139 consisting mainly of upper-tier and unitary authorities. For each NUTS 3 region the average individual Purchasing Power is calculated and standardised (PPS), and a country’s income inequality is the difference between its highest PPS region and the lowest.

Source: Office for National Statistics

The UK national average PPS is 110.6, that in the highest region (Inner London – West) 596, and in the lowest regions (Wirral and West Wales) 57 – a tenfold inequality that is almost twice that in Germany and France, three times that in Italy and Spain, and five times that in Denmark, Finland and Sweden.

Dramatic as these ratios are, it should be emphasised that they are derived from workplace, rather than residential, data: individuals’ incomes are related to where they work, not where they live. The much more widely used measures of national income inequality are those based on the Gini coefficient or ratio, developed by the Italian sociologist, Corrado Gini. He was Mussolini’s favourite statistician, with some dubious ideas about nations having life cycles, and ‘young’ nations fulfilling their destiny by expanding at older nations’ expense, through a combination of wars and cross-breeding with younger races.

Happily, his stats were less flaky, and the Gini coefficient of national income distribution is widely used around the world, generally based in more developed countries on disposable, post-tax income. Data are collected through household surveys, and the coefficient runs from a hypothetical zero or perfect equality, where everyone has exactly the same income, to a similarly hypothetical 1, where one person has the lot.

In the latest statistics published by the 34-nation OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the overall coefficient is 0.31, and the range extends from Slovenia (0.24) and Denmark (0.25), through the US (0.38) and Turkey (0.41) to Mexico (0.48) and Chile (0.49). Taking the EU-27 alone, highest is Portugal’s 0.35, closely followed by the UK on 0.34.

So Birmingham is the second most unequal city in the second most unequal country in the EU – which doesn’t altogether surprise me, but certainly isn’t something I’d want to celebrate. Nor the OECD, who are pretty clear what their figures represent: “High income inequalities typically imply a waste of human resources, in the form of a large share of the population out of work or trapped in low-paid and low-skilled jobs.”

Yes, I can see that, but then I’m not one of the 50 on the Birmingham Post’s West Midlands Rich List, published by pleasing coincidence in the same week as Cities Outlook. The net worth of the lucky 50 rose last year by just the 13.8% or £3.46 billion. That’s right, the single-year increase of these 50 mainly-male Midlanders alone equalled Birmingham City Council’s total budget, or roughly half of the real-terms funding loss of all English councils put together over the 2011-15 spending cycle.

Which, say our business leaders, is “very good news … [for] with wealth creation goes job creation and this is to be applauded.” You can almost hear Thatcher, can’t you: “Our job is to glory in inequality”. Remember the trickle-down theory? The rich perform a public service by getting richer still, because their prosperity would automatically trickle down to the poor. There are many still waiting for that trickle to reach them, and who must be relieved that the City Council’s ‘living wage’ policies at least sound as if they make sense.

How can communities mobilise to shape public policy and service delivery in new and creative ways?

01/02/201301/02/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Catherine Durose, Jonathan Justice and Chris Skelcher

Community organising and co-production can shape public policy making and service delivery in new and creative ways, providing an alternative to privatisation and the outsourcing of public services. This is the claim made in our new pamphlet, ‘Beyond the state: mobilising and co-producing with communities’. The pamphlet is written with community activists and policy researchers, and provides case studies and analysis of UK and US experience in community organising to solve problems and improve public services. The pamphlet features contributors from CitizensUK, Locality and Scope and a Chicago-based organisation, Pilsen Alliance.

Community organising has a long tradition internationally. It offers a way for communities to recognise their common interests and mobilise to achieve change. Often their target is government, and their desire is to redress disadvantage by actively campaigning for changes in policy and practice. Sometimes this is to overcome the effects of existing policy, but it is also about shaping emerging policy to ensure that affected communities become beneficiaries rather than bearing the costs. Co-production is becoming an important way of thinking about the active design and delivery of services through collaboration between users and providers. While its origins are in social care and health services, it has much wider applications. But to be effective, it requires ways of redressing the power imbalance between users and producers. Here, community organising can be an important mechanism. Together, the contributions show how community organising and co-production are powerful instruments to open up the policy process, potentially deepening democratic engagement and administrative responsiveness. As such, they offer a challenge to the way in which governing beyond the state sometimes obscures accountability, privileges private interests, or facilitates governments’ off-loading of responsibilities to civil society.

This pamphlet’s contributions show the value of moving beyond a perspective that recognises the state as the only legitimate centre of authority. At the same time, however, the contributors challenge an assumption in our title. For ‘beyond the state’ implies that non-state models of collective choice and action are somehow secondary or less fundamental than those of government. The evidence from the contributors is that community organising and co-production are not somehow second best models, when compared to government provision. They show that there is a vital energy that can be mobilised, but that it cannot be shaped to government’s agendas. Community organising and co-production are political processes that create new possibilities that are not solely oppositional but also collaborative.

This can be a struggle for those in government, used to traditional models of policy making and service delivery, and trying to reconcile the political legitimacy of politicians with the demands and campaigns of users and communities. The state has become and is likely to remain a focal institution for defining and accomplishing shared purposes. But its monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion need not imply a monopoly on the legitimate use of collective decision and action. So we should continue to look past the language to observe the actual processes and results of power, and to look beyond the state alone for solutions.

Catherine Durose is Director of Research at INLOGOV. Catherine is interested in the restructuring of relationships between citizens, communities and the state. Catherine is currently advising the Office of Civil Society’s evaluation of the Community Organisers initiatives and leading a policy review for the AHRC’s Connected Communities programme on re-thinking local public services.

Jonathan Justice is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware. Jonathan previously worked for the City of New York and for non-profit organisations in the New York metropolitan area. His areas of specialisation include public budgeting and finance, accountability and decision making and local economic development.

Chris Skelcher is Professor of Public Governance in the University of Birmingham’s School of Government and Society. His research and teaching focus on the transformation of UK governance in an international context. Chris is currently leading a three year ESRC study of the reform of public bodies and their changing relationships with sponsor departments.

In favour of the mundane: citizenship testing and participation

30/01/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Katherine Tonkiss

This weekend saw the announcement that the Government has completed its revisions to the ‘Life in the UK’ citizenship test, refocusing the questions on British culture, history and sport. According to the Government, there will be no more ‘mundane’ questions about water meters, job interviews, the internet and public transport. Rather, as immigration minister Nick Harper described, ‘the new book rightly focuses on the values and principles at the heart of being British. Instead of telling people how to claim benefits, it encourages participation in British life’.

This is just the latest in a series of announcements which have reinforced some notion of a British way of life as a criterion of both immigration and integration, as I have described elsewhere. Nick Harper’s words draw us again into the vastly questionable argument that migrants are ‘benefits scroungers’, and so rather than telling them how to access those benefits we should instead be expecting them to assimilate to the British way of life. It is this, we are being told, that holds the key to participation in community life.

The use of the word ‘participation’ is itself more than a little problematic. Is participation really what is at stake in this debate? Harper is also quoted as saying that the new citizenship test is ‘just part of our work to help ensure migrants are ready and able to integrate into British society’. Integrate into. This claim seems to denote the idea that integration is something that migrants ‘do’ when they come into a country in order to take on the national culture and history, rather than something that a society experiences collectively in order to build social inclusion and cohesion.

None of this sounds much like participation to me. Casting an eye over the ten sample questions from the new test is similarly illuminating. Does my knowing which admiral died in 1805 and has a monument in Trafalgar Square help to participate in my local community? Does my knowing the name of the prehistoric landmark still standing in Wiltshire really help me to play an active role in society?

Actually, what it might do is to further define me as an outsider, whether or not I know the answers. Much in the same way that Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has suggested that Councils only publish documents in English because ‘translation undermines community cohesion’, the new citizenship test underpins the idea that it is up to migrants to integrate into ‘our’ culture, and that if migrants are unable to do that then they have no right to live in our country, to make use of our services or to participate in the lives of our communities. It presents an ideal of Britishness which is unattainable beyond a simplistic test, when migrants bring with them their own rich cultural heritages – heritages which have, previously, been celebrated as central to the life of our communities.

And the very notion of ‘our culture’ is itself deeply problematic. This suggests a one-size-fits-all notion of Britishness that will evade people who were themselves born in Britain. Arguing that Britishness involves ‘the national love of gardening, the novels of Jane Austen and the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber’ is ignorant not just of diverse ethnicities and cultural heritages, but also of the diversity of genders, class backgrounds and life experiences present within Britain today.

I want to make an argument in favour of the mundane. If we have to have a citizenship test, then surely in a liberal society our citizenship test should be about helping people to access public services and to actually participate in their community through contact with their elected representatives and other important organisations in their area. We live in a liberal democratic society – citizenship testing should not be about reinforcing a sense of Britishness that is alien even to the most ‘British’ amongst us. Rather, it should be about making sure that everyone has equal access to services and the equal chance to participate, and that everyone is deserving of equal respect.

Katherine Tonkiss is a Research Fellow in INLOGOV. She is currently working on a three year, ESRC funded project titled Shrinking the State, and is converting her PhD thesis, on the subject of migration and identity, into a book to be published later this year with Palgrave Macmillan. Her research interests are focused on the changing nature of citizenship and democracy in a globalising world, and the local experience of global transformations. Follow her Twitter feed here.

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The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham