Rod Stewart and public service reform
By John Hitchin, Senior Consultant, Renaisi
This is one of three short blogs that were written after sitting at the back of a recent Chatham House rule debate on the ‘Future of Regeneration’, hosted by Renaisi. There were a range of participants from academia, consultancy, the public sector and the social enterprise sector. The pieces are inspired by the debate itself, but also Philippe Starck, Albert Einstein and Rod Stewart. It is difficult to talk about a session that was under the Chatham House rule without either breaking that rule, or looking like you’re stealing the ideas of other people without having to reference them. To be responsible about this, let us assume that any points of interest in these pieces come from the participants, and the dull bits in between are mine! (For more information about the debate itself, listen to these thoughts from Renaisi Chief Executive, Kevin Sugrue.)
‘I wish, that, I knew what I know now, when I was younger’.
Sound like Rod Stewart to you? Well it was actually written by Ronnie Lane and Ronnie Wood of The Faces. Ronnie Wood, now of the Rolling Stones, sang vocals, not Rod Stewart. Although the version you’re thinking of is probably the 1998 Rod Stewart cover. That piece of useless information might be useful to you in a pub quiz one day.
To finish off my three notes on the debate, I’ve started with another quote. This was provoked by one of the participants stating that ‘if we knew ten years ago what we know now, we could have done it all with half the money’. That got your attention didn’t it? The amount (half the money) was obviously more rhetoric than a calculated case, but the point remains whether it was 40%, 50% or 60%.
This statement was not so much a shock, we all know that hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it did highlight three points to me. The first is that a lot has been done in the last ten years. Through investment in public services and a growing awareness of the powerful role of the voluntary and third sectors, much has been achieved in regenerating our communities, and everybody in the sector can talk of strong success stories. In doing this, a lot has been learnt.
Secondly, do we do enough to make sure we don’t forget the lessons of previous approaches? The New Deal for Communities programme, for example, is one of the most evaluated pieces of public policy, and yet it seems to be quietly slipping off any agenda. I know, from experience, that there is plenty to learn from this massive investment in 39 of our most deprived neighbourhoods, but you try finding the NDCs on the CLG website. The evaluation reports are there, but they are not easy to find. Nobody is suggesting that we could (or even should) have another round of NDCs, but there is obviously an enormous amount to learn from them. In terms of an agenda, this is the remit of the HCA Academy (soon to be taken in-house) but a lack of institutional memory has occurred before and will probably occur again. We perhaps need to rethink how we retain knowledge within the communities themselves and not the ‘sector’. The communities are always there; individuals and governance structures move on.
Thirdly, money isn’t enough. The last ten years have seen a massive re-investment in many communities, but it also feels like money can blunt your thinking. Sorry for the cliché, but necessity is often the mother of invention, and relying on state money across the board has perhaps been pushed as far is it can in some of our communities. I am not advocating for a lack of investment where it’s needed, but I am hoping that less resource means smarter delivery, and an acceptance that money driven agendas can sometimes cloud our minds to what we originally wanted to do (see Kevin Harris’ article on empowerment that illustrates these issues from one perspective)
What Ronnie (and Rod) didn’t mention is that learning something is not a binary thing. You don’t not know it, and then suddenly become aware. It’s a process we need to go through, and we can’t ‘know’ it when we are younger. We’ve got to live it and learn it together.
