Work in progress
Today’s news that the Vauxhall car factory in Ellesmere is to be saved from closure will be a huge relief to the 2,000 or so workers whose jobs were at risk. This coincides with some welcome improvements in yesterday’s employment growth figures. According to the ONS, unemployment is down by 45,000 and so too are the numbers claiming job seekers allowance. Experience tells us that it is unwise to think that the darkest days of the economic slump are behind us, but surely isn’t this cause for some optimism?
For the economy maybe, but not necessarily for workers. A closer look at the figures reveals three or four key shifts we should probably be concerned with. The first is that the number of people out of work for more than a year rose by something like 3 per cent to nearly 900,000. A recent New York Times article lists a number of research reports which highlight the kind of ‘scarring’ effects that such long-term unemployment can cause. The title of one Pew Research Center article says it all: “Lost income, Lost friends – and Loss of Self Respect.” In a sort of self-perpetuating downward spiral, these problems in turn decrease the likelihood of finding a job.
The second trend to be wary of is the rising number of part-time workers. While some people choose to work fewer hours for reasons such as childcare issues or the desire for more leisure time, there are many others who would much prefer to work full-time. The ONS figures from yesterday show that the number of people working part-time because they could not find a full-time job reached a record-breaking 1.5 million, up by 73,000 in a quarter. The key problem with this shift to part-time employment is that it can have repercussions for people’s benefit entitlements. The recent changes to Working Tax Credits mean that people now have to work 24 hours in a week rather than 16 to qualify for benefits. The result is that if you are a part-time worker who cannot secure the minimum 24 hours you could lose up to £3,900 a year.
This brings me to the third, already well-established, shift of declining levels of growth in wages. ONS figures reveal that total pay (including bonuses) climbed by only 0.6 per cent over the past year. Given that annual inflation is currently at around 3.5 per cent, a crude calculation would make this a real wage decrease of a notable 2.9 per cent.
The fourth shift, albeit I believe not one documented in the ONS data sets, is the growth of ‘zero-hour contracts’. Typically seen in low-paid and low-skilled work, these are full-time contracts but ones which do not commit the employer to provide any working hours to the employee. The idea is that employers can fluctuate the hours of workers subject to their need. Although not ideal for the employee, in theory it should help to create more flexibility for employers and in turn increase the likelihood of them taking on more staff (since they’re not afraid of being stuck with workers should there be a serious downturn). The problem is that these contracts are reportedly being abused by many companies, leaving workers with no security and the added trouble of continually trying to re-establish their benefits when their working hours fall away. The fact that these individuals still theoretically have a contract makes claiming all the more difficult.
The following interview extract from Stephen Armstrong’s The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited gives us a sense of how those at the bottom of the pyramid are struggling to cope with the upheaval this causes:
Robin Tenant works at Argos, in Warrington. “They gave me a four-hour contract – it only guarantees four hours of work a week,” he explains. “Now for some people it suits them absolutely fine, do you know? Four hours work a week if you were a pensioner trying to top up your pension or you’re just starting going back to work is fine. But we are a family and both me and my partner have a four-hour contract with one store and so we have eight hours work between us for a week. We’re employed, so we don’t have… so unemployment benefit becomes a complete nightmare because we technically have contracts and we have thirty-six hours work one week and then four and it means that as soon as something happens – like the week before Christmas last year the snow happened – we’re stuffed.
All of the above four shifts illustrate how far we have yet to go in creating not just more, but better jobs. Not every job or working contract is a good one, so why is it that we breathe a collective sigh of relief when employment figures go up? Moreover, why do we rail at the unemployed for their lack of effort in finding employment and yet do very little for those who eventually do find scraps of work?
What is perhaps needed is a more critical analysis and honest debate about what a good job or contract really looks like. This means looking seriously at models like ‘Flexicurity’ championed by Will Hutton, and learning from the likes of Germany where trade unions, employers and workers club together to reach an agreement on working patterns which suits all parties. Conversely, what we don’t want is a fixation on job numbers alone or indeed a political class that seeks to stifle the debate by using terms such as “job snobs” to dismiss those who raise the subject.
Time for your social check-up!
I recently joined the RSA Connected Communities team working on the Social Mirror app. Social Mirror is a smartphone/tablet app that allows users to measure, visualise, and change their social connections, with the potential to strengthen communities while improving a person’s own health and well-being.
As a graduate student studying Digital Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, I’m excited to put what I’ve been studying at the intersection of sociology and digital innovation into practice.
Social Mirror is a project that RSA Connected Communities is working on in collaboration with Nathan Matias at MIT Center for Civic Media. I’m really excited to be working with this team, and think that Social Mirror is a great tool to elaborate on the work that Connected Communities is doing. Connected Communities understands the importance of a person’s social network and the impact this has on their personal life. Understanding this connection is one step. Social Mirror is the next.
With Social Mirror, people will be able to map out their own real-life social networks (so don’t think Facebook) and understand how their social connections affect their lives. Simply by visualising one’s social network, people begin to make choices to improve their social networks. Sometimes it’s hard to see the connection between the friends you have and your ability (or not) to find a job. Social Mirror will allow people to map their real-life social networks to help them recognise the connection between their communities and their individual health and well-being. When people visualise and interact with their social networks, they are more likely to understand how this affects their personal lives and start to make choices that will improve their social network. As Nathan puts it, it is essentially a tool for conducting a social checkup.
Helping the elderly and isolated
An area that we want to focus on while developing Social Mirror is how the app can be used to help the elderly and isolated within a community. Over the summer we will be working in the New Cross Gate area and beyond to develop this app in a way that will specifically benefit the elderly. One way to do this might be to work with health practitioners to develop a diagnostic tool. Health practitioners would be able to use Social Mirror to understand the patient’s social network and the implications for the patient’s health. The app will also be able to prompt suggestions for improving the patient’s social network to improve overall health and wellbeing.
One interesting example of apps that help the elderly is Care Innovations Connect. This is an app developed by Intell and GE. It is intended to help seniors living on their own to facilitate communication between them and their caregiver. It also has a social networking aspect, provides games to maintain mental fitness, news and information about the local community, and sends alerts when medication needs to be taken. Do you know of any other apps that have been developed to help the elderly?
Are there better ways to surface undeclared work?
Earlier this month, it was reported that HMRC were setting in place a voluntary disclosure scheme to encourage regular eBay traders to declare their tax liabilities. In a sign that the tax authorities are treating undeclared income from online trading more seriously, sellers who fail to come forward by the 6 week disclosure deadline will be subject to a penalty of between 40 and 100 per cent of their tax obligations. The figure is between 10 and 20 per cent for those who choose to cooperate with the authorities and declare their earnings.
For a country that is at the forefront of online trading, this appears to be a sensible and timely move. According to analysis by The Economist, by 2016 the ‘internet economy’ will contribute up to 12 per cent of the UK’s GDP, the highest figure among leading industrialised nations by a large margin. Alongside other structural trends such as the continuous rise in the number of self-employed workers (now over 1 in 10 of the workforce), this is creating a number of challenges for tax authorities since it opens up more opportunities for non-compliance.
In a country where some estimate that the ‘hidden economy’ already represents as much as 10% of GDP, it is clear that we will need to find better ways of channelling these informal activities into the formal, tax-paying sphere. One approach witnessed in initiatives like that mentioned above is to deploy greater deterrence measures; ratcheting up penalties for non-compliance and expanding the number of inspections. The reasoning behind this is simple: people will weigh up the cost and benefits of their actions and, assuming a sizable penalty and a strong likelihood of being caught, cease their activities.
This sounds like a reasonable strategy until we consider that the decisions people make are seldom based solely on such a cool and calculated cost-benefit analysis. For some, working informally is the only option available. For instance, those living in poverty and acting as family carers may have to engage in undeclared work to top up low level benefits that would diminish or cease entirely should they work in the formal sphere (this is a central message in the ‘Need not Greed’ campaign established by Community Links). For others like micro-entrepreneurs, the costs of registration, the complexities of book-keeping and the burden of tax on operations prohibit them from running their business in the formal sphere. Applying sanctions for non-compliance in this context could just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
This is not to say that deterrence doesn’t work. In many cases it can be the most effective means of drawing out people from informal working patterns, particularly those who have resisted all previous calls and who could still live comfortably while declaring their income. But therein lies the problem of deterrence approaches. They are like using a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed. Because deterrence is often not tailored to different groups and different needs, everybody is on the receiving end. Whether that’s the persistent non-compliers, the micro-entrepreneurs who are struggling to get by or the vast majority of the population who are fully compliant.
As a number of experts in the field have pointed out, the effect of this blanket approach can often be to alienate taxpayers and non-taxpayers alike, creating an “us and them” culture between citizens and the state. Those who are just about making ends meet are unlikely to respond well to a distant authority which is demanding they pay thousands in taxes for government services which they perhaps rarely feel the benefit of. Studies have shown that deterrence approaches can even embolden taxpayers to engage in more undeclared work in future years.
Arguably what is needed instead is a two-fold approach to addressing the hidden economy. First, we need to cultivate greater tax morality, recognised by many as one of the biggest predictors of informal activity. By this I mean that the state should make people feel that they are getting enough out of the system relative to what they are putting in, and that it should be fair in the way it treats every individual, rich or poor. In practice, efforts to boost tax morality might include introducing more of a contributory principle in welfare services, or establishing the ‘life-cycle’ welfare accounts that the 2020PSH once suggested. It would certainly involve addressing tax dodging from high earners.
Second, we need a more tailored approach to addressing informal activity which combines deterrence with encouragement. Community Links, the organisation that has done most in the UK to look into this issue, recognise that many informal entrepreneurs aspire to formalise their operations and that it just a matter of time before they can grow their business to a size that makes this feasible. Government services could do better to help informal entrepreneurs reach this stage by providing more appropriate advice (the current offer from JCP and Business Link is often not relevant) and decent sources of financial credit. In practice, tailored support could be delivered by segmenting groups and individuals by their risk or otherwise of non-compliance, as has been done by the Australian government.
For anyone keen to know more about effective approaches to addressing undeclared work and supporting hidden entrepreneurs, look out for an upcoming report from the Enterprise team.
Deadline approaching for new RSA paid internship opportunities
There are only four days remaining until the application deadline for the latest set of RSA internships paid at the London Living Wage.
There are three opportunities available, all of which are based in West Kent supporting our new recovery programme. This programme aims to nurture a vibrant ‘recovery community’ across the area which can support those experiencing substance misuse. At the heart of the programme is a belief that recovery can only truly be made possible and sustainable when the efforts and assets of the wider community are brought to bear on the challenge.
Interns will have the chance to assist with the programme’s community engagement strategy, particularly the many and varied recovery focussed events throughout the region. Successful candidates will support the Recovery Community Organiser in taking forward the ‘Recovery Month’ programme, part of which will involve interviewing event participants and developing promotional materials including website content, posters and blogs.
We are looking for candidates who have a keen interest in community engagement and/or recovery. Above all, we are looking for interns that are enthusiastic, committed and willing to try new things.
The internship will span a period of two months, beginning late May / early June.
The deadline for applications is midnight Sunday 13th May.
For more details and to find out how to apply, visit our internship page here.
So, exactly how are we all in this together?
Politics is the art of hard choices. But it is also the home of false dichotomies. When it comes to our approach to growth, some fundamentally unhelpful caricatures have taken root that need to be put aside. At their crudest, they pit public spending (and public services) against business and economic growth, with each – directly or by implication – antithetical to the other. Our public services are either social bulwarks to be preserved, now more than ever, as markets fail and communities struggle; or our sprawling public services are culpable for our spiralling debts and are continuing to crowd out genuine growth. Neither side acknowledge the need for change. Public services are to be protected, not reformed. Business needs to be freed to pursue the bottom line.
The problem is not so much that these positions about growth are widely shared or deeply adhered to. Even now, with nerves frayed by recession and painful public spending cuts, most political debate is considerably less either / or than its Manichean rhetoric might suggest. The problem is that the ‘pro-growth’ or ‘pro-public service’ caricatures have distracted from the fact that many of the key elements in the debate are actually in flux. Growth for GDP is being challenged by imperatives for sustainable growth; public services as dispensed through monolithic providers is being challenged by public service entrepreneurship and supply-side diversification; and business’ exclusive focus on the bottom line is being challenged by shared value approaches. Put all these changes together, and it becomes clear that the way forward will require new forms of joined up thinking at the top of government, and new forms of collaboration at every level. Public service reform and economic growth are two sides of the same coin, but they risk pulling in different directions without an operational framework and a shared agenda.
Today, the 2020 Public Services Hub launches a major new report – Business, Society and Public Services - that sets out what the key elements of that framework could consist of. It uses a social productivity approach to identify three preconditions for practical success. The first precondition is new shared spaces for policy making and business decisions. Government, local and central, has a strong role in convening these spaces, but its role may be to set the objectives and devolve the detail. The report looks at the Zero Carbon Hub, set up by the National House-Building Council with seed corn funding from DCLG, which has successfully taken responsibility for implementing the Government’s commitment to make new homes carbon neutral by 2016. The second precondition is new shared values. Again, government’s role is critical. Though it cannot and should not try and do everything, it can set clear goals and establish values, encouraging business and public services to think beyond delivery and create long-term shared goals. Public agencies can play a unique convening role – something we already see in the case of FE colleges. The third precondition is new shared resources. Business and public services alike need to look beyond their traditional resource bases if austerity is really to drive innovation, rather than retrenchment. For example, the report looks at how Sunderland City’s Council’s ‘virtual’ back office serves its own business needs, but also those of local businesses and start-ups.
It’s clear from the evidence brought together in this report that change is underway, and that over the long term we are likely to see the erosion of many of the oppositions within which we have constructed our approaches to public policy and business practice. The development of a new set of richer, rebalanced and mutually supportive relationships between public services, the private sector and society is a realistic ambition. But the report comes with a warning. Exciting examples of hybrid forms and shared responsibilities should not hide the fact that to date, this is change at the margins; and for most businesses and most public services, business as normal continues to hold sway. The challenge for political leadership is to resist the comforts of old oppositional caricatures, and do more than exhort collaborative aspirations. Really being in it together won’t be easy, but the potential gains are huge.
Actual Human Rights….
So quite an amusing tweet-cussionbetween Louise Mensch and Amanda Bancroft over the distinction between the Human Rights Act and *Actual Human Rights*[1].
Now the HRA basically put the European Convention on Human Rights –drafted by UK lawyers – into domestic law. The UK has one of those funny dualist legal systems where the government can sign up to *any* international treaty[1], but until domestic law is drafted, those treaties do not apply domestically: see discussion here.
This is why Pinochet 1998 was such a big deal. As the UK had only incorporated the prohibition on torture in 1988 there had to be proof that – in a dictatorship lasting from 1973-1988/89 – there had been actual torture occurring in 1988. Before that the UK would not have had any legal provisions that would have seen the prohibition on torture as the jus cogens – a law that trumps all other laws, such as diplomatic immunity or territoriality – that it is now seen as being, and laws cannot be used retroactively.
In any case, I digress. My question is: what do you think are *actual human rights*? The HRA only covers political and civil rights: as in to life, freedom from torture, to a just legal system, to free and fair elections etc… The main debates are generally around over Strasbourg’s slightly kinder understanding of ‘the right to family life’ and what actually amounts to ‘cruel and inhuman treatment’: for housing, for example, the House of Lord’s test used to be irrationality – only if a local authority was irrational would they step in – now it *should* be reasonableness.
Personally, I do not think the HRA goes far enough: the UK has consistently refused to accept that Economic and Social Rights are justiciable – something you can fight for in court – and frankly, it should.
Over to you.
Facebook: junk food for soul?
A quick 250 words I whizzed together for a Guardian ‘people’s panel’: what do you think? Is Facebook good for you?
Ask me in the pub, and I’ll probably tell you that Facebook has been good for me. I have bits of friendships and bits of heart scattered across the globe, and if I could get my 87 year old Italian Nonna to join Facebook or – gasp – embrace video-chat, then I would. There is only so much love you can put into a badly formatted SMS, and global warming feeds my guilt every time I step onto a luridly orange plane. But ask me at work – with my social network analysis ‘expert’ hat on – and I’ll tell you that I do not know.
As part of a balanced, calorie-controlled social diet, social networking is great. I watched a friend I trapezed with as she debuted in a Chilean soap; I see my friends’ kids from Sud-Tirol to Santiago; and those kids will grow up knowing there is a hell of a world out there. But people relying on the internet for social support do badly: like relying on desserts and chips for all your nutritional needs. The internet is not as democratic as it’s painted: twitter obeys power-laws, and you see the full extent of the twisted rabbit-holes that people’s minds sometimes fall into.
We have a maximum amount of people we can be close to: too many friends can be as harmful as none at all. If Facebook is the cherry on top, you’re probably doing fine. If it’s you main meal, you need to get offline.
The complexities and pitfalls of social capital in an ageing society
Last month my colleague Sam McLean posted a blog asking whether social capital was necessarily always a good thing. He was right in saying that too often we take it as read that strong social connections and a high level of trust create better outcomes in every scenario and on every occasion. While it is true that there has been a long standing debate about the merits of social bonding capital (connections within groups) vs. social bridging capital (connections between groups), this has really only skimmed the surface of what is a much more nuanced issue.
To give you a better sense of what these nuances actually look like, I’ve collated a few interesting examples about how complex social capital plays out in semi-formal and informal care settings. Before I lay these out, the first thing to mention is that, broadly speaking, social capital is a good thing when it comes to caring for older people and helping to maintain their independence. Eric Klinenberg’s famous study of the Chicago 1995 heat wave found that mortality rates among older people were much lower (30 per cent) in the neighbourhoods where they trusted others and felt safe to leave their buildings. Likewise, we now know from the work of John T. Cacioppo and others that health outcomes are directly linked to levels of loneliness and isolation. The risk of Alzheimer’s is said to be twice as high in older people who are lonely compared to those who are not.
All of that said, there are a number of reasons why we should be giving social capital a closer inspection, particularly when it comes to informal care and adjusting to an ageing society. The following points illustrate that the relationships and trust we have with others are neither homogenous, nor stable over time, nor indeed always positive:
1.There is a clear distinction between the support provided by neighbours, friends and family – the kind of care that older people receive is often ‘relationship-specific’. It has been suggested by some academics in the field of social care that spouses are the ones who provide both deeply emotional and physical support, adult children the emotional and instrumental support, and friends and neighbours the lighter companionship. No doubt all of these are important to older people but it does highlight the fact that neighbours and casual acquaintances are no substitute for close family when it comes to doing tasks that are of a very personal or physical nature (an important point when we think about housing policy, as my colleague pointed out recently)
2. Relationships are fragile and likely to change in times of illness – in a report on the social exclusion associated with ageing, AgeUK points out that the social stigma attached with certain illnesses can diminish or entirely sever even the strongest of friendships. The report includes the story of one man who felt like a ‘social pariah’ after his diagnosis of dementia: “Acquaintances would ‘pretend’ not to see me if I was in their presence and people stopped inviting me to dinner or events. They assumed I had changed in ways that I hadn’t, that I wasn’t the same person anymore and wasn’t worthy of conversations”. Friendships do not always weather the storm of illness.
3. Friends and family can be hyper-controlling and sometimes the best individuals to help older people with managing risks are those they have no relationship with at all – Fear can pervade the close relationships that older people have with their relatives and friends, often to the extent that the latter can become overly protective and risk averse. Care from close relatives and friends can turn into ‘containment’, severely limiting people’s independence. The same AgeUK research highlighted before found that some older people feel more comfortable discussing things with strangers who are impartial and who have ‘no vested interests’.
4. Older people do not want to be a burden to friends and family – Surprising research by Ipsos MORI shows that older people are far less enthusiastic about living with their children in old age than are their children. This is in part because they do not want to receive ‘reluctant attention’, but it is also perhaps because they fear the health consequences that may affect their spouses, children and close friends. Indeed, CarersUK found that nearly half of all carers providing significant support were in debt and affected by stress as a result of caring. Few would want to bring those kinds of difficulties on their loved ones.
If any of the above proves of interest, look out for an upcoming report from RSA Projects on risk, trust and an ageing society.
Is there more to Newham than meets the eye?
Earlier this week, Welfare Reform Minister Lord Freud delivered an address to the Reforming Housing Benefit Conference. It will be interesting to know if he explored the issue of people having to move to other areas where housing is cheaper. It extends to the heart of the government’s welfare reforms so he should have.
In a recent blog I may have given the wrong impression. Someone complained to me that I was defending the Newham policy by arguing that social networks and social capital are not always good things and that disrupting them can have positive outcomes for society and the individual. The blog was advocating more research and more nuanced policy thinking not a defence of Newham Council, or for that matter the government.
But it’s got me thinking about another possible project. The Department for Communities and Local Government and Department for Work and Pensions should consider funding work looking at the potential economic and social costs of the housing benefit cap in light of the recent debate surrounding Newham, if this has not been done already or is not already underway.
Intuitively, my sense is that the economic and social costs of potentially thousands of people and families relocating to places where housing is cheaper could be significant, undermining rather than helping the government to cut public spending. At least five or six angles come to mind straight away, but let’s take the first one that came to my mind. We know that unpaid social care provided by friends and relatives saves the economy billions. Research undertaken by the University of Leeds for Carers UK in 2007, for example, estimates that the saving of this to the UK is £87 billion every year. To put this into perspective, that was more than the government’s total spend on the NHS in the 2006-07 financial year.
If the housing benefit cap means large numbers of people having to move away, one consequence could be to weaken or break up these important support networks thus making the big social care problem we have in the UK even worse than it already is. The knock on effect nationally would be to increase pressure on already over-stretched and over-squeezed public and voluntary sectors. But the impact would be felt most acutely locally, in poorer parts of the country where living standards have been (and will continue to be) worst hit and where people are already, arguably, overly reliant on the state and where local services are most under-pressure overall.
Needless to say, this would be a rather odd way of reducing the size of the state and public spending which are explicit aims of the government. Which leads me to wonder: is the cap on housing benefit another example of the government not thinking through its policies? This might be harsh, in which case I’m happy to listen to alternative perspectives.
On the subject of social care, I had the pleasure of reading an interesting blog by my colleague, Ben Dellot, earlier in the week, which is worth a read. And for a rather good report on personalisation in social care see the latest report from the 2020 Public Services Hub at the RSA.
Beyond Big Society Capital: a future shaped by ‘socialised investment’?
Many have spoken of the potential value of social investment, or investments that include both financial and social returns. Building on initiatives from the previous government, the current government has articulated a vision and strategy for growing the social investment market. The Big Society Bank (now renamed Big Society Capital) forms a core part of this, but the underlying aim is to provide the infrastructure and support necessary for the social investment market to overcome various barriers to its growth. While social investment has been growing, there are several problems that limit its potential scale, such as a lack of investment readiness on the part of social ventures, lack of market information, and cultural and behavioural barriers among both those running social ventures and potential investors. This is why much of the debate on the feasibility of social investment has revolved around the importance of ‘social market intermediaries’ that are able to provide the expertise and infrastructure required to connect funds to appropriate social ventures, and to enhance the market readiness of social ventures.
But it might also be argued that an even more fundamental shortcoming is the lack of a focus on giving citizens a greater stake in social investment. Social investors are predominantly rich individuals (such as philanthropists) or large organisations, and social investment is typically associated with social enterprises. In comparison, citizens have very limited opportunities to become social investors, which isn’t helped by the lack of engagement with social investment by institutional investors such as pension funds.
This absence of a democratic space for citizens to develop a greater stake in social investment has led Bristol City Council to pursue its forward-looking Building a Better Bristol programme (which 2020PSH will be assisting), which is working on developing credible investment products and governance structures to support ‘socialised investment’ – getting the wider public, businesses and institutional investors involved in investing in the social and economic development of the city while ensuring financial feasibility and investor confidence.
At a time of austerity and debates about how public services and economic and social development can become more sustainable, productive, and locally relevant, ‘socialised investment’ raises some very interesting long-term opportunities for local government, including:
- A new role for local government. As localism becomes more embedded in statutory and policy frameworks, local government can carve up an enabling local leadership role (possibly having a ‘social market intermediary’ role of its own) to catalyse social change and public service reform.
- Public money can be combined innovatively with pooled socialised investment funds and leveraged to collaboratively finance services and developments, which could also help relieve pressure on cash-strapped local authorities.
- The commissioning and delivery of services will theoretically be more intertwined with what citizens want from their services. While tax is a legal obligation, social investors will expect not just a financial but also social return – and this will need to be negotiated with citizens. Expectations of social returns will also have implications for the degree to which commissioning is based on the generation of social value. It will also have the potential to reshape how we should think about productivity in public services – something 2020PSH will be exploring soon.
- Greater local accountability and transparency, and greater local distinctiveness.
2020PSH has long argued for social productivity as an organising principle for public services – that is, public services should be judged according to the degree to which they help citizens, society and local communities achieve the social outcomes they desire. If it works, and if it is able to successfully scale out across the country in the long term, ‘socialised investment’ could be a fundamental part of socially productive public services. While it certainly is at its very infancy, the potential is also great.
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Steve Broome is Director of Research at the RSA with oversight of our Connected Communities, Social Brain and criminal justice work. I also work to develop our research and evaluation capability, particularly through approaches that reflect our interests in co-production, networks, and systems.
Emma Norris is Associate Director for Connected Communities and has worked on the Civic Commons project, examining citizenship and public participation, and Furthering Opportunity, promoting social justice in the further education sector. Follow @Emma_Norris
Gaia Marcus is a researcher for the Connected Communities project and the social network analysis champion for RSA projects as a whole. Her focus is examining the role of social networks in building resilient, empowered communities; in promoting mental well-being; and in building human capabilities in everything from education to social entrepreneurship. Follow @la_gaia
Ben Dellot is a researcher within the RSA Projects team and works on both the Citizen Power and Enterprise programmes. In addition to this, he is also a researcher to Matthew Taylor.
Sam Mclean is Director of Public Participation, leading the organisation's work on citizen engagement and set up and run a programme of research into civic action - the Citizen Power programme.
Susannah Wilcox is the co-ordinator for the Citizen Power: Peterborough programme, and provides support to Citizen Power team members across six strands of work.