Social renewal: you're in charge
The Big Society has been criticised as insubstantial - on the contrary, it raises profound questions about the future of public services, argue Joe Manning and Adrian Brown.
In last year’s Hugo Young lecture David Cameron described a new role for the state “directly agitating for, catalysing and galvanising social renewal.” Through the Big Society the prime minister is attempting to turn this vision into a reality.
Over the past few months the Institute for Government, NESTA and the Design Council have hosted a series of seminars to look in more detail at what this means in five different policy areas. For each area, from education to criminal justice, the full implications for policy making and the management of public services are still to be worked out. But what is already clear is that, for civil society, social innovators and the institutions of government, those implications are likely to be profound.
At the heart of the Big Society vision is an enhanced role for civil society and a radical shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state. Elinor Ostrom, the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in economics, wrote in her 1990 book, Governing the Commons: "What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit - and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization - is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts."
The prime minister has taken Ostrom’s argument to heart. The development of Big Society policy is predicated on a belief that families, friends, communities and the marketplace can all help individuals to solve problems with minimal government support or funding. However, serious concerns have been raised over how this will work in practice. In capturing the rewards of these “residuals” civil society will be required to take on a greater share of risk, which was previously held elsewhere. For example, healthcare professionals are used to mitigating risk due to professional reliability; this will have to change if individuals assume greater responsibility for their own care. Citizens will also be asked to accept that the results of collective action will not be the same everywhere - the dreaded postcode lottery, although one in which citizens can influence the results.
The coalition is encouraging charities, the voluntary sector and social enterprises to provide outcomes that matter to individuals and communities. Public sector bodies are also being encouraged to consider new organisational forms such as mutuals. Throughout the seminar series we heard how relatively small, self-governing, non-profit organizations have used innovative approaches to produce powerful outcomes – from reducing criminal reoffending to facilitating the journey from welfare to work. But we were also told that the romantic view of Burke’s ‘little platoons’ sits uneasily with the demands on social innovators to scale-up and work successfully alongside large, private contractors, without getting crowded out. In addition many social innovators remain predominantly reliant on government money, which will inevitably be squeezed over the next few years; it is not yet clear how this will be reconciled.
Pushing power downwards
The Big Society agenda intends to push power downwards as far as possible; a key question is, to whom? Following the logic of the Big Society argument we should devolve directly to individuals if at all possible, otherwise to neighbourhoods or communities, and failing that to local government. National government will be the ‘last resort’ when all other levels of accountability have been discounted. Our seminars highlighted that the exact role of local government is not yet clear; local authorities will need to define this role over the months ahead as the full implications of policies such as free schools are worked through. One obvious role is to be a ‘joining up’ mechanism at the local level, building on concepts such as Total Place, but with far greater freedoms to combine different funding streams and broker deals across silos.
Radical devolution will require central government to become a lot more disciplined about how and when it chooses to intervene. It will need a clear operating framework. In the most devolutionary scenario, this could be a very limited set of specifications designed to ensure that minimum standards are met and the appropriate actors are clear on their roles and responsibilities. But the elephant in the room is local government financing. Several speakers in our seminars argued that true devolution will be impossible without local authorities having much more power to raise revenues. As long as the cash is distributed from Whitehall, ministers will inevitably be held accountable.
Transparency will be the oil that keeps the Big Society running smoothly. Armed with information about spending and outcomes, the public will be able to hold providers and officials to account; social entrepreneurs and community groups will be able to demand access to public assets and funding when they can run services more efficiently (or reconfigure them completely); and service managers will be able to benchmark the performance of their processes nationwide and learn from the best. New ‘infomediaries’ will package and repackage public data as the market demands. Skeptics question whether ‘armchair auditors’ will really drive the changes envisaged, but with the Public Sector Transparency Board already in place and new data sets released on a daily basis, the government is moving forward rapidly with this agenda.
The Big Society has been criticised by some as unsubstantial. On the contrary, we would argue that it raises profound questions for the future of public services. Following our recent seminars, it has become clear that these questions will needed to be answered if the state is truly to catalyse social renewal.
Joe Manning is a policy advisor at the Design Council. Adrian Brown is a fellow of the Institute for Government.