With the state adopting a more enabling role Sir John Elvidge says that there is an opportunity for charities to influence public service delivery.
We are at a time of significant change. There is increasing evidence that people want more control over the circumstances of their lives as individuals and in their communities and that there is a correlation between a sense of control over our lives and our wellbeing.
There are strong arguments in favour of the state adopting a more enabling role in response to people's desire for greater control. Working with the Carnegie UK Trust over 18 months, I have been involved in a detailed research and listening exercise on the changing role of the state. We concluded that a new ‘enabling state’ is emerging, one which is based on a more balanced relationship between the state and citizens. We lay no claim to this shift; many others have commented on it too. But we hope that by setting out its constituent parts people can better understand the nature of the change taking place.
We argued that the shift from the welfare state to the enabling state consist of seven policy innovations:
- From target setting to outcomes
- From top-down to bottom-up
- From representation to participation
- From silos to working together
- From crisis management to prevention
- From doing-to to doing-with
- From state to third sector
In this emerging ‘enabling state’, charities and voluntary organisations have a key role to play. Not just in delivering public services, but in supporting the public sector to rethink its relationship with communities and citizens.
Charities and voluntary organisations have a number of assets to bring to an enabling state:
- They are in a unique position to help address a key area of our wellbeing – our need to be involved in our communities;
- They are vital to prevention and early intervention;
- They remain largely trusted by citizens and communities.
Organisations in the third sector draw their strength from their degree of connection with those whose needs and aspirations they were set up to meet. At their most distinctive, they embody an element of mutuality and reciprocity. Unlike traditional public services, they embrace the fluidity between the roles of provider and beneficiary – seeing both as active contributors to improving outcomes.
Within the sector, those organisations which have the best experience of building mutuality and reciprocity into their approach can have a valuable role in sharing their experience with other organisations that have become more separated from those whose interests they aspire to promote. (I recognise that many worry that contracts and funding pressures are moving them more and more far from their users and beneficiaries.) In particular, there is value in sharing experience of how to help people grow their capacity and confidence, thus reducing their need for support and increasing their ability to support others.
In this way, the sector can build a model that is clearly distinctive from traditional state delivery of public services. The state model is both appropriate and desirable where delivering a public service to citizens is clearly more effective than the model in which people control provision themselves: most aspects of the maintenance of law and order and of income redistribution, many aspects of healthcare and, in most people's opinion, of schooling. It has a much less well-evidenced record of greater effectiveness in relation to many aspects of social care and even of assisting people to enter and maintain employment.
If the third sector gets behind the argument that those employed by the state need to learn the additional skills required to support the growth of people's capacity, the transformation could be significant. The sector is in danger of losing a strategic opportunity if it disregards or downplays its current and historical strengths in those skills. It would be doubly a mistake if the sector increased further efforts to substitute for public bodies in the delivery of traditional public services at a time when the inherent effectiveness of some of those services is under question.
Sir John Elvidge was permanent secretary of the Scottish government from 2003 to 2010. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an associate of the Institute for Government. He is currently leading the Carnegie UK Trust's work on The Enabling State.
- This article is part of a series of on the future of the voluntary sector being published by Civil Society News ahead of the publication of a collection of essays by Civil Exchange.
