Seeing citizens as sources of innovation and co-producers of services, rather than just consumers, opens new possibilities for a more productive government.
October 2012 | by Matthew Taylor
Here is a question I often ask public-sector audiences but
to which I rarely get a correct response: which public service has, over the
last decade or so, been through the most radical shift from being delivered to
essentially passive users to being co-produced by provider and consumer?
The answer is refuse collection. Recycling rates in England still lag behind
many other European countries but they are rising quickly. Between 1997 and
2009, the proportion of household waste recycled or composted rose fivefold from
8 percent to 40 percent. Although the cost to local authorities has also risen,
higher recycling is an affordable national objective because more and more
householders now accept a significant degree of responsibility for managing
their rubbish.
The evolution of refuse collection shows a route down which more public
services need to travel. Even before the credit crunch and subsequent squeeze on
spending, we here at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) had identified what we termed the social
aspiration gap. This lies between the broad hopes most citizens have for the
future and the trajectory on which current attitudes and behaviors have set us.
To be sure, effective policy and technological advances are important to closing
this gap, but equally important is enabling citizens to be active partners in
building the future to which they aspire.
Generally, democratically accountable governments and their citizens share
objectives. We all want children to do well at school, vulnerable elders to be
safe and treated with dignity, our neighborhoods to be pleasant and secure. Yet
in both the old, paternalistic way of thinking and the more modern consumerist
model, the assumption tends to be that these are outcomes that the state should
provide as entitlements. As the gap between what we want and expect and what is
affordable grows, this way of thinking has to change.
After all, we know that one of the most important determinants of a child’s
educational attainment is parental engagement; that eating well, staying fit,
and following medical advice is much more significant to the nation’s health
than surgical survival rates are; and that no police force can cope if a
community lacks the basic social norms and responsible behaviors that underpin
public safety. This is why the RSA has suggested a new way of measuring the
effectiveness of public services: higher social productivity is achieved when
government agencies enable people to make a greater contribution to meeting
their own needs individually and collectively.
In case this seems too abstract or idealistic, the field of social care
provides another example. Ten years ago, the demand of many disabled adults and
their carers for more choice and control over the services they received was a
problem for public-sector managers. But now the majority of these clients are
allocated their own budgets, giving them either direct access to cash payments
or control over how a budget held in their name is spent. The grants may be
modest but people can use their resource entitlement in the way that best suits
them; perhaps paying family or friends to provide flexible care and support or
clubbing together with other clients to purchase bespoke activities. One group
of clients living in a mental health facility, for example, bought gym equipment
to share and to provide a focus for socializing. Also, some of the money local
authorities used to spend on dividing up fixed services among clients can now be
channeled to direct payments.
The example of direct payments highlights an important aspect of the
social-productivity way of thinking: seeing clients and citizens not just as a
source of demands that must be managed but also as assets that can be exploited
for good. David Halpern, who is currently an adviser to Prime Minister David
Cameron, has described what he calls the “hidden wealth” that lies in the space
between the state and the market. This is a society or neighborhood’s capacity
for resilience, compassion, trust, and creativity, driven not by profit or
regulation but by shared values and aspirations.
To engage and empower people, local agencies need a nuanced and
multidimensional understanding of citizens and service users. Mapping community
assets is also an important tool for service designers in the pursuit of greater
social productivity. New UK-based companies like Participle and Think Public, as
well as more established global giants like IDEO, are developing novel solutions
to long-standing problems. A recurrent theme in their work is how better to
engage and mobilize citizens as active partners in generating public value. One
impressive example, from Participle, is Southwark Circles, a system serving a
deprived borough in South London. Based on extensive community engagement, the
service, which received seed-corn funding from the local authority, combines
paid staff, volunteers, and an affordable membership scheme for elders and
caregivers to fill the gap in support for older people at home that has been
left as shrinking services concentrate on those most acutely in need. Services
might include computer lessons, gardening, or routine home repairs. Participle
now has public funding to scale up Circles across London and in many other parts
of the UK.
Arguably, there is no shortage of new ideas for more effective public-service
interventions; the harder challenge is turning these into viable social business
propositions. In England, the government is hoping that the creation of a new
£600 million Big Society Capital fund to back new business ideas can mesh with
the growing use by public agencies of contracts for services that are paid for
based on results to generate a vibrant social-enterprise sector.
Still, perhaps, the hardest part of realizing the potential of social
productivity is creating the necessary culture shift. A senior UK politician
tells the story of a local primary school that tried every form of intervention
to tackle a long-standing problem with the mathematical attainment of boys from
Bangladeshi backgrounds. It was only when in desperation they brought the boys’
parents into school that they stumbled onto the solution. It turned out the
boys’ fathers didn’t have the confidence to help their sons with math homework.
After a few lessons with the dads, the boys’ attainment was flying high. Many
schools see parental engagement as a chore, marginal to teaching and learning,
but as this case study demonstrates, seeing children’s education as a shared
goal and widening the school’s span of influence to the broader community
provided a simple and cost-effective solution to what had seemed an intractable
problem.
Around the world, there are hundreds of great examples of this more holistic,
upstream way of thinking about social problems and solutions. If we are to close
the aspiration gap, we need the goal of greater social productivity to be at the
very heart of public service strategy.
About the author
Matthew Taylor is chief executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), a London-based nonprofit organization dedicated to finding innovative solutions to social challenges. Prior to this appointment, he was chief adviser on political strategy to the prime minister.
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