People often look at me strangely when I say this, but the ultimate measure of Trafford Housing Trust’s success is that our organisation isn’t needed anymore and I am left out of a job. People often look at me even more strangely when I say that I would be phenomenally happy if that ever actually happened.
It’s not that I’ve got a particular desire to spend more time gardening, the real reason I’d be happy is because it would mean that all of the complex and troubling issues that we deal with as an organisation would have been solved - and how could that not be a good thing? If that’s ever going to happen though, then it starts with a shift in power – not with organisations taking more power, but with us giving more of it away to individuals, and that’s why I’m cautiously excited about The Big Society.
| Big Society - Big Idea? |
You can argue that The Big Society – David Cameron’s rallying cry for community empowerment – has happened at an inopportune time. Against a backdrop of the Comprehensive Spending Review and the biggest cuts to public spending since the Second World War, any philosophy where the central tenet involves returning power to individuals is always going to draw fire. After all, it’s far too easy for critics to say that The Big Society is just shorthand for communities picking up after themselves because councils no longer have the funding to and for relying on volunteers where once there were salaried employees.
But I can see a bigger reason – that of renewing the sense of personal responsibility of citizens. Remove power from people and you create dependency; people then want a “hand out” from those with that power. Give power away, create independence, then what people will want is a “hand up”. So if The Big Society is about reversing that trend and giving power back to individuals, as well as providing a fund of resources that communities can access, then I think it is a game changing movement. This way it will produce stronger citizens, more resilient societies, the essential ingredients that you would need to do away with organisations like ours.
It’s fair to say that there’s still some confusion over how The Big Society actually works in practice – where will you be able to see it in action in your local community? Well, the fact is that there’s every chance that volunteers are already active in your own street – you might even participate in some form of community work yourself. The Big Society is about empowering that activity and giving it greater licence to take control away from governing bodies. What it absolutely is not, is a chance to simply re-brand that activity or take credit for the benefits it brings.
So how would a commitment to The Big Society work for an organisation like ours? In our business we involve tenants and residents all the time and for a number of reasons. For one, our regulator says we have to, but since when has the dead hand of regulation been a good reason for doing anything? A better reason is that by having that tenant perspective we see ways of improving services that we might not see on our own. But in that case, the benefit is actually to our organisation, not the individual.
The best reason – The Big Society approach – is that you develop it one step further so that it’s mutually beneficial. Then, the purpose of the involvement is to transfer skills to residents, to teach, to educate and instill a sense of belief and purpose; the mechanism is a discussion about services from which improvements can be identified; the outcome is then improved opportunities for tenants and better services from us.
Of course, the modern managerial mindset is always to look for the mechanisms that measure and report on the success or failure of new ideas. So how can we see that The Big Society is working? In this case I’m not actually sure that’s possible. After all, how do you measure the effectiveness of a philosophy which is wider than a single initiative and which has to be judged from the bottom up, not the top down? No wonder the overly bureaucratic system of the past is being swept away – confusing and counter-productive acronym-clad measurements like KLOEs, KPIs, LAAs and BVPIs that could never cope with the subtleties, the focus on changed feelings and behaviours that will mark a successful Big Society.
We should look instead at real world examples and set these as our markers. In Sale Moor there’s a pub called The Piper that has been through numerous owners and is now closed and has become a source of anti-social problems. The very active and very successful community group in the area knows what their community needs – and they have a vision for how the pub can best be used. The measure for them of Big Society success is that all the public service agencies in the area come together to make that vision happen and that in doing that, local people get opportunities to volunteer, train and work on the project.
So I say to politicians: prove your detractors wrong; keep the momentum of The Big Society going over the next few years and remain committed to the idea that the power should rest with the people. Harness the curiosity and excitement of those like me who believe in the profound difference this could make. And if one of the things that we achieve together is something as strange as me being put out of a job – wouldn’t that be wonderful?
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