Labour controlled Lambeth council has been making the news today with its mutualism plans. This has been contrasted with the model being adopted by Tory controlled Barnet and has allowed a reprise of the Easy Council v John Lewis headlines that first emerged last November.
Pitting two iconic brands against each other makes good headlines and provides cover for a proxy ideological battle between Labour and the Conservatives. The real picture, however, may be a little more complicated.
Lambeth’s announcement was a response to Tory plans revealed on Monday to allow public sector workers to set up employee owned co-operatives to deliver services. So what we have is a more complex debate between Barnet’s minimalist view of the council and between red and blue versions of mutualism. What all have in common is a reduction in size and cost of the local state by shifting responsibility for services away from the council.
Mutualism has been gathering momentum over the last few months: Charles Leadbeatter’s research for the Employee Ownership Association, Demos’s pamphlet on Reinventing the Firm and ResPublica’s The Ownership State, all in different ways put the case for mutualism as a source of innovation and value for money.
The difference between red and blue mutualism is not yet fully apparent, although the Lambeth version appears to involve service users more directly in the setting up and running of co-operatives.
However, the ways in which ordinary people are to be engaged by these co-operatives is just one of the thorny questions these proposals raise.
How, for instance, is democratic control to be exercised? One way would be through the council’s commissioning process, which would also help reconcile mutualism with a Total Place approach to public sector spending. But how do mutuals sit within the commissioning process? Are they expected to compete as part of a supply-side market? Will they have the capacity to do so and how might this be developed? Will people even want to form mutuals on this basis?
More fundamentally, one wonders if this approach will deliver the sort of deep spending cuts that local government will need to make?
Nonetheless, it is refreshing to see radical ideas propounded ahead of the election, with local government leading the way in debating serious issues of political substance.
Jonathan Carr-West is head of the Centre for Local Democracy at the Local Government Information Unit
