The Big Society may have had its day. But citizen power is alive and well in local goverment. It's a key way to engage the public with local services
Local government faces a major strategic dilemma. It will take strong and confident leadership to invest for the long term. In the face of continuing austerity, rising needs and the graph of doom there is much talk in local government circles of demand management.
The term can mean many things – including being a euphemism for stricter rationing – but most ambitious is the idea of developing solutions that enable individuals and communities to be better able to contribute to meeting their own needs. This is the criterion we refer to at the Royal Society of Arts as ‘social productivity’.
It is not austerity alone that leads to new thinking. New Labour’s idea of ‘behaviour change’ (now embodied in the Cabinet Office ‘behavioural insights’ team) and David Cameron’s of the Big Society were both in part responses to the need for people themselves to better align their attitudes and behaviours with their collective aspirations to live in safe, supportive, thriving communities.
More broadly, society benefits when public services are responsive and empowering rather than ‘delivered’ to a passive, and often resentful, populace.
Public services which seek to draw on and enhance public engagement do so against a broader background of public expectations and local mores. The now discontinued DCLG place survey sought to gauge the degree of attachment, engagement and civility in different places.
One place that was inspired by some pretty poor scores in that survey was Peterborough, a city with a reasonably strong economy but with low levels of attachment and trust, and high scores on some social problems such as drug abuse and anti-social behaviour.
In response an imaginative Conservative leadership hosted a major civic conversation and in turn an initiative with the RSA and Arts Council England called Citizen Power Peterborough (CPP). That project finished last year and its final report is published by the RSA this week.
The report does not gloss over the challenges involved in its seven strands of work – ranging from an unsuccessful attempt to sustain a ‘civic commons’ of engaged citizens (partly scuppered by councillor hostility) to much more productive work on links between schools and the community, user focussed drug rehabilitation services, and discovering and supporting a network of local, largely amateur, arts practitioners.
Perhaps the most powerful strand, not even envisaged at the outset, was the use of creative practice to enable much more collaborative and innovative working among Peterborough’s key public service partners.
The report argues that releasing ‘citizen power’ requires commitment from the top, an understanding of local capacity and the removal of political and bureaucratic barriers. Several key lessons are outlined including for those – like the RSA - who argue that communities should be seen as assets and sources of insight, not just bundles of demand and need.
I suspect one of these lessons may also emerge from the evaluation (such as it is) of the Community Organisers national programme, which is due to end in 2015. The RSA team that was tasked with the CPP project was talented and committed; on getting jobs at the RSA’s beautiful London HQ few thought they would be spending half their time in Peterborough!
But even for them it proved hard to combine three very different skill sets: first, they had to be research directors, not just managing projects but having an eye to our hope that some of what emerged from the project would be replicable elsewhere; second, they were community organisers directly engaging and seeking to motivate local people; third they were stakeholder managers and political operators seeking to make alliances with those who supported the project and seeking to deal with those – including a small group of adversarial councillors – who were hostile.
Overall, Citizen Power Peterborough was a successful project, something confirmed by an evaluation by academics from De Montfort University. We live in an era where almost all organisations feel the pressure to blow their own trumpet, but our decision to publish a ‘warts and all account’ of the project reflects our conviction that there is as much to learn from what proved difficult as from what worked well.
Matthew Taylor is chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and a former chief policy adviser to No 10
