On 4th June I managed to string together a very brief post on the then much anticipated launch of Lambeth Labour’s white paper and citizens consultation on it’s much heralded “Co-operative Council” strategy.

My post was a very humble and basic set of hopes/recommendations for the good people at Lambeth Labour to guide them in their proposed “public consultation”. Sadly, though lets be honest, not unsurprisingly, no one at Lambeth Town Hall reads my blog.  As I’ll soon be posting, the much vaulted White Paper and ensuing consultation process has been quite a disappointment thus far.

However – while I am saddened by the rather haphazard approach being adopted here in SW2, I was heartened (really heartened) that Matthew Taylor  (Chief Executive of the RSA since November 2006 prior to which he was Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to the Prime Minister) posted an eerily similar piece to his RSA Blog on the challenges of Government run “public consultations”.  And he’s a man who knows having been responsible for “The Big Conversation”. Remember that?

Just four days after I made my entreaty to Lambeth Labour to place an exercise in deliberative democracy at the very heart of it’s “co-operative government” consultation, Matthew Taylor suggested this particular approach as possibly the only genuinely valuable strategy to engage and gain endorsement from the public on tough policy decisions.

It’s on the rare occasion like this that I feel genuinely a little better about myself. I know this is a inappropriate and misplaced vanity, but it reminds me that sometimes I do have something useful to say when I can stay my limited intellect long enough to craft an argument.

It’s just a shame he didn’t post a little sooner. I sense the words of the Chief Exec of the RSA carry more weight in the corridors of power in SW2 than those of a well meaning if ill qualified part time blogger and one time consultant from up Acre Lane.

So – deliberative democracy. Lambeth Labour – it’s not too late; but are you listening?

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Back in February, The Guardian ran a front page story on Lambeth Council’s proposals to create a “co-operative council”.  Following much speculation and some additional explanation from @LambethLabour, tomorrow will see the publication of the Council’s detailed proposals for this new LG co-operative AND the establishment of a “Citizens Commission” made up of local people to consult on said proposals.

For anyone interested in participative democracy or indeed the “Big Society” this is all rather mouth watering.

There has been more than enough coverage on the merits of the “co-operative approach” proposed by Lambeth Labour and the “no frills” approach to Local Government to be trialled by the Conservatives in Barnet (including by me on this blog: here) so I’ll leave that for now and instead offer some humble suggestions on the “Citizens Commission” consultation which will – one trusts – guide Lambeth Council on it’s journey toward mutualisation.

Jason Cobb over at ONIONBAGBLOG asked the perinent question of Cllr Steve Reed when the date for proposals to be published and the associated consultation was announced: “How will citizens for this commission be selected?” The response from Cllr Reed:

 This is potentially exciting stuff – proper democratic engagement on proposals to change the very nature of Local Government service provision in our area. But it also has the potential to go the way of so many previous public consultations between Government and citizen. Errrm, nowhere.

So some humble suggestions for the team @Lambethabour to make this consultation count:

• Be prepared – technically and operationally

If I am invited to consult on tomorrow’s proposals either Online, via wiki or in some other format, please be ready to process my comments. The internet in particular is littered with instances of failure to anticipate and handle the taffic that comes with an invitation to participate….and once bitten; twice shy. Make the channels for comentary available and accessible from Day 1 and be ready to respond to early technical or operational glitches to ensure immediate authority/integrity of the process.

• Ensure a there is a representative sample of citizens consulted

It will not be enough to simply open a passive set of feedback channels to the general public in Lambeth on these areas. The matters at stake are too important. At least in part, the Council must ensure that a representative sample have been consulted and their views recorded. This is particularly important in the case of those members of our society (the elderly and the socially disadvantaged) who are least likely to either be online or informed of such a consultation but yet are often more likely to depend on local government services under debate

• Is a Wiki the best approach to online consultation?

Wiki’s are useful but when badly set up they require excessive moderation to ensure focus and they can become unwieldy. It can also be resource intensive to draw out natural conclusions from contributions made – particularly important here. It is a true shame that www.yomoot.com does not have a mobile app plug-in that could be used to better facilitate an online conversation but maybe next time….for now, as a half-way house, why not simply use the model adopted today by the Government Coalition and its (eventually) comment enabled “Programme for Government” document: http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/. The interface is simple and comments are focussed on a particular area of Government, it also helps a little to mitigate against the “free-styling” that an open wiki can sometimes result in. However – and most importantly – neither exisiting wiki/online polling tools as yet support the ability to engage a ‘deliberate democratic discussion’…

• How to ensure a deliberate discussion?

Successful public consultations typically rely on the participants having a shared and clear understanding of the context of the debate and are fully briefed on the various proposals being presented for their commentary - so they can make a more reasoned/informed contribution. How will those consulted be informed? Have you considered adopting the “deliberative democracy” model for this consultation? It might lead to a more considered, less populist outcome. This may be an additional overhead on the process but empirical evidence suggests that it could result in increased savings, improved service provision and higher voter satisfaction with their local councils.

• Consistency across channels

Linked to the point above – without a broadly consistent set of questions across channels it will be very difficult to usefully collate and compare commentary/contribution. This is an important consideration to avoid complicating what is already likely to be a lengthy process of data analysis.

• Be clear on how the consultation will work and keep your promises:

How long will it last? what channels are available to comment? who will moderate contributions and should they be moderated at all? how will comments be considered/actioned? what happens to ideas that are not actioned in this round of a consultation? The list of questions goes on. Crowd-sourcingis not an easy business – have you thought through how to identify and manage special interest groups? How will you ensure transparency even when commentary may be critical? And once you have asked for opinions – are you actually going to do something with them? A quick search on the recent ‘Your Ireland; Your Call’ crowd-sourcing initiative provides an insight into the challenges of running a consultation like this (albeit YIYC was on a national scale). The old Number Ten Downing Street petition site became something of a poster child for the failure of online feedback to generate online action (although interesting to note that the new coalition guarantee a formal debate on any isse attracting 100k signatures…interested to see how that works out)

I really don’t mean to be obstructive or negative – all these points are made in the spirit of someone who welcomes this attempt at public consultation. But I am also wary. For what we are being consulted on is in fact a strategy that will require individuals and groups across Lambeth’s civic society to take on responsibility for the delivery of public services. And that is a construct that requires an engaged population who trust in their elected officials to support them in their endeavors. How this consultation runs might well influence how engaged we are in the ‘co-operative Lambeth’ and certainly the trust we can place in our elected officials as part of a mutualised local government.

In a way then, this consultation is the first test of the Lambeth ’co-operative model’ and so the stakes are high. I wish them well.

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Voting is one of the great privileges of living in a modern democracy. While we know there are many who choose not to exercise this fundamental human right – for various reasons known to themselves alone – there are also many who are denied the ability, or who have difficulty in, exercising that right even though they wish to do so.

When casting my ballot today I thought of the excellent campaign being run by Scope to ensure disabled voters are not denied or discriminated against in the election process: http://www.pollsapart.org.uk/

 As they say:

“At every election, thousands of disabled voters are denied the chance to play an equal part in our democracy. Scope’s ‘Polls Apart’ campaign aims to end this exclusion”.

I hope they were heartened by the link I sent to them of the award winning work on Norwegian Polling Stations which is currently being showcased at the London Design Museum:

http://www.norskdesign.no/the-design-for-all-award/blanke-ark-polling-stations-article14159-8215.html

http://www.kadabra.com/eng/projects/sdk_eng.htm

Based on a “Design for All” principle, the ‘Blanke Ark’ framework is a beautiful example of considered social design meets functionality:

“Blanke Ark employs the principles of Design for All by being a design for a wide variety of people, which means that the design provides functionality to people, regardless of age, sex, cultural background or ability”.

The ability to vote is perhaps the ultimate expression of an individuals active participation in society. No one should be denied that right – particularly not on the grounds of disability.  Here’s to design for a truly participative democracy. 

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Posted in response to Eamonn Mallie’s piece on www.sluggerotoole.com re David Cameron’s comments on the size of NI’s Public Sector last Friday.

Eammon has this spot on. The analysis was right, the language and timing were naive and amateurish at best.

 I’ll never vote Tory but Cameron is absolutely right in his ultimate assessment that NI must grow it’s Private Sector and reduce our over reliance on the Public Sector. We have an unhealthy imbalance and without a stimulus in the private sector – particularly in attracting a range of jobs which pay in line with and above average Public Sector jobs we are incredibly vulnerable and have been for some time to Public Sector cuts and also any increase in interest rates (likely in the next parliament) which will hit many of our overstretched “property boom” keyholders. I wonder how many interest only mortgages there are in NI held by people borrowing multiples greater than 3 against public sector wages likely to be capped/frozen in the next parliament? 

All our politicians know this is a fact. Many are on record re this in the past. The executive is on record as agreeing with Camerons sentiments on Private Sector growth – the 2009 IREP report recognised it. Many commentators and the occasional blogger like myself have been suggesting for some time that this was the real elephant in the room (http://www.shanepcarmichael.com/2010/01/a-new-vanguard/) while the Executive stalled and bickered over scraps from the sectarian table. An inclusive, burgeoning private sector economy supplementing our proud Public Sector makes sense not just economically but socially and politically – any post conflict society analysis tells us that employment and it’s associated benefits has one of the biggest impacts on the process of “normalisation”. University of Ulster recently published a report telling us we probably already knew – that young people with limited job or development opportunities are more likely to engage in anti social behaviour (including political and racial violence). 

And yet our representatives on the hill have spent the last few years doing exactly what about this? Think of the time wasted while Stormont has been suspended or in sectarian stand off mode when they could have been addressing this issue given anyone with any secular political nous knew it was coming. And maybe that lack of secular nous is at the heart of this. 

 In spite of a rational if poorly executed SDLP call for a revised NI budget last year to reflect the realities of an economy in freefall nothing happened and an opportunity to stimulate a flagging economy was lost. 

More alarmingly, at a public event in Westminster before Xmas i asked a senior political NI figure (vying now for a Westminster seat and to whose political views I am broadly aligned) what he thought of IREP and his views on developing our private sector given the chances of public sector cuts in the next parliament. His response not only suggested he had barely read IREP but he actually went on to say that he “had no time for these multi national corporations coming in for a few years and then swanning off to Singapore or wherever they get a better deal. The future of our economy has to be the 1-2 person family business…”!! Seriously – you couldn’t make it up, particularly as it came 2 weeks after the great news of NYSEs support centre investment and the audience that night contained at least one potential investor from a financial MNC. It’s just an isolated example but part of a larger failure –  Politicians like that should be vilified far more than Cameron on this issue. This problem has not been addressed on their watch.

But here’s the immediate and rather sad reality for Cameron and the Tory/UU alliance. In spite of the fact all other parties agree in principle with what Cameron says, in spite of the fact they are responsible for allowing the situation to develop, all of them have the good sense to know the timing and turn of phrase he used was an act of political naivety at best and suicide at worst. It not only brings into question the nature of the Tory/UU partnership but also his own political judgement.

The scent of blood (and cuts) is in the air. In a more mature political society Cameron may have been lauded for his honesty and it might even have triggered the long overdue advent of a more secular political debate on the issue at hand. It is badly needed –  anyone who thinks a simple cut in corporation tax is the answer to our problems is surely mistaken. It’s a much more complex consideration and needs early attention. But that’s a separate debate.    

Unfortunately it won’t happen now in the mouth of an election – as Cameron should have known. And it might turn out to be a debate shaped by others than the Tory/DUP alliance, for in politics, perhaps more than anywhere else, “to the victor the spoils” and as Helmut Kohl once said: “You don’t win elections by putting the weapons of torture on display”.    

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Irrespective of whether this yields much political fruit in the form of new votes, it is undoubtedly clever from a party that actually does seem to be grasping the potential benefits of drawing upon the collective wisdom of the nation – even as an exercise in public consultation. Whether anything useful comes from the analysis or not (the site itself is rather basic – reflecting I guess the need to rush to get something out there) you can be sure that it will garner news headlines, those with an interest will feel engaged and it offers real efficiencies for Conservative HQ and their effort to respond to yesterday’s announcements by The Chancellor.  It’s hard to see how they can lose on this. I see Liam Byrne has suggested that it reflects the fact that the Conservatives “need help” with their response. I think that’s a potentially dangerous line to take on this one but we’ll see…..

Their recent “Cash Gordon” campaign online via Twitter was undoubtedly a disaster – be wary of trying to manipulate the web dwelling public into becoming a conduit for something they haven’t initiated or truly believe in – but on this one (for now) I doff my social(ist) media flat cap.

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