Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 100)
TUESDAY 30 NOVEMBER 1999
VIVIEN LOWNDES,
STEPHEN LEACH
and LAWRENCE PRATCHETT.
80. Did people think they learnt something through
this process?
(Vivien Lowndes) This will come out of
the case study material. That is not the sort of data you can
get out of a survey.
81. If I can just link that to your chart 8.
If you were presented with an outcome where 20 per cent said a
strong influence and 20 per cent said little impact, then unless
you go on to the next stage and explore how the 20 per cent that
say one thing differ from the 20 per cent that say the complete
opposite that is of little impact.
(Lawrence Pratchett) The problem is you
are getting a very crude summary.
82. These are crude questions.
(Lawrence Pratchett) This was a summary
of written responses that we got from people, not tick box-type
responses. I think the question asked was about the effect on
policy as opposed to other things. They responded particularly
to how it affected final decisions and people did put things like:
"We have learnt an awful lot about how to do it better next
time" and all that sort of thing. They did talk about how
the citizens seemed to enjoy the process of being involved, how
it had changed the views of councillors in terms of public participation,
those sorts of things, which were much more effectively explored
in the case study material than in this. This was simply a reflection
of what its impact was in almost a qualitative sense in terms
of did it affect the final decisions that you made or not and
people gave us fairly realistic answers in relation to that.
(Vivien Lowndes) I think what you learn
from this is the variety of experience. This morning the debate
was about does it work or does it not. It is very hard to answer
that question in a general sense because of the diversity of experience
represented in that chart. I think it is also a useful chart in
the sense of helping us with the kind of "motherhood and
apple pie" issue. One might expect that a survey instrument
would find local authorities telling us that these initiatives
were very influential. In actual fact, we found out that many
local authorities will themselves accept that there has been little
impact, and that allowed us to probe some of the reasons why that
was the case. I think what Lawrence has just presented really
adds something quite new to a debate that is generally held in
a very gung-ho spirit about how these initiatives will inevitably,
if we could only get everyone to take them seriously enough, add
to the quality of our democracy. That is a question for politicians,
and for researchers to try and provide evidence to help them debate,
but it is not a neutral statement by any means.
(Lawrence Pratchett) We also asked questions
about how many of these initiatives were trying to deal with problems
of social exclusion and what local authorities encountered. The
things that concerned us most was that only 30 per cent of local
authorities recognised issues of social exclusion as a problem
and in front of you you have got a list of the various issues
which they identified, which I will not run through as that does
not hold any great surprises. The issue of social exclusion is
only just starting to be addressed by local authorities. Part
of the public participation problem is a secondary issue to most
authorities. That is probably an interesting note to end on.
83. Thank you for taking us through that. I am
sorry for the constant interruptions.
(Vivien Lowndes) That is fine. We shall
move on and ask Steve to give us a flavour of the main issues
that came out of the qualitative work in our case studies, through
which we were able to probe some of these points that had emerged
from the survey data, based on our interviews with councillors
and officers. Steve?
(Steve Leach) I will talk to you about
the softer data, the 11 case studies, the detailed interviews
and about our overall impressions of the kind of things a range
of authorities were doing. Perhaps I could start by responding
to the two issues Mr White raised earlier. I found a chart on
page 33 of the longer document which deals with the average number
of participation initiatives by authority type. The county are
nearly up there with the new unitaries and London boroughs with
9.8 participatory initiatives. I think that confirms the impression
from the visits to the three counties that we made in the case
studies. You are right, basically there was an increase in activity
around the time of Local Government Review that reflected the
counties trying to make a persuasive case about "look how
we can link with the smaller units beneath". I think that
illustrates a general point, which is basically there will be
various times in the life of a local authority where there are
external impacts like that and clearly the Government's current
agenda, which is very encouraging of participation, we would expect
to generate a lot more participatory activity. The second point
you were making was about how you had to present this to your
colleagues. I think that is nicely confirmed by a section that
starts: "Strategies for enhancing public participation. 'It's
all in his head'—informal approaches to strategy,"
where we write: "However, it was commonly observed that,
while the leader recognised the importance of enhanced participation,
the strategy was 'all in his head"'—maybe it should
be his or her head—"A 'softly softly' approach was
often pursued because of nervousness or downright hostility among
the wider majority group." I think that probably illustrates
the point that you were driving at. What I have done in the two
overheads that have been circulated is try and pick out nine or
ten things that seem to me to be particularly important in relation
to local authority perspectives. The point I have just made about
the attitude of leaders in many of these authorities is actually
also considered in the first point I make in our submission, i.e.
a challenge to the representative role of councillors. I know
you had John Stewart here this morning and John Stewart will have
presented his view that public participation is not a challenge
to representative democracy, a view which I share, but that was
clearly not a view shared by many of the councillors that we talked
to in the case studies. Leaders generally were more sympathetic
to the participatory agenda. The majority of councillors had a
certain antipathy to the principle of public participation on
two counts. First of all, it did challenge their conception of
local democracy—"I was elected to be a representative.
Why do we need all this participation? The constituents knew what
I stood for. They voted me in," and all that kind of stuff
which I think is predictable, but a potential barrier to the extension
of these. Also there was a suspicion that when you did conduct
participation exercises and relied on voluntary sector groups,
or other formal groups as your token participation, then what
you got was the "usual suspects", to use a much-quoted
phrase. "Who do they represent? They have got this formal
status, but we suspect that they represent a couple of men and
a dog," and that kind of thing, so that was an attitudinal
thing.
Helen Jones
84. Did you find evidence in that that councillors
are seeing it as a system used by leaders to bypass their own
groups?
(Steve Leach) No, I think leaders were
too astute to give that impression even if it was so. There was
a clear perception on the part of many of the people we interviewed
that their enthusiasm for this agenda was not shared by their
colleagues and they recognised that they would have to present
things in a certain way. I do not think we ever found any direct
evidence that leaders took this rather machiavellian approach.
(Vivien Lowndes) I think the only machiavellian
approach was in the sense of a "softly, softly" approach,
developing a range of approaches so that they almost developed
their own momentum and fellow councillors would learn to love
them or get on with them. I think another important point there
is that, for many councillors, participation initiatives were
really seen as part of the managerial agenda and they tended to
be led by either central policy officers in the case of the flagship
citizens' juries and so on, but also through the wealth of activity
going on via service departments, whether it is housing, social
care or leisure - all the range of activities local authorities
are involved in. I think sometimes it has suited leaders for that
kind of managerial gloss to remain in place, but I think we would
probably argue that to fulfil the real potential, there would
be a need for the connections to be made between the representative
political process and these other ways of communicating with the
public.
Mr White
85. Was it not a question that many leaders would
use that so that it was a fait accompli by the time the
group caught up with what was happening?
(Steve Leach) Yes, exactly, so in two
years' time, "Look where we have got. We have got a participation
strategy and you did not know you were developing it".
Helen Jones
86. You said that one of the complaints you have
highlighted, and it is one I have heard, was that it is the usual
suspects: "You are consulting people from different groups
and we are not sure who they represent," but did you find
any evidence that would indicate whether that was or was not a
true perception?
(Steve Leach) Difficult. I think what
we did find out was that some authorities recognised that potential
problem and made serious attempts to fill the gaps, as they saw
it. Other authorities did not and basically had the attitude:
"We offered the opportunity to participate and whether groups
take advantage of it is up to them," so, in other words,
they were not prepared to go further.
(Vivien Lowndes) I think it comes back
to the issue that was raised this morning about the range of different
approaches to participation and the need to choose an approach
that is fitting to the question you are trying to ask, and then
to see how different approaches relate to one another. It is certainly
true that there are certain approaches to participation that focus
on "the usual suspects". If you have an ethnic minorities
forum, you need people to come who represent loosely, or perhaps
more accountably, different communities in the area. Now, you
might also be aware of the limitations of that and make sure that
you hold regular focus groups recruited on the street to talk
to people from minority ethnic groups who have got nothing to
do with these organisations. You might adapt that further to make
sure that you were also holding focus groups in the homes of local
Asian women, as John Stewart mentioned this morning. So I think
"the usual suspects" are there and in fact can be valuable,
as long as they do not represent the totality of the participation
effort—that the limitations of that approach are recognised.
I sometimes feel that "the usual suspects" should be
treated with a little bit more respect actually!
Chairman
87. We must have the Whips here to see what they
think about this!
(Steve Leach) The last point about the
attitude of the more sceptical councillors was that yes, they
probably go along with better information to the public and they
will go along with the more routine consultation in relation to
services, which Lawrence has clearly illustrated was well established
by the time we did the survey. What they were much less happy
about were the things like referenda where there was a distinct
kind of unhappiness amongst most councillors about that as a challenge
to their representativeness and the kind of patchy introduction
of citizens' juries also reflected in the view that they certainly
did not want to get into that kind of thing and that if a citizens'
jury decided X and the local authority wanted to do Y, they would
be in serious difficulties.
Mr White
88. Did you do any analysis of where the local
party had actually said it in their manifesto and the councillors,
if you spoke to them, just carried it forward and it was coming
from external pressures rather than any internal ones? I choose
the example of the Milton Keynes referendum on council tax where
it was a manifesto commitment, none of the councillors wanted
to do it, but they had to do it because it was in the manifesto.
(Steve Leach) No, we did not come across
that kind of thing, but what we did come across was councils deciding
they did not want to carry out a participation exercise because
something had been in the manifesto. One of the reasons for not
consulting is: "There is no choice here. We are determined
to do this. We have decided we want to do it and it was in the
manifesto, so why consult when really we are not going to change
our minds?," so it was more a certain amount of evidence
of that kind. Linked to this point about the softly, softly approach,
although the leaders that we spoke to recognised the potential
benefits of the strategic approach to participation, their argument
was, first of all: "The time is not right for this. We need
to develop a bit of momentum first," and also when we were
doing the survey, an ad hoc approach was more appropriate and
they said basically: "There is no well-established body of
theory or practice on participation," and they were quite
right in that, "so all we can reasonably do is try out various
things, see if they work and gradually develop a body of experience
that is based on that." Now, that then raises the issues,
which is the fifth point on that particular page, of whether they
were actually learning because it is fine, the principle, as long
as you actually do learn, and I think we have to say that the
evidence is a bit patchy there. We found very little formal evaluation
of the participation initiatives and a certain amount of more
informal learning. However, it was clear that in some authorities,
with Salford being an example of this, there was one particular
directorate which has been very innovative in terms of developing
scrutiny panels with a lot of public involvement to look at things
like cleaner streets, issues like that, but other directorates
there were not always wholly aware of what the other first directorate
was doing, so I think there is probably quite a long way to go,
as you might expect, in terms of internal learning. So there was
a view that: "Yes, its purpose is sensible. Let's work out
what methods work in relation to what purposes," but a slowness
in actually getting there. We have made the point about consultation
overload and working with the public and I will not labour that,
except to say that I think there is a particular concern now amongst
local authorities, and this reflects other research I am doing,
in relation to the community planning process. As I understand
it, the new Local Government Bill or some subsequent Local Government
Bill will set up the requirements for both counties and districts
in the two-tier system to develop community plans. Now, there
is a real problem about public participation in broad policy documents
like that which I will illustrate in a minute, but there is certainly
a danger of consultation overload if the county consults on one
community plan in April and the district three months later consults
on what looks like a very similar set of topics. One can understand
that local people get fed up with that and there is a certain
amount of evidence that there has been a problem around that.
89. Is there research on how the community plan
pilots have been developed?
(Steve Leach) There is, but I do not
know what the results are.
(Vivien Lowndes) There is a study that
was done, sponsored by UNISON in fact, before the election.
(Steve Leach) We identified a certain
number of circumstances from case studies where consultation and
participation were felt to be inappropriate, and that is by both
politicians and officers, and basically there were four situations.
One was a clear manifesto commitment where it was felt that there
was no point in consulting because that commitment had been made,
so maybe something like the idea of introducing a park-and-ride
system. If that was a clear manifesto commitment, you would not
consult on the principle of it, but you might consult on the details
of it later, and therein lies another problem. Then there was
a sense that if public debate would create or exacerbate public
tensions over very controversial things like the siting of travellers'
camps, public participation is best avoided, or at has at least
to be managed very, very carefully because you know the kind of
headline-catching results that will follow from that. Then there
was the case of where there is no real alternative, ie, there
is a legal requirement, so the fact that schools are to be contracted
out in Islington, Islington would reasonably feel that there is
no point in consulting about that because they have no choice
about it because Ofsted has told them to do it. There is a fourth
category which is where the public really has no real interest.
In relation to work we have been doing on the new management structures,
local authorities tried to consult the public about the exciting
new cabinet arrangements there they are planning to introduce.
They have frequently drawn a colossal blank. Very few people have
turned up to meetings, there is no interest in the topic and they
have concluded this is not a topic on which the public has got
much interest. I think that has interesting implications for the
consultation part of the Local Government Bill when it comes through.
The next point is evaluating outcomes, the point about does it
make any difference. Lawrence has presented the research evidence
on that. The question is not so much did it have an effect but
for whom did it have an effect. Many of the more interesting consultation
exercises are about schemes or proposals that are bound to divide
opinion. So if you consult on a town centre pedestrianisation
scheme and work out what has been the outcome, the outcome is
almost certainly that some of the groups involved are very positive
about it and others will be very negative. That is in the very
nature of the proposals. I think we need to move away from the
idea that you can please all the people all of the time. You clearly
cannot. Also, we had the argument, which was very difficult to
measure, that councils are also concerned, not so much about the
short-term impact of did people get what they wanted, but the
long-term impact of have we developed a climate where social capital
is being developed, where the public are better educated about
what they want to do. There is a long-term benefit here that seems
to be just as important to some of the pioneering councils as
the short-term, did the public get what they want and I am sure
that is right. Then there is the point about the danger of raising
expectations. Some of the work that authorities have done on needs
analysis or community planning for those authorities that had
pioneered it before the legislation had hit real problems of getting
wish-lists from local surveys which they soon realised it was
absolutely impossible to meet given the financial circumstances
of local authorities. So there is a real worry that by doing certain
types of participation initiative, tell us what you think the
needs of this area are, what are the priorities, you will end
up with a rod for your own back, i.e. thanks very much but we
cannot afford to do anything about large numbers of these problems
that we have raised. Also, when authorities get down to particular
proposals, even where the public have accepted the principle of
something like a park-and-ride scheme, for example, the recognition
that when you come up with specific proposals you will get real
objections and it is no use saying: "But you all accepted
the principles, did you not?" because you are not going to
suddenly get that followed through to agreement about a particular
site. Community planning, as carried out by authorities like Leeds
in the work that we did, has very real difficulties in relation
to generating public interest. I think the lesson we drew from
that is the public have got a reasonably good track record of
responding to specific proposals, particularly if they are interested
or affected, but try and involve them in some sort of more visionary
exercise, a strategy for a local authority, community plans (when
they come in) and it is a lot more difficult. So Leeds, realistically,
really struggled to get a significant number of responses to their
community plan. They used all sorts of different methods, focus
groups, leaflets left in council offices. They ended up with 10,000
responses which they felt was a reasonable number, but, quite
honestly, they had to struggle to get those kind of responses.
Then there is the point we made earlier about responding to apathy
and social exclusion. There was a real distinction between authorities
who recognised it was a problem, tried to do something about it
and those who just said we have given them the opportunities,
if people do not take it that is their problem. So things like
the well-known tendency not to participate on the part of young
people. Some councillors said they would get over this by consciously
attempting to set up new councils, youth forums. There is a bit
of a question mark over what the composition of those youth councils
is. Obviously if it is dominated by articulate sixth formers,
that does not get at the problems of young people in deprived
areas. But at least some authorities were making the attempt,
others less so. Area arrangements seemed to us to be a particularly
interesting and potentially valuable vehicle for increasing participation.
So those authorities that had set up area forums, or area committees
and tried to use these as a way of developing networks with local
interests and local people, basically reported very positively
on the impact. At best they do bring in a lot more local participants
to decision-making processes or consultation processes. It is
interesting that a number of the innovative authorities in new
political management structures are trying to balance the power
of the cabinet with increased power to area committees, assuming
that is permitted. I think there is an issue about how this whole
participation agenda is going to work in local authorities when
they move to cabinet scrutiny panels, area arrangements and the
challenge is to make the links between the different elements
of the new structures. The final point is that we became aware
that there is real potential for authorities to marginalise the
participation agenda. Even though the government is clearly going
to produce some duty on councils to participate, there are a minority
of councils who are really not interested in this agenda, who
do not want to do it, who will do the minimum. I am not arguing
that they should be more prescriptive, but if it is very very
general there will be authorities who do the minimum, who demonstrate
that they are at least doing something and do not enter into the
spirit of this part of the democratic renewal agenda.
90. Is not one of the problems if you do it prescriptively
that it is easy to go through the motions without achieving anything?
(Steve Leach) I agree with that. I suppose
what we are saying is that authorities that do not want to do
it will always find ways of marginalising. They will either go
through the hoops of a formal process or take advantage of the
generality to do very little.
Chairman
91. You mentioned Salford and how they were being
very enterprising in one part of the council and other parts were
not, they did not know what each other was doing and so on. We
had a discussion this morning about whether there should be some
sort of under-pinning centre for these initiatives. What about
at the local authority level. Are there not different arguments,
one which says this should be a normal part of the culture and
that everybody should do it and one which says it should be segregated
out as a separate activity from a nucleus that will then make
sure that all this happens properly? What emerges from the work
that you have done on that?
(Steve Leach) I am really speculating
here on impressions rather than giving you sound survey evidence.
There is an argument that you need a central focus initially to
get this thing going. If there are things happening, but particular
initiatives are not being shared, one vehicle for doing that is
to set up a unit with some sort of overall responsibility for
this agenda. Once you have done that and it is working and it
is embedded in the culture of a local authority you do not need
that unit anymore. It is perhaps a two-stage process.
(Vivien Lowndes) Just taking up that
point, I can think of a couple of initiatives that I studied at
Leicester City Council. It was clear that a central policy unit
had been very important in gathering information in from the outside
about the range of techniques, about getting going a citizens'
jury on the budget process and also a youth council to try and
involve young people. However, in evaluating the first year of
operation of both these initiatives they felt that they were really
hampered by being "Jacks-of-all-trades", and that what
they needed was people from the finance department to be involved
in preparing and collating the information out of the citizens'
jury on the budget. Obviously those finance officers are going
to need a lot of training and persuading and, similarly, on the
youth side our "Jack-of-all-trades" central policy officers
are increasingly feeling that they do not have the experience
of youth work that would enable them to get the most out of facilitating
interaction among young people and ensuring that young people
from different groups were involved. I think that evolutionary
process is very important.
Mr White
92. You said earlier on about leaders. Is there
any evidence that once those leaders have gone there is a backsliding
back to the old ways and participation in the agenda disappears
because the initial impetus, from wherever it came, the officer
or the councillor—-
(Steve Leach) Not in the case to the
authorities. I can see the potential danger, but I think, given
the use of the agenda, what we tended to find was leaders who
picked up and thought it was important and tried to push it. Perhaps
a follow-up study would reveal some backsliding.
(Vivien Lowndes) I think there were some
dangers identified in strategies identifying too much with an
individual, in that obviously the individuals moved on, and moved
round, and even went off to be Members of Parliament and so on!
I think that was identified in relation to this issue about the
lack of formal evaluation, the fact that so much of the learning
from these experiences was highly personalised, and that it was
very important for local authorities and the wider local government
community to be able to capture what was being learnt.
Chairman
93. I am conscious of the fact that we are getting
a bit depleted. We have got you for longer than just an hour,
but I wonder would it be awful if I suggested that we could rattle
through your bit?
(Vivien Lowndes) Absolutely. In fact
I was going to suggest, given the time, that I could move straight
on to some conclusions. The remaining section really was to look
at our data around citizens' views of participation possibilities,
and practice where they have been involved, but, as you say, I
could provide a short briefing on this on another occasion.
94. Do you want to leave us to muse on these
points because I think we can probably unscramble them in our
heads and we can talk to you again, if that is all right, so could
you give us some concluding thoughts and then we will perhaps
have a few quick questions after that.
(Vivien Lowndes) I am happy with that,
yes. I will use my five minutes then just to round up here, and
I do not feel excluded or marginalised! These are just a few reminders
of some of the main conclusions out of the work. In terms of the
current use of participation methods and the trends, the main
point to make is that there is both an increase in volume and
an increase in diversity of participation methods being used.
The take-up of participation methods is not a party-political
issue. However, there is more activity, not necessarily better
activity, but more activity in urban areas and areas with strong
political leadership. The objectives and the perceived benefits
tend to be service-oriented, although we recognise that there
are other agendas within local government regarding longer-term
citizen education and empowerment. I return to the point that
I made this morning about the need to cultivate a demand, nurture
a demand, for participation as well as to design a supply of accessible
and appropriate initiatives. The second point is about strategies.
I think perhaps one of the conclusions from our research is that
rather than an increasing number of guidelines and protocols,
what is important is the encouragement of strategic approach within
local authorities, and perhaps central government, to ensure that
different methods of participation are related to one another,
that data is pooled and that very keen attention is given to the
relationship between involving the public and the deliberation
and decision-making of representatives. In many of our case study
authorities, it was just simply unclear how information from participation
efforts would actually reach decision-makers. Thirdly, there is
the point about selecting from the wide range of participation
methods that is available and our main point is about perhaps
the inevitability of ad hoc approaches to that, and the limitations
of grids that say: "If you want to do this, do that."
They can be good food for thought, but our local authorities were
very positive about the need for flexibility, the importance of
anticipating unexpected outcomes as well as intended ones, and
the importance of local ownership, the development of portfolios
of participation methods that are locally owned and appropriate
to local circumstances. To take up the social exclusion point,
there is the need to adapt methods to target and work with different
communities rather than seeking some elusive goal of representativeness
or balance within every initiative. Now, with panels and polls
and so on, we can attempt to make those statistically representative,
but in terms of the more deliberative or consultative methods,
it may well be that it is the diversity of approaches rather than
their internal design that is going to help us crack the issue
of hearing a wide variety of voices. The fourth point is about
levels of participation and the issue around social exclusion,
the issue that more participation is not the same as more democracy.
Here issues around numbers are important, but also who participates,
the importance of working through local groups and local leaders,
but also trying to broaden out the participation opportunities.
In terms of outcomes and evaluation, we found from the survey
that local authorities and indeed citizens themselves, when asked,
identified improvement to services as the main benefit of participation.
However, qualitative research picks up on the point raised by
Mr White that it is actually often in the learning about the broader
needs of communities and learning on the part of citizens themselves
about the work of the local authority, the point John Stewart
made this morning, that benefits are identifiable in the context
of actual initiatives. I will just finish up with the five principles
that are on my final overhead. These are principles for thinking
about policy-making and institutional design in the area of public
participation. This sort of language can become jargon, but certainly
these were the principles that emerged from our process of research.
The idea of "fitness for purpose" is that traditional,
consumerist, deliberative approaches are all relevant and we need
to select participation methods to meet different objectives and
to reach different citizens—the point which Anna Coote and
others made this morning. There is the importance of developing
a strategic approach to ensure that methods complement each other,
that evidence is pooled, that we do not indulge in consultation
overload and also, crucially, that there are mechanisms whereby
information from participation could potentially influence decision-making.
To go on to the next point, there is the need for some monitoring
or critical evaluation of the way in which that link is made,
the need to clarify the costs and benefits of different participation
initiatives and, as Steve has said, for it to be possible to consider
benefits in relation to the development of citizen competence
which is the resource, of course, for future participation initiatives;
as well as in terms of service improvement, whilst that will always
rightly be primary goal. It was very striking, in talking to citizens,
the stated enthusiasm at least, even in the focus groups that
were randomly selected, for processes of citizen education. The
lack of knowledge that people felt they had can translate in opinion
polls simply to a lack of interest. But I think, not perhaps too
romantically, there is a latent demand that can be tapped through
not just waiting for people to come forward, but by moving through
the spectrum of informing people about opportunities, even inviting
people and perhaps even rewarding people for being engaged in
participation initiatives. The last point is the importance of
developing inter-agency approaches and issue-led approaches to
public participation both in order to ensure a joined-up approach
that does not duplicate efforts, waste resources and so on, but
also really to capture the benefits from public participation
in terms of the joined-up government agenda. It is surely citizens
who are the potential authors of joined-up government in that
all research says that citizens do not care at all for the demarcations
between different agencies, the departments within them and so
on, so I think there is immense potential here in trying to link
those two different aspects of the modernisation agenda - the
need to engage with communities, but also the need for joined-up
government.
95. Thank you very much indeed for that. Perhaps
we have just a couple of minutes left for tossing things around,
bearing in mind that we are not losing you for ever today. I just
have one question and it is an unworthy one which is the one I
tried on John Stewart this morning, which is about the sort of
supply side of this. When you talked to authorities, did you ask
them about how satisfied they were with the quality of the provision
of people to undertake the exercises for them? What I am trying
to get you to tell me about is here we have all these authorities
now, all the graphs are going up, they are all doing these things
and they have all got to find a way of doing it somehow. They
have got to buy services in. I do not know whether you are in
the market for doing these kind of things, but some universities
presumably are and some private companies are. Did you get any
sense from the people you surveyed, local authorities, about the
quality of the supply of the people that they were getting in
to do these exercises?
(Lawrence Pratchett) We have had quite
a few people approaching us. We have not done any consultancy
work in this area of advising local authorities on specific public
participation issues or whatever. What does appear to be happening
is that most local authorities have a sense of doing it on their
own because they want this ownership, but they want advice and
they are looking for advice rather than consultancy and they tend
to be using local government networks particularly. I would imagine
that if a local authority is thinking in terms of referendums,
for example, they will go to Milton Keynes and say: "Forget
the spin, what did you really learn?," because they are quite
realistic about this. They tend to be officer-led at that stage
rather than member-led. That is not to say the initiatives do
not come from members, but there tends to be a lead officer who
is charged with building this thing up.
Mr White: It is interesting that some of the key
early people like Robert Hill, who now works in the Prime Minister's
office as a special adviser on local government, and Steve Bullock,
who is now advising the Local Government Association, both worked
for Capita at the time and there tend to be a number of other
people who had the experience of local government but who also
had a particular interest in this agenda and who tended to lead
that agenda in the early days. There is a lot more now, but in
the early days it was those kind of people driving an agenda.
Chairman
96. If I am a local government officer or councillor
and I have either got to do this because I am being told to get
programmes funded or because I want to do it, but whether I want
to set up a people's panel or a focus group or run a citizens'
jury, whatever I want to do, I have got to find the mechanism
of doing it.
(Lawrence Pratchett) I think we need
to look at that graph that we looked at before which had time
and resources as being one of the big inhibiters. It is very hard
to convince hard pressed members to give funds and getting consultants
in for your participation when you are having to close a school
and it is low profile in that respect.
97. When people are in that position do they
commission one of these organisations to do it? Are you saying
they do it themselves?
(Steve Leach) It depends on what they
are doing. I think some of the more innovative and demanding methods
like visioning exercises, like conflict resolutions or serving
on citizens' juries and some of the more elaborate surveys, local
authorities would not feel competent to run or at least not initially,
so they would go to outside consultants to facilitate. I have
been involved in four citizens' juries where I was brought in
as an "expert" to help a local authority run things
that they did not feel they had the staff expertise to do. So
in some of these initiatives outside consultants are being drawn
in to help them with the particular difficulties. A lot of the
more standard traditional stuff local authorities would feel eminently
confident of doing themselves, running public meetings, much of
the straightforward survey stuff, complaints systems done internally.
So perhaps there is a distinction between some of the more novel
innovative methods and some of the more traditional methods.
(Lawrence Pratchett) Even where there
are things like citizens' panels, a lot of local authorities are
doing those on their own simply by talking to other authorities
and getting a feel for it, "I think we need 1,000 people
on our citizens' panel" and then learning as they go.
Mr Browne
98. I think this imaginary local authority or
councillor or officer will be one step forward and two steps back.
Were I that officer and faced with the need for some form of public
participation and had this enormous menu of diversity in front
of me, did your qualitative analysis or discussions tell you which
route to go down, when do I use a traditional method, when do
I use a consumerist method, when do I use a deliberative method?
(Vivien Lowndes) There is no shortage
of guides to doing participation. My shelves are weighed down
with them, so I can only imagine what it is like in the central
policy unit of a local authority with even a modicum of openness
to this issue. I think a much more interesting question is the
one that you raised, which is the receptiveness of people inside
to the messages in those guides. We certainly encountered this
great determination that it should be "our approach"
to undertaking an initiative, even to the excesses of trying desperately
to find a different name for a citizens' jury so it would not
look like we had taken an idea off the shelf. There is this hostility
to the idea of taking things off the shelf! However, the processes
of learning do tend to be relatively informal. Like you say, it
is qualitative, it is anecdotal. When you go and visit, say, the
London Borough of Newham with a very active youth council in what
is a very disadvantaged area, you almost get the response: "Oh
gosh, not another person wants to know about the youth council!"
There is this great movement of people between—I think this
does really involve the most active authorities—local authorities
in order to find out what is been happening in different places.
I think that the activity of the IDA, who I think the Committee
will be hearing from, is very important in this respect—to
try and lead and shape that process through various learning groups
and improvement processes. They have got the intention to develop
an "information warehouse" or database of best practice
in this and other areas. It will not just set out "this has
been done here, and this has been done there", but will introduce
an evaluation framework that will allow local authorities tapping
into that information to come to some judgment about what is most
suitable for their needs. So, yes, the guides exist and the grids
exist for trying to choose your initiative, but in reality our
research suggests that the actual choice of initiatives is much
more ad hoc. There is a downside to that, but the positive
side is that it is the informal processes of networking and learning
that seem to be the way in which information is spread around
these approaches. In terms of consultants, I did not hear any
negative reactions to the role of consultants. Most of the authorities
that we undertook the qualitative work with would have had some
interaction with consultants or academic advisers. Rather the
reverse. There was certainly an opinion about learning new ways
of doing things from outsiders, the importance of bringing in
outsiders in order to challenge local authority officers, particularly
around language and traditional ways of doing things. There were
some wonderful anecdotes from Leicester about the citizens' jury
on the budget, about the discomfort of local government officers
when the public wanted to keep waiting the Director of Finance
because they were not ready to hear his evidence. The local authority
policy officer was very honest in saying that she had found that
very very difficult because all her professional norms and her
normal ways of working were telling her, "No, no, we cannot
let this man wait", whereas with the help of the consultants
who were facilitating the process she was learning to allow the
public in that situation to set the agenda—not just in terms
of issues but also in terms of process.
(Lawrence Pratchett) The vast majority
of authorities are still in an experimental stage with these methods.
They do not know what they are going to get out of setting up
a citizens' panel in a clear way. I do not think there is this
sort of strategic choosing between saying if we want to do this,
which tool shall we use. I think there is a desire to have a citizens'
panel and see how effective it is and it is experimental and it
does mean that there are bad experiences as well as good experiences
from it, but that is part of the learning process. It was certainly
clear when we did our case study work and now when we go back
and talk to the same authorities on an informal basis they keep
on saying to us how they wish we would come back and do the interviews.
We would not seem quite as unsophisticated as we did then. This
experimental phase is progressing but it is experimental. I do
not think there is any hard and fixed rules that you can say "if
you want this then you choose that tool, if it is a nail use a
hammer and if it is a screw use a screwdriver".
Mr White
99. Is there any evidence that any authority
has moved beyond the pilot stage?
(Vivien Lowndes) There are certainly
authorities that have quite well-developed strategic documents.
I think there is evidence that an authority like Lewisham, for
instance, has both a repertoire of methods and a developing history
of work using different methods. The work on Leicester's environmental
consultation is quite well known and it was very striking how
a long time-frame is important to begin to assess the use of different
methods. They have been involved in this for the last five or
six years and you can see how they went beyond an initial visioning
event of the sort that Steve was saying perhaps had limited use,
or from which it was hard to elicit responses. They went from
that to a polling experience and then into developing specialist
interest groups involving different stakeholders, and then to
doing presentations to voluntary organisations and getting their
response to the emerging agenda; then they linked the whole environmental
agenda to a "millennium partnership" involving civic
leaders. A process that had run along over a number of years and
which, using an ad hoc, flexible approach rather than anything
more rigid, had actually built up a whole strategy for consultation.
(Steve Leach) But they are the exception.
100. They are still not in social services or
housing or anything like that.
(Vivien Lowndes) No, quite right, exactly,
and anybody who knows the Council, as you do, would shake their
head because they know how partial that experience is and I think
that it is this issue about strategy rather than protocol - how
can Leicester, for example, diffuse that experience across its
own organisation? I think there are a lot of problems even within
individual local authorities around that issue, apart from thinking
about the wider local government community, or extending those
lessons to central government.
Chairman: I think we should wheel the chief
executive in and go through this repertoire business to see how
these thought processes went on and how the decision went on on
the ground. Could I thank you very much, all of you, for your
time this afternoon. I am sorry about the lack of projector, lack
of heating, and I am sorry for everything else, lack of Members,
but, despite that fact, you are a class act and I think it has
been extremely useful and having it also in document form is very
useful, so thank you for all of your time and effort in doing
this. We very much appreciate it and I am sure it will contribute
greatly to what we say eventually in our report, so thank you
very much indeed.
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