Creating Community Solutions

June was an acutely challenging month for many of our places, our nation and the sector. The ramifications are ongoing and will be for months to come. There was also the election. A political moment worthy of considerable reflection, but for many of us a pause for thought that has eluded us in the weeks that followed. But pause for reflection we must.

Others are better and more appropriately placed to comment on the remarkable results. We will all have views, but my professional interest is in the implication for public services.

This was an election heavy on debate about public spending and the size of the state: how much and who should pay; universalism versus targeting; the desirability and means of taxing (unearned?) wealth and capital; and intergenerational fairness. The starting point, perhaps refreshingly for these debates, did not always break along traditional party lines. Nor, as the election outcome clearly revealed, were these questions resolved.

While I suspect not the intention of manifesto writers, strikingly absent from the campaign was a debate about public service reform. Or, to be more precise, how we innovate to make a greater, positive impact on people’s lives.

Who public services are for, how they help create a fairer, less divided, more equal society, and the respective responsibilities of the state, citizen, civil society and private sector, were themes largely muffled. Yet these considerations have come to dominate much of what we in local government do.

The desire to ‘end austerity’ resonated – in some quarters it roared in 2017 far more than 2015 – and very little was heard about the ‘long-term economic plan’. But the imperatives for innovation remain and are in many ways hardening: national debt and fiscal weakness; growing service demand; rising expectations about quality and accessibility; and community division. More money in the system – an imperative – will not be sufficient. These pressures demand fresh thinking and a new consensus about the path reform should take. Absent a clear view from the top, out of necessity and desire, local government will be the incubator of more radical approaches.

Three themes stand out, all connected, but distinct in the change they signal.

First is a more vigorous and localised approach to growth while ensuring citizens furthest away from the labour market benefit too. The goal is not just the bottom line in terms of GDP but also a society where people can live more sustainable, independent lives. The recent RSA Inclusive Growth Commission and other studies have covered the policy terrain in detail. Indeed, Barking and Dagenham LBC conducted its own independent growth commission: No one left behind, in pursuit of growth for the benefit of everyone. It concluded with 109 recommendations to propel the development of our borough. Those recommendations largely fell into two bundles: measures to develop physical infrastructure; and social infrastructure – those institutions that support and nourish the collective endeavour of individuals and families in dismantling structural inequalities so people flourish and release their productive value.

These insights led us to redesign our council in two fundamental ways.

We created Be First, our wholly owned but arms-length growth and regeneration company. Ours is a vision of reform not as a euphemism for cuts but as commitment to investment. Be First’s mission: to triple the annual volume of housebuilding and related infrastructure through targeted public and private sector investment. This has required fresh thinking about our investment strategy and balance sheet, but also about our strategy for housing. In short, the creation of a new generation of general fund social housing infrastructure assets that support people at different stages in their lives, with a variety of tenures and genuinely affordable rents. We plan to increase the private rented sector stock of our housing company, Reside, from the current portfolio of 700 units to 3,000 by the end of the decade. These are homes for aspirational local Londoners as they are – workers earning the minimum wage, essential public servants, those at the start of adulthood and those in the closing years of life – not the fantasy of the developer brochures.

The second change was the development of a new service: ‘Community Solutions’. A bold and radical redesign of council services with the aim of getting upstream of complex needs by discerning and tackling root causes. Community Solutions brings together teams – some 400 staff – which used to be responsible for worklessness, skills, poverty, debt, mental health, homelessness, domestic violence, antisocial behaviour, youth, libraries, family support, and first points of contact for adult and children’s social care, all of which were tackled separately and therefore more expensively. Community Solutions allows them to be taken together and to mentor and support individuals and families to help them be more self-reliant, and provide some measure of mutual support.

Community Solutions demonstrates the second key reform theme. As resources diminish, so the service design task becomes to understand what makes a public service intervention pivotal to someone’s life. This is a profoundly challenging question. For Community Solutions, it literally means designing in the resources and capacity found within our community and where that capacity does not exist, paying attention to its development. It also means developing the insight and intelligence to grasp the intersectional and crosscutting nature of an individual’s circumstance and barriers, and prioritise services accordingly. Already this is challenging our status quo. Services once at the periphery are becoming centre stage: domestic violence; drug and alcohol, childcare and PHSE – the kick-starters that unlock the reduction in more expensive interventions such as temporary accommodation; looked after children and long-term worklessness.

Ultimately, this is all about a new relationship with citizens where our role is to convene the resources that help people where possible to help themselves. However, moving the conversation away from ‘what am I eligible for?’ to ‘how can you help me to work this through?’ is profoundly challenging in a world where faith and trust in public institutions is at an all-time low. Accordingly, the third theme we grapple with is the development of trust. A task made so much harder following the tragic events of recent weeks. The answer will be in the workings of our democracy, in leadership, in transparency and no doubt through devolution. But in many ways, it’s also about a mindset shift that values every contact with our organisation as an opportunity to either win trust or destroy it. It is an organisational operating principle I have never witnessed in action, but one I know we must embrace.

This article first appeared in the Municipal Journal on the 17th July 2017 and can be found here 

https://www.themj.co.uk/Creating-community-solutions/208276