Compass-Finding-Our-Voice-Final1

Finding Our Voice - Making the 21st Century State
also collections of people. Most redesigns fail when they disengage the people who work for and rely on
states. Learning systematically from the experience of practice is a high priority.
• Any successful state is a settlement between masses and elites, citizens and office-holders. What creates
new settlement is conversation, as Iceland recently showed us. Enduring institutional designs emerge from
persistent experimentation, making the whole more than the sum of its parts. Our democratic processes –
civil and political – need somehow to bring these different ingredients together.
3 Restoring trust
Sue Goss and Steve Reed
Vast currents of change are sweeping the world: globalised trade and finance, the digital revolution, mass
movements of populations. Wealth and power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small global elite,
while locally people and communities feel powerless in the face of forces they cannot control. People have lost
trust in a politics that feels too small to meet the challenge of our times.
The economic crash of 2008 and years of austerity that have followed it are the biggest manifestations of this.
But trust has been eroded by home-grown disasters too, such as the MPs’ expenses scandal, the burgeoning
child abuse scandal, and the coalition government’s broken promises on the deficit, immigration, tuition fees and
the NHS.
The truth is that our political system is set up to fail. We have allowed a parent–child relationship to develop
where politicians stand up at election time and appear to promise they have all the answers. What we need is
an adult–adult relationship where politicians can acknowledge that we will only solve the problems we face as a
country by harnessing the insights, experiences and creativity of all our citizens to find answers that work.
There are plenty of practical examples of how citizens, working together, can solve complex problems more
effectively than the top-down politics we have relied on before. The values that underpin an open, engaging
politics are absent from the Westminster bubble. If we are to build strong communities we need to listen to and
respect those we disagree with as well as those on our side. If we are to tackle the difficult social problems that
confront us, we need to learn to recognise, understand and respect our differences and learn ways to make
room for each other. This can also help us tackle inequality since the poorest, most excluded people are those
offered least respect and control under the present system – people about whom we make cheap assumptions
and whose views go unheard.
Public services are an important test of society’s values. If they are top-down, controlling, forbidding, excluding,
then that is the type of society they help create. Public services can only help us fulfil our human potential if they
value that potential, demonstrating kindness, flexibility imagination, wisdom – public services do not have to
behave like machines. A more open democracy needs public services that are co-designed and co-controlled
by the people who use and benefit from them.
The Blenheim Gardens housing estate in Brixton was a place where residents did not want to live in the past. It
suffered from high levels of crime, poor quality repairs, dirty communal areas. Today it is a place transformed by
giving residents more control through an elected board, which oversees the housing managers. Crime is down,
the estate is spotlessly clean, repairs are carried out on time, and communal areas have been transformed into
clean, green and pleasant places.
Lambeth has encouraged citizens to share responsibility for services with more control over libraries, youth
services, parks and green spaces and has set up time-banks to reward people for volunteering. Cornwall
experimented with opening up its data to enable local communities to help solve local problems. Devon is in
discussion with activist towns like Totnes to devolve responsibility for many services. Cheshire West and Chester
has created a series of public service mutuals to run council services. Democracy can be extended into the
provider organisations in the public, private and third sectors. These services use public money more effectively
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