We’ve heard a lot recently about the ‘Big Society’ – but what does it mean for civil servants? Lord Wei, the government’s new adviser on the subject, tells Suzannah Brecknell that he wants to see a fundamental shift in the work of government.
The Big Society has been variously described as a people power revolution; a fig leaf for public service cuts; an ecosystem or coral reef; and a brand which has, as yet, very few products. These last two thoughts come from Lord Wei, recently appointed government adviser on the Big Society, who used them in his maiden House of Lords speech and at Civil Service Live respectively.
When we meet to discuss what Big Society means for civil servants, Wei adds another analogy by likening it to the internet. The web puts information at everybody’s fingertips, he says, but it plays out in many different ways in life and business. Big Society is about “power on your doorstep”, and the challenge for civil servants is to “take that principle of transferring power [and ask]: ‘What does that look like in policy terms? How do we do that in a way that protects the vulnerable, that transfers power in as smooth a way as possible, given the fiscal crisis that we’re in?’”
Civil servants will have a role to play in shaping the products of the Big Society brand – but it should not, Wei argues, reprise “what may have happened in previous governments: a press release, a pot of money and ‘here’s exactly how to do it’.”
Instead, civil servants should be “turning away from looking at what the centre wants us to do, and looking more towards what the citizens want to do”.
Getting involved
A former social entrepreneur and McKinsey consultant, Nat Wei – who was elevated to the Lords alongside his new appointment – says his new role has three parts: he’s a cross-government champion for Big Society and “a resource available to officials and ministers” as they think about working with civil society; he works with the Office for Civil Society (OCS) in the Cabinet Office to “strengthen the capacity of civil society to take up the powers that we’re looking to give them”; and he liaises with external partners, including the Big Society Network (which he helped to set up before joining government), to build “a sense of excitement and momentum and mass engagement with Big Society”.
This final role involves not only supporting projects like the Big Society Day – a planned celebration of volunteering and social action – but exploring how to “make it easier for citizens, even those that right now don’t feel it’s for them, to go down the journey of getting involved; understanding the motivations for doing so and why they’re not doing it right now.”
Wei’s own motivation for leaving the very capitalist world of McKinsey in 2002 was, he says, a sense of adventure rather than a burning social conscience – though his first act after leaving the consultancy was to set up the charity Teach First, which works to tackle underachievement in inner-city schools. “I like to be in the forefront of change and to be entrepreneurial,” he says. “Starting up new things and being at the interface of two different worlds has been always very interesting to me. It’s only when you get into [social enterprise], with creating change as a hook, as it were, that you discover there are other really important issues about poverty – and, in the case of education, underachievement – that fire you up.”
Though he is clearly committed to social entrepreneurship, it’s hard to imagine Wei as someone who gets ‘fired up’. His manner is thoughtful and rather measured, even when it’s clear he’s talking about an area or project that inspires him – such as his vision for building social capital, transforming the fabric of society, and renewing interest in social and democratic processes.
Getting on board
Given his own introduction to the field, Wei is well aware that many people have personal rather than altruistic reasons for getting involved in social action. Some may volunteer because they’re lonely, says Wei, adding that “social isolation is one of the biggest challenges we face as the population ages. There’s a lot to be said for getting involved with Big Society, to get to know your neighbours and others in your area.”
Civil servants may also have non-altruistic reasons for getting involved: at a time of job uncertainty, for example, joining a mutual or co-operative to provide public services (see below) could be a positive way to take control of your career. Or civil servants might consider a role as a community organiser: individuals who work with and on behalf of a community to facilitate change. These people, says Wei, will play a key a role in encouraging all parts of society to get involved; “In challenging the vocal to listen, and in encouraging the silent majority to get involved and to form their own groups”.
Before the election, Cameron pledged to train 5,000 of these individuals, and Wei has since said he would like to see an “army” of organisers across the country. They would not be funded by government (they need to remain independent, says Wei) but could be supported by social enterprises, through contributions from various community organisations, or by taking jobs with community organisations such as schools or churches.
Would Wei like to see civil servants leaving shrinking departments in the next few months and becoming community organisers? “Absolutely. I think there are significant opportunities out there,” he replies. “The most obvious is to explore setting up a co-operative or mutual or getting involved with social enterprises.”
Wei advises looking at more businesslike avenues, too. He mentions a social business he was involved in, which linked start-up franchise businesses to potential employees among young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs). “That’s a real business making real money, creating real jobs,” says Wei – and the support of the franchise operator gives them additional support as they get established. Wei believes that such business-support projects create a real opportunity for adventurous civil servants: “You need this combination of skilled people, which obviously most [civil servants] are – who have a social mission, which many civil servants do – entering the private sector and creating jobs through social business.”
Building capital
What will Big Society mean for the day jobs of those who remain in the civil service? Broadly, he says it means considering more carefully how your policies affect civic society – which may in future include a larger number of co-operatives, mutuals and new service providers as well as established charities and social enterprises. Wei also mentions commissioning and policy design: officials will have to find effective ways to get citizens involved with commissioning; see consultations as a process of co-creation rather than just “an exercise in hearing people and codifying their thoughts”; and work to involve communities which struggle to engage with standard delivery models.
“A lot of my work at the moment is looking at those communities that are not yet even ready and capable of coming together and applying in a paper-based way for any kind of support,” says Wei. “How do we design government in such a way that it’s even possible for those who have less capacity, or less current ability to participate, to do so? That’s going be one of the things that’s very challenging.”
How might we do that, in practice? Betraying Wei’s roots as a consultant, his answer starts out seeming rather theoretical. “There are a couple of ways. A lot is about understanding outcomes,” he replies. “So a really big outcome for me – one that’s perhaps not well understood – is social capital itself.
“The fact that people could come together with people who aren’t like them, forming groups to pursue a social purpose, in my mind is an amazing outcome. Evidence has shown that it helps to improve health, reduce crime and unemployment, and raise aspirations – so if [social capital] was the outcome of commissioning processes, you’d have a revolution.”
Building social capital, he says, makes it possible to create community solutions such as time-banking, which “involve sections of the community that might not normally be involved, because they may not be the most vocal or have the most means to participate in technocratic processes”. Time-banks allow participants to ‘deposit’ their time in the bank by giving practical help and skills to others, in turn ‘withdrawing’ their time when they need something done themselves; Wei himself is a member of one in Hackney.
Wei encourages civil servants to set aside funding at the front end of a process to consult with communities; he suggests as a good example the Connected Care model, which is looking at joint budgets and community-driven service design in housing, health and social care.
Being braver
Wei acknowledges that it can take courage to “work together and facilitate in that way”. Co-creation of services can imply a blurring of accountability that may make civil servants feel uncomfortable, but he suggests that we as a society should reconsider our views on accountability. “The only reason why we as civil servants want accountability for what we do is because our bosses, our ministers, have been elected by the people to administer their money. If the very same taxpayers on the front line are saying: ‘This is how we’d like our money to be spent’, and you’ve put enough safeguards in there to make sure that the poor and the vulnerable do not suffer as a result of those choices, then you’ve actually sped up the democratic process and that gives you a sense of accountability.”
More courage will be needed for “the frontline civil servant to understand that actually accountability now lies with the people, and the people also have to have some joint responsibility if it goes wrong”.
On a practical level, he suggests weighing up the risk of losing money against the potential savings and innovations that more engagement with citizens could bring – especially given that much of this work will be “quite small and on the front end – it’s not big contracts, generally”. Investments could be phased to spread the risk, he adds: “If you trust a community or neighbourhood with a very small amount, and then if they can demonstrate that they can spend that well – perhaps using the internet as a cheap and easy way to demonstrate they are making progress – then maybe they can get more [funding]”.
Finding the money
Funding itself will be a major challenge for Big Society. As departments and local authorities cut budgets, public funding of the third and voluntary sectors is drying up. In a House of Lords debate in June, Wei cautioned councils not to accept devolved powers and freedoms while cutting grants to “effective social enterprises [simply] because they represent external costs which are much easier to deal with than internal ones such as staff”. Those that do not pass on some of their new-found powers “deserve scrutiny and challenge” from the centre and local media, he said.
However, it is inevitable that funding will shrink from both central and local organisations – and part of the government’s answer is the Big Society bank. This is one of the ways in which the OCS is seeking to strengthen the capacity of civil society, says Wei, along with training for community organisers and grants for deprived areas to help develop social capital.
As well as the bank – which will be created using funds lying in dormant bank accounts, and offer capital funding to charities and social enterprises – Wei has also spoken of the need to encourage the public to actively invest in social projects. One model for this kind of investment is the ‘social impact bonds’ launched in March this year by investment fund Social Finance. The bonds will fund organisations working to reduce re-offending rates of male prisoners leaving Peterborough Prison. If the work reduces re-offending by 7.5 per cent or more, investors will receive – from government – a share of the long-term savings.
Wei describes this model as a useful way to invest in preventative action in the current fiscal climate; but he also says that we need to conceptualise money in a new way. Rather than taking “a narrow, economic view of money” based purely on financial returns, we should harness the other motivations which shape how people invest; these, he says, “can allow us, even in the context of a more fiscally-constrained environment, to tap into forms of social investment that you might not normally be able to tap into.”
For example, bids for investment could play on people’s desire to ‘belong’ to something, or to invest in change: “Why do people invest in venture capital?” he asks. “It’s highly risky, you’re probably going to lose your money, but they’re excited to be part of a change.” This can make social investments a good way to fund innovative projects “which can be harder to do using the traditional financing or PFI mechanisms”.
Making your own space
I ask Wei what single question he would like civil servants to consider in order to support Big Society. “How do we resource people and remove barriers at the front line?” he replies. “How do we get more budgets down to the communities to genuinely allow citizens to help to direct and prioritise both spending and, where they can put in their time, the assets that they have available?”
“In some departments,” he continues, “if you devolve money and power down to that level, you feel a bit stripped bare, because what is there left for you to do? But actually there’s a huge role for you to play. The civil servant can become almost like a social venture capitalist; suddenly you’ve got a thousand flowers blooming.”
The challenge, then, is to identify the healthiest and most productive flowers, and help them to scale up by bringing in third-party funding and support from within government. “That’s an exciting role, I think, for a civil servant; one beyond just passing [policy] down and risk management,” says Wei. “It’s a really exciting role for the 21st century; to enable the frontline and help create the framework in which you can thrive.”