A richer tapestry of democracy

April 23, 2009

Nigel Keohane, Senior Researcher, NLGN
House Magazine

Earlier this month, both the Labour government and Conservative opposition set out their stalls for the next phase of public service reform.

Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne spoke of the government’s desire to build its agenda around ‘the movement of power from government into the hands of citizens’. From the other side of the House, David Cameron too has championed the cause of the citizen to make more choices and have more control over what they receive from the state. Calling for a ‘post-bureaucratic age’, Cameron set out in the Spectator the Conservative ‘masterplan’ for fixing ‘both our broken economy and our broken society’. For Cameron, the answer lies in ‘the people of this country’.
Despite such shared aspirations across the political spectrum, progress to achieving more personalised services has been piecemeal. Ambition has, so far, been channelled down specific routes: individual budgets in adult social care have transformed the lives of those who receive the services; the Department of Health is itself also looking to apply personal budgets to healthcare; and personal tuition is to be rolled out in more schools.

Yet, in many ways, whilst positive approaches, these methods themselves remain centralised – pertinent to specific niches of service provision, but far from a universal or coherent handing over of power from the state to the citizen.

A new NLGN report, People Power: how can we personalise public services?, published this month, suggests that this disjointedness is hardly surprising. Devolving decisions down from the centre to the citizen is entirely right. But our research suggests that along the way, we are overlooking the role that communities and local government have to play in driving this agenda and shaping how power can be handed practically over to the people.

Would it not be a horrible irony if, in seeking to put the citizen first, Westminster and Whitehall were to dictate how this should happen: if each department were to develop its own interpretations and services models, with individuals left to navigate separate pathways, funding streams and services in innumerable different ways?

Equally, it would be ridiculous to design an approach that rides roughshod over local ambitions and capacity, that disregards the potential for communities to decide on their own particular ways of working and, to an extent, to generate their own answers. Would this not merely be micro-management of a different order – the bonfire of bureaucracy being merely one of smoke without fire?

Devolution to the individual and devolution to communities are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are mutually dependent. Without local decisions and without the scope to bring together myriad providers and decisions, choice in public services can only ever remain partial and disjointed. The needs of customers do not conform to the shape of government departments – choice and funding must be joined up across health and social care, housing and worklessness, the local environment and crime and beyond.

Consideration should also be given to the capacity and needs of particular local communities. We should be looking towards establishing a ‘mosaic approach’, where individuals can collect together to design and shape what they want, where communities that share an interest or a need can commission their own services, and where neighbourhoods can act together to generate funding and choose priorities for how they spend this money.

Services have to be designed around the particular local needs, circumstances and aspirations of local people. Variation is growing not only within local areas, but also between localities and between sub-regions. Personalisation to the individual level can in some cases empower vulnerable individuals, provide transactional convenience, easier access to services and choice over who provides the service.

At the same time, across the country within local communities reside powerful enthusiasm, social capital and positive forces that can bring communities together and help resolve issues such as the local environment, climate change, crime and political disengagement. Therefore, it only makes sense if greater power is handed down to locally elected democratic representatives who have a fuller intelligence of local need, can work to bring together services across housing, health, social care and worklessness, and can unlock the potential within specific communities.

All commentators now recognise that central performance management has been one of the principal obstacles to services being re-modelled in the past. There is now a general step back from central targets and stipulations. The question is whether politicians and central government are ready to take the additional, difficult but necessary, steps to enable personalisation to work. The government needs to revisit issues of funding, performance and power. So, first things first. Let’s see personalisation – but let’s see it driven and shaped by the right people, by local communities.


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