Rising East Online

Captain Nemesis Calling

by Captain Nemesis

Quality of collaboration is fundamental to good regeneration because no single interest can ‘lead’.

Nemesis recalls that his thinking partner, Onan the Contrarian (so called because he tosses ideas off all over the place…), once remarked that English public governance proceeded according to certain principles. These include: ‘rename something to show that you have exercised governance’.

For example Area Manpower Board begat Manpower Services Commission begat Training Commission begat Training Agency begat Training & Enterprise Council was artificially inseminated with Further Education Funding Council and begat Learning & Skills Council (LSC) – so far as Onan could remember anyway, he was thunk at the time. We are all eagerly awaiting the next round of deck-chair sexing by the Secretary of State for the Titanic.

Apply this to Thames Gateway. Has this symphony of seat-shifting made things better? When the derrièries go down, have we all become more skilled, trained, educated, learned and so forth? Who can say? A second historic principle of governance underlying the first is: ‘never knowingly share enough information to be caught out by evidence’. Very senior leaders, policymakers and funders, oddly enough, have over the years been excused ‘smart’ objectives…

But this is changing. Those notorious malcontents, teachers and GPs, have been at the centre of a huge and likely enough permanent change over the past two decades or so. This is a real shift in emphasis in a third principle: ‘professional means status and the freedom to be self-judging more than it means doing your job properly’.

A growing number of public sector professionals now work in an information context which no longer permits them alone to decide whether or not they are doing a good job. We collect evidence – for better or worse, usually less than systematically, but it’s getting better slowly – which indicates outcomes of activity. Not inputs – how hard someone works, how good their intentions are – but whether something produces desirable results.

By way of example, despite taking precautions such that no irrational sperm could conceivably happen on the egg of reason, Nemesis finds he agrees with an utterance of Norman Lamont, to wit: ‘Tony Blair thinks that because he does things with good intentions, it makes them alright – it doesn’t’.

We may speculate how far Mr Blair is on the road to Hell, commenting approvingly on its paving as he goes, but it is clear that an awful lot of people would like to know exactly how many people have died in Iraq and have a different measure of ‘success’ in mind than toppling Saddam Hussein. There is an information mentality here which is qualitatively changing governance and how we regard it.

Apply this to the regeneration of Thames Gateway. Interestingly, there are no metrics which tell you overall whether regeneration is succeeding. There never have been. There are no measures of quality of institutional collaboration. There never have been. Therefore, regeneration is what happens and different institutions are free to live in their silos even though failures of collaboration may cost taxpayer, local resident and local business dearly.

For example, a couple of years ago, the good members of Two Short Planks County Council decided to save money on gritting roads. Result! Universal rejoicing! Except there was a cold snap and a series of road accidents on insufficiently gritted road. The additional expenditure to the NHS exceeded the municipal saving by a considerable sum, not to mention sundry injuries. Doh!

Quality of collaboration is fundamental to good regeneration because no single interest can ‘lead’ – no single interest remotely has that capacity or acknowledgement. Lack of effective collaboration permits a fourth principle: ‘take the lead, but not the responsibility (because you can lead your silo and you can disclaim responsibility for much that happens which isn’t in your silo)’. This combination of fiction of leadership allied to collective irresponsibility is as undesirable as it sounds and more pervasive than is in the public interest.

A desirable form of leadership is information leadership – cause sufficient evidence to be in circulation as to make it clear what the agenda is and how collaboration should be formed to achieve that agenda. Publication of the draft London Plan did the first – suddenly, the world of policy converged on the concept of London’s growth in a context of no reserves of capacity to draw on.

Whatever else they are arguing about, no-one is arguing that there isn’t growth and there isn’t a shortage of capacity. What hasn’t happened is the second – catalysing collaboration – that is, thinking in networks not silos. Thames Gateway has a plethora of bodies all going about the place frantically regenerating. There are currently no sufficient ‘conditioning’ mechanisms in place to cause large-scale institutional convergence on genuine collaborative actions inside a common information framework. The technical terms for this are ‘normal’ and ‘a bit of a mess’.

London Skills Council folk, for example, who are all fine people, will necessarily pay more attention to national diktat emerging from LSC Central Command in Coventry in turn responding to national diktat from DfES than they will to integrated local collaborative actions. They have no choice, it’s in the bureaucratic DNA.

This is despite the possibility that said national actions may be directed by people who couldn’t find Thames Gateway with GPS, let alone carve a topographical model of the area in chilled war-surplus lard (which, oddly enough, Joseph Beuys was planning before he died including a scale model of Canary Wharf in felt or so Onan says).

Which leads us to the conclusion that everyone can act for the best in the best of all possible silos, but the result can be sub-optimal particularly when there is no common definition of optimal (see principal two above).

Tricky stuff, but supping a pint of two of intellectuale, Nemesis feels we may yet not have embarked from the land of chocolate teapots to a more conducive place despite the many nomenclatural reforms de nos jour.

Oh and by the way, it was in such circumstances that Government invented the London Docklands Development Corporation as one kind of solution to ‘normal’ and ‘a bit of a mess’. Nemesis wouldn’t bet a Mandrill’s rectal make-up kit that the current arrangements will survive John Prescott leaving the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister which, it goes without saying, will be renamed…

Captain Nemesis is Rising East Online’s man in the know.

Return to top

---

© 2004·05