Though Cowards Flinch

Decision time for the Labour leadership and deputy leadership election is upon me.

This is my final choice, barring very unexpected events before I actually do the online business:

Leader

1st preference: Corbyn

2nd preference: Kendall

No other preferences

Deputy leader

1st preference: Creasy

2nd preference: Eagle

No other preferences

The reasoning for my preferences can be summed up thus.

1) I take issue with a number of his stated policy positions, especially the emergent so-called Corbynomics of ‘People’s Quantitative Easing’, which I consider to be a sop to deficit fetishism.  He has also had pretty well nothing to say about empowerment of grassroots activists and local parties.  In isolation, the Corbyn offer is a disappointing one.

2) I am not, in my own mind therefore, a supporter of the candidate Jeremy Corbyn.

3) What I am a supporter of of the genuine grassroots movement which has made him a possible winner of the leadership contest.  I was wrong about Corbyn having no chance of winning, and that his candidacy was therefore a distraction from the real task in hand – the building of a grassroots movement.  As of now, the two have been combined – a grassroots movement has developed, and it looks like he will win because of that.  I have fears about what will happen to that movement now if the organisational building blocks are not put in place to sustain it (see below), but it would be illogical – and lacking due humility at my wrongness – to vote against the movement simply because it’s not been constructed the way I think it might have been.  Social movements are always and necessarily messy, and are undone as much by the needs of control freaks as they are by that messiness.

4) The organic development of a genuine leftwing movement, and my duty to support that in whatever way I can- currently outweighs my concern that, as and when elected, he will be surrounded by a self-regarding new Bennite elite which has little regard for the movement that got Corbyn to the leadership, and little understanding of how to empower local parties and the local labour movements, such that they are able and willing to push out beyond the narrow territory it now occupies, and develop a political space which extends beyond the current confines of state power.  If this concern of a takeover by a new elite is valid, it will fall to me and others to raise the alarm, and to combat it as best we can.

5)  I do not know if Jeremy Corbyn will be more unelectable in 2020 than the other candidates on offer.  Having failed to predict his current popularity amongst the Labour leadership elecorate, it would be foolish of my to predict whether he will be so bogged down by his ‘IRA-supporting’ (or whatever) past that he is unable to help get a leftwing voice heard at national level, or whether the dynamic of politics has changed so much that his perceived ‘authenticity’ will help him rise above all this.

6) I do not even know whether he will make it to 2020.  It may well be that a Corbyn PLP leadership is merely a stepping stone towards the leadership of a candidate for 2020 unsullied by any association with the worst aspect of Blairism.   There are several obvious candidates, come 2018-19, who might benefit from the work done under Corbyn to shift the Overton window to the left on what electability and credibility actually mean.

7) Nor, actually, do I care that much.  As of now, a Corbyn leadership stands as much chance as making countrywide electoral headway as the leadership of any of the current candidates; predictions to the contrary are largely made by people within Labour who failed, like me, to predict the current movement.   My vote is for the movement, not the person.

8) If Corbyn does not make it to 2020, it may be interesting to see if Liz Kendall can shake off her association with the elite Progress project, and return in 2018-19 -if Corbyn does not make it through – with some of her more interesting ideas fleshed out properly; currently she has failed to do so, and a promising middle section to the campaign has been outweighed massively by a disastrous start and and disappointing end.  I give her my second preference merely to signify that she did say one or two interesting things, which the other candidates did not.

9) My choice for deputy leader is easier.  Stella Creasy is the only candidate thinking creatively about how the labour movement can really engage with the new political dynamic in the country; while I disagree with her on crucial aspects of what power and empowerment actually mean over time (I do not think she grasps that the Iron Law of Oligarchy applies to social movements to), she is at least trying.  I do not think she will win this time – and I fear the kind of quasi-statecraft in which Tom Watson will engage – but then nor does she. This campaign is really about setting down markers for the next one.   Angela Eagle is my second preference, as she is a patently decent peacemaker within the party, though the deputy leadership will need more than that.

Abstract

Starting from a case study in public procurement devoid of any sense of reality, but full of the twisted logic of managerialism in times of austerity, I move onto an assessment of how such ridiculous development in public service (non)-delivery might act as a catalyst for a new surge of associative democracy institution building at a local level, which might then act as a bridgehead to wider autnomous re-professionalisation and trade union focus on service function, in the spirit of ‘English pluralist’ activists/writers like RH Tawney, JN Figgis and Paul Hirst, and in keeping with the insights of implementation theorist Michael Lipsky.  I also consider how such efforts might be supported by a social work profession in crisis and a Labour party in, erm, its own crisis.

(This is a consolidation with very minor changes of two previous posts, written some weeks apart.)

Part I

Here’s the Reverend Giles Fraser on how the police are now the social services of last resort:

The police have to sort stuff out that other people don’t know what to do with, or haven’t got the resources to deal with. Like vicars, they are often the last stop in a game of pass the parcel.

Ah, if only that were true.

This is an excerpt from a specification for a contract recently awarded by a local authority in the North of England:

External Family Support Service contract 

The Contractor [to a NW local authority] will provide intense targeted support at short notice to families with multiple and complex needs often in crisis situations where there is a significant risk of children being accommodated by the Local Authority.

The Contractor will be required to provide Family Support hours as and when requested by the Local Authority. Specifically the service will be required outside of normal office hours.

The Contractor will be expected to provide the above hours across seven days per week, including Bank Holidays.

Work includes:

Care for children / young people in their own home in situations where parents may be intoxicated or recovering from minor surgery etc. and unable to meet their children’s needs for a short period of time.

Conduct work with parents to raise their awareness of the impact and consequences of their chaotic lifestyle and behaviour on their children’s physical and emotional welfare.

Leaving aside the bizarre juxtaposition of intoxication and minor surgery as impediment to safe parenting (possibly a copy and paste error, possibly just ignorance), I think it might be agreed that this is quite a challenging contract: available at all hours, going into potentially volatile domestic circumstances, ensuring child safety and then – presumably when parents are sober enough to listen – putting them to rights on their responsibilities.

Yes – as I had to advise a group of senior social workers I showed this excerpt to at a conference – this is a real contract, really awarded by a real local authority, really recently.

How much, then, do you think the contract might be worth, expressed in £ per hour of provision?

When I asked the same group of social workers what a local authority might expect to pay for this work, taking into account of all the management, training and supervision requirements set out in the contract, and assuming that this would be a lone worker service (not, incidentally, something the police would envisage), the first estimate was £100 per hour of intervention.  That seemed reasonable, they said, given the complexity of the service.  After some ‘lower, lower’ exhortations, they settled on a measly £20 per hour.

This is what the contract specification actually says:

The maximum price permissible to fit within the Council’s affordability envelope is £16.00 per hour for the support and £8.00 per report.  This is due to the on-going budget pressures the local authority is currently experiencing.

When I told them the real price, the social workers thought I had made it all up.

But that’s not quite it.   The tender exercise also invites bidders to say by what percentage they will reduce their price if they want to get paid on time; this ‘early payment discount’ is an increasingly common feature if local authority contracts.

The upshot is that this local authority has outsourced vital emergency social services work to a provider who may be getting as little as £14 per hour for complex and potentially dangerous work on a 24/7, 365 days a year basis.

Let’s be frank.  The service set out in the specification simply cannot be delivered at that price.  It’s just impossible.  The provider will know that.  the local authority knows that (indeed the excerpt above more or less acknowledges it).  So what will actually happen is that the contract will be ‘delivered’ on paper, but not in the real world.

In one scenario, the provider staff member may turn up at a flat, they have been referred to by the social services Emergency Duty Team (EDT), who got a call from the police.  The provider staff member will call the police, on the basis that it’s too dangerous, and leave – having recorded an hour on her timesheet.  The police will call the EDT, just as they did an hour ago……   The vulnerable children may or may not be removed to a ‘place of safety’ under Sec 46 of the Children’s Act 1989.  In all likelihood, they won’t be, because within this ‘unreal’ contract there is provision for making the existing place safe.

In fact, in terms of Giles’ concept of “social service of last resort”, it’s no longer the police – it’s a service which doesn’t really exist.

This is just one contract.  I could point you to others quite like it.  I was told by one local authority commissioning officer dealing with contracts for the implementation of the expanded duties under the Care Act 2014 that there was “no room for quality in this one”: she just had to make sure the right target number of carer assessments etc. were ticked off.  When I wrote to another commissioner seeking a small expansion in contract value with a view to bringing real added value to it (this in family support), I got a copy-and-paste legalistc letter warning that we risked breach of contract if we did not comply with the terms.  No mention was made of what we were actually offering.

All over the country, providers are gaming contracts, cutting quality, cutting corners, because they have to.  Commissioners in their turn prefer not to know this is going on, because it’s easier that way, and service users won’t know any better.  This is a product not just of austerity, but also of a collapse of collective responsibility amongst public service professionals, who have been brow-beaten by their managers to the extent that reality is actually what your boss wants it to be, not what’s actually real.

But how do we try and make reality again? How do we turn back the tide of managerialism-of-the-unreal in a time of continued and even greater cuts?  Concrete labour movement and civil society organisation proposals come in part II.

Part II

In part I, looked at one particular example of how local authority outsourcing has come under such pressure – both financial and managerial – that contracts are now simply undeliverable; there has developed, I contended, a distance between what ‘exists’ in contractual form and what happens in real life.

The ‘unreal’ contracts of this type tend to concentrated on delivery of support services to the most disadvantaged.  The main reason for this is that those who receive (or don’t actually receive) these kind of services are less open to scrutiny and challenge than more universal services.  If a contract for bin collection is let and bins only get collected on paper, not from houses, there’s a pretty good chance that service users will make the local authority aware, and that subsequently performance will be questioned in overview & scrutiny by councillors.  If (to use another real world example) vulnerable carers of vulnerable people get a 3 minute phone assessment of their needs, thereby assumed to be insignificant (and cost-free), rather than the full in-person assessment they should have got and which should have resulted in a full support package, then it is unlikely that this will be picked up as part of a systematic but always inevitable non-delivery/gaming of the contract. The carers’ forum, established within the contract to make sure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen, is easy enough to skew, so that all that comes to it is a story of delivery success.

What, though, can be done about all this?  How can we put the reality back in outsourcing, given continued and ever increasing pressure on public expenditure? How, in particular, can we ensure that the most vulnerable service users are not exploited in this way?  This post seeks to explore some responses to this challenge, as well as seeking to locate these practical responses within a coherent framework for wider activism and empowerment.  As this is a Labour party supporting blog, it also sets out these ideas in the context of the Labour party and movement’s current process of ‘renewal’ (if its current internal debate can be termed such).

Here’s the kind of response I’d like to see.

I’d like to see groups of public service workers coming together, ideally though not necessarily (see below) using the existing institutional legitimacy of local Trades Councils, to develop and implement a programme of scrutiny of outsourcing arrangements, existing and proposed.   This Trades Council committee, strengthened but not dependent on service user input, should make it its principal job to assess the viability of contracts in terms of finances, likely quality of delivery and appropriateness of monitoring systems.

They should award themselves the authority – and that is the crucial concept to which I’ll return – to call before them commissioning managers, service directors/heads of department and where necessary Chief Executives to explain their decision making around how outsourcing contracts have been developed, and where necessary to justify their real world ‘deliverability’.  In the end, the committee should take a view on whether or not the contract as set out by local authorities (and over time the NHS, as ‘devo max’ starts to be implemented) is acceptable to the Trades Council.

Of course, the key questions now arise of  a) Why on earth local authority officers would subject themselves to such a process? b) Why would anyone in a position of local authority power take any notice of a decision by a Trades Council?

The short answer is that, initially at least, they may not. They may even laugh at the prospect.  I’ll come on to how this might be changed, but first I want to look in somewhat wider terms at what an attempt to set up this alternative decision-making process, under the aegis of the Trades Council infrastructure (where it still exists) is really all about.  Doing so – in the context of how power does and might work – may help in turn to determine what initial actions are appropriate in getting this kind of stuff off the ground.

We’re talking here about the establishment of a political institution which doesn’t have the sanction of the state and which, more importantly, contests the authority of the central state – via its sanctioned local decision-making process – to make decisions about how public money is best spent.   As such, we’re talking  about the kid of associative democracy championed by pre-warEnglish pluralist socialists GDH Cole and JN Figgis, and later championed, in the context of the authoritarian bent of the Thatcherite state, by Paul Hirst (pdf) before his untimely death.  In this vision of how society organises itself, the state has no a greater a priori legitimacy than any other form of social organisation, and by extension whenever the state seeks to impose itself as sole legitimate authority, it is open to valid challenge from any other grouping of people which chooses to assert its own legitimacy in deciding, say, how resources are allocated.  Such groupings might include the church (whose legitimacy as an association on a level footing with the state is at the heart of theologian JN Figgis’ work), but also those whose particular function and expertise brings them together as a group – namely the professions (in their widest sense) and the unions [1].

In practice such a political standpoint could translate, in the circumstances we’re dealing with, into the following kind of assertion: “we are a properly constituted body of public service professionals and we have as much if not greater right to oversee and scrutinise the local authority’s commissioning of services in this area, and it is our view that the service as currently commissioned cannot be delivered effectively/safely.”

From this starting point, establishing the right to be taken seriously by the local authority’s decision makers is a matter of establishing legitimacy with a range of ‘players’ [2], both within and beyond the local authority.  Clearly the use of the Trades Council institutional status may count for something, and it may be surprising what a forma letterhead and a ‘proper’ approach to the local authority can achieve, but there are a number of other ways, including through the Labour party structure (especially via councillors open to trade union persuasion [3]), through the voluntary, faith & community sector (VCFS) infrastructure and through local higher education links.  If that sounds improbable, then it might be worth reflecting on the effectiveness of the 1971 Scottish TUC inquiry into the Tory government’s attempts to annihilate shipbuilding on the Upper Clyde, the success of which was all built on establishing the external legitimacy of the inquiry.

The key thing to note about all these examples of how local workers and service users might establish associative legitimacy on a par with that of the (local) state is, of course, that they are just examples.  Every local area will have different circumstances, and different opportunities for building alliances focused on the establishment of ‘parallel legitimacy’.  While I favour the Trades Council as the existing organisational form which might take a lead on such ‘parallel’ institutional development, not least as engagement in this relatively narrow area of public procurement might act as a bridgehead to wider re-orientation of the trade union movement  [4], it may not be the most suitable one in many areas, especially those where Trades Councils simply no longer exist or where  they have been adjusted to other purposes over the years which just aren;t amenable to this new area of activity [5].

In terms of which professional groups might play a key part in this kind of calculated associative democracy initiative, where the focus is largely on defence of quality services for/with the most vulnerable, there is no better candidate than that of social work.  The social work profession is currently in a time of crisis [6], with its professional standards outsourced to a management consultancy firm, the College of Social Work (established in 2009 to develop professionalisation)forced to close in September, and a whole new training regime being swiftly imposed through theFrontline programme [6], with the intention that future social workers will wield a limited range of intervention tool to ‘sort out’ troubled families.  The old concepts of social justice, and the need to see struggling families in context, are being brushed away as an irrelevance to the immediacies of modern social work, and the proponents of those old concepts as academics interested only in preserving their comfortably ‘ivory towers’ existence

In the face of this onslaught, social justice-oriented social workers face a choice: fight a no doubt heroic but almost certainly losing battle on the current accreditation and training terrain, or beat a deliberate retreat and take up the campaign for social justice social work on different terrain.   The organic emergence of the Social Workers Assembly from the wreckage of the College of Social Work, with its intent to challenge the state’s intervention in their professional standards, could turn out to be a leading example, at national level, of the kind of parallel legitimacy organisation I advocate, but it is likely only to be able to do this by developing its legitimacy at local levels first; working with other parts of the labour movement, and with campaigning organisations like theFamily Rights Group [7] in areas where it holds expertise, and in a way which demonstrates that it is able to (re)-establish social work as a profession which, like medicine, can and should be both self-governing.

In the end, whatever groups of public service workers, trade unionists come together around te establishment iof a new decision-making institution of the type proposed, I think there should be two wider aspiration, beyond establishing initial legitimacy.

First, as noted, it should be seen as a bridgehead to greater union/professional engagement in service design, in a way which takes the labour movement beyond the current narrow focus on terms and conditions, and (back) towards the ideal of trade unions as safeguarders and promoters of quality service provision in its own right (and with an ever expanding conception of what a public service is).  I have written more about this here and here.  In ideological terms this might be described as unions taking a Tawney turn, in their active attempt to take from the forces of managerialism the right to direct resources towards the best possible social function.

Second, and closely related to this, should be a conscious attempt to help public servants re-orientate their own working lives, so that – in the terms Michael Lipsky used and which the PCS used to seek to practice – they become advocates for those service users, rather than more or less alienated from those their profession used to serve.

Of course, none of this insitutional legitimacy, and the acceptance of a trade council’s right to veto or adjust an outsourcing contract, creates more money for councils to do tender properly.  Tha’s the brutal reality of a Tory government. What it does do, though, is highlight the way in which many councils are having to/choosing to squeeze contracts focused on services to the most vulnerable, less than other areas of expenditure, precisely because the poor and vulnerable have had, to date, less capacity to resist (and because they vote less).   This in turn creates some space for trades councils etc to push local authorities towards more innovative social financing arrangements of the type advocated here, and in many other thinktank forums, but so far massively underdeveloped because of a political risk aversion to the kind of complexity that such ‘downstream savings’ require (see my post here for more on this).

Finally, where does the Labour party – in its current soul searching/holding out for a hero mode – fit with all this.  In terms of the leadership debate, Jeremy Corbyn has not yet engaged with this area at all – hence the lingering doubts about whether his is a solely state-oriented socialism.   If he does win, it is to be hoped that the process of re-orienting the Labour party’s resources towards the kind of community organisation advocated by Stella Creasy – though she too needs to reflects on the contradictions inherent to her (and Liz Kendall’s) view of power   – will be near the top of the to-do list.  In practical terms, this might mean enabling/encouraging CLPs to work with and resource emergent or re-emergent trade councils (remembering of course that trades councils cannot constitutionally affiliate to Labour), or with other institutional developments.  This kind of grassroots resourcing, funded through an extended NEC CLP Improvement Fund, should take precedence over the proposed Diversity Fund, which is a distraction from the real job in hand, and which simply fuels the Westminster-centricity of the party.

More likely, of course, is that whoever leads or deputy leads the party will prove to be a disappointment when it comes to internal party and movement development.  That goes with the territory.   In reality, local parties – along with any local bodies and people they can develop alliances with – are going to have to do it for themselves.

Notes

[1] The legalistic principles (Laski, esp. chapter 1), and the historical reality of state formation by violence (Tilly) that underpin the doctrine of associative democracy are my preferred underpinning to my proposals for the development of institutions with parallel legitimacy of the state, not least as they coalesce with a more explicitly Marxian analysis of the state as an agent of capital, and therefore one which needs to be undermined through these ‘parallel legitimacy’ means or more directly.

However, it is also worth pointing out – perhaps in the interests of strategic alliance buildingbetween the left and (more intelligent) Conservatism – that associative democracy is also consistent with the basic tenets of communitarianism, and even with the kind of reformed ‘Big Society’ programme now advocated by people like Danny Kruger.  From this perspective, it might be argued that the kind of parallel democratic structure advocated here acts as a corrective to the current ‘rights v responsibilities’ imbalance.  The old Big Society programme, now rubbished by the left and earlier advocates alike, can be seen as massively imbalanced towards the responsibilities side of the bargain, with local communities and organisations getting all the crap that goes with coping with the cuts, but none of the rights that could have gone with that.  (We”ll leave aside here that a key failure in both communitarian and Red Tory/Big Society thought is the essentialistassumption that positive communities are just ‘there’ – an assumption arugably even less validthan it was when it was first dreamed up, or emerged from faith-based discourses such as Catholic Social Teaching)

[2] See my earlier post on strategic action fields and the development of links to organisations with ‘mutually realisable interests.

[3] Trades Councils’ constitutions do not allow for official affiliation with the Labour party.

[4] I have written before about the wider potential for modernised and reinvigorated Trades Councils.

[5] In my own area, South West Lancashire Trades Council changed its remit over the years so that it runs to all intents and purposes like a small charity, focused on debt advice.  This is not a criticism of the people who have taken it in that direction in response to an identified and unmet need, and it is quite possible with appropriate support from the TUC that many could re-emerge with new purpose and energy.

[6]  For evidence of the hostility between the ‘new young Turks’ at Frontline and other social work educators, see its CEO’s “get out of the way” attack in Progress magazine, and the response.  The choice of Porgress magazine as a place for the initial attack is not a coincidence, since it was Progress, and in particular its head honcho Andrew Adonis, who were responsible for making Frontline happen, via a compliant IPPR (which hot-housed Frontline) and a Coalition government delighted at the managerial, anti social work ‘blob’ approach being promoted by Frontline.  The coup has been, to date, astonishingly effective.

[7] Declaration of interest: I sit on the advisory panel of the Family Rights Group’s Your Family, Your Voice project, which is seeking to drive its work to more local level, though it is early days.