Examination of witnesses (Questions 400
- 407)
TUESDAY 15 FEBRUARY 2000
DR MARIAN
BARNES, MS
SOPHIA CHRISTIE,
DR SUE
BROWNILL, MR
NEIL MCINROY
and MR DANIEL
DOBSON-MOUAWAD
Chairman
400. I think we have a very positive proposal
emerging here. On Saturday night instead of merely ticking six
numbers, we can tick some questions as well. Excellent idea!
(Mr Dobson-Mouawad) There is another matter which
is addressing the point which you have raised. I was smiling at
the time purely because I was thinking how difficult it is to
devolve power. This is what we are talking about when we are talking
about true participation, just to devolve a certain amount of
power whether from central to local, from local to neighbourhood,
and this is the issue at the heart of the decision-making process.
Do those already in control of the power want to devolve their
own power? Up to now, a lot of the institutional barriers which
we face are to do with people, whether elected or officers within
an agency, who believe it is their technical preserve or their
mandate to actually make the decisions and not devolve the power
or the process to the communities. This is essentially one aspect
which we are trying to challenge.
Mr Lepper
401. I wondered, Chairman, whether Dr Brownill
could expand a little on the point that she made? I understood
you to say, Dr Brownill, there were changing attitudes within
the SRB regime to the notion of participation and how you measured
it over the seven years it has run. Is it possible to sum up some
of the main changes you have noticed? Could I ask another question
to anyone who wants to answer it which has only just come up?
None of you so far until Mr Dobson-Mouawad's contribution just
now have talked about the role of information technology in the
participation process. All of our discussion in an unstated way
has been about meetings and people going to meetings to a greater
or lesser extent, or taking actions like voting in a referendum
or in an election on a particular day as a one-off event. I wonder
if collectively you have any thoughts about the information technology
link?
(Dr Brownill) Firstly, on the SRB side, initially
a lot of the questions you have raised were levelled at it, that
it was just paper consultation, partnerships were not meaningful,
but the bidding guidance from central government has been quite
key in changing that. For example, there is what is known a bit
ominously as Year Zero in which a scheme can have a year in which
they do not have to meet any of these outputs which they talk
about, they can actually spend that year building up the local
community to be able to participate more or getting the information
they need. So that is one element of change. The other element,
as I say, is the way some, not all, of the Government Offices
for the Regions in their monitoring visits to the partnerships,
have been very keen to look at how they are actually operating.
So that relationship between the regional level and the initiatives
has been very important. Also there has been a lot of interchange
amongst organisations at community and local level. People have
wised up basically and they have started to learn things. There
is another issue as well about capacity building. We often talk
about capacity building solely for the community for the excluded,
but capacity building is about making everybody involved in the
democratic process aware of where other people are coming from.
So some of the issues we have been talking about have been people
excluded from some of the processes going on, why are they excluded,
people sitting around the table being aware that the community
sector, the private sector, the public sector have very different,
what some people have called, styles of power; ways of operating.
It is about building an awareness around that, about how the local
authorities operate, can involve or exclude and change the way
decisions are made on that basis and the way that simple practices
like a consultation exercise can be changed. About info-tec, I
will just give two examples I know of. It is maybe not on computers
but the Housing Action Trust in Castle Vale in Birmingham have
a local radio station for their initiative which is putting out
information. In Oxford there is a private venture which is the
Oxford Channel, which is a TV channel, which again puts out local
information. That is two possible ways.
(Dr Barnes) I have come across examples of telephone
conferencing being used particularly with older people who find
it difficult to get out of the house; it is an opportunity for
connecting people up and enabling them to have conversations.
This is not on technology but it is about challenging the notion
that all that we are talking about is people going to ever more
complex meetings. Some of the most innovative and successful initiatives
about public participation have involved people actively being
involved in projects working together, whether that be in planning
for real exercises where people are working together to "vision"
what a community might look like, or on specific local innovative
arts projects or whatever. It is actually getting people engaged
in activities, working together, so it is not just about meetings.
Chairman
402. Could I focus on one thing as we end? We
touched on it just now and IT relates to it as well. In your evidence,
Dr Barnes, you talk about the need for the implementation of what
you call a coherent strategy, and of course we are all in favour
of coherent strategies for all kinds of things, but it seems to
me that is potentially inconsistent with the horses for courses
approach which you have all been urging upon us, the need for
local variability, flexibility. How on earth can you have a coherent
strategy across the system when everything is so particular?
(Dr Barnes) That is a response to the question which
gets asked time and time again, how do we do it, what is the best
way of doing it, and the response is, it depends what it is you
want to do. It does directly link back to the horses for courses
issue. It is about saying that as long as public participation
is seen as a special project, as something that is one person's
responsibility to do, that does not really impact on the way in
which the whole system works. It is always going to be marginal,
it is not really going to make any important difference. So the
notion of a coherent strategy is to say that there needs to be
a recognition that there are different purposes to be served here,
that it requires different approaches to engaging and involving
people in order to deliver on those purposes, that it is not simply
somebody's job to do this but this is how the system works. That
is what we are talking about in relation to a coherent strategy.
403. Let's assume that you have persuaded all
these doubters over here—
(Dr Barnes) Unlikely, but we will go with it for a
while!
404.—and we all think this is a very good
thing and it all needs to be developed much further across all
public services, what we would like to end with is some sharp
thoughts on what therefore we might do to ensure that outcome.
There are lots of initiatives going on, interesting things here
and interesting things there, but implied in your observation
there is incoherence. If we wanted to have a coherent approach
across public services, what would we do?
(Mr Dobson-Mouawad) You have to first of all quantify
the strategic and also the statutory role that different agencies
have to participate in the first instance, so you have to quantify
what Government already expects of different statutory agencies.
That is the first point. There are two aspects to this. There
is a statutory aspect and then there is a non-statutory aspect,
and we are pushing the system into the non-statutory aspect because
clearly the statutory aspect is defined already in legislature.
The key aspect here is, once you start looking at the non-statutory
aspect—and that is not to say that that aspect should not
be statutory in due course—we have to reflect that any initiative
which is genuine will have certain generic good practice profiles.
Clearly you cannot have a blue-print, you cannot say, "These
are the key things you have to do", but what you can certainly
do is produce a check list of what is essential, what is desirable,
and create a weighting system against the different types of work
that you do to actually create the matrix of assessments.
405. A good practice guide?
(Mr Dobson-Mouawad) Not purely a good practice guide,
because we want to get to the point where at the very least whatever
gets produced ought to act as guidance not purely as a good practice
guide to put on the shelf.
406. Who should produce this?
(Mr Dobson-Mouawad) There is no doubt in my mind it
has to be from the central administration, government.
(Ms Christie) There is an issue here which falls into
the joined-up government debate, which you may or may not want
to get into, but one of the barriers to effective working on the
ground is that the different departments tend to use different
terminology and have different expectations over timescale and
style of working which, at the front line when trying to work
across local agencies with communities and individuals, can get
very confusing both for front line workers and for the community
on the receiving end of it. So there is perhaps a fairly simple
intervention there and maybe the kind of neighbourhood renewal
social exclusion unit work could be the focus for that—some
consistency of terminology and understanding of what we are talking
about. The second issue which I feel is very important is that
we do not set up this opposition between representative democracy
and participative democracy. I find that a very unhelpful opposition.
It is a construct. What we are talking about is getting the best
out of our democracy, and participation and supporting participation
needs to be part of that. If local councillors are given a message
which says, "This is a threat to you, this is about undermining
representative democracy", then we are not going to achieve
very effective participation on the ground.
(Dr Barnes) There is another quite practical thing
which I think is necessary and that relates to the education and
training agenda. Particularly thinking from the perspective of
the Health Service, the way in which health professionals are
trained is very important in terms of their perceptions of themselves
as, "We are the experts, any attempts to question our expert
knowledge is not legitimate." The way in which health and
other professionals can be trained to understand their role as
one of shared decision-making with their patients, with their
service users, I think is fundamentally important in terms of
starting to deliver on this.
(Dr Brownill) We are not at the stage of having an
over-arching, monolithic structure for consultation across a whole
range of services yet, and it probably is not feasible. I teach
housing managers and community care is very much about the interface
between housing, health and social services, and just getting
those agencies together and to agree an agenda and a language
is very difficult and takes a lot of time. I think it is much
better to think of starting at these points where we can try and
build up those things like regeneration, like certain of the health
services, but having an over-arching consultation is too hopeful
at this stage but it might be a long-term aim.
(Dr Barnes) Picking up the cynicism about the likelihood
of there being a substantial change in the training of health
professionals, we in our department run multi-disciplinary postgraduate
courses for mental health workers and service users are involved
in the educational training of those health workers. The example
I was talking about with the work of frail older people in Scotland,
some of the older people who are members of those panels were
invited to take part in training GPs by the local university.
There has been discussion in the context of the patient partnership
strategy led by the Department of Health with the Royal Colleges
about involving service users, patients, in professional training.
So it might feel like this is something which cannot be shifted,
but there are chinks. I think you are going to get a new generation
of health professionals who are currently undergoing training
who are going to have very different views about this sort of
thing.
(Mr Dobson-Mouawad) From my perspective, the development
of participation of communities in the regeneration process has
purely come about as a result of Government guidance on regeneration
processes and bids and so forth. If it was not for that guidance,
I do not believe we would have got to this point. This is why
I identified that the future is also reliant on further guidance
to take the process forward.
(Dr Brownill) It is about having key principles rather
than a blue-print.
(Mr Dobson-Mouawad) Exactly. It is not a blue-print
but it has to have guidance.
(Dr Brownill) And they have to be principles where
there can be intervention to monitor and ensure they are actually
happening.
407. The little ditty which came out of the
1960s was, "I participate, you participate, we participate,
they decide." A conjugation of the verb. Why do you think
it is that those who have been around this issue for a long time,
enthusiasts for it, when asked, describe it in glowing democratic
terms; but that meets such wholesale cynicism about the very idea
of participation on the ground? Is it not the case that bad participation,
of which there is much, gives the whole idea a bad name?
(Dr Brownill) I think it comes down to power. I think
it is also about this issue of clarity. Too often people have
been asked, "What do you want out of this? What you say will
happen" and it does not. I think it is much better to say
to people, "We are consulting on this but the decision is
going to be made by these people, this is how your views are going
to be taken into consideration", rather than building false
expectations. What some people call apathy is often as a result
of that.
(Mr Dobson-Mouawad) I think realism is the key aspect
here. If you ask somebody what they would like and they produce
a shopping list, of course their expectations have been heightened
and they are not going to get what they are being asked. The key
aspect is to consult and to engage in the process within parameters.
If you actually ask them, "Would you like more money being
spent on X, Y and Z?", of course they will say, "Yes,
yes, yes", but if you say, "We have X amount of money
and you have to decide whether it should be channelled into this,
this or this", you give more credence to guiding the way
of investment.
(Dr Barnes) One area which we have not talked about
and it has just struck me is the way in which children and young
people are developing more opportunities in the context of schools
to experience participation—the development of school councils,
junior SRB boards, a whole range of initiatives—whereby
children and young people are being invited to act as citizens
at a very early age. If we are thinking about looking to the future
rather than seeing what has been the situation in the past, I
think this is going to be a really important set of experiences
which young people are going to have which hopefully will change
the sort of response you have described there, because people
are going to grow up expecting this is part of the way things
are happening.
Chairman: That is probably a positive note on
which to end.
Mr Townend: Or a depressing note!
Chairman: Thank you all, both for your written
evidence and for coming along and talking to us today. We have
had a very interesting and helpful conversation. Thank you very
much for your time.
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