The 2020 Public Services Trust Blog

My nephew has developed the French love of cycling at a early age.  He is currently reading Spot le Dog, but if he could read the New York Times, he would be sad to see an article yesterday on the disappointing reality of Paris’s Velib scheme.

Paris residents and tourists can rent a bike for a couple of Euro a day, ride round the city (or commute to work), then drop off the bike at the end of the day.  The scheme is designed to reduce traffic, encourage health and climate-conscious travelling habits, and to be attractive for visitors to the city.  Riding one of these bikes wont make you look like Greg LeMond, but its definitely cheaper than a taxi, and Paris doesnt feel like the cycle lane death race as London.

Despite notable success in some ways, the scheme has experienced big problems with theft.  Lots of the bikes have appeared in areas outside the city (some in north Africa apparently!), and many have been vandalised.  One Parisien commuter is quoted as saying: “For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration…It’s a reflection of the violence of our society and it’s outrageous: the Vélib’ is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it.”

Interesting point.  The Velib may be a subsidised public good (no free rider jokes please), but the question of civic feeling is fundamentally attached to which ‘public’ people feel they belong to.  For many of those disrespecting the scheme, the civic values represented by Velib are elitism and bohemianism – hardly the social reality in Paris’s banlieues.

The scheme is privately financed, and its major backer is feeling the strain to the point where Paris Council has stepped in to pay for the large amount of repairs and recoveries needed.  A representative from the company freely admits that “we had no reference point in the world for this kind of initiative.”

And I guess that is the key point.  To be innovative requires a great deal of risk acceptance.  When we talk about innovation in public services or in UK industry, the same applies.  One big question is how to manage the balance between providing guarantees for society, with opportunities for people to create better opportunities and outcomes themselves – a difficult task when these opportunities require untested and unproven policies.

Its been a very busy time at the 2020PST – which is a roundabout way of apologising for the lack of blog posts recently.  Why?  We have some publications out soon (watch this space for research on fiscal redistribution, how to re-think public service commissioning for outcomes, and the potential of new technology to transform public services).  We are also publishing a range of working papers, and will be launching a new debate website on which you can contribute to our policy development process.

Our work sometimes feels diverse, but there are cross-cutting themes we can pick out of each strand.  One of these is deliberation on the shape and role of the state.  When, for example, is it appropriate for the state to fund and provide services?  When should the state stand back and leave space for market solutions?  When is a mix of these approaches needed?  Answering such questions is inevitably a political question; the stuff of classic debates between big-state left and small-state right.

But these traditional dividing lines have been under strain recently, as huge market failure within the financial sector has undermined confidence in the ‘free’ market, and both Labour and the Conservative party have demonstrated an openness to multi-sector provision of public services.

This makes it all the more surprising that the Conservative party in particular have made such a play of attacking ‘big government’ as part of their critique of Labour in power.  We could argue that ‘big government’ saved us from financial ruin, and certainly some kind of visible and authoritative regulatory regime will be needed in years to come.  As an editorial in the Independent argued today, ‘strong state direction is warranted in this area’.

The debate should not be about big or small, but about what kinds of interventions will be appropriate to create the society we want in future.  Even autonomous, non-state solutions might require an enabling function from government (providing seed funding, microcredit, or institutional support for example); enabling community solutions might need a hand from local-authority-funded social entrepreneurs, and some services will continue to require central funding or heavily market regulation.  Personally, I can see the role of the state changing (including a shift in central-local arrangements) – but not decreasing in significance or importance.

Battle lines naturally emerge during an election campaign – but this one feels like a bit of a red herring.  According to the editorial mentioned above ‘our political leaders need to decide where the state has a role – and then concentrate on making it as effective and productive as possible in fulfilling that role’.  Big state versus small state seems a pretty poor substitute for such a debate.

It must have been quite a week for President Obama.  First, the high of being awarded a Nobel peace prize.  Then, the ignominy of public disquiet over the award.  Finally, the crushing blow of being compared with David Beckham by England boss Fabio Capello – suggesting perhaps that Aaron Lennon or Theo Walcott should have been first choice in the Oval Office.  There is, however, no doubt about Obama’s oratory ability – so able to articulate a feeling of progress and (of course) hope.  My colleague Jeff Masters yesterday directed me to one of his best:

“What’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial.”

Implication: that the huge societal challenges we face deserve a new politics – going beyond petty squabbles, or myopic focus on single issues and vested interest.  Contemporary philosophers such as Michael Sandel and Amartya Sen agree, each in a fashion proposing we broaden our understanding of progress to encompass morality, wellbeing and collective social capacity.

These are big and complex issues, but are mirrored in all sorts of smaller ways.  At the 2020 Commission, we are constantly wrestling with the need to re-frame the way we look at public services and the role of citizens, society and the state.  But at the same time, we must be aware of the complexity of transformation; of distilling expansive rhetoric into coherent routemaps for change.  From a practical point of view, the tension is similar: a coherent narrative and sense of purpose is a vital starting point, but this is a different intellectual process to developing specific policy proposals.  The catch is that we need both – so expect some exciting and challenging new ideas to be floated on this blog over the next couple of months.

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Being based at the RSA has its benefits – and one is certainly being privy to a number of innovative and thoughtful research projects.  Perhaps most exciting is a new partnership between the RSA and Peterborough City Council called ‘citizens of the future’.  Check out Sam McLean’s blog for the lowdown on an initiative that threatens to combine big ideas with real social change.

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Last but not least – 2020 PST director Ben Lucas has a good piece in Local Government Chronicle reflecting on the political dividing lines emerging from the party conference season, asking what the practical implications of key speeches might be.  You can read it here.

I am an ardent fan of Michael Sandel, the US political philosopher who delivered this year’s Reith Lectures (see a previous blog, ‘Moral Markets’). This morning on Radio 4’s Today Programme he argued that the language of morals should be used in politics more than it has been.

Ethical issues, by their very nature, make for difficult political terrain. Yet in many cases, they cannot and (to adopt Sandel’s normative approach) should not be avoided. In domestic policy terms, for example, what is the fair and just way to make cuts in public services? How should public services respond to cultural and religious diversity? On the global stage, do we value the rights of civilians in other countries in the same way as citizens of the UK? If so, what does this mean for foreign policy?

Beneath the surface of many political issues lie questions with a deeper moral aspect. In terms of the MP expenses scandal, Professor Sandel says that public outrage in part “points to a broader frustration with democratic politics and accountability.” He says that people are yearning for politicians and parties to address ‘larger questions’ of moral or even spiritual meaning. As a result, he advocates a “more morally robust form of public discourse” that it is not just about “what works”, but “what’s right”.

The fact that moral and ethical issues are frequently so difficult to resolve is often indicative of their importance. It matters which side of the argument we fall. These debates have logical policy implications. Yet we must be careful to ensure that political discourse based on moral principles does not reduce to a battle of dogma. It is not useful to say that the country should go to war, or prioritise spending on child health services at the expense of palliative care, simply and/or only “because it is the right thing to do.”

Moral integrity is paramount, but ‘what’s right’ cannot be a blanket justification for any and every policy. Politics should be a rich discussion of issues where every angle, from the economic to the ethical, is considered. Sandel is right to remind us of the importance of the latter (politicians should not try to duck out). But equally, ‘what works’, where and why make up an important part of the rationale behind well-thought through policies that can stand up to Parliamentary and public scrutiny, and reach out to our yearning for meaningful democratic accountability. I need to be thoroughly convinced.

Professor Sandel is speaking at the RSA tomorrow on role of justice in our society and our lives.