For better or for worse?

During the past year we have spoken with clients in the public sector about their effective and courageous responses to the original emergency budget, the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review and everything that followed from then on. The highly cogent commentary from economic experts then, that highlighted the unfeasibly high economic growth expectations that underpinned the government's economic strategy and its demands on the public sector, have now been proven beyond doubt. 


We have been suggesting to clients across this period that those growth targets would not be met and that the government would be back to raid public spending again sooner rather than later. The "sooner" arrived today unfortunately in the form of further public sector pay restraint, phrased in such a way that to suggest public sector workers do not pay income tax to boot! The pension changes are also from the same school of blunt-instrument trauma to prove the Government is up for the fight.


The infrastructure announcements seem to be little more than bringing forward plans already in the pipeline from previously constrained and reduced programmes in any event. The jobs that flow from those plans take far longer to get to 'shovel-ready' than politicians allow for or hope. 


The obvious and publicly supported option to tax financial transactions was dismissed as being 'anti-pension' (you'll really have to explain that one further please) and banks again were let off the hook, again, with a tiny increase in the annual levy. 


The previous week's announcement about assistance to get 16-24 years olds into temporary work was almost laughable in its blunt-ended simplicity and a too-late acknowledgement that the Future Jobs Fund was better supported and if necessary amended, rather than peremptorily binned as part of its "bonfire of the quangos" and all things Labour. This bonfire is more one of government's critical faculties and it betrays many in a race to the bottom of the employment and education prospects of that age group. 


So it goes across society, the rhetoric of Big Society becoming ever more sharply defined by closure after closure of successful local projects, schemes and initiatives that cost relatively little yet bind together challenged communities and interest groups. Only multi-millionaires with little if any direct experience of the context and application of these schemes would dare to continue to exhort the poorest and least able to keep taking the medicine, whilst the richest 1% remain insulated. 


Latest figures now show corporate UK, i.e. UK PLC, avoids corporation tax to the tune of £70b per annum - seventy billion pounds per annum. Yep, we'll keep taking the medicine but it becomes ever more bitter.      

Government business opened up to SME's - or is it?

The Business to Business website reported today the apparent good news that government intends to accelerate the opening-up of it's business opportunities to small and medium enterprises. 

Now, we've highlighted before that there is a fairly sizeable gap between the espoused theory of openness to competition and the actual theory in use, i.e.the much harsher reality, of Messrs Maude and Whatmore (Maude's senior civil servant). One example must be that so many so-called open opportunities to tender are in fact provided to aggregating websites who charge hundreds and thousands of pounds for SME's to access even the most rudimentary of tender information. If a company wishes to have access to these public sector opportunities across all of the regions and across the professions, the annual bill for signing-up with these aggregator sites can run into four figures quite easily. 

The issue is not one of affordability but the ethical position of a government professing to be opening up its business to small business when at the same time creating barriers to the most basic of information to access those opportunities. Oh, and one more thing - I understand that it is not apocryphal that the big four consultancies have all in the recent past bid £1 for a piece of government work that was worth several millions, i.e. they 'bought' it. Just how can SME's compete with that degree of...'rigging', or is that too strong a word?

Here's what BtB said "Cabinet Office Secretary Francis Maude is to announce plans to put over £50bn worth of public works and services tenders online. This will be a major shake up of central government procurement. The idea is to make it easier and faster to bid for government work, especially for smaller companies who often lose out when pitching for public projects. Government departments will be instructed to break contracts into bite-sized chunks to make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to get involved. The initial work going online will relate to IT and facilities management, with building and infrastructure projects going online from April 2012. These changes will simplify the process for SMEs and make it 40% faster to do business with the Government."

Security of tenure for housing to be tied to work or training

The Municipal Journal has just reported that Wandsworth LBC is considering introducing a 'Housing into Work' scheme for new housing applicants. They would be subject to fixed-term tenancies tied to periodic reviews of their employment status.

Tenants who fail to take steps to find work or improve their employment prospects during the fixed term face the prospect of losing their homes.

The Council's Housing spokesperson Councillor Paul Ellis said: "We are effectively creating a contract with selected new tenants to support and help them find a job or gain new skills. In return we expect them to take up these opportunities." 

Some questions that spring to mind include: who will be the "selected" new tenants and how selected; what is the degree of support and re-skilling they will have to contract to undertake; who will manage this contract; how narrow or permissive will the "expectation" to take up the opportunities; and how will its outcomes be measured when a family's human right to a roof over its head is at stake?

He went on to say even more portentously that 'People who refuse to meaningfully to look for work without good reason will forfeit their right to a council home." The definition of "meaningful" will be absolutely critical here.

Further, he suggested that 'This isn't about punishing people who are made redundant or cannot find a job. It is about having a way to penalise those who can't be bothered to make the effort.' So, it's not just a test of meaningfulness, they will also have to prove the degree to which a tenant has been "bothered" to find work and it is de-facto about the housing landlord now taking on the role of "penalising" its tenants not for their behaviour as tenants bit for their capacity to participate in an economy which is in recession - that's a big stretch. 

This really does begin to look like soundbite territory for the Daily Mail.It also begs the question that if this about jobs and skilling, why not concentrate on those aspects and not complicate it by tieing those outcomes to social housing availability? It is also potentially discriminatory, selecting one group in society to have their housing put at risk. 

The MJ tells us that the council are also looking into giving working families higher priority in the allocating homes. Which would suggest a consistency of approach at least, whatever one might think of the higher profile elements of the policy. What happens when/if they lose their jobs - might this policy be expanded later on to deal with existing tenants in work?

Cllr Ellis added: "It is important that our housing estates have a good mix of people from all walks of life and with different socio-economic backgrounds. We believe that increasing the number of families on our estates who are in work will act as a beacon for those around them." Which of course we would all welcome from a social balance viewpoint, but rather than create balanced communities by wider societal means, the balance will be narrowly socially engineered.

We have already blogged earlier this year that Wandsworth LBC caused controversy after threatening convicted rioters with eviction from their council homes. Despite the 'big brother' rather than 'big society' aspects of this policy  Marlene Price, vice-chair of the Borough Residents' Forum - the organisation representing the council's 33,000 tenants and leaseholders - welcomed the proposals.

She said: '"I support the council's efforts to encourage people to do all they can to improve their lives and improve the life chances of themselves and their families."

The MJ finishes it piece by revealing the policy draws on new powers contained in the Localism Bill - "giving local authorities greater freedoms and flexibility when it comes to determining who is given a taxpayer-subsidised home." We'd be interested to understand just exactly what the nature is of the "tax-payer subsidised home". Council housing finance has been complex for years, being a mix of capital and revenue funding, public borrowing and housing benefit - but this phrase is just too general and potentially emotive to be trusted.  

The policy could be effective later this month. Comment now. 

CIPD Annual Conference and appreciative approaches to change

I've spent the past two days at the CIPD Annual Conference in Manchester helping on the exhibition stand of a friend and colleague in the UK and European AI Networks and Associate in The Open Channel, Sarah Lewis. Her company Appreciating Change has had a stand at both the CIPD HRD conference earlier this year at Olympia and now this one.


Across the two days we have spoken to dozens of visitors to the conference and exhibition. These are HR professionals across all sectors who are principally charged with recruitment, selection, advancement, reward and so on. Amongst this group we found a significant number of HR managers who are also responsible for change; change in culture, structures, processes, and in introducing various approaches to those changes.


That in particular is where we came in, introducing appreciative and strengths-focused change approaches, positive psychology and solution-focused models into the conversations. For some, but not most, Appreciative Inquiry was well known and in use, particularly we found this in the NHS and local authorities and also in other sectors. The reports of the contribution AI and strengths-focused approaches make were highly positive, especially when taken across a longer term, e.g. a year or more. The professionals reported improved levels of employee engagement (and productivity), improved working relationships across organisational tiers with more effective performance management and appraisals. 


In other cases, AI and associated approaches were yet to be discovered  - which is exciting! It means there is new territory to be explored; situations offering significant potential for positive and sustainable change and employees who will find the interest, power and innovation that comes from constructing new visions, missions, strategies and actions from an appreciative standpoint. To some extent all that is required is for those organisations yet to discover the best of what is and build on that to create the best of what might be, is to have some appreciative conversations. These can be crafted by practitioners, such as we had at the exhibition, alongside champions in organisations as a result of a series of planned appreciative activities or they might crafted within the organisations with some limited support from practitioners; whatever suits the circumstances best. All of our companies offer the full range of solutions, from one-to-one support all the way through to large-scale group events involving hundreds of people and several innovative models of engagement including World Cafe, Open Space and Simureal.


Whatever clients choose, we have the experience, the passion, knowledge and skills to unlock their stories and their expertise. We can support them to discover, dream, design and create their new destinies. Critically, the focus is on the potential within the client's organisation - our role is to find ways to help them uncap the potential in whatever form it's held, e.g. people's talents and strengths, creating fruitful new working relationships, encouraging innovation and prompting imagination. It's the untapped potential that offers so many organisations the opportunity to achieve more, or better, in the challenging public service, third sector and commercial environments we face.         


  

Truth deniers on public sector pensions at it again - this time it's Dominic Lawson

Dominic Lawson makes some good points in today's i newspaper about the current pensions debate.

For instance he points out that "barely a third of all private sector workers

have an employer-sponsored scheme at all." Yet, instead of castigating the

private sector employers for atrociously failing their employees, and by the way

possibly flouting the law, he eulogises this scandal and uses it as a stick to beat public

sector employers with.



He then goes on to recycle the tired old untruth about the relative scale of

public sector pensions, completely failing to distinguish between those funded

from general taxation and those funded by their fund participants and local

employers, i.e. with not a single penny of general taxation used in those funds.



It is to his discredit and that of the i, that this partial description, even in

a piece headed "My View", is allowed to see the light of day. Until critics like

Lawson present the whole picture their arguments will always fall short of

making a persuasive case for change. While he's it, i.e. telling only half a

story, why not report on the Footsie 100 Directors' average annual pensions at

£279,000. Now there is a scandal - these 'masters of the universe' have ruined

the value of many of our industries (apparently without paying pensions to their employees

according to Lawson) and banks yet walk away with fortunes.


How about reporting on that Dominic?

European Appreciative Inquiry Network

Last week, I spent almost four days in Manchester participating in the AI Network. This self-organising network of appreciative and strengths-focused advisers, facilitators and practitioners of all descriptions, has met 12 times across Europe over the last five years. The event is structured around Open Space and World Cafe technology, which provides highly engaging ways for groups to connect, combine and co-create. 


Across a series of short yet intensive sessions we covered a wide range of themes and subjects, including imagining a new Europe through the use of AI, case studies of successful change across all sectors using appreciative and strengths-focused methods, on-site visits to community projects using AI in live action for the benefit for the community, sharing ideas to create commercial markets for these approaches and to improve our practice plus so many more.


The power of the network event lies in the knowledge and wisdom colleagues' bring to the sessions and of course in the time we spend together between the sessions. The experiences we share are based in the practical, hard-edged, real-time world, helping individuals,teams, groups, organisations and whole communities to develop, grow and change. This change has to be sustainable, repeatable and maintainable, yet unique to every situation. That's why the approaches we use in the appreciative world are not the simplistic, formulaic, 'four-box' models as promoted by some consultants. These are ethical, principle and science-based approaches, concentrating on facilitating the knowledge and skills of the client-community, not on the 'expert' knowledge of the consultant that often create a dependency culture in the client. 


Our goal is to help our clients create insights, build knowledge and develop capacity as rapidly as practicable. Our work frees the client to identify their talents, build on their strengths, dream their futures and create their own destinies. The examples we have from practice span all sectors, countries, cultures and interests; they are both energising and real.


Check out the networkplace.eu for the latest in the news of AI in Europe and beyond. There are regional AI networks gradually starting to emerge in the UKand the UK AI network has been flourishing for several years. All can be accessed by this link:  http://www.networkplace.eu/web/page.aspx?sid=736