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.

Budget 2009

budget, you can download a copy by following this link WLGA Budget 2009 briefing.

This briefing sets out the potential impact of the budget for the provision of public services in Wales it lays out an extremely bleak picture for public sector expenditure in the next cycle between 2010 and 2014.

The report states that:

• Average real terms growth in current spending is set to reduce from 1.1% in 2009-10 to 0.7% from 2010-11 to 2013-14, while public investment is set to fall by 17.3% a year in real terms over the same period;
• Budget delivers a 0.1% real terms cut in total public spending over the SR2010 period (ie 2011-12 to 2013-14);
• 0.7% projected average real terms annual growth in current (ie revenue) public spending from 2011-12 to 2013-14, compared to 1.1% in 2009-10;
• Public investment (ie capital) to fall to 1.25% of GDP by 2013-14 which means real terms cut of 17.3% a year in that period.

The briefing calls on the public sector in Wales at levels of government to ‘work together quickly to protect citizens and public services in the face of these budget cuts’.

It urges WAG ‘to think carefully about where the burden of the Budget reductions should fall across the public sector in Wales to ensure that essential services are protected’.

How should we respond this financial pressure?

In essence I feel that we have 2 options:

• To pass it on -
  * Through commissioned services in terms of reductions of budget based on declining expectation and competition,
  * these services pass it on to staff and service users together with a sense of lack of value and respect,
  * and these people pass it on as a sense of disappointment and lack of trust about each other and our leaders.
• To share it -
  * By drawing on valued relationships with providing partners that the problem must be solved cooperatively through innovation and negotiation,
  * by being open with service users and their supporters about the financial reality and being open to their priorities for services despite our professional doubts and reservations,
  * by being more ambitious for us as citizens and our communities in our shared capacity to respond to our needs given the right support and encouragement.

The first strategy is easy to do…. it has a sense of depressing reality to it.

The second requires a ‘transformational power’, the academic and Action Researcher Bill Torbert suggests that this transformational power can only be exercised under conditions of ‘mutual vulnerability’ ….. which is good because those are the conditions we are in.

The choice is ours.

Commenting on the Budget today the Western Mail today notes that WAG is going to lose £216m in 2010/11 – with more of the same, in the years beyond.

You may have come across a short paper called ‘The third sector and the recession in Wales’, WCVA, NCVO et al

• You can link to this document by following this link  – The Third Sector and the Recession in Wales

If you haven’t, you might want to look at it not least because the Third Sector is where a good deal of sustainability will need to be found.

The paper sets out the likely impact in Wales of the present recession on individuals and Third Sector organisations and the challenges and opportunities that go along with it.  It predicts the loss of income for many groups, while the demand for a wide range of services will sharply increase. There are a variety of recommendations.

Apropos income, it seems that the Third Sector sources funds from: Giving (29%); Local Government (17%); Central Government (22%); Charitable Trusts (3%); Lottery (4%); Trading and Investments (20%); and Business (4%).

In other words the nearly 37% of Third Sector income that comes from statutory sources is directly fragile as a result of the recession and the Budget. We might say the other sources are also decidedly uncertain.
The consequence, to state the obvious, is that if many social services are to be provided at all, they will need to be made available on extremely limited resources.

Many will have to be delivered in different ways, through different kinds of organisation.

The paper I’ve mentioned, for example, makes something of maximising and effectively organising volunteering and it also highlights not for profit approaches such as Cooperatives, Mutual Societies and Social Enterprises. These may not be relevant to all social services but they should be taken into account in the planning for some of them – arguably with a degree of urgency.

Clive