Shifting the role of the state to tackle hardship

At a time of deepening hardship, people are coming together to help each other. The first two instalments in this blog series have looked at themes of strengthening social infrastructure, and building connection, resilience and power in communities. But this alone will not shift the dial on hardship - indeed thinking that it can was a mistake of the Coalition Government's approach to the Big Society.

For maximum impact, work in neighbourhoods and communities must be strengthened and supported by local and national policy. It must also be met by a like-minded local state – one that puts people and relationships at the centre of its work. This is the focus of our final 4 blogs in this series, which are connected by themes reshaping frontline services, supporting people’s strengths and aspirations, and how national government can help this work move faster and hardwire a different way of working.??

Supporting people and enabling communities to thrive??

Several of our authors point out hardship is not an experience that neatly fits into our system of siloed services. The challenges people face can be complex and interlocking, for example spanning health, mental health, isolation, housing, debt and access to the right benefits.

Jessica Studdert argues powerfully that "standardised and transactional methods of state intervention have never yet succeeded in breaking cycles of poverty and destitution." She makes the case for reshaping services so they are based on people's assets and capabilities, pointing to the work of Gateshead and Camden Councils. You can read more here

Toby Lowe and Mark Smith take a deeper dive into the work in Gateshead, outlining the 'liberated method' of relational public services. Here a caseworker takes a high-support high-challenge approach to supporting people with multiple unmet needs. It works because it's a relationship rooted in trust, built by being present, attentive, pragmatic and effective at dealing with quickly solvable issues (such as sorting out benefits). Once people are stabilised, the role of community connection becomes critical to supporting people to move on. You can read more here .

In my piece I make the case for a reformed and strengthened local crisis support system to be at the heart of local efforts to protect people from hardship in England. This ‘Back On Your Feet Fund’ would bring together piecemeal funding streams to create a single pot that can be used strategically to provide access to cash in an emergency and fund in-kind help, advice and support. Read more here .

Alongside how to redistribute funds to the worst-off people and places, Sarah Longlands in her piece urges us to think differently about wealth, how we accumulate assets and who gets to own them. She points to the local authorities, metro mayors and NHS bodies that are using their employment, procurement and development functions to support the building of wealth in their communities - places like Manchester City Council, Birmingham NHS and Islington Council. Read more here .

National policy change to unlock potential

This work is happening in the margins and against the odds at the moment, but the impact could be so much greater if we supported it to move centre stage. Our authors make several suggestions for how national policy change could support this to happen.

I argue for central government to take inspiration from the focus and coordination brought by major community renewal programmes of the past, such as the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal - although what is needed today would look different.

Central government should invite some pioneering places with high levels of deprivation to participate in a shared challenge to protect people from hardship and build a foundation for thriving. This would be a way of drawing on all the resources available in a place and seeking to coordinate them behind a galvanising shared priority, supported by some additional resource from the centre, a focus on learning and a feedback loop to national policy makers.?

But Jessica Studdert , along with several other of our contributors, rightly points out parlous state of local government funding and finance after deep and sustained cuts that have hit the most deprived places hardest. While there is clearly a need to revisit local government funding, she makes a compelling case for a national shift towards pooled place budgets with local democratic oversight. This would enable funding to flow to where it is needed according to local priorities, breaking down Whitehall silos and creating shared accountability across all the public services in a place.??

Finally, and equally importantly, Toby Lowe and Mark Smith highlight the deep roots of our current approach to planning, resourcing and managing public services. For relational and person-centred approaches to flourish they argue we need to rewire public administration. That means shifting away from the current dominant model of New Public Management, with its preference for top-down performance measures and competition, and instead bringing in a Human Learning Systems, approach that prioritises collaboration and learning.?

Harnessing the art of the possible

Looking across the blog series, the ideas presented by our authors are not just abstract constructions, but ideas based in the real world. They demonstrate that, at a time of deepening hardship, people are coming together to help each other. But for maximum impact that work must strengthened and supported by local and national policy, and met with reshaped public services that put people’s strengths and aspirations at the centre.?

There is an opportunity here to be grasped by a government that wants to protect people from hardship and support them to thrive.

In case you missed it...

You can find my first two posts on this blog series here:

Tackling hardship in neighbourhoods

From community connection to community power