• It will  be leaner than it has been, with smaller staffing complements   and fewer or pared-back services in many areas.

• The experience of service provision is likely to be different: one-stop shops and services shared between different local authorities will become more prevalent. A different relationship between service users and local government with  more of an emphasis on putting more responsibility onto service users e.g. using the internet to obtain careers advice, subjecting oneself to means testing prior to qualifying for care services or challenging someone dropping litter in a neighbourhood

• New models of public service ownership from employee owned ‘spin out’ mutuals  delivering housing, health and childcare ( many will fail!) to services provided by volunteers(libraries) or will be community-owned (community centres).

• Increasing use of the internet to deliver services:  a web-based self-service economy for the majority while targeting scarce  resources to those most in need.

More specifically

Perhaps one of the biggest changes to the local authority provision is its lead role in the new Health and Wellbeing Boards which are designed to remove divisions between the NHS and local authorities and give communities greater say in the services needed to provide care for local people (that is the theory anyway!).

This is not about – or not just about –  the provision of social and health care services. By far the bigger aim is to keep the public away from the need for costly health interventions; it is about a healthy, active general public  where wellbeing, social connection and healthy lifestyles are valued at least as much as more traditional medical interventions.

This approach seems to chime with new thinking at the Guardian’s recent Public Services Summit. Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester police, highlighted that his biggest concern was  not about  police numbers, nor a squeeze on budgets. Instead, he identified mental health as his force’s biggest single issue, one that “threatens to overwhelm us”. Campaigners argue that social issues such as these are the reason why public services must change – but more collaboration is needed between local service providers and Health and Wellbeing Boards seem to be a significant step in the right direction.

Their analysis confirms that it is  local authorities with the most deprived communities who will be hardest hit and  suggests “that the consequences for vulnerable people and places living in the most disadvantaged council areas may be substantial”

The report highlights two distinctive choices to managing budget contraction are being made:

One type of distinction was between those authorities who were:

• developing a more client- or community-targeted approach to services with a  shift from universal provision to focusing scarce resources on the people and places where they were most needed;
• and those resisting targeting in favour of a focus on service sustainability by distributing  cuts proportionately across services.

A second type of distinction was found between authorities:

• who intended to use area decentralisation or neighbourhood management approaches as part of their strategy to manage the cuts;
• and those who planned an a-spatial approach with no focus on ‘place

Yet the impression given here is of a smoother strategic response than is actually the case. For example the report refers to the ‘cumulative impacts’ on particular groups and places. These will be difficult to anticipate in the best of times – but made much harder by cutting back the monitoring and evaluation teams that are supposed to assess the impact of such radical changes*.

Moreover there will be cumulative impacts on particular groups, including the most deprived communities. As the report says, these changes have  the potential to ‘tip’ communities and individuals over vulnerability thresholds, and could lead to the generation of additional, more intense problems or needs (my italics). What else does that mean but far more costly interventions by public services at a later stage? – a reactive model to service provision in place of  cost effective preventative services.   Listen to what one senior executive at a local authority had to say:

‘It just feels like we are making cuts that are okay for now, but will come back and get us in the next couple of years, particularly when we’re talking about cutting preventative services that are going to   come back and get us in 10 or 12 years’ time.… The long-term view’s not there. It’s very much how do we get the cuts done now, how do we survive the next three years to five years. Maybe we’re in a place where we can’t afford that financially at the moment and we just have to deal with the emergency crisis now and we can’t say – this is daft we need to have a longer game in mind because actually what we’re doing is storing up problems for the council in 12 years’ time’

While tackling poverty cannot just be about social and welfare provision, with no safety net for the vulnerable, you have no foundation on which to build the kind of regeneration initiatives talked about in City Deal and the apprenticeship schemes. It just isn’t do-able.

*The requirement to assess the impact of changes to service provision on the range of ‘equalities’ groups does not apply to   assessing the impact on socioeconomic groups .

An earlier version of the game was based around project scenarios (played in groups)  which include:

• The profile of the organisation in detail: its starting position in terms of accommodation, staffing, other costs
• A list of potential business and trade ideas that may be taken up by the organisation.
• A set of figures on cards that allows the organisation to play through how the adoption of different ideas will affect its business plan (a more detailed version will have spreadsheet support)
• A set of risks, challenges and opportunities that may arise through national or local circumstances
• Cards that can be exchanged to indicate deals between agencies and groups (grants etc.)

Geographical mapping of project activities could be introduced as an additional dimension to the game. Cards dealt to different groups could locate ‘potential business and trade ideas’ or the ‘set of risks, challenges and opportunities that may arise through….local circumstances’ .  A shared map showing both areas of need and project activities  offers up the possibility of enhanced collaboration in particular localities ; it  also allows groups to exchange cards to “indicate deals between agencies and groups (grants etc.)”.

To make this happen, the content of the game needs to include

• an A3 size printable map divided into a grid of 9 squares with labels stuck on top giving fictional names of neighbourhoods.
• additional cards to suggest  a certain line of action: “you are doing a short survey in  in the wakeham area (grid reference A3) as part of a funded project to do music activities, put a disc on grid A3″. A second card hidden in a pack for a different group might say “as part of a funded project to engage isolated older people, you need to do a survey of   area X – put a disc on grid A3″.
• In either of the above cases you would pose the challenge: “in whatever you do, find ways to collaborate and save money”. 

In the example above, one charity might approach another and say ‘ we know you are working in area X, can we piggy back on your project and ask you to do ‘y’ on our behalf – we’ll pay towards costs”.

In the three decades prior to the recent economic downturn, wage gaps widened and household income inequality increased in a large majority of OECD countries. This occurred even when countries were going through a period of sustained economic and employment growth. This report analyses the major underlying forces behind these developments.

My take on this is  that, for all the talk of Big Society and ‘we are all in this together’,  no real co-production of public services is possible without a more equitable distribution of resources and a reduction in the equality gap. Mapping community assets and tapping into the ‘hidden wealth of communities’ becomes no more than a bean counting exercise when the rich are seen to  lock themselves into gated communities. The press exposure over crazy rises income that far outstrip GDP, together with tax avoidance schemes show them to be exactly who they are: wealth takers rather than wealth creators. It can’t go on like this

The ‘first wave’ of City Deals will focus on the eight core cities and their Local Enterprise Partnerships. The Government will look to roll this process out to other cities in due course.

The City Deals center on:

Financial benefits – cities will have greater freedom to invest in growth with a single consolidated capital pot instead of having to bid to Whitehall departments for different pots of money. Local authorities will also have the freedom to set lower business rates for certain types of company.

Skills and jobs – the creation of City Apprenticeship Hubs which will help support small businesses through the various hoops they have to jump through in order to take on apprentices . There will also be more resources put towards joined-up-services with work, training and career advice placed under one roof.

Power over infrastructure – unlocking investments to improve transport, housing, broadband with decision making over transport and regeneration projects  handed over to local government.

Assuming that City Deals will be rolled out to all sooner rather than later, how does this tackle one of the biggest issues we face as a country: the widening   inequality between rich and poor which  also takes on a geographic dimension – deep pockets of deprivation side by side with affluent residential areas?

Neil McInroy (Centre for Local E conomic Strategies) cautions against the assumption that decentralised resources will be the economic tide that lifts all boats and points out that economic growth did not reduce inequality even in the good times -it actually got worse in the boom years up to 2008. He refers to the research of the Adam Smith Institute in highlighting that poverty cannot just be about  social and welfare policies but ‘pre-distribution’ policies associated with work and pay – something that might be achieved through new city relationships between the local state, unions, business and citizens – with a common goal of using the labour market as a means of tackling poverty.

However these measures only go so far. Given the present economic realities of high unemployment and zero growth. He suggests an alternative economic vision  which is ‘freed from economic growth orthodoxies’ and includes policies which focus on how the local economy works   in relation to better environmental, health and social outcomes; one where we achieve social and cultural growth and where place and economic resilience is placed above growth. Such an approach requires a leap in thinking, a rejection of the economic models that implicitly deny the vital links between economic and social systems.

While public policy and particularly local regeneration strategies have sought to tie the two together, too often regeneration strategies are over-reliant on housebuilding and other capital investment programmes. God knows we need them but they can only be the beginning, not the last word, in an alternative economic vision that seeks to promote social and cultural growth alongside economic resilience.

if we seriously wish to tie in economic activity and outcomes as they relate to environmental health and social outcomes – particularly for deprived areas – then some means must be found to incentivise  local businesses to get involved. Social Return on Investment (SROI) measurements is one way  to establish the impact   on the bottom line – their profits. This could be applied to initiatives such as the Responsibility Deal on health in the workplace in order to reduce the £45 billion a year lost in productivity as a result of unhealthy behaviour through drinking, smoking and unprotected sex. This initiative works with small and medium enterprises.

Yet approaches based on the ‘bottom line’ also have their  pitfalls, for the danger here is that you reduce every issue to the accountants ledger; health and social deprivation experienced by real human beings is reduced to a cost-benefit analysis on which a business bases its decision to do business in a different way (and be a good corporate citizen) or not.

Another approach is to explore an emotional connection to place; where you live and work matters. Every business – but especially the small to medium enterprises – touches the life of the community and while employees may live in a different area, there will be a shared concern about the quality of environment to shoppers and residents, levels of anti social behaviour and crime, parking issues and pedestrian access. What I am suggesting is a common agenda could bring together residents associations and traders associations through joint periodic meetings to strengthen the relationships between business and community. That itself could be the foundation for partnership initiatives involving anything from ‘buy local’ campaigns to recruitment of apprentices from the local area.

The public sector also has a role to play here, with its ability to shape the local economy and tackle high levels of deprivation employing such tools as discretionary cuts in business rates (assuming they are allowed to retain business rates as proposed) and community budgets.

What social entrepreneurs bring to the table is a drive, energy and passion to tackle social or environmental issues that the public sector has failed to address – despite the considerable resources and energy we have had at our disposal.

What they don’t always have at their disposal is the business acumen and organisational skills to make things work. That’s where the mentors come in and the little I know of this scheme suggests this is a great idea with huge potential.

However I would like to take this ‘huge potential’ in a different direction: mentoring community enterprises. Unlike social enterprises which tend to be highly focused, single purpose organisations, community enterprises are multi-purpose organisations that seek to benefit a particular geographic area – and it is those in the most deprived areas of our towns and cities that need the most help. Many community centres  have assets such as buildings and meeting spaces but lack the supportive training and advice that might turn such centres into hubs of social and business activity. They cannot be called  ’enterprises’ in the strict sense of the word since they are over-reliant on public funds and   limited  to a ‘halls-for-hire-model’.  Yet the potential is there, even in the present funding crisis. The people who run such centres are often deeply committed to their communities but lack the business and project management skills to take their organisation in a completely different direction.

In their report Supporting Community and Social Enterprises the IPPR suggested that ‘carrying out an organisational review’ was one of the most important steps in making the ‘enterprise leap’: to change from being an organisation depending on voluntary support and grant aid to an enterprise that operates on a business basis: selling its goods and services as its principal means of generating revenue. Most community centres cannot undergo that process without help and while there is no shortage of online resources and toolkits (some of them 60 pages long!), there is nothing like the personal support that mentoring brings. It is not just about sharing business skills and expertise, mentoring is  about relationship – the kind that can ignite hope and  unleash energy and  creativity.

There is another vital reason for working with community enterprises: the multiplier effect which may occur when inward looking, socially excluded neighbourhoods are introduced to new ideas, behaviours and  information. You may target all the training and employment opportunities at your disposal – but it is ‘community outlook,  the attitudes, values and aspirations of local neighbourhoods which often determine whether or not employment and educational opportunities are taken up.

Such communities may have strong ‘bonding capital’ in terms of mutual support and neighbourliness, but little or no ‘bridging capital’ , the links to the wider community   which act as a conduit for culture change with the influx of new ideas,  values  and aspirations.

The business mentors deployed by BiTC could be the kind of  bridging links that creates not just community enterprises but  community transformation.

To recap, the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment is the single most significant exercise conducted by local authorities in partnership with health authorities. The emphasis to date has been mainly around producing a statement of needs which could drive commissioning across local government, the NHS, and other local partners. It prescribes services for communities who are seen as uninvolved passive consumers and has arguably contributed to overdependence on many of our poorest communities on a heavy state support structure, while overlooking ‘community assets’ and strengths.

So what about a different take on this? how might we change the JSNA approach? The report by Wakefield Council and Wakefield NHS districts is a brave attempt to include mapping of community assets as part of its approach but I am not sure it succeeds – much of it is just a bit too fluffy – yet I do feel they are going in the right direction.

Here’s how I would add to their efforts:

• build on the area based model of community engagement and train staff to be ‘network weavers’ by linking isolated individuals and excluded groups into the wider community
• encourage the development of  consortia of voluntary and community sector providers with opportunities for community commissioning and service delivery around the wellbeing agenda. Let’s get away from the competitive culture for a diminishing size of the grant cake that has done so much to damage trust and co-operation between voluntary organisations
• Blog it! the community meetings at the World Cafe were attended by a ‘scribe’ and facilitator and while a record of the meeting was shared at a Xmas event in order to encourage follow up conversations, it could also have been put on a blog (ensure it is mobile phone friendly) and kept there over a number of weeks and months . That way, you have a live record of an evolving conversation which pulls in as many people as possible, especially those who only heard about the meeting afterwards. The chances are you would have ended up with a much richer conversation with precisely the kind of qualitative data sought by the JSNA exercise (there’s a job here for someone, preferrably an individual or community enterprise from a deprived area with the blogging and interpersonal skills along with strong local networks to deliver such a rich picture)
• Create an online photo story of your neighbourhood – The Warwick approach was different; no meeting at the World Cafe. Instead it took the form of a digital photographic project as a means of bringing people together to reflect and discuss on some of the key questions (see page 19 of ‘Growing Communities Inside Out’). Again this lends itself easily to an online platform with a discussion forum so people can have more time to share and contribute

Admittedly all these approaches can still end in a rather fluffy mapping exercise where you may change the narrative to one of hope and envision a different future – important though that is- but you still haven’t really tied down what specific community assets there are.

Yet somehow, a start has to be made somewhere. To give up and say that such communities have nothing to give inevitably plays into the old failed model  of   communities as passive recipients of state aid. Yet how to start?

If the adage ‘those who experience a problem are best able to solve it’ contains any truth at all, then we have to start tapping into the intelligence, skills and understanding of those who live with multiple challenges on a daily basis. And even then, the immediate and overwhelming need may not be the best starting point since asking the question ‘what do you need?’  may block any possibility of hope or the ability to imagine a different future.  Rather we may need to open  everything up with broader questions that envision and imagine a future quite different to the present:

“What kind of future do you want for yourself, your family, your community?”.

Such an approach rejects the needs/ deficit based model of the Public Sector approach- JSNA’s which produces a statement of needs and  prescribes services for communities who are seen as uninvolved passive consumers. An asset based  co-production approach  seeks to balance the identification of needs with the identification of assets and  answer the question: how can people help themselves and each other, while accessing the professional services they need to live independent and fulfilling lives?

But what assets? well, the lived experience and understanding of key challenges as I’ve already mentioned. The social networks and levels of trust would be another. Beyond that, the whole thing becomes murky and difficult to pin down when we try to apply this to communities with  high levels of deprivation.

There are two examples that I read recently that give a glimmer of light. The first is a discussion paper by the New Economics Foundation called Right Here Right Taking co-production into the mainstream. It gives the example of  an Australian project called ‘Local Area Co-ordination’ which focuses on people with disabilities .

A  co-ordinator links to between 50-60 people with disabilities and asks the question “what kind of life do you want to live?” The answer is usually ‘friendships’, a job, living independently; co-ordinators work with each individual to identify existing social networks and resources such as a churchgroup, library or local timebank.  Now this is a way of asset mapping which can be tied into existing community maps such as this one. In doing so, local area co-ordinators could ensure that existing maps are updated and expanded to give a richer picture of a locality. What is also so important about such an approach is that it introduces people into mixed networks; instead of linking into peer support groups composed of others with similar disabilities, usually in a day care setting,  that person is linked into networks of interest, activity and purpose whose members are composed of all ages and background. Silos are broken in more than one way.

In the Australian model,  the co-ordinator introduces them to other people, integrating them into existing networks. Funding and support is devolved to individuals and attention is  paid to maintaining existing networks such as family, friends and neighbours

The result has been a  complete shift away from residential care and drop-in day centres and the evaluation of the LAC service in Australia have demonstrated a 30 per cent reduction in costs as part of a move towards a preventative service with much lower levels of acute interventions and much higher levels of participation and enthusiasm from the people who use the service.

Could the same model be applied to other areas and challenges? to communities experiencing high deprivation as well as vulnerable individuals in a way that is enabling and empowering?

The second is really another approach to asset mapping based on the Ecomodo. It is really a platform to “ Lend and borrow each other’s everyday objects, skills and spaces with confidence”. Now what has lending a bike, ladder or drill got anything to do with asset mapping? Well it’s the model or concept I want to borrow, not the content. But even here I suggest there is a very real and practical way of building co-production and the support networks that can turn a community around. While it can be a difficult and awkward process introducing someone into a new network when they feel disempowered and have nothing to offer, the ice-breaker can be instead “do you have something you are willing to lend, a skill you are willing to share?” Lending  a ladder may not exactly seem like a big deal, but  that very act makes a connection that goes beyond the material object being handled. It ignites trust, gratitude and the possibility of further relationship that might not otherwise have happened.

This presentation proposes  a dramatically different analysis of our economic crisis. We have so far not looked beyond an economic analysis of the recession and the role of bankers and the whole banking sector in distorting and undermining the real economy.

Jeremy Rifkin is an American economist, writer and public speaker. What he suggests here is that

two events in the last three years which signal the end game of the Industrial Revolution based on fossil fuels.

The first event July 2008

The first event in July 2008, Oil prices hit a price of $147  a barrel on world markets and all the other prices across the supply chain for all the goods and services went through the roof. Why? because our  whole civilisation is made out,moved by and embedded in fossil fuels; it isn’t just petrol for the car. We grow our food in petro-chemical fertilisers and pesticides for the most part, most of our pharmaceuticals are petro-chemical based, all of our construction materials are fossil fuel  based from plastic to cement. Our synthetic fibre, power, transport, heat and light are fossil fuel based.

When crude oil prices  hit $120 a barrel, all the other prices in the supply chaing went up, we had food riots in 22 countries because 14% of the human race lives under $2 a day because the price of wheat, barley, rice and rye was doubling and trebling.

At $147 a barrel, people stopped buying because as he says “the entire economic engine of the industrial revolution shut down in July 2008…the collapse of the financial market 60 days later was the aftershock, they were related”.

He suggests that world leaders, business leaders, the media are still focusing on the aftershock, the financial crisis, not the earthquake.  The fact is that we have hit peak oil – as confirmed in an announcement last December by the International Energy Agency. Aggregate demand by the economic powerhouses of China and India was a factor in this – and the IEA figures suggest that further extraction of remaining reserves will cost several trillion dollars. He also predicts that economic shutdown will now happen with increasing frequency, roughly 4-year cycles.

The second event -December 2009 Copenhagen

the 192 leaders of world government sought to deal with the entropy of the industrial age – the CO2 gases  and we are now in the early stages of the 6th mass extinction of life on this planet with the possibility of a 70% extinction rate by the end of this century.

Whatever happens we need to move off carbon in the next 30 years with a road map that brings together the developing and developed world, based on a new energy regime. Two things need to come together: change the energy regime along with a commensurate communications revolution.

The internet revolution has already started to supplant the centralised, top down communications with its distributed, collaborative nature. Solar, wind, tide, geothermal energy are also ‘distributive’ in nature and more than enough to provide for our species.

The EU 5 pillar infrastructure for a third industrial revolution

• 20% renewable energy by 2020
• convert every building into a green micro powerplant- photovoltaics, vertical wind, geothermal heat pumps under the ground
• energy storage – hydrogen storage technology
• transform the power grid into an ‘energy internet’ software programme sends the energy across continents
• electric transport