It Ain't What You Do, It's the Way That You Do It.

How government works. And why it doesn't.

The What You Do – well, we’re all very familiar with that.

Generally, the Labour Party will do whatever it takes to prioritise society - raise taxes, spend more on the NHS, schools, police, welfare, our military, build homes, regulate to protect our environment, nationalise our railways. The money is for the many basically.

Generally the Conservative Party will do whatever it takes to support the economy - cut taxes, spend far too little on public services, deregulate to enable the pollution of our environment, inflate land values to benefit landowners, nationalise our banks, leave the EU. Oops. The money is theirs basically and no one has the right to tell them what to do with it even it means losing some of it.

Neutral intros to one side, this blog isn’t about the What You Do. Our echo chambers have already loudly and emphatically agreed to disagree on that one.

How You Do It. Now. That’s What Get Results. That’s when politics steps aside for the dry, dull business of governing. This is when manifesto’s primary colours morph into a traffic light spreadsheet, when whooping audiences become nagging audits, when words become numbers, when the best of intentions stumble with two left feet toward completing THAT proverb.

How we govern is far too often seen as a dull, technocratic, bureaucratic tangled mess. No one retweets spreadsheets. However, I am very keen that as Labour prepares for government that it gives how we will govern some considerable thought. While I accept it is unlikely how funding and policy will be managed and devolved from Whitehall will ever form the centre piece of a Corbyn conference speech or a Momemtum directed Stormzy promo, it is the stealth part of our plan to govern which we need to get clear in our own heads.

It’s probably easiest to illustrate if I use an example.

Back in September last year at a fringe event at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, organised by Momentum’s A World Transformed, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary and my local MP, friend and comrade, Jon Ashworth sat alongside Comedy’s Booky-Wooky Political Provocateur and someone I’ve never spoken to, Russell Brand.

Both spoke about the damage done to the lives by addiction. Jon by his alcoholic father. Russell, by his numerous addictions. Both spoke movingly about addiction as a symptom or presentation of a deeper lack of trust and self-respect, and/or a way of somehow framing or controlling a severe mental health issue. Sometimes it’s all of that in a toxic spiral that swallows the individual whole but also sweeps up in its path those closest to the sufferer - their parents, partners, kids, friends, family, who themselves become traumatised by the experience. There isn't a single agency out there that can adequately support those ensnared by these circumstances.

Particularly away from the conference hall at fringe events such as this, a constant refrain was that the problems people now face are complex, too complex in fact for the departmental silos that we govern under, nationally and locally. There was a consensus measured by applause and nodding heads that a Labour government would look to support and fund solving these problems in a more imaginative and compassionate way. No-one got round to actually proposing how (and spoiler alert, nor do I).

One of the most telling, visible examples of the toxic compound of austerity for mental ill health and addiction is rough sleeping. In Leicester, as in most places is on the rise. I recently visited a recovery 30 bed facility for rough sleepers in West London managed by St Mungos and funded by the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.

The centre is designed for those under its roof to form and shape attachments and take ownership across a series of relationships and interactions: with their assigned support worker, their living space, their treatment. It's not a hand-off, emergency intervention but a carefully designed model of engagement design to enable recovery through forming attachments, not avoiding dependency.

In return, there is a very tolerant attitude to behaviours that in other places might lead to eviction and there’s no hurry to get on out and move on. For example, you can continue to drink or take drugs or if you get into trouble with the police this won't always lead to being kicked out. Stays last on average between 14 and 20 months. It’s a psychologically informed environment so it’s been designed to ensure someone staying doesn’t become anxious, distressed or traumatised by their environment. In much the same way I guess a hospital is designed to be hygienic so that patients don’t get even more ill.

It’s working. Engagements are incredibly high; evictions are incredibly low; rough sleeping in that part of London is bucking the horrific national trend and is declining; there’s an increasing waiting list to get into the facility. Others are taking more than note, including where I live in Leicester.

*

How did they do it? How did they get these results? They have combined DWP and social care funding, applied the expertise of NHS professionals and secured the support and trust of the local police. Ideally, the NHS and Police would contribute financially also.

Now such funding and partnerships are far from impossible to mobilise but nowhere near as easy to set up as they should be. It only takes one of those partners to belligerently or reluctantly to stick to their funding Whitehall department performance measures or an under paid provider to point in the direction of their contract and stretch targets and such a facility and model of care could collapse. If money arrives in departmental envelopes or via a contract, it’ll be spent to please those that sent it or commissioned it. The best of intentions bumping against a granite bottom line.

It doesn't have to be like this even if our governing structures are monolithic and impenetrable, it is important, vital, to remember how we govern is not politically neutral - it is a product of the political culture which informs it. It is a choice. Think about the current mechanisms for deciding budgets and priorities. Dragons's Den departmental spending reviews ahead of red box budgets, competitive infrastructure bidding processes for capital funds, the fiendishly complicated and cumbersome Transformation Plans of the NHS, the tendering and outsourcing of our public duties. All are based on a concept of internal or external competition and unit value. Ultimately, this culture devolves into delivery, frames how we view places and people. So, we compete for funding against other places who most likely experiencing exactly the same problems we are trying to solve, often amplifying our deprivation to secure funding; or we view people as units delivering an economic or social return on our public investment.

Let me continue with the rough sleeping example. Someone who has recovered from the trauma that led to them sleeping for weeks in a shop doorway should not be considered a public investment failure if two years later, they are living on welfare but healthily and independently, drinking but functioning, maintaining friendships but occasionally presenting as aggressive. And yet the above circumstances would never be used as a case study, even though they are alive, warm, significantly happier, significantly better. The spreadsheets at the DWP and NHS would have a cell turning red, a target would become harder to reach.

Currently we have a huge talent pool of well meaning, talented, over worked and under valued public officials (ahem declare an interest, I have been one for most of my working life). This beleaguered bunch are asked to try solve commonly shared problems for little reward while balancing institutional budgets with serious repercussions if they don't. They are torn between brutal and competing jeopardy's - the cost of doing nothing or the risk of doing something. Far too often you have the anomaly of a frontline desperately working with partners to solve a problem while a back office desperately tries to balance a budget to save jobs and services. Far too often these noble motivations compete and work against each other and austerity's grim cycle is cranked up - rising demand for services, falling budgets to provide them, compounded by inflexible governance and the unforgiving spreadsheet.

This is the problem and, as I said, I offer no solutions here. I have ideas but Labour is currently an imaginative and bold political movement and I'd like that energy to focus on the how. I appreciate that it is a frustrating inconvenience to many that managerial mechanisms are required to govern but they are. However it'd be neglectful and ultimately counter-productive not to apply serious thought and energy into redesigning these mechanisms so that they reflect the values that the next Labour government will stand for. We have already repurposed our politics, it'll be our responsibility to do the same to government.

I may not be offering solutions here but I will lob in a starting point - the principles by which we would redesign the mechanics for government. Labour could shift the institutional emphasis from one of market management and narrowly departmentally defined efficiencies to one that proudly and unapologetically measures itself against by how public money has improved the quality of our air, education, homes, health - the quality of our lives, not the quantity of our outputs. How our government has made us better, not just better off.

Now see, I began with quoting the Fun Boy Three & Bananrama and ended by evoking Robert Kennedy. Like I say, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it….

Danny Myers is an Assistant City Mayor and a Labour Councillor on Leicester City Council.