(Local) Knowledge is Power

Joseph Rowntree have just published research on a question which fascinates and vexes us: why are poorer streets dirtier than richer streets? Nothing can explain away this unfairness. Poor neighbourhoods don’t ‘deserve’ less clean streets; it’s a visible problem; and interventions are simple (road-sweepers, bins, repairs).

So why? Obviously deprivation factors overlap with factors linked to dirtier streets, such as higher human densities – each metre of paving in deprived areas gets more daily footfall. That sounds reasonable and we accept that. But then come some findings from JRF which (though not surprising) are harder to sit back and live with.

1 JRF saw evidence of political resistance (!) to managers who wanted to manage outcomes instead of inputs e.g. aiming for all streets to enjoy a minimum level of cleanliness (counter-demands from wealthier neighbourhoods apparently play a part in this).
2 Instead of setting service frequencies according to different neighbourhoods’ needs, councils set them borough-wide, then have to spend more resource on responsive ‘catch-up’ tasks in neighbourhoods which get more footfall or rougher use. Staff assigned to deprived areas then have less time to spend on each street because they have to fit in all those catch-up tasks.
3 Underlying these factors, is evidence that service managers do not use (and/or lack) knowledge of street by street variation in conditions, and that little use is made of frontline staff who do have that contextual knowledge.

Many public officials will say this comes back to the lack of detailed administrative data at neighbourhood level on everyting from health, to unemployment, to local environment (crime maps being the honourable exception). Indeed the Government’s latest neighbourhood management research confirms the lack of neighboruhood level data. But focusing on the data misses the point – sure data plays a part but you can’t task by numbers alone or from a distance. We should to re-write job descriptions of frontline staff so they are not ‘operatives’ who work through task sheet or follow procedures, but problem solvers and intelligence gatherers. (And changing JDs is cheaper, though admittedly harder, than large-scale operational data gathering).

And then there’s the deference to the loudest, wealthiest voices which skews decision-making from the political level to the frontline manager. Again it would be easy to say the Government must invest more money in disaggregating data to neighbourhood level to expose and ‘narrow the gap’. But the truth is, the Government isn’t very good at providing the kind of culture-shifting data which disrupts and challenges delivery systems – the Index of Multiple Deprivation and Neighbourhood Statistics have been useful tools for monitoring, but limited in shifting values in public services. Government tends to produce clunky sites, which don’t go down small enough, which have little debate-provoking interactivity, and which have been designed to get data out the door instead of meeting specific needs faced either by citizens or council officers.

There is a more interesting and potentially more disruptive argument about to make about knowing more, which is that the Government should stop spending money on clunky data websites and spend it instead (after skimming 20% to pay the national deficit) on enabling people who are good at this sort of thing to develop user-orientated, and debate-provoking neighbourhood data. There are already many examples and they are growing daily, like the JRF’s new Housing and Neighbourhoods Monitor, rating websites for GPs or teachers, Fix My Street, Harringay online, and civic-society versions of the Experian’s Mosaic and Acorn’s CACI street-level mapping of our behaviours and preferences. These kinds of tools are designed to stimulate action and debate, and often smoother to use than their municipal cousins.

So what does this all mean? First achieving a fairer share of street cleaning will always depend on who you know and what you know. And to turn Knowledge into Power depends whose website that knowledge is on!

Enjoy the break!