Ha! No pictures of naked local authorities I'm afraid.

Naked Council Session

Session led by Anthony Zacharzewski from the Democratic Society http://www.demsoc.org/

Slides here: http://www.demsoc.org/cms/node/529

The Pitch for the Naked Council

What is localism for?

Place shaping, more responsive services, economic growth, local services?

What ought to be local and what shouldn’t? You can draw lines at all sorts of levels for who is responsible for different services. What is the natural level for things to exist at. E.g. Revenues and Benefits could be delivered nationally. Why are services being delivered at a local level?

Different issues about localism – how do we get to grips with this?

Events like localgovcamp could be used to innovate and change thinking.

Start with a blank sheet of paper. Forget about the historic boundaries, organisational charts. What should a new service model look like? Short of a revolution, will this happen? Use this approach as a thinking exercise. Could be a useful tool for decision making at a top level. Civil servants underrate the innovative thinking that goes on at local level.

Naked Council Programme

Anthony proposed a programme of work as follows:

·         Participant led events at start and end of a programme.

·         Use different work streams to come up with creative solutions for peoples ‘ needs.

·         Work streams use online tools rather than physical meetings to widen participation and keep costs low.

·         All work streams brought together in the end.

Possible work streams

·         School-age child

·         Citizen

·         Entrepreneur

·         Person with learning disabilities

·         Old person with limiting illness

·         Householder

Anthony asked people to sign up at http://www.nakedcouncil.co.uk or email team@nakedcouncil.co.uk and you’ll be added to a mailing list.

Discussion

From the floor - working for a small local council – lots of hard to reach groups. How do you get to those groups. Especially on a big scale.

Anthony - you could get people involved in specific work streams.

From the floor – how can you stop this being a navel gazing exercise from local councils and truly involve people in a democratic process?

Anthony –good question but don’t have an answer yet. Need a representative sample.

Carrie Bishop – people could fall into any of the work streams at different points in their life. How do we look at this more holistically?

Anthony – how do you get the social network working for itself rather than state agencies working for them.

David Wilcox – suggested games e.g. social media game. Look at scenarios that play through a service design plan. Work through the different levels of what that would be like for different personas.

From the floor – thinking about the democratic process. Big questions. Councillors are primarily part-time. Most are retired or in business by themselves. Don’t think they are necessarily engaged. Part of the process has to get people back to the idea that voting is important or you might as well have a private organisation running things.

Anthony – the democratic element is important. Stuck with representative system which works averagely well at national level and ceasing to work well at local level. Come from Brighton – youthful city but councillors are getting older. Need to move to a more engaged place – citizens themselves are taking responsibility for engaging with elected members. Inevitably must be a big part of this.

From the floor – great idea, but perhaps we should see what people use and iterate rather than a big up front re-design of services.

Anthony – not able to roll out anything to anyone! All done by councils with a fixed mindset. Get councils who are at cutting edge to try it out and see what works then improve.

Hugh Flouch – quite keen to split the room and take two approaches to see how well it works.

CLG rep – running Total Place and agenda is picking up lots of what you’re discussing.

Anthony  - there is a bean counting approach. Keen to look at a service level area. Challenge is starting with what you’ve always had.

Michele – sounds like systems thinking approach i.e. you determine what you need to achieve for service users then strip away all the rubbish. Also known as Lean. Are any Councils doing it successfully?

Anthony – have heard anecdotally that generally people snap back into old ways of thinking.

From the floor – systems thinking is tinkering in the box – stripping out stuff from an existing system. Would rather look at a totally new system.

Anthony – Agree need to look at all government to see how we can change things.

Tom Phillips – concerned it is not naked – by keeping democracy in there you are keeping a g-string on it! By having to constantly re-elect officials you have to keep the ‘council’ in it.

Shane McCracken – amazing how far we’ve come down the road. Ages ago we would have had a group of elders who would decide what is best for community. Now we have huge bureaucracy. Used to work at Rover and they had to completely strip down work force.

From the floor – expecting it to be an anarchic discussion, rather than planning a programme. Disagree with the market testing approach. In technology many products take people by surprise. E.g. text messaging, Twitter not designed for how they are now used. Therefore you can’t say it doesn’t have value if you don’t know what people want. Councils have very long timeframe (to 2014) to meet a set of challenges. Barnet’s Future Shape report – parodied by media but very useful.  Co-production a useful part of it. To a certain extent it’s a naked council approach. If you’re going to get anywhere democracy has to be central part of the project. If you are going to have change then it has to be through a democratic process, or else you’ll need a revolutions and guns.

Anthony – democracy is not necessarily about a purely elected structure. There is a richer conversation we could be having at local levels about how people want to interact with local services.

From the floor – we have a British democracy of we do that for them. Until we can take control of our services, our citizens, nothing can change.

Anthony – think this is about a mindset of what people need.

From the floor – if we’re doing this for ourselves, to what extent do we need to know how the process works. There has to be some basic level of what services are and how they are delivered. Otherwise people are intimidated b y the process and don’t know how to engage. Otherwise you have an elitism of those who are educated to know how it works.

Anthony – the work streams would have to be informed by what people do on the floor. Need to get the right mix of people to ensure you get thing informed well.

From the floor – why not make it complete anarchy – make it statutory that everyone has to do it!

Anthony – thanks to Dave Briggs, Anna Tan and Dominic Campbell on the thinking for this session.