I want to share with you some writing

I wanted to share with you today some writing from our two Local Authority Young Persons of the Year – Alissa Davies and Lucy James. They won this competition recently by demonstrating a different and unique perspective on public sector local government and its challenges at a time when many others are conforming to outdated models of thinking, behaviour and service design. I was so impressed by what I read that I wanted to share it with you. We all need to be thinking and acting in this way. It would be great to hear your thoughts.

If we want to succeed it’s time to stop talking about money and start talking to communities

Imagine councils had money, enough money not to worry about the future. Would we be more successful?

Well, that depends what success looks like.

Healthier, happier communities? But would more money do that?

Well, there’d still be obesity, because people would still like food. There’d still be crime, because we couldn't control behavioural choice. Older people would still feel isolated. People would still disagree about what they want.

So if having money doesn’t automatically make us successful, why do we talk about it so often?

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Have you noticed how often conversations start and end with money? Look at the most recent Local Gov. Newsletter.[1]

“Legal duties not deliverable”

“Council tax”

“Voluntary redundancies”

“Welfare reform”

“Cost of flooding”

“No money for care reform”

This isn’t just lazy journalism, it’s an accurate reflection of how we think and act every day.

We looked at ten local authority business plans. All ten talked about money within the first three paragraphs and every single section explained decisions directly affecting the happiness and wellbeing of their communities in financial terms.

Why are we telling our communities to think about how much we’ve invested or saved? Because it’s easier.

Take our council. We provide, at a conservative estimate, 350 services, from bins to safeguarding. Name a private sector CEO who has to balance so many life and death decisions. So we break it down into measurable, manageable units: assigning every service a department, giving every department a cost centre and every decision a cost code. We cocoon ourselves inside structures and processes – like a managerial safety blanket – but in doing so we become awkward, obnoxious introverts and lose sight of what’s important: the communities we serve.

We breathe a little easier because our complex, messy, confusing jobs fit neatly, ordered into an excel spreadsheet but we cut away the passion and belief, the social justice, the talent and potential of our staff and our communities and instead, tell our story in the language of finance.

This obsession with money is unhelpful, because much as we try to pretend we are, fundamentally we are not a business. Local authorities exist because the free market doesn’t care about people’s health and wellbeing and we work in local government because we do. Money is only as effective as our ability to use it well and the best way to do that is through meaningful conversations with communities.

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Because ultimately our success is about their wellbeing.

They know things we don’t know, like the best place to put sandbags when it floods, or the real location of a town centre. Yet we bombard communities with financial conversations, swamp them with pitfalls and problems and shut out potential solutions. And then complain we have to decide where to put the sandbags!

We reduce individuals to their “needs” and express these as costs. Our relationships are therefore defined by money. Have you ever looked at an application form for housing benefit? We did. Once we found it in the dark recesses of the council’s website, hidden away as if they were afraid another blood sucking individual might stumble upon it (but that’s next year’s paper). When you find one you notice that “recipients’ entitlements” are measured financially and their “outcome” (whether they get money, not whether they have anywhere to live) depends on their ability to cope with “financial responsibility”.[2] It's a business transaction which makes it much harder to understand the whole person sitting in front of you.

And it’s not just how we make decisions, it’s how we offer choice.

Take the literature on mental health support, which makes uplifting reading, full of hope for a normalised and productive life. Until you realise the choice offered boils down to paying the public, private or voluntary sector for the same service.[3]

When we construct choice and make decisions based on money, we stop seeing the real people. We encourage a financial response because we ask financial questions.

One tired resident recently complained about dragging his bin to the end of his drive. “It’s only 5 feet” he lamented, “you could just come to my door”. Our response was fairly predictable. If the bin man walked 5 feet to his door, he would need to walk to everyone’s door, which would cost too much money.[4] Financial demand; financial response.

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If we weren’t so focused on money, we could have said:

“Sir, we’d love to empty your bins. But we’d also quite like to stop the child next door being taken into care, get the kids at the end of your street off their ASBOs, your elderly parents will need our help soon, your town centre business is struggling and your home may flood. So tell us sir, if you’d like the bin man to walk to your door, which of those things would you trade it for?”

Of course that would sound quite disingenuous when we’ve spent decades persuading people to only think about what we spend their council tax on and how that benefits them. But we can change this, if we stop reducing what we do to the bottom line, and start tackling the complexity head on through real conversations with real people.

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Until we do, we have no chance of success - especially when we measure success financially.

It’s easier to know what you’ve put in or taken out, and to shout about it to anyone who will listen, than to measure the impact on real people. But saving money is a meaningless form of success. It only means something if people’s lives are better in Bolton, or Bath or Barnett.

Otherwise, we’re making ourselves look like idiots. We recently heard a leading mental health professional quote a £66,000 annual saving per person as the fundamental benefit of “delaying suicide.”[5] We laughed. But then we cried inside a little. That bright, passionate man with a wealth of experience appeared cold and ridiculous because he felt compelled to evidence in financial terms an issue that can never, and should never, be financial.

Should we even be surprised that this happens when we assume an automatic link between money going in and “outcomes” coming out?

"Let’s take a survey to measure how happy people are," says Mr Cameron. "Fine idea sir," says the ONS, "and let’s turn the answers into indicators so we can assess return on investment."[6]

Yes, social good is incredibly difficult to quantify. Turning our complex, messy jobs into outputs and outcomes gives us a warm snugly feeling in the stomach. But this doesn't tell us anything useful.

What councils do is complicated but we manage it every day. So why, when measuring our own impact do we fling our arms in the air and exclaim: “how can I measure happiness without a conditionally formatted spreadsheet!”

Why can’t we just ask people how we’re doing? Or even better, how are they’re doing?

We can’t just ask them because they don’t trust or believe in us. Because they’re so used to us talking about money that whenever we change track we sound, at best, deluded; at worst, like we’re trying to pass the budget balancing buck.

It’s time to take some of the energy we put into balancing our spreadsheets and invest it in working out how to communicate meaningfully with communities. It’s time for a genuine conversation.

With people like Liz Douglas, a quietly impressive individual from Bolton who helped 80 adults back into employment, launched micro-enterprises and massively reduced anti-social behaviour on her estate. All for the princely sum of 5 grand.[7] We couldn’t achieve that with 50 grand. And until we convince people like Liz we care about what she needs and how to support her, we won’t get anywhere close.

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What councils do will always be complicated. It will always depend on our ability to pay for it. We haven’t lost the plot, we understand we don’t have any money. Our point is not that we shouldn’t care, or worry, about money. Rather, that it can never be the start of the conversation.

Financial explanations cannot capture, in fact they often distort, the reality of local government. There is a gap between what can be fully explained objectively (or quantified financially) and what’s really going on – like the gap between a music score and the performance.

As the new generation of local government officers we have a choice. We can stare down at the scores handed to us and slowly fossilise, or we can take a leap into that messy, complicated gap and start a new conversation with communities about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. We can work with people like Liz, with the passion, experience, contacts and motivation to transform a blue sky vision into a tangible reality. No amount of money can buy us that. But a genuine dialogue with communities just might.

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Carlton

Flooding - thanks for your help

The last seven weeks have been dominated for colleagues and myself by the flooding events that we have experienced right across the county.

This is an unprecedented and extended period of time to be dealing with an incident such as this for all of us in the county; our communities, our partner agencies, our elected members and officers alike. Throughout the weekend a number of us were on call dealing with flooded homes, businesses, roads and vulnerable people at risk because their homes were compromised.

The expertise and reaction of our staff in all of those services affected has been excellent. Whatever the time of day, the team has been on hand to help, support and to solve problems for our citizens and their communities as quickly and efficiently as possible. I would like to say thank you to all of you for the response so far.

Unfortunately the forecast is for more bad weather and we will need to call on many additional services and staff to be involved in our response. We will let you know in which areas we need support and how you can become involved.

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Carlton