Weeknotes S4, Eps 3, Language, Climate and Future Public Services

Hey ….

Another one of those weeks where my weekly ‘Stuff to Do’ Trello gained more length in the ‘to do’ (by some margin) than in the done or doing lists…. Hey Ho, at least summer has arrived! “what’s that you say, it’s been cancelled? I’m off to Italy then….” (I jest… Although yesterday felt like we had finally cracked the cloud cover — so i duly sat in the garden with an obligatory bottle of corona to celebrate!).

Anyway, three things to reflect on from this week;

One

Over the last couple of weeks we (the team) have had a lot of conversations around accessible language to use for people to understand what we are trying to communicate and ask of them, this stems from our preparations for the forthcoming consultation on the Greater Cambridge Local Plan in autumn in which we are going out for the second time to talk to communities and stakeholders around the work we have been undertaking since January last year.

Plain English communication tends to be a problem generally in Local Government services as we are full of acronyms and jargon at the best of times. However more technical services like planning often suffer most heavily from incommunicadoitis (my new word to add to the jargon train) Mainly as they are trying to satisfy professional and statutory legal scrutiny at the same time as simplifying and explaining things in lay terms for communities and non technical stakeholders.

Hana who leads our engagement has worked tirelessly on reframing narratives in the policy work we are doing and trying to give relevance to terms and phrases which are accessible to people who don’t have any background in planning (most people).

This is super important as one of the single biggest issues with place making is the lack of diverse participation from communities as many people don’t feel it is relevant either through lack of understanding or being able to align with things which are important to them. Bearing in mind that place and planning, especially policy work touches and influences almost every area of peoples lives in some way, this is why we are working so hard on this.

Two

Quite an environmental focus this week with OxCam ARC Environment Working Group meeting and the reasonably new Local Government Associations Climate Action Group (CAG) meeting. The ARC group is incredibly exciting as there is real passion skills and expertise here and I think it could really drive a paradigm shift in how we do place at scale which makes puts sustainability and climate at front and centre. You can sign up to the ARC newsletter HERE.

I chair the LGA CAG and it is an absolute honour, as the energy amongst those working in local government climate and sustainability areas is just phenomenal. There is so much activity in this area at the moment that I really see the role of this group to try and build networks and relationships with all of the fantastic work going on across the country so we are joined up in thinking, actions and can learn and scale up great initiatives.

I would encourage everyone to sign up to the LGA climate newsletter HERE and as we go forward to thinking about the best way of signposting and communicating with each other stay tuned as we will try and get information out regularly.

If anyone is doing good stuff and wants to get in contact please just shout and there is a great TRELLO board below which has been set up by Emily Tulloh at Hammersmith and Fulham and other colleagues at Climate Emergency UK which has a serious wealth of info on it…

Climate Engagement — Best Practice | Trello

Three

This has only come into my feed this morning but another great piece from Jess Studdert on Local Government structures and responsibilities. Her first article below published for New Local was around election times and was a fantastic explainer of the quite ridiculously complex governance of LocalGov. This new piece goes much further and begins to explain services, who does what and how some of the structures work. There are some crucial points in here around spend on discretionary and statutory services but the key message which hangs across the piece and really stands out for me is the way that austerity has forced local gov to disproportionately focus their dwindling resources on the reactive services and failure demand further up the chain whilst cutting the vital preventative and softer proactive work.

This reduction towards failure demand will have a long tail for all in public services not to mention those they serve, however it is especially relevant for those areas such as housing and planning which have been worst hit. These areas have a fundamental impact both directly and indirectly on the future economy of places, and more importantly have the ability (positively or negatively) to profoundly affect social and environmental outcomes which furthermore will dictate what role public services of the future will need to assume.

For example; lack of resource resulting on poor design of places (all facets of design from aesthetic, to functionality, to stewardship and structure) will lead to social, health and environmental issues which adds further pressure to failure demand services, ergo the hamster wheel and a less than optimistic outlook.

However I’m a glass half full person and I know there is an undercurrent of real drive in public sector and a generational shift which feels it can use what seems like a critical point in time politically, socially and environmentally to catalyse real and radical change to to both public sector services and provision but more importantly policy and structure which allows services of the future to be transformed.

The full post is above and whatever your bag I suggest you read it as at the minimum it will help you understand why one organisation collects your bin and and one recycles it…

Happy Friday Peeps