DEMOS

I agree that political leadership is important here, but one question I have is how much will ever be able to be done from central government. We came across one great example of the difficulties with this, when we looked at children’s services a couple of years ago. One local authority was having to deal with 17 different ‘advisors’ and ‘partnership workers’ from national government, none of which knew about each other.

Similarly with the employment and skills systems – one measures employment, the other measures qualifications, and both are responsible back up to Whitehall. So what happens when someone wants to leave half way through a course/apprenticeship to take up a job? And will the two systems ever really collaborate as things stand? I’m not convinced that reducing the number of PSA targets and oversight will be enough to overcome that, even if it would be a good start. Doesn't proper collaboration mean more devolution?

Yes it does mean more devolution - one of the points that maybe doesn't come across from the powerpoint is that I think a new geography of collaboration is emerging. The local authority area is really the most compelling level for collaboration to happen. There's less complexity, fewer players to marshal and a sharper moral and political spur to action.

But that means the centre needs to get used to a different role and set of tools. It should focus the system - by which I mean it should encourage concerted action and innovation around a small number of key goals. And it should augment the system by looking for opportunities to support, develop and encourage existing useful work.

There's an interesting question here about the role of government regional offices. We know that small countries have the advantage of being able manage public services more conversationally - it's easier to spot problems and learn from innovation when you've only got 30 or so healthcare boards as they do in NZ. Can the regional officers replicate that?

I think virtual outcome departments chaired by regional ministers at the GO level could be really interesting - nice way to solve the west lothian question anyway.

"We need to write a follow up to the Collaborative State about how you actually put it all into practice."
Good idea. Tell me if I'm misrepresenting all of this, but is collaboration not an output rather than an input? Perhaps the word suggests a greater equality of status than, say, 'coordination' or 'organisation', but these are all words that lead pretty quickly to the  question 'how??'. What technique are you going to use to produce or achieve collaboration (or coordination/cooperation/organisation)? Modern societies have various technical devices: legal contracts, informal networks, price mechanisms (markets), voting systems, management techniques etc. Then as Weber pointed out, people will abide by these in the aggregate for various reasons: bureaucratic rationality, charisma or tradition. Save where violence is employed, it's difficult to think of many political relationships which aren't collaborative on some level. At the same time, it is impossible to conceive of forms of collaboration which aren't mediated in some way - the dream of some 'pure collaboration' founded in egalitarian voluntarism scarcely works at the scale of the family, let alone a modern society. So the political questions are these: who gets to set the terms of that relationship, how is it designed, which devices mediate it, how is it legitimated? If a political system or relationship can't even achieve collaboration, then it is quite obviously failing. It seems to me (admittedly from a position of ignorance of the specific issues you discuss) that politics begins in the question of how we collaborate, not whether we collaborate (which you have to be a sociopath to think twice about).

woops, just re-read that and it looks in the last line like I'm accusing Demos of being sociopathic! Umm... which of course I'm not.

Hi Simon,

The "How To" Collaborative State was my first thought at the launch back in March – so ignore me if I bask in a little reflected glory for a minute...

Following on from just one of your points - Collaboration between public service providers and the citizens they serve - we've been looking at this through a few of our better Innovation Forum pilot projects, which interestingly enough grew out of earlier work on Choice.  Whilst it's early days (some projects are still in the design stage) one of the first lessons I think we've learnt, especially from our work in Sheffield on Liveability services (parks, houses, streetscene etc), is that - as well as taking both a phenomenal amount of time and a phenomenal amount of effort to build the sorts of networks that can facilitate this type of collaboration - the success of collaborative working "at the coalface" often rests on intangible and financially unquantifiable assets: trust, the personality of the Council’s engagement workers, the actions of the service providers in the community or the historical/political divisions and allegiances of an area or of a cohort of service users. 

This point seems obvious but it has massive implications for how you resource and build a business case for collaboration as a public service reform and delivery model.   How you do it on the ground feeds into how you justify doing it in Whitehall or the Town Hall – but how you do it on the ground is day in, day out plugging away at restoring trust and delivering on promises, educating, building citizen’s confidence, overcoming people’s monolithic dissatisfaction with “the council” and building sustainable community engagement mechanisms – and this costs: people, time, money, effort. 

Add to this the fact that the greatest payoffs from this “coalface” collaboration might take a generation or more to manifest in any meaningful (to the government) way and the answer of “how to” collaborate seems, initially – and certainly within the current spending round – to be “with difficulty”.  Which of course makes it all the more important to write the book in the first place.

Having admitted that we're weak on some of the 'how', I now feel the need to defend The Collaborative State. It's actually full of case studies about collaborative work in action. So it's not like we don't know what's worked and why.
The more important point for me is that collaboration is intensely context specific. I can produce you five principles for effective collaboration by the end of the day, but that won't help you because what you need to do depends on the problem you face and the organisations and personalities involved.

Will - you and I are generally on opposite sides of a chicken and egg debate about the way collaboration works, but in this case I'm not sure we disagree so much.

My argument is essentially that public services provide a forum in which collaboration can happen, that they have a number of incentives to bring people in, that the experience of collaboration breeds more collaboration, and that public services are one of the few places left where collaboration can happen.

It's also worth noting that in this case I'm talking about how we reshape institutions for collaboration. How do we retool councils and Whitehall departments to do more collaboration with each other and with citizens?

Simon says: "The local authority area is really the most compelling level for collaboration to happen. There's less complexity, fewer players to marshal and a sharper moral and political spur to action."

Absolutely! Only problem is that ideas on collaboration at local government level are thin. Think of all of that IT lying around in schools and neighbourhood centres. Think of people's facility now to connect in informal social networks. These resources are ripe for collaborative planning of strategy and service delivery. But I don't see much of it going on.