Big Society - Small Minds - Charles Crawford

David Cameron made a businesslike case in the Observer today for his Big Society initiative:

The first objection is that it is too vague. I reject that. True, it doesn’t follow some grand plan or central design. But that’s because the whole approach of building a bigger, stronger, more active society involves something of a revolt against the top-down, statist approach of recent years.

And neither is it about just one thing. Rather, it combines three clear methods to bring people together to improve their lives and the lives of others: devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny; opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve; and encouraging volunteering and social action so people contribute more to their community.

So the big society doesn’t apply to one area of policy, but many. For example, if neighbours want to take over the running of a post office, park or playground, we will help them.

If a charity or a faith group want to set up a great new school in the state sector, we’ll let them.

And if someone wants to help out with children, we will sweep away the criminal record checks and health and safety laws that stop them.

My libertarian heart rises several notches at these words – someone at long last articulating the moral case against centralised collectivism in this country, and offering a different way of looking at social problems.

Yet … I have a nagging anxiety. Namely that even after a ‘community’ or a ‘neighbourhood’ is defined for Big Society purposes, the whole issue turns on how decisions are taken and then implemented. And that is fraught with complications.

One way of looking at the way a small community works is to imagine a group of people marooned on a desert island – how might they agree to run things and to settle disputes?

The usual objection to this approach is that it is too artificial – even if the desert islanders came up with some sort of model scheme, it would have no relevance to modern society with all its inherited interests and expectations.

Maybe, maybe not. As it happens, I have been living in something close to a ‘desert island’ scenario for the past three years. Let’s call it Carboot Park.

The interesting thing about Carboot Park is that it was a small development of less than 20 houses set up in 1996 in effect from scratch. The new properties were sold off as freehold houses to brand new residents, who were bequeathed a simple set of ‘byelaws’ for running the commonly owned surrounding areas. The expectation was that the first residents would look at the byelaws and soon improve/consolidate them in the light of experience.

This, in short, was a dummy run for the Big Society idea – local people having a more or less blank canvas for running their own affairs, including the power of ‘taxation’ (ie the level of service charge required to keep the common areas in good shape, or not). Flawlessly democratic and more or less as fair as it could be – each property regardless of size had one vote.

Various things soon became clear.

First, that the willingness of people to ‘get involved’ varied significantly. This was not surprising as different households had different interests (ie for some people their house was their main family dwelling and investment, for others it had less significance; not everyone lived there full time; and so on).

Second, that there was a collective reluctance to confront the core question of how decisions were taken. On the one hand no-one wanted frequent meetings; on the other hand, there was no enthusiasm for devolving spending authority to specific residents between meetings. "Let’s not decide today and instead think about it a bit more".

It duly took until 2009(!) for any full considered view to be taken on Carboot voting issues, a development which quickly led to various long overdue improvements.

The voting issue is especially interesting from a philosophical point of view. Why? Because if you’re setting up a Big Society scheme from scratch, how to design decision-making?

Most of you did not bother to read the link to the Wivenhoe Station Master’s House project mentioned in my recent BBRU:

And so two hours after a group of individuals rather nervously sat around in a circle in the Loveless Hall, we concluded with a co-operative group that had started to come up with a very real plan for the future of the Station Master’s House.

It is the next stage that will be even more challenging. Assuming that negotiations with Network Rail are positive, some form of social enterprise needs to be created to help steer the project.

The danger here of course is that a committee style operation somehow loses the bottom up enthusiasm that was evident at the Loveless Hall on Thursday evening.

That one was all about a group of local residents looking at options for an empty and run-down local landmark building. The group found some possible outcomes which they liked, but the piece does not make clear what if any thought was given to taking and implementing specific decisions.

What in practice would happen is that the main ‘activists’ would tend to prevail, simply because they alone were ready to commit the time and energy to thinking about it. Even then, what if decisions were taken but then those implementing them failed to do what was expected? Where would accountability fit in? Should someone loyally following the agreed line but somehow messing up have to carry on her/his own shoulders any financial costs arising from putting right the mistake?

Back at Carboot Park things were rather different, as all households had a direct legal stake in the the community’s common property and in the good neighbourliness of the community itself. So the voting arrangements (such as they were) tended to be by consensus if at all possible. Which (usually) promoted good neighbourliness, but at the cost of making it easy for anyone to block a new idea, especially if it involved spending new money.

This dilemma – the tension between democracy and ‘getting things done’ – plays itself out at on a grand scale. See the many posts I have written here about the turbulent rows within the EU over voting, such as this early one. The future of the Eurozone and the EU itself is at root all about who pays in to the common pot – and who decides how and where the money is spent.

So let’s say that where I now live, as a private idyllic libertarian/conservative householder on a fairly unpopulated country back-lane, the newly identified ‘Big Society neighbourhood’ gets to have the deciding say on small local planning issues. I want to build a new hi-tech glass extension on my house. Many people don’t care, some people do care but approve, some people do care but oppose.

Those who oppose may do so for all sorts of reasons – maybe they’re worried about something legitimate, or maybe they are motivated by sheer spite and insecurity: neurotic or even mentally challenged people who have no friends and want to use any opportunity to show how tough they are at others’ expense.

What sort of voting mechanisms take the final decision? If it’s consensus, the few nasty busybodies can delay block everything. If it’s a majority vote, should only those who show up at meetings vote? What about e-voting? What about proxy votes, and how to validate them? Should one resident be able to appear with a bundle of proxy votes which s/he has mustered?

What if, gulp, one faction offers financial or other inducements to get the votes needed to prevail? Is that fair? Is stopping votes-for-sale fair? Should lobbying be banned, or at least ‘regulated’? What are the sanctions for disruptive or dishonest behaviour? Who should enforce them?

And what status does that one decision have? When is any decision final? Can a group of residents demand that it be re-opened? Are the outcome and the process necessarily a precedent for others up the road wanting to do something similar? Who decides that one, and how?

And so on. Welcome to politics, all the more bitter, ridiculous and obnoxious precisely because the issues are so small, immediate and ‘local’.

The basic point being that for all the horror of local authorities and quangoes and the other accumulated sprawling edifices of ‘government’ as it now oppresses us, it does have certain advantages. Namely some sort of requirement upheld by the law (in theory) to maintain consistency and due process. Rules exist and count for something. Bureaucracy’s very aloofness and anonymous impenetrability have a value – people taking decisions have (in theory) no reason not to try to be objective and more or less ‘fair’. The role of malicious local busybodies is much reduced towards vanishing-point.

As the Carboot Park micro-example suggests, those noble qualities can become all the more elusive the smaller the community gets…

In other words, let’s support the Big Society impulse as something probably flawed but at least heading in the right direction away from insane centralised Brownian target-setting.

But let’s also remember the fine words of the late Polish statesman Bronislaw Geremek: