The 2020 Public Services Trust Blog

Buried in the Financial Times today is an interesting piece by Quentin Peel on a row erupting in Germany over the extent and scope of the welfare state.  He writes that

“It is a classic debate between liberals, conservatives and social democrats over the right and wrongs of welfare for the long-term unemployed, and about who pays to fund Germany’s generous but over-burdened system.”

Worth a quick read, if you can tear yourself away from the Royal Rumble of letters going on between of the most prominent UK & international economists.  Two letters in the FT today (including Skidelsky & Stiglitz as signatories) to rebut one in the Sunday Times – and most remarkably, each shadowing a distinct party line on appropriate timing.  So after months of trying to convince the voters of distinct dividing lines, it looks like the economists have done the job for the parties. 

I am not an economist (big disclaimer), but after reading Shiller, Taleb etc last year I would be deeply suspicious of the ability of either side to predict with anything with certainty – though that seems to be instinctively closer to today’s position than Sunday’s.  Tim Harford has written saying something similar, but (perhaps sensibly) doesn’t take sides.  The FT leader, however, was much stronger – read here. 

hat tip: Alisdair & Becca

Today ive been writing a short piece with my colleague Paul.  It is an introduction to a report we are co-publishing with the RSA, which is based around a review of public opinion on public services put together by Ipsos MORI. 

The review pulls together qual & quant data on what citizens want, need and value from public services, and engages with live debates on fairness, localism, choice and engagement.  We are publishing the whole thing on March 18^th. 

The 2020 Commission’s interim report will emerge on the same day.  And although a lot of the citizen opinion work has influenced what is said in the interim report, the documents will feel very different.  Writing the intro, I wondered whether this is a problem.  Our commission is broad, with a range of political and vocational interests. So its interim recommendations are also broad, and reflect a way of thinking that could be applied in different ways by different people. 

But working around the hard numbers of citizen opinion is slightly different.  The public overwhelmingly dislike the idea of local variation in public services – yet our commission is likely to advocate a less centralised system.  75% of the public think that efficiency savings will suffice in the face of a spending squeeze, yet our commission will suggest otherwise.

The question is how to interpret what people value.  Our report suggests that we a fearful of postcode lotteries, yet we really value the idea of local engagement and influence.  So: a more nuanced reading of the figures, taking some chances and reading between the lines, and trusting the public is what I think. As one interviewee told me last week, in enabling change, ‘framing is everything’.

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.