I am currently putting the finishing touches on a book considering the relationship between individualist thought and welfare policy. I’ve just attended two fascinating sessions given by Quentin Skinner, the intellectual historian, who explained what was, to me, a completely unfamiliar different way of understanding the idea of liberty. In Roman law, he explains, freedom was a status, not a course of action; the distinction between freedom and slavery rested not on individual choice, but on domination, dependency and subjection to arbitrary power. Within the neo-Roman or “Republican” model, people lose their freedom, not so much because they are interfered with by laws, but because they have a status which is subject to the decisions of others. There is, arguably, a lesson for contemporary welfare states in the construction of our social rights.
Tag: Social Policy
Tax relief for charitable donation
The purpose of tax reliefs on charitable donations is intended, in part, to limit abusive tax avoidance, but there are points of principle to consider. Whenever tax relief is given, the state is foregoing the tax revenue it could otherwise claim; effectively, the charity is receiving money that would otherwise have gone to the government. Charities are already exempt from a range of taxes, particularly council tax and water rates. Charities which raise money by asking people to declare that they are are taxpayers are effectively seeking – and receving – government subsidy. The idea that this is “free” money is illusory.
The support of “philanthropy” by tax relief effectively means that people are able to give money to charities in lieu of giving it to government – a situation which puts individual preference in place of collective decision making. What a phalanx of very rich “philanthropists” are demanding is that they, not the government, should be able to determine how their tax liabilities are spent. The US Government accepts that demand, unreasonable as it is, and the US functions consistently with the federal government in deficit as a result. Most European governments would not tolerate it, and they should not.
Physical activity and sport
I’ve been looking belatedly at the Scottish Health Survey 2010, published six months ago. In the report of the 2008 survey, physical activity is broken down into four categories:
- heavy housework
- manual labour, gardening and DIY
- walking, and
- sport and exercise.
Housework is consistently the most important category; specific engagement in sport and exercise decline rapidly as people get older. In the 2010 report, figures for housework, domestic activity and walking are not given, but there is a breakdown of sports and exercise – including some activities that have little to do with sport, such as cycling and dancing. The tables tell us that participation in sport is heavily biased towards younger males, and that within the category of sporting activity, competitive sports scarcely feature as contributing to exercise.
The report states, rightly, that “there is abundant evidence that regular activity is related to a reduced incidence of chronic conditions of particular concern in Scotland, such as cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.” However, the report also claims that “sports and exercise are important elements of any physical activity strategy, and major events such as the 2012 London Olympics and 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games are considered valuable ways of promoting physical activity in the population.” There is no good evidence to support that contention. Athletics, and indeed competitive sport in general, make very little contribution to the physical activity of the population. If we want people to engage more in physical activity, we ought to be promoting walking, gardening and cycling.
Additional note, 20th January 2019: An article in New Scientist (edition of 19.1.2019) explains that calorie consumption has a surprisingly limited association with exercise. As obesity is only weakly related to physical activity, physical activity is only weakly related to sport, and elite sport is only weakly related to participation in sport, it’s unsurprising that obesity has no visible relationship to major sporting events.
Public sector pay
The government expresses concern that public sector pay has risen above private sector pay. That is only to be expected. Whenever services are commissioned from the private and voluntary sectors, lower-paid workers are moved out of the public sector. Those who are left behind are the senior managers whose task is to commission services, and their pay tends to be higher than those of the employees who have been transferred out. This has been the policy of both Labour and Conservative governments for more than twenty years.
Freedom of Information requests
Various Freedom of Information requests have been made recently to the Department for Work and Pensions about the mandatory imposition of work experience. This process has produced copies of the guidance issued by the DWP, including a recent revision removing instructions to JCP staff to mandate claimants. There is a full set of documents covering mandatory experience here and a list of related FoI requests and their returns at http://helpmeinvestigate.com/welfare/ .
I’ve also posted this information to the Social Policy discussion list at JISCmail, because it relates to a long-standing debate in Social Policy. The Social Policy Association published guidelines over two years ago which stated that researchers have to obtain the consent of participants, and allow them to withdraw from the research. I think the guidelines are misconceived, and FoI requests are an illustration of why I think so. First, some information is public, not private; it is not under the control of the people who happen to know it. Second, Social Policy has an important critical function, and that does not depend on the consent of government. Those who are interested in the arguments might want to look at my piece on “Research without Consent” in Social Research Update or the criticism of the SPA guidelines that Dave Byrne and I made in Policy World.
Social work as it happens
The BBC documentary, “Protecting our children”, has offered the best sense of what happens in social work I’ve seen for years. Sadly, the first episode will only be available on IPlayer for a week, but social work and social policy students will find it well worth viewing. The first part wasn’t perfect – it didn’t give the viewer a sense of the options the social workers explored, or how they settled on the methods that they chose to use in preference to others. For example, a ‘contract’ was made with the family, but that wasn’t explained. What it did give was a sense of the problems that are being addressed and how social workers have to negotiate with a family – a springboard for discussion, rather than a revelation.
There are several noteworthy issues, but let me point to two in particular. One is the use of power by the social work team, most obviously in a team meeting where the family was simply overwhelmed by formality and numbers. The other is the the reluctance of social workers to offer advice. The dominant professional ethic is still that service users have a “right to fail” – but not that they have a right to know what the consequences of alternative actions might be.
Systems thinking
I attended a dreadful lecture last week about “Systems Thinking”, which had little by way of thought, or indeed of system. Systems thinking was, and could be, a distinctive set of methods for analysing complex relationships within an entity; but the term seems for the moment to be a catch-all term used to describe flexible, responsive organisations that are open to using information. Ideas like Kaizen, Lean and continuous improvement have been drawn in from private sector management in order to criticise the operation of public sector activities – the Department for Work and Pensions has embraced “Lean” in principle, if not in practice. But the ideas are confused. They rely heavily on insights from staff and service users, without considering that policy makers, officials and users might legitimately have different perspectives and priorities. They are overlain with other management fads, like leadership, networks and collaboration. John Seddon’s book Systems thinking in the public sector (Triarchy, 2008) is a prime example of this kind of muddle. Seddon identifies systems he disagrees with as “command and control” – but hierarchical and bureaucratic management are quite different from each other, and different again from management by objectives. He claims that systems thinking is responsive to service users, but then he distinguishes “value demand”, which the service wants to meet, from “failure demand” which is “wasteful” – a distinction rooted in the perspective of the agency, not of the service user. And he supposes that rights of citizenship (like the demands of citizens for security through visible policing) are wasteful, because they do not serve the agencies’ purpose – except that serving citizens may well be the purpose. There are often good reasons why public services behave the way that they do. The first step for would-be critics should be to ask why – and analysing processes in terms of systems ought to have been one way to find out.
Leadership
This is the abstract of a newly published article, in which I discuss the idea of leadership: it has appeared under the title of “Leadership”: a perniciously vague concept, International Journal of Public Sector Management 25(1) 34-47.
Purpose – Despite the vast amount of literature covering the concept of leadership, it remains contentious, under-conceptualised and often uncritical. The purpose of this paper is to question the validity of the concept and dispute its application.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews what the idea of leadership means, how it relates to competing accounts of management in the public services, and what value it adds.
Findings – There is no evident reason why the supposed roles, tasks, or qualities of “leadership” either need to be or should be concentrated in the person of a leader; the tasks involved in “leading” an organisation are not in fact the tasks of motivation, influence or direction of others which are at the core of the literature; and there is no reason to suppose that leadership is a primary influence on the behaviour of most organisations.
Practical implications – In the context of the public services, there is no set of skills, behaviours or roles that could be applied across the public services; the emphasis in leadership theory on personal relationships may be inconsistent with the objectives and character of the service; and the arrogation to a public service manager of a leadership role may be illegitimate.
Originality/value – The argument here represents a fundamental challenge to the concept of leadership, its relevance and its application to public services.
"Government cannot create jobs"
I am puzzled by the repeated mantra that government in general, and the Scottish Government in particular, cannot create jobs. Of course they can; for example, every job in Parliament is created. Nor is it true that public jobs are not “real” jobs. Real jobs we need more of include, for example, police, cleaners, teachers, janitors, carers, street and park wardens, or guards. If we invested more in builders, plumbers, painters, gardeners or people to mend roads, it would do a power of good. Part of the argument was made by Keynes: it makes more sense to pay people for doing something than it makes to pay them for doing nothing, and the economic benefits of engaging people in paid employment will be considerable. But there is also a social benefit in ensuring that people are integrated into the economic structures and have the basic entitlements that work brings. If we judge certain activities only by the standards of costs, then it will often seem cheaper to use heavy machinery to repair holes in the road than it is to get human beings to do it – but we cannot afford the machines, and we have labour to spare. (I do not understand the case that CCTV is more cost effective than a street warden; CCTV is very expensive, and a camera cannot actively intervene during an incident.) Creating jobs is often worth doing in its own right. We need to start thinking about costs and benefits across the wider economy.
Kiss and tell
This is, admittedly, just a little out of my usual field. However, I cover issues relating to human rights as part of work on principles in social policy, and privacy is also a vexed issue in social research, so the recent furore about privacy injunctions has piqued my interest. The central issue concerns a footballer who had obtained a “superinjunction” preventing a girl from revealing secrets about an affair, or even the name of the footballer from being revealed. There are two striking issues. The first is the issue of secret justice, which is no justice at all; the prospect of anonymous, unreported enforcement and legal sanction is repellent, and John Hemming MP was absolutely right to raise it in Parliament. The other issue is the interpretation of privacy by the courts.
Privacy is usually understood in one of two senses. The first, which is the interpretation given to privacy in legal cases in the USA, is that people have an intimate sphere of life which other people are not able legitimately to intrude on. The second, which is more prominent in social science, gives people control over information that relates to them. In the context of social research, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council explains:
“Individuals have a sphere of life from which they should be able to exclude any intrusion … A major application of the concept of privacy is information privacy: the interest of a person in controlling access to and use of any information personal to that person.”
The idea of consent in research is based on the idea that information is private, and that it needs the consent of the person who reveals it – the research participant. It’s not usually the case, however, that researchers are asked to get the consent of everyone mentioned in research. That, by contrast, is what journalists are now being asked to do.
Let me offer a little scenario: a man’s girlfriend goes to his wife and says, “I am having an affair with your husband”. If the husband has an intimate sphere which no-one can impose on without permission, the girlfriend has breached it – admitting the girlfriend to intimacies is not a licence to reveal those intimacies later. If he has a human right to control the information, the girlfriend has breached it. I find it hard to believe that either outcome is what the advocates of privacy laws intend; privacy may be a right, but it does not follow that secrecy is. An individual may retain control over information only in so far as that information relates solely to his private actions. A couple, a group, an association, may control aspects of information that relate to that couple – but they exercise that control jointly, not severally, and if they do not agree, neither retains the right. If one partner in a couple wishes to reveal all, the right does not pass to the control of the other person. The attempt to curb revelations by those who want to “kiss and tell” may be many unpleasant things, but it is not a breach of human rights. The courts have got it wrong.