Can social innovation be solved by big government?
Author: James Morris, NALC LCR Magazine |
Central government is by definition disconnected from its citizens, and is never likely to be able to understand the specific problems which a local area faces. National politicians will almost always produce blanket one size fits all proposals, but invariably different areas will have their own unique problems to address.
An example is housing policy, where the centrally developed Decent Homes Scheme, has produced an inefficient, high cost system which fails to deliver a service which service users desire. The National Audit Office recently established that the scheme will run 8 years longer than anticipated, and at nearly twice the original budget estimate, at £37billion.
But crucially, in many cases the Scheme has led to poor quality work and missed appointments. The result is that a number of Councils have left the scheme – in order to offer an alternative customer-led approach to housing. Edward Leigh MP, Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said that the Scheme had been “riddled with oversights and a sketchy grasp of detail”.
Even when central government outsources work to third sector organisations to tackle key issues directly, most often local organisations are overlooked for larger organisations with the capacity to meet national targets and bureaucratic processes. We touched on this issue in our 2009 report, ‘More for Your Money‘, which described the funding relationship as “fundamentally undermining the connection between ‘investor’ and receiver”.
Local government is in a strong position to provide a bridge this gap.
In its local leadership role, local authorities can provide the investment which can impact directly on the area, whilst also providing the funding for a new social and environmental market to emerge. These markets could be developed by setting up ‘Local Investment Funds’, which could be managed by an organisation such as the Post Office, who would help to encourage investment into the local area.
Going further, there is an opportunity to completely rethink how the public sector operates, transferring ownership from the state to people directly.
We touch upon some examples community ownership in our forthcoming report ‘For Good Measure’, which looks at a number of initiatives from the post 2001 economic collapse in Argentina to housing co-operatives in the UK. Town and parish councils could potentially become the facilitator of these community groups and begin a transfer of ownership.
The models operated by John Lewis and others are being looked at closely by the major parties. Tessa Jowell recently announced that the government were considering mutual’s for potentially running housing, social care and some children’s services. Grant Shapps, the Shadow Housing Minister also declared that co-ops and community land trusts were “superb examples” of communities taking responsibility for themselves.
Such schemes offer the potential to view the public sector in a completely different way, moving away from the debate around whether small government or big government are the solution, to a situation where public funding more naturally finds its natural level. The potential benefits of such a system are enormous.
But we must not lose a grip of the scale of the challenge we face.
Firstly, we must address the public perception of so-called ‘postcode lotteries’ which are a misrepresentation of local experimentation and innovation. Secondly, the target culture and funding relationship have distorted and centralized local policies. And finally, following the vast expansion of the ‘quangocracy’, we now have a void of local accountability in respect to many areas of policy.
Going forward, initiatives such as Total Place, City regions and marginal financial flexibilities for councils are a start, but nothing more. With the public sector currently looking for significant cuts, the potential for significant efficiency savings offers a brief window for systemic reform. But the public sector must act now, and must not shy away from the challenge.
Big government is therefore categorically not the answer.