The Campaign Company Blog

The third way is back - but where's the 'nudge' factor?

The Welfare Green Paper is out today and James Purnell argues in The Guardian ("Only we can help the poor") how the Tories recent focus on individual responsibility as a way of tackling poverty is wrong and that the Government's focus on using the collective power of citizens to galvanise individual responsibility is right. 

Reading the new measures that will be (eg investment in skills, infrastructure and other measures that will encourage people to get into work and out of poverty) is a reminder that the "the third way" aka post neo-classical endogenous growth theory aka supply-side socialism aka investing in people / infrastructure rather than giving out dosh to individuals is back as Labour's dividing line. When these concepts were first touted by Labour in opposition the mid-1990s, they showed that Labour had the mantle of the "party of ideas".

However, the world has moved on, as has the behaviour of its citizens. The Tories are reclaiming the mantle of "party of ideas" by recognising the role of behavioural economics / social psychology in resolving current policy problems. Their current policies are  heavily influenced by leading thinkers in this field (for example, Robert Cialdini author of Influence and Richard Thaler co-author of Nudge). Some on the left, dismiss these as being too individualist and ignorant of the responsibilities of society. Those of us who use these techniques to help organisations tackle inequalities, know that targeting individual behaviour can lead to societal "good". The Government recognises this in the health sector by its continuous endorsement of social marketing approaches as a way of reducing health inequalities effectively. The next step will be recognising this in its economic policies. Or else they will be nudged out.

"We've Got the Power?"

TCC has posted a lot about the White Paper on Community Empowerment when it was still developing. We are pleased to that it is is now published and commits to:

• A local authority duty to promote democracy
• An extended duty to involve covering most crucially Police Authorities
• A £7.5 million Community Empowerment Fund
• £2 million in opportunities for people with disabilities to volunteer
• Extending mentoring and befriending
• A pathfinder "Take Part" programme on Citizenship education for adults
• £70 million "Community Builders" scheme to support independent multi-purpose organisations
• A duty on Council's to respond to petitions
• An extension in participatory budgeting to all local authorities
• Modest incentives for voting
• More Neighbourhood Councils
• Extensions of Neighbourhood Management by Council's and partners
• More "community justice" and pilot projects in "community payback" by young offenders
• The establishment of the Tenant Services Authority to strengthen the rights of tenants of affordable housing
• Direct access and shadowing by  young advisors of ministers and elected mayors
• A £6 million national institute of youth leadership
• Youth internships with Councillors
• Making it easier to have a directly elected Mayor
• More discretionary localised budgets for Councillors to act as a community leader on
• A new Asset Transfer Unit to help local communities act on the the Quirk Report
• A national framework for Community Land Trusts and 14 pilots

Whilst the debate on community empowerment will continue, the most important aspects at this stage of the process are:

• The additional monies that will be available. This is important in pump priming local activity. 
• The Asset Transfer process being strengthened. This area needs support to encourage demands to come from below, in order to realise the ideals of the Quirk Report. Any body should itself be made accountable to the bodies representing community groups such as the Development Trust Association and the recognition given to Community Land Trusts could also strengthen local communities.

Some organisations have expressed the concern that white paper is giving giving individuals rather than communities "control". However we at TCC think the proposals are actually the sort of approach that we have been advocating and acting upon for years. We recognises that to empower communities you need to empower individuals first. Community groups shouldn't feel threatened by this - they should feel genuinely empowered by it.

In saying the above we recognise this is an unfinished agenda. A lot is being proposed, but there is a lot more to consider. For example the need to make make Police Authorities and PCT's more accountable to the communities they cover is clearly now next on the agenda.

As a result rather than than just passively promoting the document, surely we should not just be talking to ourselves but instead organising a serious public information campaign by all engagement practitioners from across all the various sectors. We should not just leave it to the DCLG but collectively promote it. This would maximise its impact and its benefits to the public in the run up to it being approved as well as pushing public bodies to organise more pilots in advance of it.

The DCLG has produced postcards promoting the white papers key elements. Perhaps we should ensure they have a much wider distribution than usual?

Richard Wilson, the Director of Involve commented on need to treat community empowerment similar social networking software. In the same way that the web 2.0 makes many services as ubiquitous as electricity, we now need the scope for communities of interest, whether geographical or interest group, to be able to plug into democratic structures in the same way that one can plug into an online system. The fact that vast numbers are now mobilised by Facebook for social events shows the potential for involvement.

Finally we should add that the White Paper seemed to gain a reasonable degree of consensus from the main political parties. This should mean legislation happens quicker and there is a degree of stability to bed down some of the proposals.

 

 

80 Years of an Equal Franchise for Women

If we truly believe in Making Democracy Work, we should be celebrating the victories that advanced Democracy in the UK.

On 2 July 1928 the Equal Franchise Act was passed, which meant Women were given the same rights as men in terms of age of voting. Previously the 1918 Franchise Act only allowed women over the age of 30 to vote.

This week the Guardian Newspaper website is running a series of articles celebrating this landmark in the struggle for democracy as well as encouraging more involvement by women in the democratic process.

Whilst there are still some inequalities to overcome such as equal pay across the genders, nevertheless the Equal Franchise Act made a difference and contributed to greater equality and greater participation in public life by women.

Memo to Local Authorities: "Make me smile (come up and see me)"!

A useful report published today from the Young Foundation on the wellbeing and happiness agenda and empowerment. It adds strength to the case against the low aspiration agenda for the Community Empowerment White Paper argued by some who do not wish to leave their comfort zone and which I have previously blogged on.

The report presents evidence to make the case for three hypotheses:

• that wellbeing is higher in areas where residents can influence decisions
  affecting their neighbourhood
• that wellbeing is higher amongst people who have regular contact with
  their neighbours
• that wellbeing is higher in areas where residents have the confidence to
  exercise control over local circumstances.

TCC experience working with local authorities and their local strategic partners also seems to confirm these hypotheses. The insight we gather through social marketing for Primary Care Trusts (PCT's), provides a slightly different angle in looking at this issue, but also seems to confirm the case being made.

In saying this, I don't fully agree with Richard Layard's arguments over the happiness issue and that you can improve things across the board to similarly match the rise in GDP. For example any complex human society will have sadness at various points in life such as a family bereavement and other stressful episodes that happen such as divorce or bankruptcy. Nevertheless the public and voluntary sector can do much to help the least happy 10% through the recently agreed extra expenditure on talking therapies in mental health.

Whilst some of the wellbeing and happiness agenda may be ambitious at times, surely part of the empowerment agenda should include an attempt at increasing wellbeing. If a local authority can't always make people happy all the time, surely it can try to empower residents to increase local human interactions that in themselves will "make people smile a bit more". This can even be be measured in how people react to a local authority in surveys and qualitative local discussion groups.

TCC have worked for local authorities such as Newham where we have developed community engagement programmes for Neighbourhood Forums along the lines of "shared challenges" such as local community led "Clean Sweeps" of Neighbourhoods. Watching whole families of all ages and from very diverse backgrounds turn up to don their luminous jackets and work together to litter pick local public spaces, in my experience, puts a smile on most people's faces!

The forthcoming Community Empowerment White Paper should address well-being issues and assist local authorities in putting a smile back on the faces of their many local communities!

I can get some satisfaction.....but is that enough?

Ask Ben Page, of Ipsos MORI - the company who tend to do a lot of local government polling - what he thinks is required and he will say that the polls his company conducts for Council's show that if local government focuses on improving communication with the public, they will show increased satisfaction with services and the evidence he provides is compelling.

However the proposed Community Empowerment Bill is likely to raise the bar over not just satisfaction requirements across services but also develop the duty to involve. As reported in an earlier posting it provides the opportunity to create a "balanced scorecard" for the public and other stakeholders to judge local government and health commissioners, not just in terms of satisfaction, but also in terms of real involvement in developing and improving services.

This is important since over the past 20 years local government services, whether education, health and social care, environment or housing is managed in a much more arms length way. The role of the corporate centre in local government has therefore become more of an enabler and increasingly a performance measurer and improver. However the Bill now provides the opportunity for the corporate centre to develop a much greater empowering agenda.

Some might argue that people are broadly satisfied and only a minority want to get involved more - again that is what the polls that measure satisfaction in local government seem to show.

Who are this minority? Ask Ipsos MORI again: they are social and political influencers. By their nature they impact on the opinions and participation of others. Local Government needs to engage with and involve this minority as they can influence the views and social behaviour of others - a key area for local government and health commissioners in the coming years.

Communications on its own will not achieve this. Personal engagement on the doorstep, in the community and on the phone can both identify who the influencers are and develop a deeper ongoing relationship with them.

Over the coming months we will expand on this theme to demonstrate why there should not be a "poverty of aspiration" in empowering people and why a draft Community Empowerment Bill provides a unique opportunity for those in the cross-party consensus who do not have any low expectations of the public, to develop the involvement agenda much further!

 

 

Time to end the poverty of aspiration over engagement?

There does seem to be a worrying trend from people who should know better to attack the proposals in the Community Empowerment draft bill as not being of great relevance to an apathetic public. This was the case made by David Walker of Guardian Public Magazine writing in Guardian Society today.

Sometimes you expect to come across a poverty of aspiration within poorer communities but it's depressing to hear it from the editor of a journal read by many public sector professionals.

The argument seems to go: "If people claim to be generally satisfied with their public services just let sleeping dogs lie".

Just as modernisation is occurring in specific services such as health and education, the community empowerment bill is promising similar modernisation in public engagement. This will create a new "balanced scorecard" for public services that doesn't just measure public satisfaction, but also measures public involvement.

Of course we also need more emotional intelligence from public servants in dealing with the public - that requires additional training programmes as well as feeding back to staff the views of the public in real time . However that still doesn't far go enough. And we shouldn't be satisfied with a 33% turnout at local elections. But there is a clue in the fact that during the Poll Tax era it reached nearly 50% and that in the recent Boris v Ken contest there was a significantly increased turnout of in the mid forty per cent mark in London. We know people will engage if the issues are important and the choices are clear.

David Walker  compares "cold" local election voting and "X Factor" reality shows. But he draws the wrong conclusions. Why is reality show voting (when it is done properly and not rigged!) popular? It's because people actually feel empowered in the context of what they are taking part in. They are not just passively watching but collectively creating programme content and in effect "writing the script for the following week" by determining who comes back. How often does that happen in local government? Just as important as the immediacy, is that the results of their voting appears in the popular magazines they read and also provokes a conversation the next day around the water cooler. Where is the equivalent infrastructure in the public services that encourages this debate around a decision? You can't simply do it with a glossy leaflet!

He also confuses antagonism for creative tension over the issue of "personalisation v collectivism". I think he is far too pessimistic. This creative tension dates back to when humanity first created societies of towns and cities which allowed both public spaces but also individual endeavour.Of course there will be political choices that need to be made over resources for places like sport centres. But why is there a contradiction between this and allowing local communities to build up a wide range of locally owned community assets? Why should such choice be restricted to an existing building or facility? It could also include land for development too where the debate could be what they use it for. More affordable eco-housing v a new community centre? If local democracy is just seen as a remote Council making decisions for people, of course voter turnout will stay at 33% but we know that regeneration and stock transfer ballots are far higher so the potential is there to help people feel they have a much greater stake in their community.

The Community Empowerment Bill gives us an opportunity to build on the current relatively rare three-party consensus that exists to do something quite exciting in the coming year. Whilst we need to be realistic, we should not start off pessimistic.

Empowerment to the People!!

Richard Wilson Director of Involve has posted an article on the Guardian Blog about the "empowerment gap" and gives an excellent overview of how the government has sought to tackle it over the last decade.

I commented on it and made 3 points, which I expand on in much greater detail here:

• As Richard points out there has been a lot of progress, but as a result of many of these initiatives being driven by individual government departments through the relationship with relevant local agencies there has been uneven empowerment development across public sector bodies within localities. So for example, some sections of local government (eg, planning) may be far ahead of other departments in the local authority as well as compared to other local bodies like Primary Care Trust's (PCT's). There would be nothing wrong with this if it were a conscious decision arising out of collective local priorities, but this has actually emerged through many, sometimes unconnected, decisions made at various times in separate Whitehall departments. The next stage could be to develop a combined empowerment agenda at Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) level, to enable local public sector and voluntary bodies to advance together and become collectively more accountable to the communities they serve. Ways to achieve this might include: LSP's to jointly commission single public engagement units in each local government area which would benefit from economies of scale with duplication of savings ploughed back into more engagement; agreeing common local standards to various consultations; strengthening the scrutiny function in local government as well as perhaps even developing a formal scrutiny function for MP's over their own local public services?
• Capacity building is vital and part of this requires greater investment in community leadership support and training at a local level. This should not just be aimed at Councillors but should also be targeted at less well-off communities. TCC has already done work on developing local community champions for communities covering specific policy areas like recycling, but also in a wider role. This approach can help develop the local leaders of the future and widen their representativeness and diversity. This would be a broader approach than rely simply on the electoral process in a locality to throw up a small number of individuals who might then receive training from their local authority. Early intervention here can widen the pool of local leaders thus helping to build wider local trust in institutions.
• TCC, in working with PCT's, has discovered that in reviewing services there is an issue around "low expectations" whereby people may say a service is fine because they have no way to compare it with the equivalent in another area: eg you may find that people say they are happy with GP services, even when they do not compare well with somewhere else. This can also be linked to the wider "Delivery Paradox" whereby people say they are satisfied with their local service, but feel the same service is as a whole declining. So far the government has generally relied on league tables and delivery incentives from the centre to drive up some improvement, but if expectations are low in the first place, there is much less local pressure from below on organisations to improve. Greater local democratic accountability is clearly part of the solution, but is probably not enough on its own. Training up "expert residents" in local communities to learn more about what is happening elsewhere and be able to assert themselves as part of a wider community champion scheme might be a way forward to help build a critical mass for higher local expectations. We have formal twinning between Council's in different countries across Europe and even with the developing world, why don't we have twinning within the UK so Council's twin with other Council's to share knowledge and good practice with much of the work being done online to ensure value for money. Most local authorities will have historic connections with many others across the country so the decision over who to twin with could be quite an interesting process in its own right. Twinning could also be taken further so good practice is shared between twinned LSP's and therefore services in areas like health are twinned too.

Increased social capital makes for a more socially cohesive society. Community Empowerment provides an opportunity to challenge complacency at the local level, whilst making people feel they can influence more at a national level.

As Richard says in his article, we don't need countless repeat measures to tell us that. What we need is to use the current broad political consensus in this area to make some clear progress in wider local empowerment in the coming years!

Developing online Political Book Groups - the easy way!

I think we would all recognise that to help make democracy work we need to develop more ongoing political education. One way to do this is to run an online political book group. The easiest way to do that is to obtain daily or weekly email parts of books, which you can obtain at The Daily Lit.

Once one person has subscribed to a book they can then upload it to a Ning social network group and then invite others to join the book group of that book and comment on the daily or weekly parts. There are free books like Machiavelli's The Prince that one could read or institutional economist Thorstein Veblen's.Theory of the Leisure Classes which I am just reading myself. I should add there are also many non political books at the Daily Lit if you want to run your own personal online book group on a hobby or on a piece of literature.

I also think this concept of an online book group could work well on Facebook too. If it does take off there you heard it first here!

Do as I say, not as I do?

We were recently engaging with a community where they were asked to express their views broadly for or against an issue. The issue as such was one where people in the office would also take differing views, if only for a spot of light-hearted banter.

The point I made in our discussions was that what was far more interesting was that those who were critical also expressed their views on the benefits and the same applied vice versa. Very few people were either completely for or against on this issue where you could actually express a clear yes or no. Clearly the depth of our engagement showed that people hold complex views on the subject..

I think one of the interesting areas that one discovers within community engagement is the difference between what people say and their actual behaviour: eg people say they disagree with something and then, when given the choice, behave somewhat differently.

We see this in people's views and actions with recycling, gambling, healthy living, using big shops when they say they really prefer smaller local shops etc. The current debate on the future of local post offices is a good example. People say they want a local one but usage is declining as people vote with their feet and use other service provision - some on the internet..

Some of this may be due to people weighing up incentives against what they perceive to be commonly held views. Thus we see people say they like their community to stay the same and will oppose an over-development next door to them, but if a developer offers them £50,000+ on top of the value of their property they don't then say "no, this will ruin the neighbourhood I am moving from, so I won't accept this extra money.

Organisations like the RSA are currently studying the dichotomy between views and behaviour as a driver for challenges such as "private activity, public despair", which we have previously blogged and its an area that there will clearly be more debate. As we are discovering in some areas we are working in, people have very complex views on "entitlement" both for themselves and others. The challenge for politicians and society is how much should we actually restrict people's choices and potentially damaging behaviour or how much should we debate with it in a slower process  of engagement?

In other words - how far do civil liberties go and how possible is it to impose one approach to areas of personal behaviour in a single state, let alone a complex global society where some people in future may see their on-line community as far more important than their local community. .

I used to think you could impose such an approach but now I am not so sure?

This is why social marketing is such an interesting area with much wider applications than what it is being used for at present and why I think TCC are well positioned to be at the centre of that..

I suspect it goes back to the point I made at the beginning that people rarely hold a single view on these issues (see The Political Brain for more info - it has much wider application than politics) and that immediate influences at any point in time are really important.

McCain and Ming and the age thing..

I am sure that this will have been written about and I've missed it but what is the explanation for the trashing of Menzies Campbell(aged 66) and the lionisation of John McCain (aged 71) on the basis of their age?

Is the demographic profile of the US and UK so different? Are the US media just biding their time before turning on McCain? Is there genuinely a more mature(!)attitude to ageing in the US?

And doesn't it appear that in the UK that far from becoming more enlightened about the role of older people in public life etc, attitudes are actually moving the other way?

Jonathan(aged 53)