Hidden in plain sight are deficits of power that if addressed could change everything

As we approach the quarter way mark, the 21^st Century is proving far more complex than we might have imagined when we ushered in the new millennium just 20 years ago.  Alas for many of us in Local Government, our task has not been the relentless replication of the ‘ideal authority’- the New Public Management equivalent of Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ – but the daunting job of determining who public services need to be for, and how best to deliver. At the heart of this re-imagining are profound questions about power. Who has it, who doesn't, who exercises it and who experiences its impact. These questions are structural but also moral, and in their answers, we glimpse the shape and character of public services and their leadership for generations to come.

The starting point for many places is a context that is ever clearer, familiar and one which shows no sign of going away anytime soon. This ‘new normal’ is one of: perma-austerity; unsustainable rises in demand for services, conceived for different times, now struggling to cope; mega changes in expectations and the erosion of trust, driven in part by new technology, but also the rapid decline of old world power paradigms; environmental degradation; rapid and unpredictable demographic change that challenge prevailing patterns of cohesion and identity; and an economy that isn’t working for too many people.

Places like Barking and Dagenham have been at the sharp end of this change.

Like others, we’ve been battered by austerity. We’re a post-industrial town (quite literally post-Fordist) where stable, semi-skilled, mainly (white) male jobs have disappeared in a manner not dissimilar to some of our great northern towns and cities. Over the last two decades we have also experienced seismic demographic change. In 2001 89% of our population was White British, by 2011 less than half were. That change hasn’t slowed. We have some wards in the borough where fewer than 9% of folk associated with an address in 2011 were still living there in 2018. We also have the youngest population in the UK.

Meanwhile socio-economic outcomes for many of our residents are not good enough. We languish at the bottom of too many London league tables – and often, those furthest away from the prospects of economic and social participation are women and girls. The financial cost of this context to cash starved local-public services is huge, the human cost is unbearable.

                                         

Its against this back ground that notions of tradition, identify and power are contentious and contested. In 2006, 12 members of the British National Party were elected to the Council, an event no less remarkable for the fact that they only stood 13 candidates. With hindsight were we the canary in the mine? A decade later we went on to be one of the few Brexit Boroughs in London.

On the upside, we’re a part of London that is experiencing significant economic growth. We have space for 50-60,000 new homes 25-40 minutes from central London. Two years ago we created our own growth, regeneration and development company Be First and our own general fund housing company Reside. We’re now building more Council owned houses that we are able to let at Council equivalent rents than we are losing through the right to buy, for the first time ever. Meanwhile we’ve completely redesigned Council services so that they are focused from first principles on tackling root causes rather than presenting needs. There is much more to be done in all these areas but we’ve made start. 

Accordingly we see our role as three fold: intervening in how capitalism is working in the borough, particularly in relation to housing delivery, job creation and wealth retention, so that we shape it to our ends and ensure a local economic foundation that works for as many as possible; secondly by intervening at structural level in our society and community so that we break down the barriers that are holding people back and so tackle the long term root cause of demand. This will require the use of data and insight on a scale never-before seen in the public sector, but deep empathy too; and finally establishing new relationships with citizens because all of this is personal, and it is political. Our mission is to foster trust, and a sense of agency, and provide real opportunities to participate in and sometimes control those decisions that affect citizens lives.

It’s at the intersection these themes, that we find - hidden in plain sight – deficits of power, those structural characteristics of our place that if changed or altered or diminished, could change everything. In Barking and Dagenham one those of features is domestic violence.

Our Borough has the highest level of reported domestic violence in London. Indeed, Village ward in Dagenham has the highest reported DV of any of the 600 or so wards in the capital. Public Health colleagues estimate that 1 in 30 female residents have suffered FGM. Meanwhile 80% of our 400 or so looked after children were taken into care from households where DV was a feature of daily life. As troubling, last year when   we surveyed year 11 students (14 years old) about relationships, care for one another, and love – a staggering 38% agreed with the statement: “there are occasions when it is ok to slap your partner if they have been out of line”. This, in the Borough with the youngest population in the country.

Now that we chose to see, we find an imbalance of power between the sexes that is at the heart of an epidemic level of harm. Moreover, it is normalised and so it is doubly catastrophic.  Accordingly, Barking and Dagenham Council is seeking to understand why it is that domestic abuse and violence has become so culturally acceptable within the communities that we serve. And then we then want to act -through our workforce; with partners; and with our communities. To this end, in the early Autumn, we will launch a Commission to help inform our thinking. We hope it will draw our Borough together in a conversation about how we live together, how we love, how we resolve conflict and what equality between men and women, and boys and girls must mean and the norms of behaviour that flow from that. We think it will have national significance too because as we are finding, Inclusive Growth can’t only be a matter of economic distribution but one of understanding and overcoming those pivotal deficits of power however and where ever they manifest.

this article first appeared in the Local Government Chronicle in June 2019 

https://www.lgcplus.com/services/community-cohesion/chris-naylor-why-we-must-address-deficits-of-power-10-06-2019/

Creating Community Solutions

June was an acutely challenging month for many of our places, our nation and the sector. The ramifications are ongoing and will be for months to come. There was also the election. A political moment worthy of considerable reflection, but for many of us a pause for thought that has eluded us in the weeks that followed. But pause for reflection we must.

Others are better and more appropriately placed to comment on the remarkable results. We will all have views, but my professional interest is in the implication for public services.

This was an election heavy on debate about public spending and the size of the state: how much and who should pay; universalism versus targeting; the desirability and means of taxing (unearned?) wealth and capital; and intergenerational fairness. The starting point, perhaps refreshingly for these debates, did not always break along traditional party lines. Nor, as the election outcome clearly revealed, were these questions resolved.

While I suspect not the intention of manifesto writers, strikingly absent from the campaign was a debate about public service reform. Or, to be more precise, how we innovate to make a greater, positive impact on people’s lives.

Who public services are for, how they help create a fairer, less divided, more equal society, and the respective responsibilities of the state, citizen, civil society and private sector, were themes largely muffled. Yet these considerations have come to dominate much of what we in local government do.

The desire to ‘end austerity’ resonated – in some quarters it roared in 2017 far more than 2015 – and very little was heard about the ‘long-term economic plan’. But the imperatives for innovation remain and are in many ways hardening: national debt and fiscal weakness; growing service demand; rising expectations about quality and accessibility; and community division. More money in the system – an imperative – will not be sufficient. These pressures demand fresh thinking and a new consensus about the path reform should take. Absent a clear view from the top, out of necessity and desire, local government will be the incubator of more radical approaches.

Three themes stand out, all connected, but distinct in the change they signal.

First is a more vigorous and localised approach to growth while ensuring citizens furthest away from the labour market benefit too. The goal is not just the bottom line in terms of GDP but also a society where people can live more sustainable, independent lives. The recent RSA Inclusive Growth Commission and other studies have covered the policy terrain in detail. Indeed, Barking and Dagenham LBC conducted its own independent growth commission: No one left behind, in pursuit of growth for the benefit of everyone. It concluded with 109 recommendations to propel the development of our borough. Those recommendations largely fell into two bundles: measures to develop physical infrastructure; and social infrastructure – those institutions that support and nourish the collective endeavour of individuals and families in dismantling structural inequalities so people flourish and release their productive value.

These insights led us to redesign our council in two fundamental ways.

We created Be First, our wholly owned but arms-length growth and regeneration company. Ours is a vision of reform not as a euphemism for cuts but as commitment to investment. Be First’s mission: to triple the annual volume of housebuilding and related infrastructure through targeted public and private sector investment. This has required fresh thinking about our investment strategy and balance sheet, but also about our strategy for housing. In short, the creation of a new generation of general fund social housing infrastructure assets that support people at different stages in their lives, with a variety of tenures and genuinely affordable rents. We plan to increase the private rented sector stock of our housing company, Reside, from the current portfolio of 700 units to 3,000 by the end of the decade. These are homes for aspirational local Londoners as they are – workers earning the minimum wage, essential public servants, those at the start of adulthood and those in the closing years of life – not the fantasy of the developer brochures.

The second change was the development of a new service: ‘Community Solutions’. A bold and radical redesign of council services with the aim of getting upstream of complex needs by discerning and tackling root causes. Community Solutions brings together teams – some 400 staff – which used to be responsible for worklessness, skills, poverty, debt, mental health, homelessness, domestic violence, antisocial behaviour, youth, libraries, family support, and first points of contact for adult and children’s social care, all of which were tackled separately and therefore more expensively. Community Solutions allows them to be taken together and to mentor and support individuals and families to help them be more self-reliant, and provide some measure of mutual support.

Community Solutions demonstrates the second key reform theme. As resources diminish, so the service design task becomes to understand what makes a public service intervention pivotal to someone’s life. This is a profoundly challenging question. For Community Solutions, it literally means designing in the resources and capacity found within our community and where that capacity does not exist, paying attention to its development. It also means developing the insight and intelligence to grasp the intersectional and crosscutting nature of an individual’s circumstance and barriers, and prioritise services accordingly. Already this is challenging our status quo. Services once at the periphery are becoming centre stage: domestic violence; drug and alcohol, childcare and PHSE – the kick-starters that unlock the reduction in more expensive interventions such as temporary accommodation; looked after children and long-term worklessness.

Ultimately, this is all about a new relationship with citizens where our role is to convene the resources that help people where possible to help themselves. However, moving the conversation away from ‘what am I eligible for?’ to ‘how can you help me to work this through?’ is profoundly challenging in a world where faith and trust in public institutions is at an all-time low. Accordingly, the third theme we grapple with is the development of trust. A task made so much harder following the tragic events of recent weeks. The answer will be in the workings of our democracy, in leadership, in transparency and no doubt through devolution. But in many ways, it’s also about a mindset shift that values every contact with our organisation as an opportunity to either win trust or destroy it. It is an organisational operating principle I have never witnessed in action, but one I know we must embrace.

This article first appeared in the Municipal Journal on the 17th July 2017 and can be found here 

https://www.themj.co.uk/Creating-community-solutions/208276

Better out than in: thoughts and practice on Public Sector Transparency

Over the last couple of years I’ve been working on and writing about public sector transparency. There have been three main reasons for this: the first philosophical; and the second two pragmatic. They are:

> Transparency is a precondition for greater public trust. Without trust, public engagement is difficult/impossible – and yet the challenges we face (austerity, growth in demand etc.) requires us to involve citizens and services users much more intimately in decisions about the future nature and scope of the services we provide to them. The public won’t listen and give their view, if they don't first believe we’ve got their best interests at heart or if we’re not on their side. A perception that we’re hiding something won’t help! 

> information is likely to be leaked in any event; and

> Folk will simply make things up if you decide not to disclose, and usually the truth isn’t half as bad as the reality of what’s not being disclosed

I wrote this for the Guardian last year and it pretty much sums my thoughts. I’ve transcribed below if you have a problem with the link.

When I get a moment I’ll provide some reflections on the experience in Barnet of becoming transparent “by default”. But for now here is a link to LB Barnet’s transparency portal – a major publication of over 60 open format data sets.

Here is also a link to LB Barnet’s Declaration and Commitment Statement to Transparency.

And finally here is also a link to contracts we agreed with Capita a little over a year ago. I’ve yet to find a fuller publication with very little redaction. For what’s worth my view is that - long term – its far more commercially damaging for private sector suppliers not to be transparent about their commercial model, than it is to hide it all away. More on that particular subject another time.

'In Barnet, the default setting is open government'

For council decision makers, public trust is a commodity that is in growing demand but diminishing supply.

In Barnet, we want to buck this trend and build the trust and confidence of our residents as we plan for the next wave of public spending cuts. Our starting point is a default setting of openness.

We recently took the unprecedented decision to publish, with only minimal redaction, more than 2,700 pages of the back-office service contract we signed with Capita in August. Later in October we will do the same for our joint venture, also with Capita, to provide the council's development and regulatory services.

Why are we doing this?

Councils face some deep-rooted and difficult challenges. Demand for services is increasing, including high cost and personal services; customer expectations are rising about how services are accessed, provided and experienced; there is significant and worsening financial pressure; and there has been a major downturn of public trust in political organisations.

All this means people will not accept the necessary pace and magnitude of change to local services unless they first believe their council is working in their best interest. Developing public trust becomes the defining characteristic of a successful public policy response to austerity in its widest sense.

Trust is lost through poor communication or consultation, poor services or a one-off bad customer experience. Just one or all of these can destroy in a single moment the intimacy and respect service users and residents demand. 

The situation is made worse by the kind of hyper-sceptical "you must have something to hide" attitude that is the starting point for most modern public policy discourse.

Many will argue that given recent scandals, such as MPs' expenses or private sector over-charging, that this default disbelief is well placed. But sometimes it can be frustrating. In Barnet, data that we routinely publish, such as risk registers, have been presented back to us as "secret documents" that we have kept "hidden". Hidden? When they have been discussed in public meetings, published in public reports and posted both before and after on our public website? It's hard not to feel frustration, but being defensive is self-defeating. 

So in Barnet we are pushing harder to explore new and fuller ways to be transparent. 

Two years ago, for example, we were processing only about 75% of freedom of information (FOI) requests within 21 days. This year we're achieving 99%.

We are also challenging prevailing presumptions about commercial confidentiality. Some matters are sensitive, but most are not. Often they are very dull, but not disclosing them leads many to assume the worst, prompting a flurry of FOI requests and negative speculation.

This is why we have taken the bold step of publishing the whole of our contract with Capita. We may have been the first, but we are unlikely to be the last local authority to adopt this fresh approach. On 7 October, the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, agreed to publish most contract details of suppliers to the Greater London Authority, following a report by the London Assembly on transparency. 

Some people will take what we are trying to do in Barnet with a pinch of salt. 

We know we need to do much more, not least making our data more meaningful, insightful and specific. But this is just the start of a journey, and no one ever said it would be easy.

Local Government has an ace up its sleeve - 2013 is the year to play it

On the face of it 2012 was a disappointing year for those wishing to see a profound and sustained shift in the nation's political governance from the centre to the local. The public’s resounding ‘No’ to directly elected mayors and its indifference to elected police commissioners was a huge let-down for supporters of these projects who had hoped they would be the catalyst for more power to be transferred locally.

But look deeper and there are some significant reasons for optimism. Not least amongst them was local government’s largely successful response to national deficit reduction measures. 2013 needs to be the year when it builds on that to persuade the public and central government that localism is vital for national growth and future national deficit reduction strategies.

If power is to be ceded back from central government, it needs to be for a reason and that reason needs to be compelling. For the city regions in particular, and others more generally, that reason is economic recovery. Britain needs sustainable local growth. So the argument runs, enhanced city wide or regional governance will be a prerequisite to manage and deliver the investment and activities to kick-start and sustain local economic activity. In other words the conditions for growth require the conditions for localism. Framed in this way the case for change features both congruence and reciprocity. Local government and its partners offer responsibility and accountability, in return for which they will be given genuine power from the centre to enable them to act. For national government, the lesson to be learned will be that a problem shared is a problem well on the way to being solved.

If the argument works for economic growth then it should work for other objectives too.

Take deficit reduction. Local government has shown it can be extremely dexterous and successful in managing its contribution to central government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). Indeed former local government and housing minister Grant Shapps took to Twitter in early December to exclaim “If whole of govt’ had achieved 8.7% Town Hall cut (the) deficit (national) would be erased!” Those of us who live and breathe local government know that this did not happen by accident. Nor was it because councils were better off than other parts of government – far from it. The story of the sector’s success is itself the case for localism. In direct contrast to the old stereotype of stuck-in-the-mud, backwards-looking local politics, local authorities of all shapes and sizes rose to the challenge, accepted the obligation and navigated established patterns of political leadership and governance to craft strategies and deliver a response. One might even argue that local, transparent and accountable leadership has delivered on deficit reduction while Whitehall has floundered.

As central government considers its next CSR, local government needs to choose its negotiating stance carefully. The temptation will be to progress defensively, argue that councils have already taken their fair share of cuts and attempt to direct attention to bloated budgets elsewhere in government. Worse, there may also be a temptation to argue about regional differences and the need to rebalance the share of spending from south to north or east to west.

There is an alternative, more ambitious proposal. Instead of trying to push the national debt problem to other parts of central government, localists should make the case to push more of it outwards and local. This sounds alarming but in fact, by making the case for more public policy objectives, service commissioning and delivery to be governed locally, local government would in return secure acceptance that it can take full responsibility for the future of these services, including the need for reductions of expenditure thereafter.

The short-term dangers are obvious – that Whitehall demands more and deeper cuts. But the long-term prize of a permanent shift in political governance should be a goal worth playing for.

"My flourishing is fundamentally bound up with yours" - first thoughts from the independent chair of the Tower Hamlets Fairness Commission

For the last five months or so I've been responsible for making sure the independent Tower Hamlets Fairness Commission actually happens. Chaired by Rev Dr Giles Fraser and supported by 13 Commissioners, the Commission met for the first time this week, following it's launch at Toynbee hall on the 5th November.

The Commission has been asked to consider some of the big issues facing the borough and its residents in light of the country’s current social and economic challenges - or as the Chair puts it, what 'principles of fairness can be applied to help triage limited resources in periods of economic hardship?'

Between November 2012 and March 2013 the Commissioners will gather evidence based on research and conversations with residents, businesses and voluntary and community groups. They will hold several public meetings focussing on the themes of communities and housing (the focus of this week's meeting); income and employment inequalities; and safety nets and mutual responsibility. Commissioners, residents, interested others are also encouraged to blog here. There is, of course, a twitter feed - @THFairness. The Fairness Commission will report on its findings in spring 2013 and make recommendations designed to promote equality and fairness in Tower Hamlets.

The Borough is not the first to launch a Commission of this nature - see here for a summary of the other Commissions. Conclusions from across the Country have varied. Some have focused on the determination of high level principles. Others have recommended specific public policy interventions - such as the adoption of the Living Wage.  In summary, the desire to achieve fairer outcomes has followed well trodden debates regarding ethics, moral purpose and the appropriate balance of obligations between the individual; civil society; state; and business. What differs is the blend and emphasis of these perspectives. It's early days for the Tower Hamlets Commission but a flavour of the Chair's thinking was revealed in his contribution to the "thought for the day" slot on Radio 4's Today programme on Monday 26th November. A transcript of which is below:


A report just out by the TUC argues that Britain’s poorest families
are facing further hardship as public services are cut back in
order to meet the Government’s spending targets. Such cutbacks
obviously impact the poor more than the wealthy simply because the
poor rely a great deal more on public services. Some argue that these
cuts, along with those to the welfare budget, are an essential route
to overall fiscal responsibility. Others insist that because they fall
disproportionately upon the vulnerable they are fundamentally unfair.

So what then do we mean by fairness? This is a question with which I
have become increasingly engaged since I recently took up the Chair of
the Tower Hamlets Fairness Commission. Our job is the unenviable one
of trying to describe how a community like Tower Hamlets - already
vastly unequal - can best navigate a fair path through a future of
increasing austerity. What principles of fairness can be applied to
help triage limited resources in periods of economic hardship?  These
are not, of course, theological questions. And yet they are ones on
which pretty much all religious traditions have something indirectly
to contribute. Yes, as one of the most diverse boroughs in London, the
commission necessarily reflects a wide variety of religious and indeed
non-religious perspectives. And looking for what we all have in common
can easily lead to some anaemic lowest common denominator.
Nonetheless, what all monotheistic faiths do seem to share is the idea
that, as John Donne once put it, “No man is an island” - that is: we
all have some fundamental responsibility for each other. This idea is,
I suspect, historically connected with the development of monotheism
and with the belief that because reality has some unified origin then,
however diverse we may be as a society, we are nonetheless
fundamentally connected. In contrast to, say, Greek polytheism that
imagined a world where the gods were forever at war with each other,
it is no co-incidence that the world’s first great monotheistic faith
- Judaism - was also the first faith to develop an ethics of equality.

Still, this only takes us so far developing a response to the question
of fairness. Theology does not neatly hand out policy proposals or any
detailed programme of action. And it’s here that religion can have
nothing to do with politics. Nonetheless, politics works on many
different levels. Those who speak on both the left and the right about
the idea of One Nation Britain are emphasising the need for a society
in which we are all called to bear one other’s burdens. I know this
can easily sound like some call for generalized benevolence. But it’s
more than that. It’s a sense that my own flourishing is fundamentally
bound up with yours. That rich and poor and not forever locked in some
desperate zero sum competition over resources. And indeed, without
some sense of underlying connectedness – from individuals, from
business, from government -  it’s actually hard to imagine that any
form of politics will ever be able to make things right or fair.