An interesting weekend as I got to reading the report from the public services trust which was published earlier in the week -"From social security to social productivity: a vision for 2020 Public Services" . I then attended the chairman's civic service and the bishop of Grantham preached a message which supported many of the ideas and views emerging from the report.
The report calls for a complete reconfiguring of public services around the needs and capabilities of citizens, based on the principle of social productivity. It argues that our public services are increasingly unsustainable. The Commission calls for a new deal between citizens and the state, based on social productivity - greater social responsibility and more intelligent collaboration between citizens and public services.
2010 Public Services are described as too centralised, too prescriptive, too narrow, too passive, too static, too opaque and too patchy. The commission argues for public services which engage others to to create better social and economic outcomes - leading to social productivity.
It's well worth a read.
Hi Terry. It's certainly an interesting report and seems to be with the zeitgeist at the moment - very 'big society' and embracing social innovation, co-production etc.
ReplyDeleteI'm certainly not against this stuff, and indeed have worked with government at various levels to get greater citizen involvement with the design and delivery of public services going. The frustrating thing is always the level of response - it's so hard to actually get people to engage at scale, especially (strangely) in local issues.
I guess this partially comes through in difficulties in recruiting councillors, both at parish and district level, but general participation is low. Perhaps we are asking people to do the wrong things, or at least things that people aren't interested in doing.
But whilst I think the essence of this report and others like it is correct - that public services must allow local citizens to contribute in meaningful ways - they do assume that there is a large corps of volunteers desperate to get involved, which isn't always the case!
Maybe the role of local government in future is to be a convening body, getting people together to do the stuff, rather than actually stuff doing itself?
Yes an enabling role for local authorities facilitating communities to become more socially productive - can believe I just typed that sounds like babble !!
ReplyDeleteI cannot agree with this.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the definition of Social Productivity?
It sounds to me like getting CT payers to do the work they pay CT for, for nothing i.e. by taking their garbage to collection points so that loacal authotities can reduce their collections even further.
It needs to be borne in mind that local authorities have a further function other than providing the usual services and that is providing employment. this was made very clear when there was the big shake up of local authorities in the 70's I believe, when lincolnshire went from three districts to seven the increase in public sector employees was very substantial. It seems as though the thought is that all public sector redundancies will be taken up by the private sector, this is far from the truth, the private sector will shed many jobs also as much of their services are purchsed by the public sector.
In short, there is very little that can be done that does not involve severe job losses. Resources should be utilised to resolve this problem which means the creation of paid jobs not volunteers.
Sorry i have had to bumit this as anoymous, but could not do it any other way from the options available.
John