By David Walker
6 May 2010
In the election campaign, all the parties promised the public a starring role in running and vetting public services. But where’s the evidence that people want to be actors on this bigger stage? David Walker investigates
THIS WEEK, the sovereign people spoke. By the time you read this, you will know whether their voice was muffled or rang out loud and clear. But voting was the easy bit. Are the public aware of the epic role the manifesto writers have scripted for them? Perhaps it’s Sunset Boulevard except the people, unlike Gloria Swanson, are not ready for their close up.
Yet the public, like it or not, are going to be stars of the forthcoming show.
Without them, the parties’ programmes lose a pivot. In this election, the public have been cast as serial voters, turning out to fill in ballots time and again: for police chiefs (a promise from both the Liberal Democrats and the Tories), for health boards and for national park authorities (Liberal Democrat pledges) and, in the cities of England, for mayors (on this, the Tories and Labour agreed). The public are also to step up and take over libraries, parks, swimming pools and schools, and – on wet Monday evenings, perhaps – attend meetings to check what borough police commanders are doing.
And that is not the end of the new activism. Citizens are also expected to become more energetic choosers in schooling and health care and, of course, to fill in the service gaps created by the retreating, fiscally damaged, state. Do they know what they are letting themselves in for?
Election 2010 was the confluence of two streams. One became a torrent after the scandal over MPs’ and peers’ expenses. The British political class is desperate. Last autumn, Ipsos Mori reported that only 13% of the public trusted politicians to tell the truth, down from 21% in 2008. All the party manifestos desperately sought absolution through greater participation.
The other stream mixed ideology and Zeitgeist. Its key words were ‘co-production’ and choice. People want more control over public services, according to the pundits; they want both ‘civic’ participation through voting and ‘consumerism’ in the shape of, say, individual budgets for social care.
The upshot was visible in the Conservative manifesto, which even bore the title Invitation to join the government of Britain. Under policy review chair Oliver Letwin, the Tories pushed an information agenda. The public would be ‘cognitively enfranchised’, with rights to inspect government data and demand to see job titles, organograms and salaries. Every item of public spending over £25,000 would be published online (£500 for council contracts).
Reading all of this would take a chunk of time, but in David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ the public are assumed to be intensely interested in public business. The Big Society’s centrepiece is schools: parents setting them up and running them (and doing the paperwork, taking out the insurance, battling with contractors, negotiating pay and so on?).
Bravely, people would band together to acquire parks and libraries under threat of closure. After perusing the new reams of crime and disorder information published by the police, they would elect new sheriffs. ‘Our ambition is for every adult in the country to be a member of an active neighbourhood group,’ the Tories said. The Cabinet Office would pay to train ‘community organisers’. Once, ‘community organiser’ was a synonym for a bearded Leftie, intent on stirring up residents to demand more from the council. Now they are to sport blue rosettes.
The manifesto did not stop at the general public. Civil servants undergoing their annual appraisals would earn merit points if they could prove they were taking part in ‘social action’.
That is not all. Both Labour and the Tories have advocated new public rights to petition the House of Commons, even command legislative time for favourite Bills. Communities would write their own area plans and nosey neighbours (the Tories prefer the phrase ‘immediate neighbours’) would inspect next door’s roof extension themselves – saving on council planning staff.
The Liberal Democrats’ active citizens would sack corrupt MPs (and possibly members of the European Parliament) thanks to a right of recall; turn out and vote for health boards (which would take over primary care trusts); and elect police authorities, which would appoint and sack chief constables.
In a Fabian pamphlet last month, Gordon Brown envisaged locals monitoring traffic accidents and poring over school performance data, which would be published online. Like the Tories, Labour promised parents an educational right of recall, with the ability to force out head teachers and governors. Brown said that the 1.5 million ordinary members of NHS foundation trusts would be doubled within two years, as the number of trusts grew.
In the campaign, Labour offered the public more votes, including referendums on proportional voting for the Commons and on elections for the House of Lords. It also promised to give local people the right to petition councils to toughen licences for pubs, clubs and lap dancing parlours. The Tories had a similar proposal.
The Conservatives’ national citizen service for 16 year-olds was equivalent to Labour’s national youth community service, with all young people contributing at least 50 hours to their communities by the age of 19.
Just reading the proposals is tiring. Can these civic orgiasts be the same people Labour was encouraging to take allotments and do more sport and the Tories were urging to set up new small businesses? Where are they going to find the time?
Michael Wagstaff, head of public sector research at the polling company YouGov, says: ‘The issue here is whether people actually want the power.’
Over at Ipsos Mori, chief executive Ben Page acknowledges there is support for the idea of participation and for David Cameron’s Big Society and that the public ‘seem keen that opportunities to get involved exist’. But this is not quite the same as seizing those opportunities. ‘When it comes down to it, most want to leave it to someone else,’ he says.
That is the trouble with participation. People tell pollsters it is a great idea, but not everyone has the time, energy or inclination to do it. It might be a flimsy basis for the revolution in public services that all the parties have been proposing. The latest (2009) citizenship survey found one in ten people had ‘participated in civic activism’ in the previous year, for example by serving as a councillor, magistrate or school governor.
About one in three had ‘engaged in some form of civic participation’, such as attending a public meeting and signing a petition – a proportion unchanged for a decade.
These are probably overestimates. In 2008, Ipsos Mori found one in 25 people was ‘involved in local services’ and one in four said they had had some involvement with a local organisation in the preceding three years. A further one in 20 wanted to be more actively involved and one in four wanted ‘more of a say’. You could conclude from the data that nine out of ten people are not active citizens and have no particular wish to do more, although they say they would like more information. Yet the manifestos have assumed the reservoir of willingness is much deeper.
The public might imply they want to participate more but have they got the time? ‘People already feel they don’t have enough time to get everything done,’ says Page. Household surveys suggest a woman who works outside the home would spend nine hours a day on sleeping and personal care, an hour and a bit eating, two hours in household jobs, five hours working and three and a half hours on leisure, including sport and watching television. That leaves about 37 minutes a day for ‘voluntary activity’, including going to church.
Those are averages but the point is plain: there is not a lot of spare time in most households for heroic endeavour sorting out the local school, park or planning department. And they would have to spend an estimated 16 hours a week online studying the printouts of school results, crime maps and the annual accounts of national parks so enthusiastically described in the parties’ plans.
On top of this, the participation data is not straightforward. The Department for Communities and Local Government found a puzzle in collating the results of the local government Place survey, which provides information on people’s perceptions of their local area and the local services they receive. It showed that active participation in local affairs neither made people happy nor gave them a sense of participating.
Of those actively involved, 35% said they believed they could influence decisions, but a far greater proportion, 56%, thought they could not.
And the feelings of influence are not much higher than among those who do not get involved. Only 51% of those whose favoured party was in power locally believed they had some influence, compared with 44% of those whose favoured party was not.
Ipsos Mori found that of the 15% ‘involved’, almost two-thirds were discontented, much less satisfied with the council, and felt uninformed and unconsulted. ‘Not a happy bunch,’ says Page.
The Place survey suggests activism is much less likely in ‘unhappier’ places, among them Gosport, Redcar, Thanet, Torbay, Doncaster, North Somerset, North Lincolnshire and Havant – places where people feel less connected. But the findings are often ambiguous. In areas where people are more satisfied with public services and the local authority, they might be less motivated to get involved since they already feel influential.
So are the parties setting the public up for parts in the public service drama they have no intention of filling? In a study for the Scottish Executive in 2005, researcher Linda Nicholson noted dryly: ‘Policy making in this area does not appear to be grounded in empirical evidence of what works and why.’
Labour’s manifesto – like the others – did not mention the huge social experiment in activism undertaken since 1998, the New Deal for Communities. At a cost of £2bn, the New Labour scheme gave 39 run-down estates their own regeneration funds, to do it themselves. Evaluations are now saying that these areas remain as relatively unequal as they were in 1998. Some lives were changed by the fact of participation but only a minority.
Activism turns out to be painful, costly and a vocation for just a dedicated few.
Donna Henry has been chair of the Clapham Park NDC in the London Borough of Lambeth. Before, she says: ‘I had no idea what I was getting into. I had no notion it would become 25 hours a week, giving up most evenings and many weekends, our flat filled with papers and files, that we would be blamed by others. You have to have broad shoulders or you go home in tears, the patience you need with people.’
Another Labour effort was community ownership of assets, recommended in a 2007 report by Barry Quirk, chief executive of the London Borough of Lewisham. But transferring parks and redundant civic buildings to community groups is not easy – legally, financially or sociologically. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said local groups were often under-capitalised and short-term in outlook. In addition, projects can be captured by minority interest groups.
The potentially undemocratic nature of activism worries even such enthusiasts as the think-tankers of Demos. In a report, associate Paul Skidmore and colleagues noted that: ‘Community participation tends to be dominated by a small group of insiders.’ Barriers to entry are created for those not involved in governance and potential participants ‘are often put off by the experience of feeling excluded by the way community participation arrangements work’.
As YouGov’s Wagstaff puts it: the question about activism is ‘whether those who do want it can be trusted with it’. The paradox of the ‘new activism’ could be rule by mini-elites. David Halpern, director of research at the Institute for Government and a former Blair adviser, talks about increasing ‘social skew’ as traditional forms of engagement fall and alternatives arise.
So, whatever the manifestos prescribed, are we really fitted to be social heroes? For some – perhaps no more than one in 20 – the answer is, yes. But they are likely to be occupied already, as petition organisers, councillors or civic players. Many of them will also be mainstays of voluntary groups and churches. (The religious dimension to activism is noteworthy, too.)
But, otherwise, the public realm is not going to be overrun by activists. Levels of involvement and feelings of empowerment have been static over the past decade, despite Labour’s sundry initiatives. For Page: ‘It is going to take a seismic shift in our approach to citizen involvement for the public to even notice.’
And what happens if they (we) won’t? Halpern raises the scary prospect of sanctions against those who do not do the stipulated minimum hours of activism, ‘such as publishing local or neighbourhood lists of contributions’. Those pinning the list of civic non-participators up on the bus shelter wall could quickly seem like vigilantes.
6 May 2010
In the election campaign, all the parties promised the public a starring role in running and vetting public services. But where’s the evidence that people want to be actors on this bigger stage? David Walker investigates
THIS WEEK, the sovereign people spoke. By the time you read this, you will know whether their voice was muffled or rang out loud and clear. But voting was the easy bit. Are the public aware of the epic role the manifesto writers have scripted for them? Perhaps it’s Sunset Boulevard except the people, unlike Gloria Swanson, are not ready for their close up.
Yet the public, like it or not, are going to be stars of the forthcoming show.
Without them, the parties’ programmes lose a pivot. In this election, the public have been cast as serial voters, turning out to fill in ballots time and again: for police chiefs (a promise from both the Liberal Democrats and the Tories), for health boards and for national park authorities (Liberal Democrat pledges) and, in the cities of England, for mayors (on this, the Tories and Labour agreed). The public are also to step up and take over libraries, parks, swimming pools and schools, and – on wet Monday evenings, perhaps – attend meetings to check what borough police commanders are doing.
And that is not the end of the new activism. Citizens are also expected to become more energetic choosers in schooling and health care and, of course, to fill in the service gaps created by the retreating, fiscally damaged, state. Do they know what they are letting themselves in for?
Election 2010 was the confluence of two streams. One became a torrent after the scandal over MPs’ and peers’ expenses. The British political class is desperate. Last autumn, Ipsos Mori reported that only 13% of the public trusted politicians to tell the truth, down from 21% in 2008. All the party manifestos desperately sought absolution through greater participation.
The other stream mixed ideology and Zeitgeist. Its key words were ‘co-production’ and choice. People want more control over public services, according to the pundits; they want both ‘civic’ participation through voting and ‘consumerism’ in the shape of, say, individual budgets for social care.
The upshot was visible in the Conservative manifesto, which even bore the title Invitation to join the government of Britain. Under policy review chair Oliver Letwin, the Tories pushed an information agenda. The public would be ‘cognitively enfranchised’, with rights to inspect government data and demand to see job titles, organograms and salaries. Every item of public spending over £25,000 would be published online (£500 for council contracts).
Reading all of this would take a chunk of time, but in David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ the public are assumed to be intensely interested in public business. The Big Society’s centrepiece is schools: parents setting them up and running them (and doing the paperwork, taking out the insurance, battling with contractors, negotiating pay and so on?).
Bravely, people would band together to acquire parks and libraries under threat of closure. After perusing the new reams of crime and disorder information published by the police, they would elect new sheriffs. ‘Our ambition is for every adult in the country to be a member of an active neighbourhood group,’ the Tories said. The Cabinet Office would pay to train ‘community organisers’. Once, ‘community organiser’ was a synonym for a bearded Leftie, intent on stirring up residents to demand more from the council. Now they are to sport blue rosettes.
The manifesto did not stop at the general public. Civil servants undergoing their annual appraisals would earn merit points if they could prove they were taking part in ‘social action’.
That is not all. Both Labour and the Tories have advocated new public rights to petition the House of Commons, even command legislative time for favourite Bills. Communities would write their own area plans and nosey neighbours (the Tories prefer the phrase ‘immediate neighbours’) would inspect next door’s roof extension themselves – saving on council planning staff.
The Liberal Democrats’ active citizens would sack corrupt MPs (and possibly members of the European Parliament) thanks to a right of recall; turn out and vote for health boards (which would take over primary care trusts); and elect police authorities, which would appoint and sack chief constables.
In a Fabian pamphlet last month, Gordon Brown envisaged locals monitoring traffic accidents and poring over school performance data, which would be published online. Like the Tories, Labour promised parents an educational right of recall, with the ability to force out head teachers and governors. Brown said that the 1.5 million ordinary members of NHS foundation trusts would be doubled within two years, as the number of trusts grew.
In the campaign, Labour offered the public more votes, including referendums on proportional voting for the Commons and on elections for the House of Lords. It also promised to give local people the right to petition councils to toughen licences for pubs, clubs and lap dancing parlours. The Tories had a similar proposal.
The Conservatives’ national citizen service for 16 year-olds was equivalent to Labour’s national youth community service, with all young people contributing at least 50 hours to their communities by the age of 19.
Just reading the proposals is tiring. Can these civic orgiasts be the same people Labour was encouraging to take allotments and do more sport and the Tories were urging to set up new small businesses? Where are they going to find the time?
Michael Wagstaff, head of public sector research at the polling company YouGov, says: ‘The issue here is whether people actually want the power.’
Over at Ipsos Mori, chief executive Ben Page acknowledges there is support for the idea of participation and for David Cameron’s Big Society and that the public ‘seem keen that opportunities to get involved exist’. But this is not quite the same as seizing those opportunities. ‘When it comes down to it, most want to leave it to someone else,’ he says.
That is the trouble with participation. People tell pollsters it is a great idea, but not everyone has the time, energy or inclination to do it. It might be a flimsy basis for the revolution in public services that all the parties have been proposing. The latest (2009) citizenship survey found one in ten people had ‘participated in civic activism’ in the previous year, for example by serving as a councillor, magistrate or school governor.
About one in three had ‘engaged in some form of civic participation’, such as attending a public meeting and signing a petition – a proportion unchanged for a decade.
These are probably overestimates. In 2008, Ipsos Mori found one in 25 people was ‘involved in local services’ and one in four said they had had some involvement with a local organisation in the preceding three years. A further one in 20 wanted to be more actively involved and one in four wanted ‘more of a say’. You could conclude from the data that nine out of ten people are not active citizens and have no particular wish to do more, although they say they would like more information. Yet the manifestos have assumed the reservoir of willingness is much deeper.
The public might imply they want to participate more but have they got the time? ‘People already feel they don’t have enough time to get everything done,’ says Page. Household surveys suggest a woman who works outside the home would spend nine hours a day on sleeping and personal care, an hour and a bit eating, two hours in household jobs, five hours working and three and a half hours on leisure, including sport and watching television. That leaves about 37 minutes a day for ‘voluntary activity’, including going to church.
Those are averages but the point is plain: there is not a lot of spare time in most households for heroic endeavour sorting out the local school, park or planning department. And they would have to spend an estimated 16 hours a week online studying the printouts of school results, crime maps and the annual accounts of national parks so enthusiastically described in the parties’ plans.
On top of this, the participation data is not straightforward. The Department for Communities and Local Government found a puzzle in collating the results of the local government Place survey, which provides information on people’s perceptions of their local area and the local services they receive. It showed that active participation in local affairs neither made people happy nor gave them a sense of participating.
Of those actively involved, 35% said they believed they could influence decisions, but a far greater proportion, 56%, thought they could not.
And the feelings of influence are not much higher than among those who do not get involved. Only 51% of those whose favoured party was in power locally believed they had some influence, compared with 44% of those whose favoured party was not.
Ipsos Mori found that of the 15% ‘involved’, almost two-thirds were discontented, much less satisfied with the council, and felt uninformed and unconsulted. ‘Not a happy bunch,’ says Page.
The Place survey suggests activism is much less likely in ‘unhappier’ places, among them Gosport, Redcar, Thanet, Torbay, Doncaster, North Somerset, North Lincolnshire and Havant – places where people feel less connected. But the findings are often ambiguous. In areas where people are more satisfied with public services and the local authority, they might be less motivated to get involved since they already feel influential.
So are the parties setting the public up for parts in the public service drama they have no intention of filling? In a study for the Scottish Executive in 2005, researcher Linda Nicholson noted dryly: ‘Policy making in this area does not appear to be grounded in empirical evidence of what works and why.’
Labour’s manifesto – like the others – did not mention the huge social experiment in activism undertaken since 1998, the New Deal for Communities. At a cost of £2bn, the New Labour scheme gave 39 run-down estates their own regeneration funds, to do it themselves. Evaluations are now saying that these areas remain as relatively unequal as they were in 1998. Some lives were changed by the fact of participation but only a minority.
Activism turns out to be painful, costly and a vocation for just a dedicated few.
Donna Henry has been chair of the Clapham Park NDC in the London Borough of Lambeth. Before, she says: ‘I had no idea what I was getting into. I had no notion it would become 25 hours a week, giving up most evenings and many weekends, our flat filled with papers and files, that we would be blamed by others. You have to have broad shoulders or you go home in tears, the patience you need with people.’
Another Labour effort was community ownership of assets, recommended in a 2007 report by Barry Quirk, chief executive of the London Borough of Lewisham. But transferring parks and redundant civic buildings to community groups is not easy – legally, financially or sociologically. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said local groups were often under-capitalised and short-term in outlook. In addition, projects can be captured by minority interest groups.
The potentially undemocratic nature of activism worries even such enthusiasts as the think-tankers of Demos. In a report, associate Paul Skidmore and colleagues noted that: ‘Community participation tends to be dominated by a small group of insiders.’ Barriers to entry are created for those not involved in governance and potential participants ‘are often put off by the experience of feeling excluded by the way community participation arrangements work’.
As YouGov’s Wagstaff puts it: the question about activism is ‘whether those who do want it can be trusted with it’. The paradox of the ‘new activism’ could be rule by mini-elites. David Halpern, director of research at the Institute for Government and a former Blair adviser, talks about increasing ‘social skew’ as traditional forms of engagement fall and alternatives arise.
So, whatever the manifestos prescribed, are we really fitted to be social heroes? For some – perhaps no more than one in 20 – the answer is, yes. But they are likely to be occupied already, as petition organisers, councillors or civic players. Many of them will also be mainstays of voluntary groups and churches. (The religious dimension to activism is noteworthy, too.)
But, otherwise, the public realm is not going to be overrun by activists. Levels of involvement and feelings of empowerment have been static over the past decade, despite Labour’s sundry initiatives. For Page: ‘It is going to take a seismic shift in our approach to citizen involvement for the public to even notice.’
And what happens if they (we) won’t? Halpern raises the scary prospect of sanctions against those who do not do the stipulated minimum hours of activism, ‘such as publishing local or neighbourhood lists of contributions’. Those pinning the list of civic non-participators up on the bus shelter wall could quickly seem like vigilantes.
