Thanks to Adrian Roper and Chris Geake of Cartrefi Cymru for suggesting this great article written by Charles Leadbeater and published in the Guardian on the 1st July.
State of Loneliness
In the State of Loneliness Charles Leadbeater argues that supportive relationships are key to tackling social ills. He says:
- ‘The fiscal crisis has fully exposed the current model of public service reform – invest, modernise, set targets, review performance, eliminate failure – as having run out of steam. Public services may be more efficient, but all too often they are not joined up, leaving the people on the receiving end bewildered by what one elderly woman, who was being visited by four occupational therapists, described to me as a blizzard of services’.
He sees the personalisation agenda as a step forward but not sufficient to address the growing deficits of ownership and control faced by many vulnerable people living in the community. The necessary public service reform must come from a very different starting point:
- ‘The key will be to redesign services to enable more mutual self-help, so that people can create and sustain their own solutions. The best way to do more with less is to enable people to do more for themselves and not need an expensive, professionalised public service’.
Relationships are at the heart of what makes for a good life, and ‘people grow up and age well if they have supportive relationships’.
He echo’s much of what we have said in the Sustainable Lives dialogue by saying:
- ‘The challenge of the future is how public services can support relationships, at scale, without being heavy-handed. This is where some of the most exciting radical innovation in public services is emerging’.
You can find the complete article by following this link State of loneliness.
Charles Leadbeater is a founding partner of Participle, which works with communities to devise solutions to intractable social challenges.
As a postscript to this post Charles Leadbeater has written a really useful pamphlet called Personalisation through Participation (2004) you can get hold of this document on Google Reader by following the link.
