TAKING THE LID OFF 'LOCAL'

Interview with Francis Davis, Department for Communities and Local Government

This week is Local Democracy Week, an apt time to examine the government's Big Society policy, which aims to give communities more power. This ties in with the Localism Bill, yet to be passed by Parliament, which could give individuals the right to challenge their council if they think they could run an aspect of the community, such as care services or local amenities, in a better way. Francis Davis, policy advisor on the Big Society for the Department of Communities and Local Government, and Warwick alumnus, explains more about building the Big Society.

Listen to Amy McLeod interviewing Francis Davis on the Big Society.

Sceptics of The Big Society project are encouraged by the statistics that suggest the majority of people, 55% at the last count, are not aware of Cameron’s initiative. The plans are, however, going ahead regardless; change-makers have been installed into Whitehall and they are going to make some pretty radical alterations to the way people can engage with council authorities. This autumn Parliament will receive a new The Localism Bill - legislation that empowers the individual to challenge local government decisions that directly effect their community.

Francis Davis, the policy advisor on The Big Society for the Department for Communities and Local Government, explains: “This bill sets out three rights: to save an asset that would have otherwise been lost, to buy an asset that has community benefit, and to challenge a council contract.” So, for example, if your council is selling off a community centre, you can club together with your neighbours and buy it for yourselves. Or if you live on an estate you can decide to get together with your fellow residents and take over the management of the whole place. Citing examples is a useful way of illustrating how policy might translate into practice, but it is important to remember that examples are only one set of ideas. Actually the possibilities are almost endless, only limited by the imagination and initiative of ourselves as active citizens.

It is hearing about specific success stories that really brings this project to life: “A group in the Eden Valley found out that the Highways Agency run broadband cables down the side of motorways to make the signage work. A few miles from the road there are farms that have no access to the internet. A farmer came to us and said he wanted to dig a trench and lay a cable to connect the farms. Why shouldn’t he make use of the resource?”

This is about unlocking a new spirit of innovation across the whole of the public realm.

You could come up with all kinds of reasons ‘why not’. There is something brilliant, but chaotic, about the image of a farmer tunnelling into a motorway’s broadband and providing his village, to their delight, with super-quick broadband. But the instinctive reaction to such a proposal is to worry about what could go wrong. This is where DCLG itself has got creative about how to solve the problem of sluggish bureaucracy suffocating innovation. “They have a dedicated team of ‘Barrier Busters’ whose sole responsibility is to troop around Whitehall and find out what protocol is preventing such proposals from going ahead."

They are currently focusing on facilitating such projects in four vanguard areas, concentrating resources so that the civil servant team can get to grips with how local people will utilise these new freedoms: “In Windsor there are some really interesting ideas coming through about how to harness energy from the River Thames. In Cumbria the council was quoted around £140,000 to build a path through a park; the community think they can build the same path for £40,000 so they can bid for the contract and use the money saved to invest in other things.”

Lessons will certainly be learnt but the ultimate aim is not to establish a series of flagship projects that will then be rolled out nationwide. The real secret to success is the creative energy and insight of the individual people involved, addressing the specific problems they are facing, taking strength from groups that have done something similar elsewhere. “A community hospital closed in The New Forest. Locals wanted to reinstate the building as a centre for health and wellbeing offering certain NHS services. Lower level bureaucrats said it was impossible but when the Chief Executive heard of the plans he loved the idea and it turned out he actually had experience of that type of project. He took the initiative further and suggested the entire hospital be transferred to the community and run as a co-operative.”

If passed, the legislation could open up the business of local governments to the people so that if they can think of a cheaper or better way of getting something done, they can say so - driving efficiency through the public sector. The more idealistic hope is that this cost saving will be combined with an increasingly engaged and enthused citizenry: “A team of public sector workers in Sandwell, in the West Midlands, decided that they could run their community care services at a much lower cost. They took over running the service and this inspired a real sense of ownership. The number of sick days taken completely collapsed.”

The common criticism that the Big Society is just meaningless terminology only rings true because it means so much, as opposed to it meaning too little. “This is about more than the voluntary sector,” explains Francis. “This is about unlocking a new spirit of innovation across the whole of the public realm.” Antagonism toward the “Big Society” brand is understandable as the term itself is not really in-keeping with the Big Society ethic - this is not about one person’s big idea but lots and lots of little ideas coming from lots and lots of individuals. It is the community action that has already been going on for decades; it is the open-data movement that established itself years ago. “This is a long bottled-up British instinct that the Liberals and Conservatives are trying to take the lid off. The state has been radically centralised since the 1960s, but the move to return power to local government and beyond is a cross-party project.”

Failure is only an issue if you think that every decision that London has made has been a good one.

However, the prejudice against the specific notion of the “Big Society” is not the most difficult obstacle the project faces. Insightful judgements need to be made about how much power is devolved, how much public money is invested and how quickly. How are equal rights protected in autonomous community organisations? How are these organisations regulated and the investment of public funds evaluated? And is there a danger that successes will be over-looked if the impact of devastating cuts dominates the news agenda?

In addition, certain initiatives might simply fail, but as Francis points out, “Failure is only an issue if you think that every decision that London has made has been a good one. Think of all the money that has been wasted on FE buildings that have never been finished or the millions wasted on defence procurement that left our soldiers with the wrong equipment.” The point is that local people are not being given free rein to try out experimental solutions to problems that have already been fixed - they are being given a chance to have a go where Westminster policy-makers have failed many times before.

“This is about changing expectations,” Francis concludes. “Not just our expectations of the state but our expectations of everybody. It is about unions being more flexible to a dynamic labour market, it is about big businesses acknowledging their great returns and reinvesting in society, it is about pushing power downwards and outwards to empower people without making them dependent on state-run income streams.”

Francis Davis is a Fellow of the Young Foundation. He has founded and led organisations in the private, public and voluntary sectors. He is a member of the Oxford Centre for Mutuals, formerly taught at Cambridge and is a graduate of Warwick and Ashridge Business Schools. In 1992 he was co-founder - and from 2004-07 Chair - of an award-winning social enterprise during a period when it took community control of a hospital, and opened the UK's first NHS social enterprise dental clinics in addition to wide ranging social care, transport and training services. His 2008 study Moral, But No Compass was described as "formidable" by the Conservative frontbench and "fascinating and important" by the Archbishops of York and Canterbury. Francis is Policy Adviser on The Big Society and Decentralisation at the Department of Communities and Local Government having previously been Policy Adviser to the Secretary of State. Francis is a governor of St John's College, University of Durham and advises a number of charitable foundations.

Francis will be speaking at the WBS Forum on 'The Business of Social Change' on 6th December.

By Amy McLeod