26 October 2007
... it's the way that you do it. And that's the problem when it comes to putting policies such as healthy eating into practice. Phil Swann identifies the obstacles
Some of today's pressing social problems do not lend themselves to neat policy solutions. Take the remorseless increase in the number of seriously overweight people or the link between a young person's family circumstances and their educational achievements. The lessons from, for example, the literacy hour, or the drive to cut waiting times in hospital accident and emergency departments, do not have much to offer here.
This month's Comprehensive Spending Review, with its emphasis on cross-departmental Public Service Agreements, provides a framework for tackling such issues. There is also an increasing emphasis on partnership working at a local level, with Local Strategic Partnerships and Local Area Agreements becoming the fulcrum of a more joined-up approach.
But these new structures and targets can take us only so far. To ensure successful, genuinely integrated approaches to these so-called 'wicked' issues, we must tackle difficult and messy areas, such as inter-organisational dynamics, notions of hierarchy (between, for example, Whitehall and town hall) and the tensions involved in moving policies from plan to action.
These themes have dominated the work of the Tavistock Institute since it was established 60 years ago. And our recent work evaluating the impact of public policies, helping partnerships to shift from talking to talking and doing, and working on the future of local governance sheds useful light on what needs to be done if the approach set out in the CSR is to have a discernable impact on people's lives.
We can learn a lot about what needs to be done (or not done) nationally by looking at the impact of policies at a local level. For example, the institute recently evaluated a public health initiative designed to stimulate a more integrated approach to encouraging healthy eating. The scheme tested whether disadvantaged families' entitlement to financial support could be used as an opportunity to give them advice on nutrition. It aimed to do this by promoting cross-organisational working among health professionals, benefits officers and community development workers.
Four lessons stood out. First, the programme rapidly became bureaucratised. The focus became 'take-up' of the core offer financial support for better food rather than the use of that offer to prompt healthier eating. As a result, its creative potential was lost.
This was reinforced by two other factors. The time scale for implementation was completely unrealistic. Evaluation after evaluation has shown that policymakers consistently underestimate the time it takes to implement policies effectively. The casualties are innovation and imagination, the opportunity for different actors on the ground to think and plan together.
In addition, weaknesses in cross-departmental communication nationally were reflected in a failure of communication and co-operation locally. Whole swathes of people who should have known what was going on didn't because they were not in the direct communication line from the centre.
Finally, the speed of policy churn the focus on the next initiative seriously impedes the ability of the government machine, at both national and local level, to take on board lessons from projects such as this one.
The framework within which policies are pursued is also important. Since the 1980s, more and more weight has been placed on local organisations working together. Initially the focus was on regeneration but today, through LAAs, partnerships are required to play a major role in relation to the whole gamut of locally delivered services.
Yet many are very fragile organisations. In a recent session on partnership working with senior county council officers, one participant drew his LSP as a set of clothes without an emperor. The lack of clear communication from the centre, identified as a problem in the healthy eating evaluation, is also an issue for many local partnerships, where there can be great tensions between vertical and horizontal lines of accountability and communication.
Another institute study found that running through all the attempts to secure more effective local partnership working, from City Challenge to LAAs, was 'a frustrated aspiration on the part of councils and their partners to ensure that the mainstream programmes and expenditure in an area positively support the delivery of locally agreed priorities'. The 2005 study, Into the mainstream, examined the embryonic local public service boards for the Local Government Association and the Improvement and Development Agency. It found that many partners find it difficult to participate wholeheartedly in local partnerships because their 'vertical' accountabilities through a national reporting and communication line often trump their 'horizontal' allegiances to local partnerships.
One response to these pressures has been to strengthen the arrangements for collective decision-making and 'authorisation' of partnership decisions. In our work with one strategic partnership, we recommended the creation of an 'accountable bodies group', bringing together council and other local leaders of the main bodies responsible for public policy and services.
The aim was for these leaders to take part in collective decision-making and commit 'in public' to their organisation's contribution to the partnership. It would also mean that any reservations or caveats would have to be articulated in the same setting.
But even improved structures are not enough. The culture of partnership working is also important. In the words of the Bananarama hit, 'It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it'. Two phrases encapsulate much of what we have found:
- 'give and take' or, more accurately a lot of take and not much give. This reflects the tendency of organisations to send senior representatives to partnership meetings when they want something, but not when they don't;
- the 'benefit of the doubt' or, more accurately, its absence. The development of a 'nit-picky' blame culture in partnership relationships.
Understanding and addressing behaviours such as these requires time and effort another reason for resisting unrealistic timetables and policy churn.
We have also seen a prevailing ambivalence about the role of local politicians. This flies in the face of the fact that one of the unique features of local government is the relationship between the political and managerial leadership of a council.
This relationship is under-studied and therefore inadequately understood. If partners see that the relationship between senior politicians and officers is often dysfunctional, is it any wonder that they struggle with their relationship with councillors on partnership bodies? If councils could do more to make the relationship work, that could strengthen partner involvement.
The emphasis in the CSR on further moves towards more joined-up government nationally and locally should be welcomed. But that welcome should be accompanied by at least three important warning notes.
First, Bananarama were right. More time and effort must be devoted to the 'how' as well as to the 'what' of partnership working.
Second, the implementation of initiatives must be planned so as to retain innovation and imagination, which means it must not be rushed.
Third, better communication is crucial, particularly between the centre and localities and between local politicians and their partners. This also takes time.
Phil Swann is director of the Tavistock Institute
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