Self-help and why the government hates it
Town & Country Planning, September 2006
The trouble with politicians, one highly successful community organiser from New York City told me some time ago, is that they just want to turn up, spread fairy dust and listen to everyone cheer.
They have to change the political rhetoric if we are ever going to decentralise power, he said. He certainly convinced me.
It is true that localism requires a radical new offer from politicians to the public. Not any more ‘ask and you shall receive’ – nobody believes that any more anyway, least of all the voters. It has to say: we can achieve these things, but not without your help.
You can see why politicians are suspicious of saying things like that. It sounds like they’re avoiding responsibility themselves – and possibly doing themselves out of a meaningful job.
You hear them gargling a little with the rhetoric of self-help and responsibility, without apparently realising – as Blair and Brown don’t seem to realise – that this is a two-way deal they have to propose (I bracket them together in case they have swapped places by the time this column is published). Nobody is going to take more responsibility unless they are given the power to exercise it – and that means you have to trust them to make mistakes.
And there’s the rub, because – despite the rhetoric – one of the reasons this rarely seems to happen is that the political system actually loathes the idea of people taking initiative.
So it was fascinating for me to come up against this in practice as part of a major Joseph Rowntree Foundation research programme into co-production, the idea that users of services are regarded as assets and involved in mutual support and the delivery of services.
The resulting report, Hidden Work, was based on research led by the New Economics Foundation at the South London & Maudsley NHS Trust, the Gorbals Initiative in Glasgow and the Wales Institute for Community Currencies. And we found a vast range of informal, unacknowledged work being undertaken in those neighbourhoods considered to be most ‘disadvantaged’, by people frequently considered a ‘drain on society’ – single mothers, refugees and asylum-seekers, people with mental health problems, and those too young or too old for conventional jobs.
But in the spirit of co-production, the bulk of the research was carried out by people who were themselves outside paid work, who we trained up to carry out the interviews as researchers.
It was an innovative project and an innovative methodology, and it was intended also to give the lay researchers work experience and training which they could use later. You would have think government officials would have welcomed it.
Not a bit of it. One of the researchers in fact lost their benefits as a result, and had serious difficulties as a result of the initiative he had taken.
Never mind that he could have done similar training on an official course, and been encouraged to do so by officials. The fact that he had done this independently was a source of deep suspicion.
It was clear to us on the research project that this was indicative of a wider malaise, that – whatever they say – official bodies tend to clamp down on signs of initiative, self-help or imagination among those who rely on them.
Their clients are supplicants to their largesse and they prefer it that way, just as the government prefers us all to be supplicants rather than responsible partners exercising power.
So, if you are wondering why public services are so expensive and so ineffective – at least when it comes to long term change – you might find some of the root causes here. Supplicants tend to hang around waiting to be told what to do
But then, if the official attitude – whether it is in the Benefits Agency or other public services – is that they prefer their clients to be passive, then this ‘co-production’ is unlikely to develop.
Perhaps the first task is to get those who run the nation to come clean on this. Do you really believe in self-help? If not, why keep appealing to it? If you do, then for goodness sake put together a radical programme to hand power back to people as locally as possible.
You may say that all this talk of ‘double devolution’ implies that such a programme is actually on the way. If fear that the powerful preference Whitehall has for supplicants rather than citizens will prevent its emergence for some years yet.
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David Boyle is an associate at the New Economics Foundation (www.david-boyle.co.uk). Hidden work: co-production by people outside paid employment by David Boyle, Sherry Clark and Sarah Burns is published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and is available from York Publishing Services Ltd (01904 430033), price £16.95 plus £2 p&p. The full report and summary can be downloaded, free of charge, from www.jrf.org.uk.
