By Jonathan Clifton
25 February 2010
Greater citizen involvement in running public services is building a popular front of support from Westminster to Tooting and beyond. But Jonathan Clifton cautions that it is harder to achieve in practice than in theory
Following in the footsteps of Citizen Smith, it seems that ‘power to the people’, has become the mantra of all political parties when it comes to improving public services.
The most recent incarnation of this is Conservative leader David Cameron’s plan to give public sector workers the right to run the service they provide as a co-operative – be it teachers running schools or employment advisers having a stake in their jobcentres.
This is just one initiative of many under Cameron’s wider call for a ‘big society’ to replace the ‘big state’. His constant refrain has been that the expansion of the public sector under Labour has crowded out personal responsibility, leaving communities uninvolved in how their services are run.
But the other parties have also called for change in the way our public services work. The Liberal Democrats have criticised what they see as an overly centralised approach, proposing instead to devolve power to the local level. The government itself has long been a champion of the co-operative movement and is calling for ‘empowered communities’ to help improve the performance of public services and secure better value for money.
There is a growing political consensus that the answer to public service reform lies in involving citizens and communities more in the provision of services. There are two reasons why politicians are turning to communities in this way. First, the improved outcomes that the Labour government managed to achieve at the start of its administration in areas such as health, poverty and education have now plateaued. The tools that they used to do this - increased investment, competition and top-down targets – no longer seem up to the job and new approaches are required. Secondly, the onset of a deep recession and the explosion of public debt mean politicians from all parties are seeking ways to do more for less.
With all parties proposing to rewrite the relationship between the general public and the services they use, now is a good time to ask whether this approach is really the panacea it is made out to be. Can involving citizens more in the production of services lead to better outcomes? How can this approach be put into practice?
The first question is the easier one to answer. It is clear that the best outcomes can be achieved when the resources of both citizens and the state are brought together. On their own, neither government nor citizens have access to all the time, energy, knowledge and money necessary to provide public goods. We see this happening every day: for example, when parents read with their children at home, a teacher is more likely to improve literacy rates. Or when people sort their rubbish, councils can increase recycling.
But the principle of involving citizens in public services can be extended further. The NHS has started training patients with chronic medical conditions to care more for themselves. In one example, asthma patients attended a course to learn more about their condition and how to manage it, leading to better lung function and a 69% decline in GP visits. Volunteers patrolling with the police, community courts and older people being given personal budgets to spend as they wish on social care are all examples of individuals and communities providing services in partnership with the state. These experiments produce better outcomes for no extra cost and when people are involved in producing a service, they are usually more satisfied with it.
Citizens and communities could therefore be considered the ‘missing link’ in public service reform over recent decades. This gives some credence to the Conservative’s claim that there is a greater role for society to play. Certainly the idea of giving more power to people over the services they use is a popular one. Recent research by the Institute for Public Policy Research and PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 82% of people believed that communities should do more to help police tackle antisocial behaviour and crime; 54% also supported the use of personal budgets in social care.
But it is the second question – how greater citizen involvement in public services can be put into practice – that throws up a greater challenge. For while there is support in principle for society being more involved, public opinion gets a bit hazier when you start talking specifics.
The IPPR/PwC report, Capable communities, found that although the public supported moves to give them more control they rarely believed that individuals, families or communities should be primarily responsible for providing services.
Well over 90% of people think that the state should mainly be responsible for keeping our streets safe and running our schools. Two-thirds of people believed that the state should be most responsible for caring for them, compared with 24% who thought this should be left to individuals and families. While Cameron’s strong push for a ‘big society’ is popular, the public do not share his scepticism about the state. They expect government to lead.
This is even true for the Conservative Party’s flagship policy for handing power back to the people – letting parents set up schools. While there is some interest in this concept (41% support the idea), only 2% believe that individuals, families and communities should be most responsible for running local schools. This complicates any notion of simply handing power from the state to society. What is required is a partnership between the two.
There is a second question around the capacity of communities to respond to such a demanding agenda. In a nation where feelings of influence over local decisions has been falling steadily for a decade, and where local election turnout hovers around 30%, it might seem premature to assume people are willing to get involved and take on more responsibility. While people support getting involved in principle, they are often too busy to personally give up the time to do so. This could pose serious problems for a future Conservative government wanting to turn principled support for mutually run services into a reality.
A third problem in giving communities more power is that involvement varies enormously depending on class, income and gender. Some communities have more trust, cohesion, time and money than others, and are therefore better placed to get involved in service provision. Ensuring that the benefits of greater citizen involvement are evenly and widely spread will be just as hard as attempts to achieve equality in other areas. There is a serious risk of such an approach leaving the very communities that are most in need of services – those that lack wealth and social capital – being hung out to dry.
A final challenge for advocates of increased community involvement is to identify where this approach works most effectively. The benefits will be greatest in services that depend on a relationship between the service user and provider, such as early years, education, chronic health conditions, social care and parenting. It will be less useful for services that don’t rely on this relationship in order to be effective – for example, acute health conditions and public transport.
A shift to services produced in relationship with citizens will not just require communities to take on more responsibility, it will also require the state to change the way it works. Most importantly of all, this shouldn’t be used as a cover for the state leaving people to fend for themselves, or putting them in situations for which they are unprepared. Rather, it should be about the state supporting communities to play more of a role and work in partnership with them.
For example, Westminster council has developed ‘Get Together’. This provides a telephone conferencing service for isolated older people, allowing them to link up and visit one another . The direct benefit of the service is individuals contacting each other, which the state does not get involved in – but the programme still requires the local council to facilitate and support it.
A good example from the US is nurse-family partnerships. Here, nurses are trained to visit new mothers over a two-year period, teach them basic parenting skills and link them up with other new mothers in the area, rather than simply help them give birth and then walk away. This is not about ‘more’ or ‘less’ state, but about a different way for the state to work to achieve better outcomes.
Involving citizens in public service provision is clearly a popular idea, which explains why it is attracting so much attention from our politicians. But they would be wrong to read public appetite for these ideas in principle as an indication that they will work easily in practice. This is a demanding concept – requiring a new relationship between citizens, the state and service providers – and policymakers need to understand how to overcome the barriers.
Jonathan Clifton is a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research. He is a contributing author of Capable Communities, published by IPPR and PwC
25 February 2010
Greater citizen involvement in running public services is building a popular front of support from Westminster to Tooting and beyond. But Jonathan Clifton cautions that it is harder to achieve in practice than in theory
Following in the footsteps of Citizen Smith, it seems that ‘power to the people’, has become the mantra of all political parties when it comes to improving public services.
The most recent incarnation of this is Conservative leader David Cameron’s plan to give public sector workers the right to run the service they provide as a co-operative – be it teachers running schools or employment advisers having a stake in their jobcentres.
This is just one initiative of many under Cameron’s wider call for a ‘big society’ to replace the ‘big state’. His constant refrain has been that the expansion of the public sector under Labour has crowded out personal responsibility, leaving communities uninvolved in how their services are run.
But the other parties have also called for change in the way our public services work. The Liberal Democrats have criticised what they see as an overly centralised approach, proposing instead to devolve power to the local level. The government itself has long been a champion of the co-operative movement and is calling for ‘empowered communities’ to help improve the performance of public services and secure better value for money.
There is a growing political consensus that the answer to public service reform lies in involving citizens and communities more in the provision of services. There are two reasons why politicians are turning to communities in this way. First, the improved outcomes that the Labour government managed to achieve at the start of its administration in areas such as health, poverty and education have now plateaued. The tools that they used to do this - increased investment, competition and top-down targets – no longer seem up to the job and new approaches are required. Secondly, the onset of a deep recession and the explosion of public debt mean politicians from all parties are seeking ways to do more for less.
With all parties proposing to rewrite the relationship between the general public and the services they use, now is a good time to ask whether this approach is really the panacea it is made out to be. Can involving citizens more in the production of services lead to better outcomes? How can this approach be put into practice?
The first question is the easier one to answer. It is clear that the best outcomes can be achieved when the resources of both citizens and the state are brought together. On their own, neither government nor citizens have access to all the time, energy, knowledge and money necessary to provide public goods. We see this happening every day: for example, when parents read with their children at home, a teacher is more likely to improve literacy rates. Or when people sort their rubbish, councils can increase recycling.
But the principle of involving citizens in public services can be extended further. The NHS has started training patients with chronic medical conditions to care more for themselves. In one example, asthma patients attended a course to learn more about their condition and how to manage it, leading to better lung function and a 69% decline in GP visits. Volunteers patrolling with the police, community courts and older people being given personal budgets to spend as they wish on social care are all examples of individuals and communities providing services in partnership with the state. These experiments produce better outcomes for no extra cost and when people are involved in producing a service, they are usually more satisfied with it.
Citizens and communities could therefore be considered the ‘missing link’ in public service reform over recent decades. This gives some credence to the Conservative’s claim that there is a greater role for society to play. Certainly the idea of giving more power to people over the services they use is a popular one. Recent research by the Institute for Public Policy Research and PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 82% of people believed that communities should do more to help police tackle antisocial behaviour and crime; 54% also supported the use of personal budgets in social care.
But it is the second question – how greater citizen involvement in public services can be put into practice – that throws up a greater challenge. For while there is support in principle for society being more involved, public opinion gets a bit hazier when you start talking specifics.
The IPPR/PwC report, Capable communities, found that although the public supported moves to give them more control they rarely believed that individuals, families or communities should be primarily responsible for providing services.
Well over 90% of people think that the state should mainly be responsible for keeping our streets safe and running our schools. Two-thirds of people believed that the state should be most responsible for caring for them, compared with 24% who thought this should be left to individuals and families. While Cameron’s strong push for a ‘big society’ is popular, the public do not share his scepticism about the state. They expect government to lead.
This is even true for the Conservative Party’s flagship policy for handing power back to the people – letting parents set up schools. While there is some interest in this concept (41% support the idea), only 2% believe that individuals, families and communities should be most responsible for running local schools. This complicates any notion of simply handing power from the state to society. What is required is a partnership between the two.
There is a second question around the capacity of communities to respond to such a demanding agenda. In a nation where feelings of influence over local decisions has been falling steadily for a decade, and where local election turnout hovers around 30%, it might seem premature to assume people are willing to get involved and take on more responsibility. While people support getting involved in principle, they are often too busy to personally give up the time to do so. This could pose serious problems for a future Conservative government wanting to turn principled support for mutually run services into a reality.
A third problem in giving communities more power is that involvement varies enormously depending on class, income and gender. Some communities have more trust, cohesion, time and money than others, and are therefore better placed to get involved in service provision. Ensuring that the benefits of greater citizen involvement are evenly and widely spread will be just as hard as attempts to achieve equality in other areas. There is a serious risk of such an approach leaving the very communities that are most in need of services – those that lack wealth and social capital – being hung out to dry.
A final challenge for advocates of increased community involvement is to identify where this approach works most effectively. The benefits will be greatest in services that depend on a relationship between the service user and provider, such as early years, education, chronic health conditions, social care and parenting. It will be less useful for services that don’t rely on this relationship in order to be effective – for example, acute health conditions and public transport.
A shift to services produced in relationship with citizens will not just require communities to take on more responsibility, it will also require the state to change the way it works. Most importantly of all, this shouldn’t be used as a cover for the state leaving people to fend for themselves, or putting them in situations for which they are unprepared. Rather, it should be about the state supporting communities to play more of a role and work in partnership with them.
For example, Westminster council has developed ‘Get Together’. This provides a telephone conferencing service for isolated older people, allowing them to link up and visit one another . The direct benefit of the service is individuals contacting each other, which the state does not get involved in – but the programme still requires the local council to facilitate and support it.
A good example from the US is nurse-family partnerships. Here, nurses are trained to visit new mothers over a two-year period, teach them basic parenting skills and link them up with other new mothers in the area, rather than simply help them give birth and then walk away. This is not about ‘more’ or ‘less’ state, but about a different way for the state to work to achieve better outcomes.
Involving citizens in public service provision is clearly a popular idea, which explains why it is attracting so much attention from our politicians. But they would be wrong to read public appetite for these ideas in principle as an indication that they will work easily in practice. This is a demanding concept – requiring a new relationship between citizens, the state and service providers – and policymakers need to understand how to overcome the barriers.
Jonathan Clifton is a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research. He is a contributing author of Capable Communities, published by IPPR and PwC
