As we approach the quarter way mark, the 21st Century
is proving far more complex than we might have imagined when we ushered in the
new millennium just 20 years ago. Alas
for many of us in Local Government, our task has not been the relentless replication
of the ‘ideal authority’- the New Public Management equivalent of Fukuyama’s ‘End
of History’ – but the daunting job of determining who public services need to
be for, and how best to deliver. At the heart of this re-imagining are profound
questions about power. Who has it,
who doesn't, who exercises it and who experiences its impact. These questions
are structural but also moral, and in their answers, we glimpse the shape and
character of public services and their leadership for generations to come.
The starting point for many places is a context that is ever
clearer, familiar and one which shows no sign of going away anytime soon. This
‘new normal’ is one of: perma-austerity; unsustainable rises in demand for
services, conceived for different times, now struggling to cope; mega changes
in expectations and the erosion of trust, driven in part by new technology, but
also the rapid decline of old world power paradigms; environmental degradation;
rapid and unpredictable demographic change that challenge prevailing patterns
of cohesion and identity; and an economy that isn’t working for too many people.
Places like Barking and Dagenham have been at the sharp end
of this change.
Like others, we’ve been
battered by austerity. We’re a post-industrial town (quite literally post-Fordist)
where stable, semi-skilled, mainly (white) male jobs have disappeared in a
manner not dissimilar to some of our great northern towns and cities. Over the
last two decades we have also experienced seismic demographic change. In 2001
89% of our population was White British, by 2011 less than half were. That
change hasn’t slowed. We have some wards in the borough where fewer than 9% of
folk associated with an address in 2011 were still living there in 2018. We
also have the youngest population in the UK.
Meanwhile socio-economic
outcomes for many of our residents are not good enough. We languish at the
bottom of too many London league tables – and often, those furthest away from
the prospects of economic and social participation are women and girls. The
financial cost of this context to cash starved local-public services is huge,
the human cost is unbearable.
Its against this back ground
that notions of tradition, identify and power are contentious and contested. In
2006, 12 members of the British National Party were elected to the Council, an
event no less remarkable for the fact that they only stood 13 candidates. With
hindsight were we the canary in the mine? A decade later we went on to be one
of the few Brexit Boroughs in London.
On the upside, we’re a part of
London that is experiencing significant economic growth. We have space for
50-60,000 new homes 25-40 minutes from central London. Two years ago we created
our own growth, regeneration and development company Be First and our own general fund
housing company Reside. We’re now building more
Council owned houses that we are able to let at Council equivalent rents than
we are losing through the right to buy, for the first time ever. Meanwhile
we’ve completely redesigned Council services so that they are focused from
first principles on tackling root causes rather than presenting needs. There is
much more to be done in all these areas but we’ve made start.
Accordingly we see our role as
three fold: intervening in how capitalism is working in the borough,
particularly in relation to housing delivery, job creation and wealth retention,
so that we shape it to our ends and ensure a local economic foundation that works for as many as possible; secondly
by intervening at structural level in our society and community so that we
break down the barriers that are holding people back and so tackle the long
term root cause of demand. This will require the use of data and insight on a
scale never-before seen in the public sector, but deep empathy too; and finally
establishing new relationships with citizens because all of this is personal,
and it is political. Our mission is to foster trust, and a sense of agency, and
provide real opportunities to participate in and sometimes control those decisions
that affect citizens lives.
It’s at the intersection these
themes, that we find - hidden in plain sight – deficits of power, those
structural characteristics of our place that if changed or altered or
diminished, could change everything. In Barking and Dagenham one those
of features is domestic violence.
Our Borough has the highest level of reported domestic
violence in London. Indeed, Village ward in Dagenham has the highest reported DV
of any of the 600 or so wards in the capital. Public Health colleagues estimate
that 1 in 30 female residents have suffered FGM. Meanwhile 80% of our 400 or so
looked after children were taken into care from households where DV was a
feature of daily life. As troubling, last year when we surveyed year 11 students (14 years old) about relationships,
care for one another, and love – a staggering 38% agreed with the statement:
“there are occasions when it is ok to slap your partner if they have been out
of line”. This, in the Borough with the youngest population in the country.
Now that we chose to see, we find an imbalance of power
between the sexes that is at the heart of an epidemic level of harm. Moreover,
it is normalised and so it is doubly catastrophic. Accordingly, Barking and Dagenham Council
is seeking to understand why it is that domestic abuse and violence has become
so culturally acceptable within the communities that we serve. And then we
then want to act -through our workforce; with partners; and with our
communities. To this end, in the early Autumn, we will launch a Commission to
help inform our thinking. We hope it will draw our Borough together in a
conversation about how we live together, how we love, how we resolve conflict
and what equality between men and women, and boys and girls must mean and the
norms of behaviour that flow from that. We think it will have national
significance too because as we are finding, Inclusive Growth can’t only be a
matter of economic distribution but one of understanding and overcoming those
pivotal deficits of power however and where ever they manifest.
this article first appeared in the Local Government Chronicle in June 2019
https://www.lgcplus.com/services/community-cohesion/chris-naylor-why-we-must-address-deficits-of-power-10-06-2019/
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