The perils and pitfalls of cleaning your own teeth
Town & Country Planning, April 2005
There is no doubt about it. If cleaning your teeth was something we could contract out, we would soon be forbidden to do it altogether – regulations would insist that we employ a fully-trained professional with liability insurance.
I exaggerate, but only slightly. That is the direction we appear to be heading in so many areas where risk seems to have been magnified to the point that activity becomes impossible.
I put this point recently to the new Home Secretary Charles Clarke, and asked him whether this trend might undermine his ability to encourage volunteering in the public services: the stated aim of the Russell Commission.
I should say that this is not quite the name-drop it seems. I’ve never met the man before, though his attitude to basic civil freedoms do not indicate that we would get on very well.
I had been invited to a conference at the Treasury on the future of volunteering – why has the Treasury involved itself with volunteering? that is another story – and Clarke was speaking, along with a bevy of other New Labour ministers.
I fear he did not answer the question. He pretended I had implied that it was the potential volunteers that were risk averse, when any sane witness of the current scene must know it is actually the local authorities and public service managers.
So I still don’t know the answer. Or rather, I fear I do. Because despite all the trends that are currently under way towards localism, the fear of risk – or perhaps fear of the no-win, no-fee lawyers – is probably the greatest barrier to its development.
We all have anecdotal evidence of long-standing community activities abandoned or severely curtailed because there might conceivably be a risk to those taking part.
One Sussex village even replaced its traditional Fireworks Night bonfire with a flickering light on the grounds that somebody might be burned.
Ofsted recently announced that it would be inspecting step-grandparents who regularly look after their step-grandchildren.
The official mind always had a low opinion of local people and their abilities. Two decades ago, I remember the people power pioneer Tony Gibson talking about one self-build scheme where the local authority had offered a choice to new residents about local landscaping – between red or green tarmac.
But now the mere possibility that blame might fall on officials of any kind is enough to strangle whole swathes of local life.
It’s hard to know quite who to blame – lawyers, insurers, bureaucrats, greed – and there has been on abortive attempt by MPs for a private members bill that excludes volunteering from the blame culture entirely. But legislation is clearly difficult.
The trouble is not so much that risk-aversion will strangle localism at birth. I won’t. But it will pervert it.
Risk-free localism is all about putting local people on committees. It’s about sharing decision-making, and a massive expansion in the consultation industry, rather than letting people actually use their skills and abilities.
These things are important, but they are not local life. They are simply an extension of centralisation, but involving a handful of professional representatives to water it down a little.
It promotes as much cynicism as rule from Whitehall. Those who take the decisions are just as remote, just as faceless.
No, if localism is going to mean anything, will have to mean that we can trust people to run a bonfire if they want to, or local football coaching.
Above all, it means trusting people to play a role in public services that goes beyond simple representation.
One of the exciting aspects of the time banks that are growing up in public service outposts, encouraging patients, tenants or pupils to play a responsible local role, is that they enable this to happen.
And actually there are some jobs that are better done by local laypeople – going round to check up on older people who have just come out of hospital – than by professionals.
Local people do not need training to provide a friendly face. Quite the reverse: once you start professionalizing human skills, you undermine the confidence of everyone to care.
And if informal care breaks down, public services or the police suddenly become ruinously expensive.
Localism depends on the voluntary sector, and on self-confident people at a local level. They in turn depend increasingly on some kind of legislative support that can give them protection against outright abuse, but can also ward off the corrosive influence of lawyers and insurers.
The alternative is that we start shutting up the shutters of local life altogether. It cannot be far off otherwise, when any unofficial or voluntary gathering or endeavour of any kind – whether it is getting together in church on a Sunday morning, or just giving a cup of tea to a neighbour – becomes impossibly expensive.
