The 2020 Public Services Trust Blog

I went to a policy launch this morning hosted by Ian Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice.  It was packed out, which is a sign that they are doing some interesting and good quality work, but I guess also reflects the common perception that IDS has the ear of the leadership, and represents a ‘good angel’ on David Cameron’s shoulder, focusing him onto issues of poverty and social justice.

The event was good.  It was a launch of four or five new policy strands, each advised by a group of experts, and planned to be an exercise in consultation and community engagement.  A project on social returns from early investment sounded particularly interesting, and the centre is also working on elderly care, mental ill-health, sport and youth justice.  All ideas at early stages, but clearly some resources behind the projects, and a clear sense of overarching direction (based on the idea of early intervention) from the chairman.

What was really fascinating (to me, anyway) was the tone of IDS’s remarks.  At first parse, a world away from the stuff of Conservative reformers past.  I started to think about how the IDS agenda might match up to his party line on various things, and whether this is really what people mean by ‘progressive aims using conservative means’.  A few themes stuck out:

1. Focus on prevention and early intervention.  This was a key theme, cutting across all of the projects, and providing a narrative for the centre as a whole. Investing preventatively is proven to make economic and allocative sense, so this was largely good to hear.  But I also have some questions:  Would systematic early intervention require new national frameworks and guidelines set by Whitehall?  And if so, how does this square with handing greater autonomy to local authorities in a ‘post-bureaucratic state?’
2. A key role for the voluntary & third sectors.  This is again welcome, and consistent with an approach to public service reform that prioritises outcomes, rather than particular forms of service delivery.  But conspicuous by absence was a role for the (central or local) state.  In a more paternalistic model – which prevention can sometimes represent – the role of the state is key in terms of providing information, market shaping and also service delivery.
3. The elephant in the room.  The elephant in this particular room was the fiscal squeeze.  The long-term benefits of the CSJ approach is often very lucidly made – as in their recent paper on benefit reform.  But just as the case for up-front spending on social aims is being articulated, the shadow treasury team seem to be rolling their sleeves up for a very different agenda of rapid cuts to public spending.

Tomorrow I am at a Progress session entitled: ‘does localism hold the key to achieving efficiency while maintaining social justice outcomes in the downturn’.  I’m sure there will be lots of crossover (it will be interesting to see how much).  I just hope that the pressure being applied to these issues across the political spectrum is maintained, even as the calls for arbitrary cuts get louder.

I read an interesting paper this morning from the journal Nature – a bit leftfield of my usual reading, but totally relevant to mainstream politics and public services. It made me think.  Yesterday I wrote (well, I copied Martin Wolf anyway) about the challenges of consensus building, and the implications for long term economic policymaking.  The suggestion was that, now that party politicking is back in full swing in the run-up to the election, generating necessary consensus on some serious big issues will be nigh on impossible.

At the same time, we are gasping for such a consensus on some of them – as recent debates over the future funding of social care and our strategic defence planning have shown. 

At the 2020 Commission, we have talked about the need to generate a new consensus on the need for a 21^st century blueprint for public services.  The hope of consensus lies behind the very idea of a cross-party commission, and, whilst the development is difficult, the impact is hopefully broader, more powerful and more coherent…. 

Anyway, this article – by Dan Kahan – offers some reasons why consensus is difficult to find.  Cultural cognition – which is the ‘influence of group values…on risk perception and related beliefs’ skew our perceptions of policy, meaning that we ‘endorse whichever position reinforces (our) connection to others with whom (we) share important commitments’.  Bluntly, we have pack mentalities, which magnifies difference and ‘polarises’ debate in artificial ways.   

This might seem obvious to anyone who follows a sports team, but the author also reflects on how these polarised mentalities can often push at the same outcomes (though maybe not in sport):

“citizens who hold opposing cultural outlooks are in fact rooting for the same outcome: the health, safety and economic well-being of their society.”

And he concludes that:

“We need to learn more about how to present information in forms that are agreeable to culturally diverse groups, and how to structure debate so that it avoids cultural polarization.

If we want democratic policy-making to be backed by the best available science, we need a theory of risk communication that takes full account of the effects of culture on our decision-making.”

Easier said than done for sure, especially when the means to achieve outcomes can be as contested as the outcomes themselves.  For instance, all parties responded to the Hills review of inequality with similar horror, but the strategies they use to address the problems it highlights will certainly differ.

There’s a typically reflective piece in the FT this morning from Martin Wolf, pulling out his key themes from the World Economic Forum in Davos.  Strangely, I wasn’t invited this year, so I will have to take his word for it…

The article considers the short and the long term challenges for the global economy, and the killer question of if and when to withdraw fiscal stimulus and start cutting public spending.  The question is a global one, but is utterly relevant to our own election campaign. 

Labour accuse the Tories of wanting to ‘strangle the recovery at birth’.  The Tories accuse Labour of ignoring the ‘great bulk’ of the UK’s structural deficit.  There are risks to both strategies, but Wolf also points to the longer term challenges of financial sector reform and a rebalancing of the global economy. 

What interested me was his perspective on leadership and consensus.  An ‘impressive ability to deal with the crisis’ was shown, but now we are back to the push and pull of everyday politics, it may be much harder to generate the kind of global consensus and willingness to work together that pulled us out of the crash.    

Speaking of which, there is an interesting article in this weeks New Yorker (which can be read online) about the new Tea Party movement in the US.  Really fascinating to see how a disgust with mainstream politics (and mostly with the ‘liberal’ elite) has led to such an organised, collective set of protest movements.  This is definitely not a coalition that would make many moderates or Obama supporters (or indeed me) feel comfortable, but its fascinating to see how grass roots mobilisation is impacting on formal US politics.

There’s quite a storm brewing in certain circles over the government’s personal care at home bill.  I was at an event organised by the SMF’s James Lloyd this week, where a panel was convened to critically reflect on the bill, including perspectives from a local authority that will have to find the cash and capacity to provide the extra care, a measured (but damning) perspective from the Kings Fund, and a searing and direct critique from Lord Warner. 

Not many people stood up for the bill – and those who did argued in terms of awareness, of keeping social care at the top of the legislative agenda during an election campaign.  Their fear is that a new government would have other priorities, and a greater compulsion to make immediate cuts that would harm those in need of the greatest care. 

But it seems from my perspective that forcing through the bill would seriously undermine the pretty sophisticated debate that has evolved around last summer’s green paper.  The idea of fairly sharing responsibility for the implications demographic change is blown out of the water by the PCAH bill, which – according to the Kings Fund – would have a partially regressive impact, and undermines the idea of partnership between individuals, families and the state.  The question of how local authorities could swallow the extra costs of the proposals (which are currently mooted from efficiency savings) becomes a daunting one if new figures suggesting serious under-estimation are to be believed. 

Next week the 2020PST will be launching a series of working papers – one of which is a paper on social care.  I wrote it before the bill was announced, so it doesn’t offer a perspective on this mess, but as Im not sure how this short term legislation could be squared with the long term goals of the green paper, I’m quite glad I didn’t have to try…

Wakefield prison

I went to an interesting round-table discussion this morning at the smf. The smf has been working on the question of how you could model a system of payment by results to reduce recidivism rates.

The smf has done some good thinking on this, having already undertaken a number of consultations before the round-table, so they had some slides to explain what they thought were the five biggest issues that would need to be dealt with before PbR could be put in place. These were:

Measuring re-offending: How accurate are reconviction rates as a proxy for re-offending rates? Are they accurate enough to contract on?

• Capacity and geographical dispersal: Many short-term prisoners are held far from their communities, and are also moved around for various reasons, disrupting attempts at rehabilitation.
• Case mix: Will providers ‘park’ offenders that are considered ‘to difficult to rehabilitate’?
• Profit motive: Would the profit motive that drives providers create perverse incentives in probation’s role to provide sentencing assistance to the courts?
• No cost saving to the criminal justice system: Will cutting re-offending actually make savings, or will prison places simply be occupied by new offenders (‘backfill’)?

Participants flagged numerous problems with the smf’s proposed solutions to these challenges. On the measurement question, there was a suggestion that a binary measure (either they are reconvicted or they aren’t) was perhaps not the best, and that a measure of the number of reconvictions may be more appropriate. The idea was put forth of taking into account the severity of the crime, but this was quickly dismissed as too subjective.

On capacity and geographical dispersal, the smf proposed holding short-term prisoners in dedicated prisons. The was objected to, since more, smaller prisons will be more expensive, and also often it is necessary to have a mix of prisoners on remand, short-term and longer-term prisoners, for reasons of maintaining order.

Inmates at Doncaster Prison

On case mix, the smf seemed to think this was not an issue, since the short-term prison population would be mostly non-violent offenders. This assumption was put in doubt, and questions about prisoners with multiple and complex needs being ‘left’ were raised. The smf proposes an ‘escalator tariff’ which would increase depending on how difficult an offender was to rehabilitate, but there were questions about how one would set those tariffs.

On making savings, the smf’s argument was that there would be wider gains to society, but this is sounds rather weak in the current climate.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the seminar focussed on a model for those offenders sentenced to less than 12 months in prison, which precluded any discussion of the best segment of offenders to target for a system of payment by results. I personally have my doubts about what the length of the sentence tells us about how prepared an offender might be to give up offending. Of course, we don’t want to work with offenders that will give up on their own very soon (this would be deadweight cost), but neither do we want to work with offenders that are extremely unlikely to change their behaviour. We need to find the appropriate target group between these extremes, which may be males aged 18 years old regardless of sentence length, or some other group.