I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib‘s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.

Ryanair: Business model coming to your town hall soon? (Click for pic credit)

Nick Clegg has gone on the attack. His target is the London Borough of Barnet’s easyCouncil model of service provision.

There are a number of ways of portraying Barnet’s idea, but I’ve not seen many that appear to be very kind. As a Barnet resident who has to use Ryanair in his line of work, I should probably leave it to others to comment on the politics behind this - I suppose the most neutral one would be to call it a freemium service.

I’ve posted on ‘cognitive polyphasia’ before (broadly, it’s the phenomenon where voters want Scandinavian welfare systems on US tax-rates), and this idea seems to be another attempt by politicians to get the public to believe that they can have the best of all worlds.

Barnet’s approach – like Ryanair’s – appears to be based upon the idea that a service can be packaged as being more attractive than it actually is – hardly a revolutionary concept in politics.

I doubt if Barnet will be as brazen as Michael O’Leary’s outfit are either. Ryanair tell us that you can fly to Perpignan for only £5. But then, once you start buying the ticket, you find that the figure multiplies if you want optional extras.

Optional extras include the right to stay out of prison for tax-dodging, or the right to pay for your ticket with anything other than a fairly exotic credit card as well as other more commonly requested premium services such as the option to have luggage with you.

You have to keep your wits about you to ensure that you don’t bump the price up by accidentally ordering any unwanted additional services from their badly-designed website. Other elements of their service are also deemed to be non-essential. The options to change reservations for example – are prohibitively priced, leaving you with little option but to re-book.

And the coup de grâce comes from Ryanair if you do have cause to complain about the service: By accepting our inflexible terms, you helped us to provide you with the thing that you said that you wanted the most: A very low headline price.

It appears that Barnet want to appeal to the kind of cognitive biases that many commercial companies appeal to. They want to be able to appeal to the consumer reflex that will pick the lowest price. It’s a variation on the ‘stealth-tax’. Again, politicians have long beleived that totemic pledges demonstrably delivered can trump good governance with the electorate.

As Jean Baptiste Colbert put it, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing.”

Now it all appears to be about a stealthy withdrawal from the elements of public service that we may have always taken for granted – offering the absolute basics but charging for ‘optional’ extras.

It will be interesting to see which services this approach will apply to. There are services that councils have to provide, despite themselves: Services that they would be electorally able to withdraw from – services that central government requires them to deliver, but ones that mainly benefit groups that are not electorally decisive.

It may be the case that this approach allows some councils to ‘tick the box’ in cases like this.

Politically, it may be expected that some Conservatives will want to re-cast public service in order to make private alternatives attractive. My worry is twofold:

• that this will accelerate the degree to which local authorities only serve electorally active sections of society – particularly the active middle class that don’t rely too heavily of social services
• that voters may come to regard local government in the same way that regular users regard Ryanair?