In 2009 I set out the case for a 21st century welfare state that would replace current transactional models with a more collective, relational approach. I called it “relational welfare” (I’m hopeless at snappy titles).
Underpinning the idea of Relational Welfare is an argument that the current crises facing our public services are not about money alone. The crisis is as much socio-cultural as economic. Simply put, our current public services focus on the wrong problems in the wrong ways, which is costly in terms of money, self esteem, trust and community bonds.
Relational Welfare then asks how we can best organise our services to ensure that individuals, communities and workers within those services can flourish. It is a developmental approach, which draws on the work of Amartya Sen who urges a focus first on what we are trying to achieve rather than on economics, or bureaucratic re-organisation.
Capabilities are at the heart of this approach. What are the core capabilities citizens need in the 21st century to make the most of their lives and flourish? Participle’s practice has led us to four core capabilities: health and vitality, working and learning, contribution to the community and – most critical of all – the capability to foster and nurture relationships.
We are not going to achieve this deep transformational shift in approach in the UK without broad consensus, so it was great to see IPPR take up this work as the Relational State. Matthew Taylor has recently contributed to the debate and Rick Muir, lead author of the IPPR work responded on this blog. It has been genuinely fascinating.
And yet, I can’t help feeling something has gone missing. A debate that started with people, asking from a human perspective what 21st century public services should be for (my answer: to foster the core capabilities we need to build flourishing lives) is in danger of rapidly eliding into a debate about managing demand and re-connecting old things in new ways.
It is not enough. Relational Welfare cannot be primarily about the active engagement of the patient and pupil in old models (the models still don’t address the right issues), or a debate on state versus society (it is not either or and the excellent work of Jocelyne Bourgon has shown how a new dynamic model can underpin the relational approach), nor can it be a proxy for a debate on devolution (relational models are distributed within society, not just to local levels of the state).
Rick Muir asked whether a relational approach requires a de-politicisation of public services and what the role of the state might be; “I sometimes wonder if there is any room for politics and democracy in this model?” To which I would respond it is all about politics – because relational welfare is about power as Jon Cruddas so effectively nailed in his recent speech to local government.
The developmental/ capabilities approach is a radical agenda. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum who has done so much to develop the concepts calls the approach a “counter theory”. She argues that too much debate on government policy in this area reflects the biases of society’s elites. Instead she says we should start with the granular stories of people’s lives and create policy approaches that shift the balance of power through the development of core capabilities in practice.
What’s next for Relational Welfare ? We need a national conversation about the core principles that underpin this fundamental shift and the ways we might unlock and combine resources to make this work systemic. The starting point: people’s real lives and how we might flourish as a nation. Interestingly this was the starting point of yesterday’s letter to the Guardian from a broad alliance of left and centre thinkers: the consensus is growing.
Hilary Cottam is Principal Partner at Participle and author of Relational Welfare and Beveridge 4.0.
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