New Year, New Website

It has been a journey these last few years blogging on this site, but now it is time to move on. My new website is now at http://www.natwei.com. Visit it to find out what I am up to. I will no longer be posting here, but over there! See you soon. Nat

Why we need a National Retirement Service

It has been a while since I last posted, partly because I have been heavily preoccupied with the question of major life transitions, which I and others will be publishing a report on next week to coincide with the launch of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Life Transitions which Chris White MP will be chairing with my backing and that of David Blunkett MP and Lord Rennard. This is an issue that has attracted real cross party support, especially the idea of a non-compulsory National Retirement Service, which the Shaftesbury Partnership will be developing pilots for over the coming year or so.

There are a number of other key recommendations from the report which will come out on Monday, for employers, government, and social entrepreneurs, but for now if you or your organisation are interested in getting involved in developing and supporting the pilots then please contact Patrick Shine at the Shaftesbury Partnership (patrick.shine@shaftesburypartnership.org), and if you have press enquiries or want to come to the launch event, please send your request and background info to LifeTransitionsReport@gmail.com.

A huge thanks to Andrew Barnett and the team at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as to Unltd, the Beth Johnson Foundation, Saga, ManpowerGroup, NIACE, and many others for helping us get to this point, with more excitement to come!

The following article was published today in the Guardian’s Comment is Free section which sketches out Why we need a National Citizen Service. More details to follow when the report is published on Monday.

With the ongoing crisis in the Eurozone, global growth slowing, and austerity back in the UK, one could be forgiven for not wanting to dwell too much on the other big challenge of our day, our ageing population

The figures on ageing are indeed depressing. Millions of baby boomers are entering retirement, some may have to work till they drop, and many from surveys feel often ill prepared and abandoned as they enter what can be a stressful period in their lives. There has also been much mention of the economic impact of having a smaller workforce which will have to bear the increased health and social costs of the older population. All this makes for a timebomb of intergenerational conflict and tension for hundreds of thousands of families in the years to come.

But we do not have to see it this way. Ageing and retirement are transitions like many others in life, a source of stress but also of opportunity for people to plan and take more control if given the right support and guidance. A report I recently co-authored funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation which we are publishing next Monday the 2nd of July has highlighted the many transitions we face in life from those relating to our births and childhood, to those such as becoming parents or marrying or starting work, as well as those in later life. It found that there are ways that government and civil society can better support all of us as we transition than is currently the case.

To further investigate how policy-makers can better take into account the different transitions we go through in life Chris White MP, David Blunkett MP, and Chris Rennard and I, together with a number of other interested Parliamentarians of all parties and none are establishing over the coming week an All Party Parliamentary Group on Life Transitions. We are doing this because increasingly how we cope with our transitions affects us all and has become more challenging than ever for government or civil society to address. The failures happen too often in the gaps – when we change schools, or leave care, or enter or leave hospital, when we retire, become unemployed, or leave unemployment, and so on. Transitions matter politically because everyone goes through them. They matter even more arguably to voters than what is happening in the Eurozone.

One way to help address transitions that millions of people are going through is to take a National Service approach to them. Such as with the National Citizen Service Programme for young people, which has had success based on initial reports in promoting personal development and social mixing at that critical transition as young people enter adulthood and leave formal compulsory secondary education.

What would happen if we were to take the same approach, and working with the public, private, and voluntary sectors, develop a National Retirement Service? One designed by retirees for retirees? One that would be built on those activities we seek out and pay for when we near retirement, to get away or retreat, but which would facilitate for those retiring a way to better plan the decades ahead, to mix with each other and different generations to build better support networks and understanding, and which gave alumni a sense of what they could get involved with to lead a more balanced life, in which work, leisure, and service were blended together? This is exactly what have now asked the Shaftesbury Partnership to test and pilot – together with interested forward-looking organisations such as Saga, Manpower, Heinz, various Foundations and relevant government departments – and with the input and guidance of a working group of recent retirees.

Some might ask why this is necessary? Surely natural networks among retirees already allow them to find the activities and networks that they want post-retirement? Our preliminary research indicates that the baby boomers will not necessary follow the traditional expectations of previous retirees, and that they and other generations above and below them will need support to navigate the lifestyle choices this new wave of retirees are about to make. Choices which will be driven less by duty and morality, and more by feeling a sense of reward and purpose.

The baby boom is the largest generational tribe the Western world has seen in recent centuries. Their ageing and spending patterns are in part the reason why global growth in the West is slowing, just as it has in Japan. We need to explore ways to help the coming retirees support each other and embrace a conception of retirement that is more active, economically and socially, and more mixed than ever before, saving tax payers money and generating health and wealth for all generations. A National Retirement Service could be one powerful way to help all of us adapt and prepare for the Great Transition ahead.

Why citizens should be allowed to provide care not just professionals

It is has been an eventful week, and a milestone in a campaign which I and a number of Parliamentarians, ably led by the dogged Lord McColl, have been trying to get the government to agree to allow legal advocates, essentially volunteers like magistrates, to work alongside children who have escaped from trafficking.

You can read more about the context of the scandal of the lost children we are trying to address which I have posted about at Conservative Home here, and I have enclosed the longer version of the speech I had prepared which you can also find in shortened form on Hansard, during the debate on the amendment in the Freedom’s bill which would have made it possible for third parties and volunteers to build a network of such advocates nationally. In the event we secured a major concession from the government to refer the matter to the Children’s Commissioner to make recommendations on the matter, which led us to call off the division or vote. The report will add impetus to efforts to get the system changed from within, though we will not hesitate to harness legislative means to continue to keep up the pressure on the government if necessary. Lord McColl and others have shown how our Parliamentary system, and the Lords, however creaking some may believe they are, can still help secure progress in tackling injustices suffered by minorities who in this case literally cannot vote (having come into the country as aliens against their will to be slaves or farmed for their benefits sometimes as young as 11 months!).

The wider and most interesting point that has hit me during this campaign is how there must be many areas of the state where non professionals, if properly trained, could provide care and emotional and parental like support as legal advocates, better than what currently exists, if only we could open up our public services to let them in and be recognized for what they do, to provide a sort of “right to care”. Our hospitals, care homes, schools, mental health contexts, fostering environments, in an era of austerity, and often weighed down by short term managerial targets or performance contracts, are not the most conducive to being the most loving environments, even though more has been and could be done to enable public servants to increase their levels of empathy and concern (I think even the best struggle when contact time can be so limited now). Historically, and for many people, family and friends can sometimes fill the gap, and more innovations such as respite hotels near hospitals to free up beds and enable family members using online rotas to care for patients and lower the burden on professionals are needed to facilitate this. But there must be many in our increasingly isolated society, who could benefit from someone else, who is not doing it primarily for payment or by statutory dictat, helping to advocate for them. Why not start opening up the state to let them sensitively and carefully in as well?

My Lords I very much welcome amendment 57A, and I also welcome the announcement by the noble Minister which is a positive step in the right direction.
I want to primarily direct my comments to the scope that the amendment provides for the use of volunteers but before I do so, I must make some general observations.

First, my Lords, it is clear to me as it has been to other noble Lords that the level of care currently provided for rescued trafficked children is not sufficient. The fact that between 2007 and February 2010, of the 942 child victims of trafficking that were rescued, a staggering 301 were lost from local authority care is, as others have noted, a huge national embarrassment. I note that over that period the numbers lost decreased each year but the 18% loss rate in the final year is still completely unacceptable.

Moreover, my Lords, as a compassionate country we should want to do all we can to help these incredibly vulnerable children whilst in local authority care. It would be odd to congratulate ourselves merely on the basis that a child’s experience was that they were not lost. The resources of the state are seriously stretched and sadly in this context there are accounts of children being passed from social worker to social worker, having to start again with a new person, rather than having the opportunity to develop a focused, constant supportive relationship. There are also deeply disturbing accounts of social workers failing to turn up to court to accompany children. My Lords in this context of limited resources it is clear that something different and something creative must be done.

Of course there are provisions in the Children Act 1989 that should benefit trafficked children. The Act makes plain that the local authority is responsible for safeguarding the welfare of children. It also provides roles like the advocate, the independent visitor and the independent reviewing officer that have the potential to benefit trafficked children. However, even when considered collectively, these three roles fall well short of the internationally accepted definition of a Child Trafficking Guardian. Moreover, the fact that all these provisions are in place has not addressed the significant failures in the care of trafficked children that I have just highlighted.

My Lords it is for these reasons that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McColl – and supported across the whole house – is so important. The legal advocate he proposes crucially does not complicate matters by introducing additional bureaucratic burdens on the child. It simply provides a means of helping all the things that must already be done to be done. It provides additional capacity to help and very crucially provide more support for the child and the reassurance that there is one person who will help them who will remain constant, so they don’t have the emotional trauma of having to keep going back to square one, explaining their painful story all over again. The Legal Advocate will be able to provide general advice and support and crucially be permitted to accompany them in all their interactions with state agencies and to advocate to all those agencies on the child’s behalf. This is based on internationally accepted best practice as set out by UNICEF.

My Lords, one of the most important parts of the McColl amendment is the fact that it does not tie the government’s hand but provides scope for Legal Advocates to be the employees of statutory bodies, of voluntary organisations or volunteers with voluntary organisations. I believe that the opportunity for using the voluntary sector and volunteers is hugely significant.

On the basis of the numbers of children rescued between 2007 and 2010 we are talking roughly of about 300 a year. I know very well from my work in the voluntary sector that it would not be difficult to find 300 volunteers a year to be a volunteer Legal Advocate for one child. Indeed I have been approached by voluntary organisations that are ready to rise to the challenge. This presents us with a win-win situation because not only does it address a very pressing problem but in a way that will help to further build British social capital.

Now my Lords, I am aware that there may be those who feel nervous about the role of volunteers. I can imagine people wanting to protect their turf and an agitated Sir Humphrey Appleby telling Bernard, ‘This must be stopped. If volunteers can take functions that should be handled directly by the state, who knows where it might lead. Bernard this would be the thin end of the wedge!
In response to this I would make two key points.

First, the amendment is keenly aware that anyone serving these deeply vulnerable children must be properly trained and all will be subject to the same robust training framework. This is no place for some well-meaning volunteer who just feels compassion but has not been properly trained.
Second, to those tempted to suggest that volunteers cannot do the job I would simply point them to our magistrates system. Magistrates are volunteers. They are properly trained and have to deal with very sensitive situations. Whilst there may be some who, defensive of their turf, are tempted to justify their fears of volunteers by pointing to training, we must recognise that volunteers can be and are trained, as our magistrates system eloquently demonstrates. Another great example of the very successful use of volunteers to which I would direct noble Lords, is that provided by Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASAs) in the United States. Court Appointed Special Advocates are trained volunteers who have a proven track record of dealing with extremely delicate situations very effectively.

Of course the opportunity to make proper care for the victims of trafficking through volunteer legal advocates is hugely important in the current fiscal environment where money is so tight. This is not to say that amendment 57 would have no cost to the state if the volunteer route was used, but it would be minimal and money very well spent when one has regard for the imperative of providing better and more sensitive care for incredibly vulnerable children, and further reductions in the numbers lost.

My Lords my political hero is Anthony Ashley Cooper the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury who arguably did more than anyone else in this house, in the other place, and beyond, to establish the tradition of compassionate Conservatism in the 19th century, demonstrating concern particularly for vulnerable children in factories, mines and sweeping chimneys. I am sure that if he were here today he would be fronting this amendment which comes in the very best tradition of my party historically and recently and which also crucially resonates with the traditions of other parties, whether your vision of society is big, open, good or otherwise. I very much hope that the whole house will support it today.

Speech on social value: a nudge in the right direction

I had the privilege of speaking in the Lords in a second reading debate on the Public Services (Social Value) Bill, which seeks to oblige commissioners of public services to take into account social value. The idea is to open up commissioning so more social enterprises and charities can get opportunities to provide services to local authorities and other government agencies, as well as socially minded businesses and even mutuals. As you will see from the speech, this is definitely a positive step forward and the news is that it should pass quickly into law, which will give a much needed boost to social organisations, many of which have had a tough time lately. I’m keen that we do more to make commissioning easier for smaller organisations, and highlighted a few ideas for the future to make it even more innovative and accountable. Do share any ideas you might have and let’s explore what else we can do.

Here is the speech I gave:

Lord Wei: I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Newby for sponsoring this Bill, and thank the Government for their generous support for it, which is most welcome. I speak as one with a passionate interest in the content of and context behind this Bill, which I wholeheartedly support, not least because of my prior and ongoing work in fostering scalable social enterprise, in which I declare an interest, as well as more specifically being an adviser to the Community Foundation Network, a movement that seeks to enable giving at the local level, often alongside local and national commissioners.

I welcome the intention behind the Bill to promote engagement with and support for social enterprise, and want to focus my remarks on the suggested amendments to the process of commissioning public services in it to ensure that social value is taken more into account.

Some might question, wrongly in my view, why this Bill is necessary, given that, as has already been mentioned, the law already technically provides the flexibility for the public commissioning of services on a holistic basis. Indeed, many public bodies and commissioners recognise that the value of work tendered out has to be about more than saving money in the short term or satisfying minimum statutory requirements, and must take into account the other forms of value without which society fragments and costs for all become greater.

Such smart commissioners recognise, particularly in light of what we have witnessed dramatically throughout the financial and social crises that have marked recent years, that we need to try to cultivate and live in at least three kinds of economy, each with their own kind of value. First, there is the global economy, based on financial transactions, which encompasses everything from tax and spending to trade and investment, and so on. Secondly, there is the reciprocal economy, or what Avner Offer, paraphrasing Adam Smith, calls the economy of regard—that sense of community, however configured, in which we derive mutual support based on principles of reciprocity. Thirdly, there is the gift economy, driven by who we are, what we believe is right and wrong, and what we feel our call and passion is that compels us to help others with no expectation of reward or even recognition.

If we exist only in one of these economies, we become vulnerable when hard times or sudden changes come along, like a wrecked ship with only one section in its hull. If we cultivate all three, we become resilient, like a ship whose hull has multiple sections, able to draw upon funded support from the state, jobs or savings, on the support of our community, and on the support of friends, partners and fellow believers in our hour of need.

Smart commissioners intuitively try to minimise the damage to each of these economies in the way they tender, while promoting their autonomy, sustainability, and the innovation that comes when such economies or spheres overlap and work together rather than apart. Smart commissioners recognise that value includes but extends beyond that which is purely financial today. However, despite the flexibility already enshrined in law to enable smart commissioning, and despite the best efforts of smart commissioners, there remain too many people, I am afraid, who tender out contracts that conform to a more narrow definition of value—a definition that is, to put it crudely, too often about who can apparently deliver the most output for the least money and/or who has the best financial backing, irrespective of their ethos or approach, or who has the best track record of supplying to the public sector.

This is a definition that too often unfairly favours the supplier most adept at writing loss-leading bids, which may be subsequently renegotiated after they have been awarded over those that provide good honest value; the supplier who often has the best private sector backing over those such as charities or mutuals, which have limited reserves financially, even though they have ample reserves from the community of time, networks and skill; or the supplier who is the incumbent over the new market entrant on the basis that one is easier to manage than the other.

This is a definition that may seem to save money in the short term, and that apparently lowers risk, but that costs us more in the longer term, financially and otherwise, and potentially increases long-term systemic risk, as witnessed in major public sector procurement scandals that have arisen from time to time, when risk aversion or fear creates itself over time risk and moral hazard on a large scale—for example when suppliers become to big to fail, to negotiate better prices with, or just to lose.

In many such cases, the answer is to not use commissioning at all but to co-produce solutions or foster citizen-led services without using any or much money, just its power to convene through, for example, matched grants; or to embark on joint ventures where other partners can share the risk of managing new, small, and local suppliers—John Lewis partnership style. However, when commissioning remains the best way forward, this Bill will provide a much welcome nudge to get commissioners to consult properly and to consider the social benefits or otherwise of services that they are about to procure, not generally then to ignore them, which would be unwise, or even automatically to favour the non-monetary over the monetary forms of value, which is equally unwise, given our urgent need to reduce the national deficit, but to try to seek out where possible the solution that is best value over the short and long term financially, and that also can bring benefits of a non-financial nature—the win win rather than the either/or.

There are many areas of commissioning in which this opportunity for consideration would be of benefit. Central government procurement is a key area in health, work and pensions, and transport, to name but a few, where reductionism is rife and long-term value is not always taken into account. In an era of local authority spending restraint and de-ring-fencing, this Bill and its focus on the smart commissioner has heightened importance. Had it been in place earlier, perhaps we would have seen fewer or at least smarter reductions than those that have occurred in some local authorities, which have disproportionately targeted charities and social enterprises, as well as local sustainable businesses, and indeed much loved and valued local public services.

As an advocate of the big society, I have welcomed this Bill from the moment I first set eyes on it, and I am glad to see that it enjoys healthy cross-party support in both Houses. The direction of travel that the Bill exemplifies represents another example of the kind of shift that we need to see, putting more control into the hands of the community and those who are community minded and not just of vested interests, who have monopolised power for too long. It represents a crucial first step in making commissioning more citizen-orientated and less risk-minimisation orientated. I look forward to seeing other concrete future measures beyond this one, such as the power for citizens to recall suppliers in extreme cases, more commissioning that encourages collaborative work between suppliers and not just competition, and measures to make more joint commissioning the norm rather than the exception not just across the public sector but alongside the private and voluntary sectors. But for now, I can only recommend that we pass this Bill speedily.

Sometimes Conservatives are perceived unfairly not to care much about society, given our convictions about the importance of sound finances and their impact, good or otherwise, on future generations and our sustainability. But my honourable friend in the other place, Chris White, has shown how on the contrary Conservatives are actually on the whole socially responsible, caring, and innovative in thinking about how we use the scarce resources that we now have to maximise social value for the benefit of us all. For that, Chris deserves our thanks.

What is the government’s approach to social policy?

With the only focus it seems these days and over the last 24 hours especially to observers of government being economic matters and deficit reduction (or more accurately but less eloquently deficit growth reduction since we are not actually yet on course to reduce our national debt just slow the rate at which it is increasing), it might seem that the government has no non-fiscally driven framework for social policy development.

But this is not true based on my own experience. I was asked recently “What is the coalition government’s social policy?”, by which it was meant its approach to social policy-making rather than every government’s mantra of better schools, policing and healthcare etc. Reflecting on my time in government and on how the coalition came together, this was the answer that I gave.

Government does not have one single social policy approach, but three, which are derived from the the fact that it is a coalition. Social justice, social mobility, and social responsibility.

On the one hand, you have a focus on social justice, championed in particular by Iain Duncan Smith, which is about releasing those trapped in different cycles of poverty from worklessness, to addiction, offending and so on. It incorporates ideas around payment by results, social return on investment, and prime contracting (since it is focussed primarily on the impact not size of suppliers). Such an approach should be welcomed for what it is trying to do, moving away from the previous governments obsession with money as the proxy for poverty, even when that same money itself sometimes kept people trapped in it.

The second focus is on social mobility. Assuming through better interventions, work, and support one is now coming out of one or more poverty traps, how can one progress and aspire to a better life, particularly if you come from an excluded background or group. This approach is championed in particular by Nick Clegg, though it is not right to say that it is only driven through the Lib Dems in government. One might argue that Michael Gove’s approach in DFE is very much focussed on how to ensure children progress whatever their background (to be contrasted with some left wing beliefs that low income kids can never succeed). Here the aim is to help you get up the ladder whatever your background, belief, or lifestyle.

The third focus is social responsibility, which is the heart of the Big Society, and championed personally by the Prime Minister. The focus here is on encouraging everyone to play their part, whether as an individual through social action, a community through community empowerment, or as civic entrepreneurs through involvement in the running or shaping of public services. It is important that neither caricature is assumed here about the relationship between your wealth or lack of it, and how responsible you can be: I have met over the years both low income people who take huge amounts of responsibility for what goes on around them, and equally wealthy people who do not, but broadly speaking whilst social justice targets those most in need, and social mobility those in the middle, the social responsibility agenda speaks first to those who have means to help those who do not and ultimately beyond that to all of us where we can play a role large or small.

Which leaves the final question: what is the social policy of the opposition. My reading is that much left leaning policy remains either decidedly 20th century, focussing on poverty and society mainly in relation to income, rather than in its different felt forms in different contexts; or worse because it lacks a layered approach it confuses social responsibility and social justice and social mobility, for example accusing the government of undermining the Big Society because people are poorer due to cuts, or due to university tuition fees – all of which demonstrates a lack of understanding about how social responsibility can work. It seems in the absence yet of a proper nuanced social policy, the left is currently adopting one of social protest, hence its sympathy for industrial action and street based demonstration. Better it seems when in opposition to oppose, rather than develop and articulate social policies that make sense for the austere world we now unfortunately inhabit.

Of course getting elected still mainly comes down to whether people feel their schools, hospitals, police have improved; the economy; and whether you a trust a given party’s leader. But that is another question altogether…

The Garden Centre as a Community Hub

As I go round the country these days I am often on the lookout for unusual places where community thrives, away from traditional locations we might normally associate with the idea of community. Many of these are sport, arts, or environment related, perhaps because people want to interact in less formal places based more on their interests or leisure – a challenge potentially to those running government and civil society-led buildings given the debate on the future of community assets and their funding at the moment. The future may increasingly about hubs where people already go, which have a dominant emphasis or theme, but which are also multiple-use, clustering many different public, private, and voluntary activities so that the whole is self-sustaining.

One example I recently visited of an unexpected hub for community was a garden centre. Scotsdale Garden Centre in Cambridge is what the garden or horticultural industry calls a “destination centre”. Indeed despite going in the middle of the day it was packed – it seems in the recession and with an aging population more and more people are gardening and growing food, and keeping pets! As well as the expected range of plants and sundries on offer, the store was abuzz with children strolling through the pet and fish displays, a mini-indoor amusement park and several grottos were being built for Christmas, and the restaurant close to full with families (especially grandparents with their grandchildren) enjoying the half-term break. Check out their website for full details.

The main purpose of the visit was to witness the garden industry’s surprisingly strong role within the local community. I was inspired by the Cambridge Cancer Care Help Centre that Scotsdales have built on-site to provide a facility for mutual support and understanding for those suffering or otherwise affected by cancer in the community. The finance was raised by the local community, and the centre is run by volunteers with one professional centre manager. There is an amazing sense of peace when you step into building, and despite being told it was a “quiet” day, there were plenty of people around enjoying a cup of coffee after a presentation on the power of acupuncture!

And Scotsdales is just one of hundreds of garden centres around the UK that play a strong and important community role, according to the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA). Many of them work closely with school gardening clubs, teaching kids a sense of sustainability through how to grow their own food and plants. They raise money for local and national charities. They resource the planting of allotments on and near housing estates. They provide therapeutic facilities for people with learning disabilities and support local hospices. They run social and community events. They are increasingly providing space for local charities, social enterprises, and businesses on their land. And in some cases, they have even become the local post office. I encourage you to visit your local garden centre – like me, I suspect you’ll be surprised how much is going on.

Raising the Village: Speech to heads of local authority youth services

I have just got back from giving a speech alongside a very positive Tim Loughton MP to heads of local authority youth services at their annual gathering organized by CHYPS the Confederation of Heads of Young People’s Services. In it I stressed the need to recover the sense of the village as an actor in helping young people succeed and the role that Community Foundations can play in helping those in and outside of government working with and alongside young people. The full text of the speech is below.

I want to thank you for the chance to come and be with you briefly today and pay tribute to CHYPS and the work of those involved in youth services. So often others can take the limelight, whether the young themselves or politicians, but you deserve credit for often the years of hard slog that sadly frequently goes unrecognized. Hearing about the way you are adapting to changing circumstances and innovating today to allow you still to deliver your mission has also been tremendously inspiring.

All over the world it seems we are in the grip of a crisis for young people – Whether you look at youth unemployment here in Europe or even in booming China, whether in analyzing the riots or comparing the lives of the baby boomer generation and those of the millennials, struggling sometimes to get housing or on the housing ladder and with fewer entitlements, higher costs and less prospective pensions. For our most marginalized young people, living in social housing estates up and down the country, the challenges have been long-standing – NEET levels have been stubbornly high for over a decade despite so much effort to address them over the years. In an era of even more limited resources, what on earth, many will ask, can we possibly do to tackle these chronic challenges?

I do not pretend to have any silver bullet answers, but I would like to focus on one approach which may help us look at the challenges we face differently, and perhaps with a little more hope. I am sure many of the things I will explore today you are already doing already or have witnessed in your professional careers, so I no doubt have more to learn from your experiences. And the approach begins with a provocative question: we perhaps all know the old adage, “It takes a village to raise a child”, could it be that it also takes a village to deliver effective youth services? I ask this because over the years partly because the challenges relating to youth have been so acute in this country, youth services seem often to have become a highly specialized area, subject to the same silos that persist across Whitehall and in local authorities, which was perhaps fine when the money flowed abundantly but perhaps is more of an issue in an era in which the emphasis where limited money remains is now a bit more on early intervention, education, and employment – areas which can be equally siloed but which can dominate policy because they belong to bigger departments (health, education, work). Everyone it seems, is now doing youth work as it were, or work with youth, and it may be that many of the historic workers will and are going to migrate into these adjacent sectors and departments for that very reason. Which brings us back to what is left for leaders of youth services? Can I suggest, again provocatively, that one opportunity is to almost do the opposite, both of what has been done in the recent past, and also from what those involved in health, education, and work may be tempted to continue to do: raise up the village that raises the child, and not just the child. Or to put it in a more pithy way, and without wanting in any way to make a pun on youth culture as a whole: mix it up. Let us take a mixing approach in three ways.

Firstly, mixing up with those other sectors in and outside government, starting with departments in local authorities as well as outside them. It can be hard to do this, so one way may be first to mix up and collaborate with local businesses and voluntary organisations who may in turn create connections within local government and with central government. Community Foundations here have the potential to be a powerful facilitator, and here I declare an interest as an advisor to their national network. With fifty eight across the country, many of these work closely with business, donors and delivery charities and groups, and government. Over half of all foundations have funds targeted at helping young people.

Community Foundation for Merseyside for example have partnered with Merseyside Police, Liverpool Echo and the Tutu Foundation UK to tackle anti-social behaviour among young people by creating the Merseyside Young Transformers Programme (MYT). MYT aims to provide grants to local groups and community leaders to provide diversionary and transformational activities for young people, especially those on the verge of crime, to create a safer, stronger Merseyside. The Community Foundation approached businesses, individuals, local authorities and MPS for their support. The Foundation’s work on MYT led to them contributing towards Home Office’s Tackling Gangs Action Programme and Tackling Knives Action Programme and also the Channel 4 Street Weapons Commission.

Oxfordshire Community Foundation have recently established a community bond for young people in the area, drawing in donors and businesses, and working with local delivery organisations, with a view to channelling money from across sectors from social investors into helping local youth.

The Outlook Fund aims to improve the lives of Cambridgeshire children that face difficulty and disadvantage, with a focus on the more than 400 Looked After Children. Outlook Fund grants will be made to charitable projects that offer extra activities and opportunities that can help disadvantaged children widen their experience, gain self confidence, and succeed at school.

The Outlook Fund has adopted a long term approach to fund raising. All money donated into the fund will be held as an endowed sum and on an annual basis a percentage of the fund (currently 5%) will be used to make grants to local groups that are working to improve the quality of the lives of Cambridgeshire children that face difficulty and disadvantage.

These are just a small selection of many more examples across the UK of community foundations doing their bit. Using web platforms such as localgiving.com, community foundations can also help raise funds from the public who increasingly want to support very local community-led projects even if overall giving to larger and more traditional causes may be slightly declining. The power of harnessing such third parties is about more than just money though, and is increasingly extending towards helping front line charities and organisations, including those that specialize in working with young people, to transition to more mixed funding models away from government grants or contracts alone.

One of the most useful things those of us involved in government can do at this difficult time is to help put youth organisations together with business angels perhaps from networks such as community foundations who can advise them as trustees or pro bono advisors on their strategies for survival and mixed income moving forwards. There are no shortage of opportunities for youth organisations that are ready to exploit them who have had the right strategic input and leadership who by pursuing them may allow you to achieve your policy goals: getting involved in youth intervention impact bonds, mutualisation, being part of consortia targeting vulnerable families with troubled youth in them, participating in community budgets, helping to shape the youth employment strategies of LEPs, partnering with welfare to work providers (including those working with offenders), harnessing initiatives such as somewhereto to provide multi-use spaces for young people to carry out their activities such as in commercial or meanwhile places even as traditional dedicated youth facilities are phased out. The role of businesses here should not be underestimated and is well documented and the appetite out there to help is huge to provide mentors, to help coordinate resources and advice such as through the Big Connect and Business Connectors Programme, and even to provide facilities. If you drew a timeline of a young vulnerable person’s life from before birth to their first job, you could probably find a business in the country interested in helping them at every stage. I recently visited one of the largest gardening centres in the country, Scotsdales in Cambridge, and saw a centre they had built from their profits and local donations for cancer suffers, which was on their land for a peppercorn rent and run mainly by volunteers with one professional coordinator. It was inspirational, and helped them get great goodwill as well as more visitors to their garden centre. But it made me wonder why you could not have similar facilities for youth and young people also backed by businesses on their land, which would also have the effect that positive role models for young people would also be around.

A second way to mix up the approach to youth services is to foster mixing between young people from different backgrounds – particularly socioeconomic backgrounds. I am so proud of having had a hand in developing the national citizen service for young people programme, which contrary perhaps to lines you may hear from government in my view is less about youth per se and more about social mixing. I will never forget the story of the two alumni who spoke about how their perceptions of hoodies and private school kids had been transformed and greater trust built from having been part of the same team for three months despite being from diametrically opposed social backgrounds. This is why there is potential for other future forms of national service for others going through big transitions in their lives, maybe not always ones led by government, in the transition from university to work, from work to unemployment and back, and from work to retirement – each transition creating an opportunity to mix people up and fill the void that sadly has opened up us our housing has become more segregated, or institutions from church to cricket less able to help connect across class lines, and as our society has become more stratified and less socially mobile. Whilst NCS is therefore no replacement for a proper youth strategy, it does not have to have a monopoly over the mixing of young people with each other and I wonder what other opportunities there might be to create links between the young people who would normally be clients of youth services and other young people who can both learn from them and be a support and positive peer group to them, opening up their social capital to help disaffected youth access job opportunities, learning experiences, and to just widen their horizons.

The third and final area for mixing, is between generations, between old and young. I will never forget a programme I watched last year, the Estate We Are in, in which on one estate it was clear that the older inhabitants mistrusted the hoodies on the streets because they did not know them, and did not realize they had nowhere to go, despite the young teenagers being fairly balanced people. I am sure you have experienced this before. Young people often tell me they resent how they are perceived by older people. Perhaps there is more we can do to change this by bringing both sides together perhaps around common activities. Such as when on NCS kids came up with the idea of visiting the elderly in retirement homes and befriending them. Or through schemes such as the Good Gym where young volunteers exercising in the community are coached by lonely elderly people who they drop by to see on their jogging trails. Activities such as time banking and skill sharing can also be a great way for the young and old to mix, swapping knowledge and skills. A social enterprise recently launched in Shoreditch called the Amazings seeks to get retired members of the community to share an amazing skill that others can come and pay to use or benefit from. All this can seem I am sure a million miles away from the day to day work of overseeing troubled youth, but I fear as long as we continue to deal with our elderly and our youth in completely parallel worlds we will suffer deepening mistrust and societal breakdown and youth services themselves will find limited support from an aging electorate, and prison services more.

These ideas around greater mixing are in themselves not new. In many ways the focus on raising the village harks back to age old principles around community, apprenticeship, and respect for old and young. The question is how this might affect our roles, and yours specifically as heads of local authority youth services. Let me suggest three ways in which a focus on mixing might affect the day job as leaders, consultants, and commissioners of youth policy locally.

Firstly, it might affect how we share information (in a sanitized form) and broker between different groups to draw in resources and initiatives to develop more mixed organisations and work roles. We have heard a lot about data transparency from central government but how many local business and other partner organisations regularly get data on where youth hotspots might be, and what the issues you face are which you could benefit from help in tackling. It takes courage perhaps in government to admit one needs that help and may be that one cannot do everything, but it can be worth it. How many local youth services could benefit from being put in touch with a community foundation, or business connector, or business mentors to help them work out their next step strategically in this new more austere world? And will we maybe see a return of the youth worker who is also a community worker and community organizer, able to be sustained from multiple funding streams and plugged in sufficiently to facilitate mixing across government and other sectors, across socioeconomic barriers, and generations?

Another fertile area is in consultation about developing policy and strategy, which may lead to local commissioning frameworks. I prefer to call this co-creation, which if done well can lead on to co-production. Because as we have learnt from experiments in participatory budgeting a good cross community consultation can sometimes have an even more impactful effect on supporting young people than the eventual commissioning process and delivery itself. If multiple departments locally, old and young, rich residents and poor ones, business and charities can work together to address issues relating to young people – hearing each others grievances and being invited to come up with the solutions together – we at least build understanding and participatory budgeting shows that people can end up being satisfied even when their ideas were not adopted and complain less at implementation stage because they felt part of a process and heard the reasons why not – often from other citizens. Too often we invite only the youth to certain consultations – maybe we should invite their village too.

And finally commissioning itself. Perhaps we need to find ways to commission less on hard youth outcomes, and more on outcomes relating to innovative ways of mixing youth, or harnessing a mix of resources to help youth, and on mixing young and old. I know from my brief time in government that commissioning can actually separate those who do the commissioning from those who are bidding – rightly for legal reasons. But I fear that such a separation can often lead to poor commissioning. Commissioners in my view should ideally have frequent exposure to the context in which they are commissioning. One way might be to colocate – even a day a week as has been trialled in healthcare by the likes of the Young Foundation – with non-government organisations who have complementary resources but who are unlikely to bid for contracts directly – such as local foundations or businesses: this stimulates contextual understanding on both sides. Jointly developed commissioning frameworks with such organisations probably stand a better chance of being better designed, and there is the added potential of matched resources too. One innovative way of changing the commissioning model comes from the places like Seattle led by the likes of Jim Diers and Cormac Russell in the UK, in which local government, businesses, and foundations created a local match pot for community groups – in this context ones perhaps wanting to work with youth – in which local people could unlock grants or funding as long as they matched as well either with money or pledged time (ten dollars equalling an hour). Bureaucracy was reduced because forms were pre-filled to help make it easier for residents to participate. Not only did this multiply the money available, but also gave the community real ownership because of their matched commitment – though it worked best when there were also local community organizers involved.

To sum up, it takes a village to raise a child. Maybe the future of youth services is now in raising villages that raise children. Perhaps only by having this kind of focus will we be able to truly address the many challenges we face alongside our young people in the coming decade of austerity without the kind of violence and instability now being witnessed around the world and this last summer. You are truly at the frontline of holding our society together and I again am genuinely grateful for the role you play and wish you all the best in the challenging but also noble task that lies ahead. But never forget, no matter how tough it gets, there are many villages out there who want to help you succeed. If you let them support you, you surely will.

Give Shoreditch – popping up to raise money for local charities

Starting this morning a group of civic entrepreneurs are getting together to raise money for Shoreditch-based charities by setting up a pop-up coffee shop.

Called Give Shoreditch, it’s running for 9 days continuously, outside St Leonard’s, the Shoreditch Parish church – the large, white building at the intersection of Shoreditch High Street, Old Street, and Hackney Road.

Smaller, more agile ways of raising money for causes that are closer to home and affect the immediate community are becoming more and more popular and increasingly important as larger pots of centrally administered money become scarcer.

So, if you’re in the area, volunteer to be a barista or get down there, have a cup of coffee and make a donation. Or have a look at the website if you want to know more or make an online donation to the community fund.

We may have to get used to scenes like these

As I and other Peers and MPs return to Parliament today, I cannot help but be struck by how extraordinary the events of the last week or so have been. Global financial meltdown on the one hand is mirrored by scenes of violence on our streets. Extraordinary as these scenes appear, I cannot help but also fear that we may have to get used to them.

Because while many of the reasons given for the meltdown and the violence which already have been and will be debated at length today, are no doubt in part true – the rising influence of social media, the unrest that austerity can bring, a sickening of morals, indecisive and remote leadership (particularly in the EU/US), trade imbalances and globalisation, unsustainable debt and over-regulation hampering growth – there is one driver of recent events which will not go away any time soon: demographics.

What we are witnessing in the Western world is the impact of the ageing of the baby boomer generation. Their entry into the workforce in their millions fueled a welfare state and borrowing binge which is now no longer sustainable as they spend less (once children fly the nest) and retire or work less (and hence pay less tax). Yet their power as voters remains dominant, which makes it hard to go all out politically to help the young, whose futures and prospect of employment now looks uncertain. As boomers naturally started to spend less, the finance industry to maintain its returns (remember the promise of annual stock market returns of 8 percent?) leveraged up investments and ‘innovated’ using borrowed money – debts which then got transferred to sovereign states when banks overreached and collapsed. And our sovereign deficits are no longer sustainable (compared to similar crises such as during the 1970s) because the markets know the boomers will not be replaced by enough workers (particularly in Europe) to generate the tax revenues to pay back what we owe and their future pension and healthcare costs – hence the credit rating problems in both the US and Europe. Alongside this, if you are a young person today, you will not likely enjoy the kind of life your boomer (grand) parents and those around you will have enjoyed, despite having been raised on a diet of consumerism and consumer brands which you will struggle in future to afford. This is not about excusing thugs for looting but does explain what may have motivated some of them. And the State can only do so much, partly because of a lack of funds, and partly because it is not particularly easy to favor the young over more populous and politically active older voters. China or India do not (yet) face this demographic problem, but the opposite, a relatively medium aged population going into spending mode as their families grow (hence inflation). The Middle East and Africa have teenage and youth dominated populations which historically tend to fuel revolutions, war, and mass unrest. America has a youngish population mainly from its migrant communities, and will bounce back as long as it reins in its spending. The Eurozone has little chance of recovering. Britain sits, as ever, somewhere in the middle.

So we are going to have to get used to scenes like these all over the world, and adapt. If we don’t we will face bankruptcy in our markets and anarchy on our streets. How might we adapt? To address future social unrest we will need to conserve what cash we have left for essential public services (good policing, hospital care, and education), for addressing chronic social problems (such as problem families, addiction, and youth unemployment), and for a more modest set of foreign policy aims (such as defending global cities). We will need to harness innovation and local initiative co-developed and co-delivered with citizens to maintain less essential but still worthwhile services particularly in more affluent areas for less (which allows us to target what cash we have left on poorer areas and essential services).

To address our economic problems beyond reducing spending we need to grow by implementing a contrarian and less centralising fiscal strategy whose economic assumptions were based on baby boomer behaviours which will no longer hold true (and which underpin both Keynesian and monetarist thinking). We will need to be much more nuanced – there will be no silver bullets – and harness the rising wealth of the East for both investment and new markets, create more citizen-led and peer to peer means of financing consumer and business activity (moving away from the broken banking model of the 20th century), promote more self-employment among the young and underemployed (particularly franchise models which tend to fail less and create more jobs than normal self-employment), focus on collaborative consumption versus consumerist models (eg car and land sharing) to lower the cost of living since rising incomes are no longer guaranteed, and focus on helping cities develop and form global partnerships (particularly with the East) since cities drive growth.

Above all we need demographic and intergenerational solutions: old and young brought together not dealt with in silos overseen by professionals only. We need focussed help for youth to be mentored and gain employment based on what they are good at. And we need encouragement for families to have more children across every income level to smooth future generational peaks and troughs.

In summary whether in economics or sociology, demographics matters. And we ignore it at our peril.

After Hackgate – towards a more citizen-led media

From out of the wreckage caused by Hackgate, which has rocked Westminster, Fleet Street, and Scotland Yard alike, it is clear that a long-overdue programme of media reform must arise. What is unknown at this point, at the start of a process that will undoubtedly drag on for years, is how the relationship between citizens, the media, and public figures will change.

Because it has invariably been both too cosy, and too fear-driven, and above all too centralised. I personally experienced this during my time in government, my internship as I now call it, in developing and seeking to launch policies relating to the Big Society. The first time I came across it was when it became apparent that part of the reason that some journalists resisted the idea of Big Society was that it actually meant focussing less on what was going on in Whitehall or Parliament, where it is easier to pick up or blag your way to a story, and more on what is going on in real communities – breaking out of the bubble. The second was when a left wing journalist presented me with two potential stories she would run on me and essentially threatened me with running the worst of the two (for the record, relating to unfounded rumors about my ability to do my job), unless I gave her information which was eventually spun into the story that broke about my work life balance. That fear which all politicians feel at the hands of journalists where you have no recourse or way to correct the first story, led to much pain and difficulty for me and my young family, despite years of charitable service. The third was when I realized that the very business model of modem media itself now makes it almost impossible for new and innovative policy to be understood and piloted well, because resources are too constrained for journalists to get out into the country to find out what is going on and what is working. This is what I have previously called news by press release, where the same story is regurgitated from one news desk to another with lots of opinion and spin heaped upon it, not always sadly backed up by many facts. It too often stops the right ideas being turned into reality and breeds instead sadly cynicism and inertia.

So what now, now that we have arrived at the point when our politicians, media and increasingly even our judicial and policing system have suffered such a loss of trust? Well, we are likely to see increased regulation. I defer to Lord Mandelson on this who has already written articulately on how it needs tightening up. How can we have different regimes for television and broadcast media (which is incidentally more trusted than other forms) from print media which is essentially self/non/un-regulated? But as Mandelson also hints at, there is a role for technology, whether in more models such as iCorrect where people can correct mistaken articles written about them, to a place where media interviewees – whether celebrities and public figures or ordinary citizens – can upload recordings of interviews they have given so the public can compare how accurate articles are that were based on what has been recorded, to a site where individual journalists can be rated (who has the domain for ratemyjournalist.com?) based on how accurate, entertaining, and balanced their articles are (one may need to rate raters as well to avoid abuse). Beyond this there is a need for a different business model, one in which citizens actively help to generate news content, in partnership with professionals, and co-edit that content so the best filters up, and get rewarded financially or reputationally for their stories or receive donations or tips to encourage them to continue their citizen journalist careers. Twitter and blogging in a way is therefore just the start. Models such as blottr, with the right backing from us all, may represent a more sustainable, more humane, and dare I say it more Big Society way of doing media in the future.

UPDATE: of course politicians can be just as susceptible to spinning as well; when I left Labour politicians and their civil society representatives such as Peter Kyle claimed I worked less than a year in government, which is clearly not from the case from my original appointment and resignation letters and the PM’s acceptance letter of my resignation – which I am now putting into the public domain – showing I worked from the 18 May 2010 until the 1st of June 2011 at which point I switched to advising the Community Foundation Network