Values for money: the municipal philosopher

I was very taken with the news this week that a tiny town council in Italy has appointed a municipal philosopher to help individual citizens to think clearly, listen to each other and question themselves and others. So, big kudos to Corigliano d'Otranto. 

One can well imagine the fulminations of the Taxpayers Alliance were such a position to be advertised by an English local authority. Indeed a state of zen would probably be required to deal with the outrage, scorn and ridicule that would pour down on anyone with the temerity to suggest such an appointment.

In fact, the need for municipal philosophers is perhaps about as great at the moment as it has ever been. Michael Sandel's wonderfully lucid book 'Justice' contains any number of observations which would be relevant but here's just one:

'A just society can't be achieved simply by maximising utility or be securing freedom of choice. To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life, and to create a public culture hospitable to the disagreements that will inevitably arise'.

In the debased political culture that we often see around us there is little encouragement to engage in reasoned argument. Many of our politicians seem happy to pass over responsibility to individuals or to communities as if somehow all preferences can be accommodated. They can't.  

We may be approaching the point at which the idea that freedom of choice expressed predominantly through market mechanisms has gone beyond all acceptable limits. But what will be put in its place?

At root this concerns values. Lack of money means that choices have serious distributional consequences. Some councils have taken a values based approach whether fairness or equality as a means of informing the choices that are being made. 

A municipal philosopher would be well placed to aid that process; asking politicians hard questions about their roles and the basis for their decisions; helping citizens to take on more of the attributes of being good citizens and being challenged about their assumptions and preferences; asking some tough questions of both businesses and third sector organisations about their motivations and contributions.

Commercial firms have on occasion hired corporate 'jesters' giving them some of the freedom that went with the role played by the equivalents in a medieval court to challenge assumptions and put noses out of joint without being subject to the usual penalties. Someone in fact to point out that the emperor might really have no clothes. G4S might have well have benefited from one.

Hospitals have employed ethicists to help doctors to make appallingly difficulty judgements about whether or not to treat patients and the best course of action when all choices seem unpalatable.

So whilst I don't for a moment expect anyone to follow the exact example of Corigliano, it would be heartening to think that the underpinning reason for the appointment - to help people to be better citizens - might have some traction. The thought processes associated with being a citizen are very different to those of being a consumer; paying taxes is about more than shopping; and participating in decision making is different to being a supporter at a football match (whatever one might think from PMQs).

However, in the current economic climate, I suspect that any hard pressed English council would be most likely to welcome applications from that largely forgotten philosophical discipline of alchemy. Preferably from someone with a proven track record.

Should Parliament play a bigger part in central local relations?

Is Parliament thinking more strategically about the role and purpose of local government than the Government? Looks at some of the work that is under way.

The Public Accounts Committee has been examining in some detail the way that accountability for public expenditure will be secured in a more localised future and has found, perhaps not too surprisingly, that the overall approach to accountability for localised services lacks coherence and clarity.

The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has been examining the case for codification of the relationship between national and local government.

The Communities and Local Government Committee has been examining community budgets and suggesting that more profound changes will be needed in terms of accountability for public funds, both nationally and locally, if these are to come close to fulfilling their potential. Through the Councillors and the Community inquiry, the committee is also examining the role of local politicians as leaders of communities and neighbourhoods and the associated questions of accountability.

The Public Administration Select Committee has (as I have commented before on this blog http://mountgroveassociates.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/strategic-thinking-and-local-state.html) been considering strategic thinking in Government and raising some questions which go to the heart of the unresolved issues about central-local relationships.

Also rumbling away in the background is the Alignment project which will bring a much clearer line of sight between the Estimates being voted by Parliament and the resource accounts which are produced by Departments. This could result in changes to the way that spending plans are put to Parliament, and significantly expand the scope to make input prior to the approval of final spending plans.

Some of these Committees are even talking to each other!

From these various pieces of work could come something quite profound in terms of the role that Parliament (not just the Executive) might play in central - local relations:

- an embedded set of expectations about the role of local government and how to facilitate more collaborative working arrangements between services at local level

- a joint committee of other form of Parliamentary apparatus to oversee how that is implemented in practice; and

- a greater opportunity for Parliament to consider the implications of the spending plans being put forward by the Executive which would give greater emphasis to what happens before money is distributed alongside the impressive interrogation of what happens once it has gone out of the door.

The last of these points is significantly underplayed in current discussions.  The reality is that the detail of public expenditure allocations is rarely the subject of detailed scrutiny in Parliament. Even more pertinently, the combined effect of the different allocation in terms of the total amount of resources being made available for a given locality is never considered.

Parliament, in voting through the Estimates and the annual settlements that cover local services and local government, may engage with some of the bigger distributional questions but each is looked at in isolation.  Parliament does not consider any changes that would reflect the different local circumstances across the country and which might improve value for money. 

Some steps are being taken through City Deals, but to make much more of a reality of the rhetoric about more genuinely devolved arrangements would mean changes within the Executive in the way in which money is allocated and presented to Parliament and some changes in the Legislature in terms of how it scrutinises the proposals of the Executive. It would be even better if there were some choreography between changes in each.

At the moment there is probably greater likelihood that much of the work being undertaken in Parliament will grind into the sand. But there is the opportunity to build on some of the questions already being asked and to push forward on significant changes which would make the rhetoric about greater devolution turn into something which is a product of the way that Government and Parliament work together rather than something which is currently largely frustrated by those very arrangements.

Sunny June Morning Manifesto

It's a sunny morning and I have a day of admin ahead including the joys of tax returns. So, instead, here is an off the cuff, undigested and unrefined list of ten things that would make the sun shine more frequently for me. Yes, it’s political (it could hardly be anything else) but these are frustrations with the current state of the public policy debate across the piece:

1. Fair, living wages: a low wage economy treats working people as units of production not humans and has immense impacts on our economy and our society; not least it cost shunts from employers to taxpayers through benefits and tax credits

2. Fair rents: high rents subsidised by the benefit system is yet more cost shunting onto the public purse and leads to misery for many

3. On social issues, morality after the fact is at best unhelpful and in some cases positively disastrous. Everyone makes duff choices in their lives; some of us are in the fortunate position to be able to pick up the pieces ourselves. We should not be damning people who are not in that position and compounding their problems - whether through withdrawal of benefits or services

4. On economics, in contrast, morality needs to play a bigger part. In particular, paying taxes is an entry pass to being a member of society: thin lines between evasion and avoidance should cut no mustard

5. Collective insurance is almost always a better bet in terms of efficiency than individual arrangements: from the licence fee in broadcasting to tax and national insurance for health and social care

6. Choice should be about much more fine grained issues of how things are done not about who does them. Obsessive discussion about choice of provider has occupied us far too much for far too long

7. Dodgy financial arrangements are generally just that: dodgy. PFI has now been shown to be what most of us always thought: a very expensive way of paying for things with complete capture by the provider but precious little by way of real transfer of risk. Don't repeat the same kind of problems with some of the new wheezes being dreamed up and in particular recognise that payment by results means lots of different things to different people. It is no more a panacea than PFI

8. Innovation is frequently not innovative. That doesn't matter particularly but the clamour for bright shiny and new can be distracting: for the most part we have been there in some form before and frankly that's fine

9. Co-production has a major role but it should not be oversold. People, residents, users (whatever name we use) do have a genuine interest in being involved with some design and with some delivery but imagining that this translates into a whole new way of business across swathes of services is fanciful

10. Anti-politics must be fought. Politicians in modern democracies have a dreadfully hard job but a vital one. Whether it is businesses who prefer to avoid the messy stuff of deliberation in favour of nice clean 'deals' or that 'plague on all their houses' feeling we need elected and accountable political leaders and decision makers. In the current climate, politicians need to matter more in stark contrast to big finance and big business. But they also need to do the very hard job of saying things to us that we don't want to hear:  such as 'the local district hospital really does need to close if we are really going to be able to shift money to more effective primary care'.

The sun has now gone behind a cloud. So I’ll stop.

Pilots, Pathfinders and Prototypes

Slightly tounge in cheek but a serious point or two lurking in here as well  ....

http://www.cles.org.uk/yourblogs/pilots-pathfinders-and-prototypes/

Councillors in their communities

A New Start piece from a month or two back which I failed to post at the time ..

http://www.cles.org.uk/yourblogs/councillors-in-their-communities-should-i-be-bothered/

If it’s not Mayors … why not put form after function?

Whilst there may be one or two new city mayors widespread enthusiasm for the model remains stubbornly elusive. We will surely see much discussion about exactly why over the coming days.

This piece is instead about what could happen next; what is a possible new dispensation for a period in which directly elected Mayors have been largely given the thumbs-down but in which there remains untapped enthusiasm for more devolution and on-going need for more integration?

The arguments for greater devolution and greater integration at both local and conurbation scale are entirely separable from those about specific types of governance. Indeed, it makes considerably more sense to match the form of governance to the functional roles and responsibilities being sought than to make an ex ante decision about the types of governance options that are available.

In responding to the mayoral referendum results, Ministers have been saying that it should be for local areas to decide how they want to be governed.

Yet at the moment, in line with guided localism, people can only respond to questions set by the Government.

The rejection of mayors in many parts of the country leaves some big questions:

-         How will the city deals offering at least some additional devolution of responsibilities (however unclear) now be taken forward and will the Government move from the presumption of going further with places which have a mayor or take their ball away?

-          How could the greater integration in decision making that Mayors were intended to achieve now happen?

-          In the largest metropolitan areas the need for further development at conurbation level seems clear and the problems with mayors for only small parts of these areas has always been apparent but how is that to be achieved?

And as part of the answers to these questions will the Government now facilitate the development of other options apart from mayors as new forms of decision making?

It is not that the hands of the Government are tied.

The Localism Act allows the Secretary of State to establish other types of governance arrangement beyond the existing models for the executive (mayors or leaders with cabinets) or committee structures.

The largely unremarked section 9BA which the Localism Act inserted into the Local Government Act 2000 allows the Secretary of State to make regulations prescribing the arrangements that local authorities may operate for and in connection with the discharge of their functions.

Councils may ask the Government to make such regulations if in their opinion the new arrangements would improve the discharge of their functions.

There are many unanswered questions about these provisions including the focus on the council alone rather than on a broader set of functions at local level but they open up the possibility of a wider range of new local governance arrangements.

A good move now would be for Ministers to signal that they are prepared to make use of them to give impetus for some more experimentation that might better respond to needs at local level.

That is not to overlook the uphill struggle to make the arguments for change when people have generally turned their backs on mayors. But it would be possible to make the whole mayoral saga have some positive outcomes if there were now clear commitment to:

-              the need for more devolution from central to local and for more integration at local level both in terms of principle and in terms of practice, particularly given the very severe public expenditure climate

-              a positive response from Ministers to proposals for new governance models that would be used to give them effect.

That’s where some effort could now fruitfully be focused.

Strategic thinking and the local state

Today's Public Administration Select Committee report on 'Strategic Thinking in Government' has received considerable coverage precisely because its critique is that Government in the UK lacks such thinking in any properly developed sense. The Committee has over a number of reports argued the case for 'national strategy' which it distinguishes from policy and from operational strategy and which is characterised as being about the long term and by definition bigger than any single Department. 

Intriguingly the Committee have also fastened on to the idea of 'emergent strategy' which requires a 'directing mind' to steer a process which means that the emergence of strategy moves from being chaotic (its description) to being positive generating effective policies and positive outcomes which reflect the public values that in turn informed and inspired that leadership.

Whilst there is passing reference to issues such as child poverty as being ones that exemplify failings arising from a lack of coherent and relevant strategic aims, the focus is very much on what might broadly be seen as national level questions. 

It is striking that there is no discussion (aside from a general point about national strategy needing to reflect 'all parts of the UK and the devolved policy agendas') about the impact of the lack of strategic thinking on the way that Government deals with what might be described as the local state - the set of organisations including local government that make things happen in places up and down the country. Yet arguably the lack of strategic thinking when it comes to the local state is actually a massive failing on the part of Government. 

The report identifies some of the long standing problems of dealing with issues coherently:

- Departmental silos which place the primary accountability on Secretaries of State to Parliament and which lock Departments in as the 'key unit'

- the commensurate lack of strength at the centre of Government with the means and the influence to act as an effective centre of gravity for national strategy

- the lack of alignment of financial resources with strategic thinking and the lack of longer term thinking about  budgeting linked to where society is going

- the opportunities for a change in the role of Parliament in helping to promote and challenge national strategy (the contrast is drawn with the approach in Canada which includes a review of financial commitments, pressures, priorities etc at the start of the spending round).

All of these issues figure prominently when one analyses the systemic problems that hamper the development of a more coherent approach to the local state. Indeed, work that I have been doing with a colleague suggests that without some rethinking of Parliamentary and local accountability arrangements current Government moves to decentralise and devolve powers to communities are doomed to fail, the Coalition’s objective of promoting ‘localism’ will continue to be more rhetoric than reality and it will be harder to avoid a deepening crisis in public services. 

Major changes are happening including in the form of Police and Crime Commissioners, further directly elected mayors, new plans for ‘City Growth’, and ‘open’ public services.   But these will leave key aspects of our present constitutional arrangements, and a set of critical dysfunctions at the heart of English governance, largely untouched.

The new landscape for local public services currently emerging from Government reforms on health, policing, education, and local government is highly complex.  Accountability arrangements, and the citizen’s question of ‘who decides’ on the allocation of resources, have become virtually unanswerable even to the expert.  

On the financial front, achievement of large-scale public service savings through preventative measures, early intervention, and joined-up delivery remains a distant goal – rarely achieved in practice.  Many valiant efforts have been made, over many years.  Traditional arrangements for accountability to Government and Parliament, and our silo-based systems for delegation of authority, stand in the way.   

There needs to be a rethink of the present national arrangements for financial accountability and devolved decision-making, from Parliament downwards including changes in machinery of government terms. 

There are opportunities to do so but they would be greatly enhanced by a collective will to rise to the challenge set by the Committee to do strategy differently and better.