Queen’s Speech

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson]

My Lords, the first words of the gracious Speech tell us that the Government will continue to focus on building a stronger economy so that the United Kingdom can compete and succeed in the world. That is exactly right.

At a recent meeting with a large construction company that is playing a major role in rebuilding some of our public infrastructure, I was told how the company longed to build developments that were more “joined up”. The present silo approach to regeneration did not make business or social sense with the limited funds now available. In recent years, there has been much talk and some action from successive Governments in seeking to join up public sector budgets because they get more bang for their buck, but the living examples of success are still rare. The silos that exist between education, health, housing and business funding remain stubbornly in place, and successful partnerships between the business, public and voluntary sectors are still hard to do because our procurement systems are broken. When times get hard, the tendency is for us all to retreat back into our familiar silos precisely at the time when the financial squeeze presents us with a real opportunity to address this enduring impasse. I fear that this is happening now, and without clear leadership centrally it will get worse.

When you have worked in a local community for 30 years, you gain the long-term view. You have seen government programmes come and go, and you have gained some measure of what works and what does not. There has been a whole host of attempts in recent years by successive Governments to join up local delivery. Everyone—particularly the business community—knows that that is really important and that it is the only way to make smaller budgets stretch further. As a result, there has been a whole host of initiatives. To name just a few, there have been local integrated services, Total Place, small area budgets, participatory budgeting, Total Neighbourhoods and the Neighbourhood Community Budgets programme. These government programmes had one thing in common: they were short-term initiatives promoted by one Minister. What seems to have happened is that as some have encountered the difficulty of making change happen, interest towards them has waned and the pilots have not been sustained or the Minister has changed. Another Minister has then decided that they want to tackle the problem and so they start again.

These initiatives seem to fall into two types. There are the Total Place-type initiatives, which are about bringing together local public services—for example, health and social care—and then there are the small area budgets and Neighbourhood Community Budgets programme, which seem increasingly to have taken the direction of consulting local people about local service delivery. However, it is far from clear why the process of consulting local people necessarily has an impact on the quality of local services or enables services to be delivered in a more joined-up way. Again, in our experience the private sector was excluded.

It may be helpful at this point to share with noble Lords some recent practical experience. This is not a criticism of government but it illustrates what can happen to those of us in local communities who are serious about this agenda. On the Department for Communities and Local Government website we are told that in October 2011 the Communities Secretary announced details of how areas can bid to trial two local approaches to integrated services: Whole Place Community Budgets and Neighbourhood Community Budgets. The website describes this dramatic new shift as,

“an opportunity to change the future of the way public services are funded and be the thumping heart of your community”.

We are told that 24 areas out of 45 had been shortlisted to put their name forward to work with Whitehall and develop neighbourhood-level community budgets to explore how different public sector funding streams could be brought together to both save money and create more integrated public services. The website says that the applications demonstrated a drive across the country to explore new ways to give local people more control over services.

Our partners in Tower Hamlets working in education, housing and health thought that this was a very good idea and timely, because we had been developing integrated services together for many years with some success and often against the odds. Here was an opportunity seriously to extend our work and create more joined-up solutions that focus on the individual and the family.

As partners, we applied for and won pathfinder status, and here I must declare an interest. I was asked to speak at a meeting of civil servants new to this field of work and to share our experience early in the process. I was also invited, with an excellent local authority CEO, to meet 15 directors-general from across government, who said that they were all keen to co-operate and learn from our experience of what works on the ground. We were encouraged by the offer of support and involvement from government. Although we did not want government to hold our hand, we did want understanding of the practical issues involved and a little oil in the wheels.

In Tower Hamlets we began to get practical, bringing local people and partners together. We developed a pilot programme and explored how we could bring budgets together and thus use the limited moneys that were available in health, education and housing more efficiently. Crucially, we wanted to involve local people in the delivery process and not in talking shops, thus creating buy-in, new skills and community ownership. We began to talk to major business partners to bring them on board; there was some interest.

There is real concern from politicians across the House about a lack of engagement with local communities, particularly at a time when people feel increasingly disengaged from the political process. We have had a taste of this in recent weeks. In my experience, people do not want to be just the recipients of the state and its services or to be consulted to death about what the state is going to do to them. No—our experience over many years is that many local people also desire to be involved and practically engaged in the delivery of services. New jobs and skills and innovation can come through this process, as we have discovered, and very poor people’s lives and those of their families have been changed for ever as a result.

After some consultation and research, our team decided to focus its efforts during the first year on the diabetes epidemic that is rife in Tower Hamlets. This epidemic needs to be tackled through a joined-up approach in the local community. The lead consultant at the local hospital told me that his caseload was overwhelming him. He agreed that the solution lay in people’s lifestyles and diet, and that it could be tackled only through a joined-up programme run in the community connecting health, education and lifestyle. We created a business plan and began to commit individual budgets as a sign of good faith and to build the project around well established work we had already been doing in this area.

What we then experienced from government was what one of our very experienced CEOs described as a “journey in retreat”. Promises were made to work with us to “enable” the process, but when we asked the Minister to write two letters to the chairman of a supermarket chain and the chairman of the local hospital—both of whom were coming towards the project anyway—to help to oil the wheels, we were told that the officials advised against it. The more we sought to create integrated solutions, bring funding together, innovate and to take seriously what the Secretary of State had said about empowering communities, the more we experienced a process which encouraged consultation and talking shops and not delivery.

Given the health crisis we faced, this about-turn was serious. We were being pushed back into thinking we had explored 20 years earlier and had moved on from precisely because in our experience it delivered little change in practice and often led to increased apathy among local people, along with more talk and reports. My colleagues and I began to ask: is government under the leadership of any party capable of being a learning organisation? Very little, as far as we could see, was being learnt. I never saw the directors-general again and, as far as we can tell, we will now have to move forward on our own with, we suspect, little learning taking place at the centre. This we will of course do; we do not want wet-nursing by central government but we worry about the cost of this process and another wasted opportunity.

I suspect that this experience is not unique and that it has something to do with why the electorate, many of whom have become involved in this project, are increasingly sceptical about the ability of any Government to follow through and deliver. This is one policy initiative that was actually a very good idea: it could have led to deeper community engagement, joined-up innovation and a streamlining of public funding. We had created a project that we could all together learn from by acting both centrally and locally, but, as far as we can tell to date, there has been little follow-through.

So how do we move integrated working forward and deepen practical partnerships between the various sectors? First, we need to recognise the importance of long-term leadership. In my experience, real change happens in a community where there is clear, committed leadership that remains involved for the long term. Secondly, we need to resolve the confusion between democracy and delivery. The reason local services are not joined up is not that local people are not consulted. While it is good to understand the priorities and concerns of local people, joining up delivery is hard work and, if at every turn the partners feel they need to check via some amorphous consultation process, it is likely to run into the sand. Instead, we need to enable and encourage local organisations to deliver services together, and to use the Government’s procurement muscle to deepen partnership working between the sectors. Business is now up for this but it needs encouragement and not signals that point to a retreat.

Thirdly, what is the role of government? Everyone knows that we have to make this work. One of the reasons why there is such a loss of trust in the political process is the frequent failure of successive Governments to deliver on all their many promises. My colleagues and I suggest that the Government identify a figure who everyone respects and who will take long-term responsibility for this process in government. Then they should find an organisation outside central government to run the programme and agree a sensible budget with a 10-year contract.

To be frank, if the will or desire to do this is not there, my advice is to stop wasting everyone’s time with talk of joined-up thinking and action. The electorate know spin when they hear it. If the present Government want to distinguish themselves from previous Governments and distance themselves from broken political promises, I suggest our politicians focus on three words: delivery, delivery, delivery. My colleagues and I have found that trust is created and local people participate when you deliver in practice on what you say.

Is not an integrated, in-the-round community what politicians past and present are struggling to define when they use phrases such as the third way, big society and one nation? This is how you put flesh on the bones of what these terms might mean in practice and make them come alive for people.

I have an awful feeling that I could be making this same speech in response to many future gracious Speeches: I just hope that someone will prove me wrong. We can hope. I certainly will continue to worry about this issue like a dog with a bone because I know what a difference integrated working can make when you get it right and, of course, what moneys can be saved if you do it.