We gave up our car at the end of October – you can read more about why we did that here and here.

It wasn’t just about the money – although we’re hoping we will save a bit of cash – but I’m interested whether we end up spending more or less without a car sat on the drive.  So I’ve been keeping track of our transport costs in November (and the last week of October)- and here they are in summary:

• We spent £240 on car hire and related costs (petrol, annual insurance, car club fee)
• We spent £218 on public transport
• So, with a  few other things (including internet shopping delivery charges) in total the cost for a family of three getting round for five weeks without owning a car was just under £480.

A few facts to put these figures into context:

• £85 of the car hire costs are annual charges for insurance and car club membership.
• We hired a car twice for a total of ten days
• Around £200 of the public transport costs are costs we would have incurred if we still had a car –  as that was for work travel (mostly on the bus) and visiting family (mostly train and the odd taxi).
• So, given that we estimated that the car cost us about £3000 to run, we’re on course to save a bit of money, but not much (based on around £240 costs over and above the public transport costs we would have incurred anyway).

Over five weeks our mileage in hire cars was 215 miles.  This compares with a monthly average of around 500 miles a month over our final twelve months with a car.  We’d got our monthly average mileage down from around 1000 miles a month in the previous 18 months.  For me this is the most significant change.

So how have things changed?

• We’re walking more – short journeys of around a mile each way (e.g. to take my son to a weekly after-school activity) which we’d have done in the car – we’re now walking
• We’re shopping more regularly – more locally.  We’re picking up things on the way home from work, or popping out to the shops a mile up the road.  We’ve also had a couple of online supermarket deliveries for bulky stuff.
• I’m cycling more – it’s been fortunate that the weather’s been pretty mild – so I’ve been cycling to more work meetings.

I think the other stuff that’s interesting is how you need to be a bit more organised because you can’t always just pop out and get something that you need.  So I’ll be taking the wheelbarrow up to the Christmas Fair at the local hospice this afternoon to buy our Christmas tree. Life takes a bit more planning when you haven’t got a car sat on the drive ready to go.

Have we missed the car?  Not really – because when we’ve really needed one we’ve hired one.  I think it does change what you choose to do in your leisure time though – we’ve noticed that we’re more regularly going to places that we can get to easily on the bus – which for us means Leeds city centre or Harrogate.  Places like Wilkinson’s and Clas Ohlson – i.e. DIY stores in the city centre – come into their own when you don’t have a car to go out-of-town.

You might be thinking, “So what?”    Fair enough.  I’m not suggesting that everyone should give up their car.  We live in a city, have only one child, and have jobs which mean that with a bit of organisation we can get around without a car.  Our families live in places that we can easily get to on the train.  Not everyone’s life is like ours.

But plenty of us could drive less, or perhaps consider giving up the second car.  Or maybe share our car with other people.  And, in some cases, follow our lead and give up the car altogether.

With years of austerity ahead, many people will need to look at how to spend less.  For years it’s been a given that you learnt to drive at 17 and then as soon as you could afford it, you bought a car.  That’s changing already – and this trend is bound to get stronger as we learn to adapt to a good few years of falling incomes.

More than anything, it feels good not to be such a part of car culture any more.  In a small way we’re reducing demand for a finite resource.  We’re also making a bit of a counter-cultural statement that personal progress (better job, earning more) doesn’t mean you need to buy a nice car to sit on the drive.  And, you never know, I might finally get fit, before the midlife crisis hits……

I was in town this morning for a very productive meeting with a friend who’s a local GP to help me explore potential opportunities for social enterprises (aka #socent on Twitter) if GPs end up directly commissioning services.

We’d spotted earlier in the day that Billy Bragg was going to be at Occupy Leeds in City Square at midday, so we wandered across after our meeting finished.

I love Billy Bragg.  I think kids in 50 years time will study his lyrics in the way that we studied war poets.  And there is a coherence and clarity to his view of the world which I find hugely inspiring (even though I’m the first to admit I’m not a socialist).  So it was good to hear a few songs and listen to what he had to say about the importance of the Occupy movement.

It was the first time I’ve been down to Occupy Leeds.  I took a passing interest when Occupy Wall Street started, and got a bit more interested when people attempted to occupy the London Stock Exchange.  But it really caught my  imagination when the protest moved to the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.

I thought the symbolism was brilliant, and could immediately see how moving the protest to the steps of a Christian church was likely to lead to something quite interesting.  But of course I couldn’t have anticipated how much it would shake up the hierarchy at St Paul’s and in the wider Church.

I’m a conflicted, uncomfortable Roman Catholic, born into a Catholic family.  I wouldn’t actively choose to be a Catholic now, but it’s the tradition I’ve been brought up in and it’s where, in lots of ways, I belong.  I also value in some ways the sense of discomfort that it brings me.  But I have no time for the hierarchy of the Church, and I struggle with a lot of its teaching.  Yet I find a niche within it – informed mainly by my year in Ecuador with a social project steeped in liberation theology - that keeps me hanging in there.

It was my patchy understanding of liberation theology that sparked my interest in the protest at St Paul’s.   I was pretty sure that Jesus would be outside in one of the tents, sitting with the people whose demands may be incoherent but who are saying something profound about social justice.  I also thought that the kind of church leader who inspires me – someone like the assassinated Archbishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero - would be out there with them too.

So that was my way in to the Occupy movement. But I’d be lying if I said I felt that I was part of that movement.  When I was down at City Square this afternoon I found it too easy to tell myself that the people there – camping, speaking, waving banners were people not like me.  I accept that’s not particularly helpful, but it was my honest response.  Got a beard?  Probably not like me.  Read Socialist Worker?  Not like me.  Look vaguely “alternative” in any of the ways that we like to compartmentalise other people?  Not like me. Got a desire to camp outside in the freezing cold at City Square?  Not like me. And there were lots of people there who, I told myself privately, were “not like me”.

But I think that’s the challenge, both to me and to the rest of us – both those who do currently feel totally part of the Occupy movement – and those like me who are intrigued by it and who see how important it is at this moment in time.  And that’s why I think the We Are The 99% slogan is so clever and so powerful.  Because in my opinion we – the vast majority of the world who are at the mercy of modern capitalism (and the vast majority of the world are doing far worse out of it than I am) – need to see that all of us are ill-served by the current economic system.  There has to be a better way.  If we don’t find one, the only question will be whether it’s economic collapse or environmental catastrophe that gets us first.

So I think with time we need to all see ourselves as the 99% – a diverse, engaged and not so engaged, political and apolitical, religious and non-religious, “alternative” and “mainstream” group of people.  So, speaking personally, I can be part of a movement that aims to make the world a much better place than it currently is.  Me, with my lack of political upbringing, my complicated relationship with Christianity, my lack of desire to take part in protests, my interest in finding business opportunities that deliver social change, my pragmatism, and my messy contradictions.  I see myself as part of the 99 per cent now.  Do you?

So we’re ten days into our car-free life.

Having said that, we hired a car for about five of those days, with it being half-term.  Good service from Enterprise – picking us up, dropping me off for my 930 meeting on Monday morning.  Why bother owning a car when you can rent one and then be chauffeur driven to your first meeting of the day?

It was interesting to compare renting a car with sorting out our membership of the local car club.  Joining the car club felt very modern and hi-tech – I applied online, then had a three way telephone call with the DVLA and the Club to check that I was who I said I was.  My smart card arrived the next day – and now a couple of cars are there for when I need them, about a 15 minute walk from our house.

Things were a bit different with Enterprise.  First thing to say is that their customer service was excellent – friendly and efficient. But the process leaves a lot to be desired.  Whereas the car club makes you feel like you’re making a sound decision, hiring a car makes you feel like this might not be such a good idea after all.

First of all you search the house for your paper driving licence and two recent utility bills.  And your passport.  Then you fill in all the documentation and they instil fear into you by suggesting that if the car doesn’t come back perfect they’ll take £600 off your credit card.  Unless, of course, you take out our ridiculously over-priced excess-waiver.  Oh, and if your partner wants to drive the car too (who’d have thought of that?) that’ll be an extra £10 a day.  Have a nice trip!

And it’ll be the same next time, find the documents, sign all the disclaimers etc etc.  Now, I understand there need to be some safeguards – I’m sure some shady people hire cars and get up to all sorts.  But maybe the big car hire firms could learn a few lessons from the new entrants to this market – City Car Club, Whipcar, BMW DriveNow and the rest.

Enterprise appear to making the assumption that you can’t trust your customers, whereas our car club seems to trust that most customers are decent people who will do the right thing.  So they rely on us to not leave the car low on fuel, or tell them if there’s a problem with the car.  Some people will abuse the system because some people can’t be trusted.  But they don’t build their system based on the assumption that you can’t trust your customers.  And, I’d like to think, when you make it clear to people that you trust them, they’re less likely to abuse that trust.

Trust is a key issue in what is increasingly called the sharing economy, or collaborative consumption.  And it’s one reason that I’m keen on sharing more and owning less.  I know I need to get better at trusting people – and I think relationships based on trust do us all good.  So if I lend my lawnmower to my neighbour who I don’t know very well, there’s a chance that he might run off and sell it on ebay.  But he probably won’t.  And by lending stuff to eachother we’ll get to know eachother better, and trust eachother more.  And my street will be a nicer place to live in.

So what’s that got to do with Enterprise?   Maybe they need to go beyond offering friendly customer service towards understanding this new breed of customer, and work out ways to trust us a little more.

I went along to Revive Leeds this morning for the launch of the Vision for Leeds 2011-2030 – Our vision to be the best city in the UK.

More on the Vision later, but first a few words about Revive.  It’s an idea that’s been a long time coming – I chatted with someone there who was exploring this idea eight years ago, and someone else reckoned he’d been talking about it fifteen years ago.

Revive Leeds is a Re-Use Shop which is based at a tip (sorry, recycling site) in East Leeds.  It’s run by a Community Interest Company – which in turn is a collaboration between three well established Leeds social enterprises – Emmaus Leeds, St Vincent de Paul Society and Slate.

The idea – and it’s a good one – is that people can drop off stuff that can be re-used whilst they’re dumping other stuff at the tip.  As someone who despairs whenever I go to the tip at what people are throwing away, I’m delighted to see this up and running.

First impressions?  The shop is attractively laid out and has a good range of stock.  The stock was generally good quality.  I think there’s work to do on pricing – as a charity-shop regular I think some of the pricing was a bit on the ambitious side.  £10 for a second hand iron, £175 for a decent but unremarkable three piece suite, didn’t strike me as realistic.  But these things take time – and they’ll have had to second-guess who their customer base will be.  They’ll know better who their customers are in six months time – and I’m sure their pricing will reflect that.

It made me think of my visit a few years back to another Revive (unrelated) in Liverpool – part of the FRC Group.  They take stock primarily from their Bulky Bobs bulky waste collection service (which I notice has today been successful in the Big Venture Challenge) and sell it in their high-street shop.  Shaun Doran, who was responsible for Revive, was frank about they got it very wrong in the early years at Revive.  In short, they took little notice of who their customers were – who was walking past their shop front in that part of Liverpool.  Once they realised who they were really serving, the shop became more successful.

I liked their emphasis on quick turnover of stock – I can’t remember the detail but let’s say it was something like “Have an item for two weeks at full price, two weeks at half price, then move on”.  It’s important that customers see fresh stock regularly – it’s what keeps people coming back.  You might make a bit less on each item, but you’ll sell (and divert from landfill) a lot more stuff.

I also liked their pricing strategy – with different prices for products depending on whether you had just walked in off the street, were on benefits, or had been referred by a FRC partner organisation.  It sounds like a logistical nightmare, and could be a bit embarrassing for people if it was implemented poorly, but it seemed to work well.  The £175 three piece suite brought this pricing strategy back to me – who’s the customer with £175 in their back pocket?

But let’s not take anything away from the people who’ve worked really hard to get Revive Leeds up and running.  They’ve done a great job and I wish them every success.  And it’s been a long road.

Which brings me to the Vision for Leeds.  This was the softest of soft launches I’ve ever witnessed – I’d be interested to know why the Council has gone for this approach to launching the Vision.  At most there were 50 people there – perhaps 10 of whom were unrelated to the Council or to Revive Leeds.

I’ll be honest, I really struggle to get excited about long-term visions.  The ten minute video which accompanies the Vision (not online yet) is all very nice but voxpops with loads of people saying how great Leeds is (it’s friendly, it’s diverse, it’s a great place to do sport/learn/do business etc) just leave me cold.

But, let me try my best to suspend the scepticism.  There’s something quite refreshing in the idea of trying to be the “best” city in the UK.  As the Vision says:

“Not the richest or the biggest, but the best for all who live and work in Leeds – our children, our communities and our businesses.”

Maybe that’s something I can get excited about over time.

It’s worth reflecting on the story of Revive Leeds, alongside the Vision for Leeds.  Revive Leeds will hopefully do well, but we can’t wait another 8 years for the next great innovation.  The Councillor at today’s event was very proud of the Council’s collaboration with three local social enterprises – and that is undoubtedly a step forward.  But we have to get better – and quicker – at coming up with creative ideas which make a real difference.

And this is where things might just get interesting.  Leeds Council – according to this article by the Council Leader in the Yorkshire Post – seems to be opening up and suggesting that in the future it needs to become more entrepreneurial – for example by collaborating more with other organisations.

As someone who’s worked with the Council closely for a number of years, let me just say they’ve got a long way to go before I’d use the words entrepreneurial and Council in the same sentence.  But acknowledging that things need to improve is a starting point, at least.  The hard bit will be moving from nice words to messy practice.  Councillors and Council officers have a steep learning curve ahead of them.

This was my new year’s resolution on a frosty New Year’s Day in 2010:

I won’t bore you with the thinking behind wanting to use the car less – I’ve written about it before and you”ll be aware of the issues.

But I wanted to tell you about how we got to where we are today, and why I think that is relevant to how we adapt to a world  where scarcity of resources and climate change is going to shape how we live.

We didn’t just decide to give up our car.  We agreed to try, over time, to change how we travelled.  So we started to think about how we got around, to consider whether there were alternatives.  Making conscious decisions – instead of just jumping in the car, meant that over time we changed how we got from A to B.

It also helped that we ended up living in the city centre for six months when the deal to buy a house fell through.  Suddenly we didn’t have a parking space, and we had good public transport on our doorstep.  That helped to strengthen some of the changes in behaviour that were already taking place.

Two years on, and we’ve cut down our mileage from over 10000 miles a year to 6000.  We’ve also moved to a house on good bus routes, and walking distance to school.  Yes, not everyone can make those choices – but it’s also worth saying for the same price we could have moved deeper into suburbia – and further from other transport options.  How we would travel to work and school was a big factor in where we chose to live.  We didn’t want to end up living somewhere where we’d be more reliant on the car – or end up having to get a second car.

The week in the strawbale house got us thinking again about things.  The fact that the MOT and insurance are due this month also focused our minds.

We sat down and tried to consider things rationally.  The car sits on the drive nearly all of the time Monday to Friday, slowly depreciating.  It gets used for a few hours most weekends.  We estimated that it costs around £3000 a year to run – if you include depreciation at around £800 a year.

So are there better ways to get around – which might also end up cheaper than £3000?  Time will tell – but we reckon we might hire a car one weekend a month – £750 over a year.  Then we might hire a car for another two weeks over the year for holidays etc – £500.  With petrol, that might total £1500 a year.

We might also join the local Car Club.  £75 to join, with occasional use maybe adding up to £350 over the year.  Additional bus and train fares, (remember we already routinely travel on public transport so we already incur that cost) might add up to another £500.

So, let’s say we might save somewhere in the region of £750 a year (plus what we’ll get from selling the car).  A sum worth having, but also an amount of money worth weighing up against the convenience of having a car at your service 24 hours a day.  In other words, it looks like it makes financial sense, but it’s a close one.  Clearly things would be very different if we were comparing buying a new car – with credit – against hiring a car and joining a car club.

But it’s not just about the money.  It’s also about changing how we live.  I think it will help us to walk more, cycle more, do more stuff locally.  Live life at a slightly slower pace.  Not be part of a car-centred culture which I think in many ways is damaging to society.

So we’ll see.  The car goes in for its MOT next week, and we’ve got a potential buyer for the car.  We might reconsider and decide to wait until the car finally fails its MOT.  But I think we know what the right decision is.

Back today from a great couple of weeks’ holiday – first in Northumberland, then in East Yorkshire.

I really felt like I needed the break. Lots of people have things far worse at the moment, both in terms of work and personal life, but as a small social business we’re by no means immune from the troubles we’re facing as an economy. No-one will tell you it’s much fun to do 20% more work for 20% less money, as I reckon we’re doing at the moment. I’m a believer in hard times bringing out the best in innovation – but there’s always a limit to how much more you can do with less. So it was good to get away for a while – no phone, no Twitter, no TV. Even the car radio packed in, seemingly in solidarity with my desire to escape from the world for a bit.

I didn’t think too much about work. But obviously when you’re on holiday you’re dealing with lots of businesses – places to stay, places to eat, things to do. It’s great when some of them inspire you, and we were lucky to find a few that we fell in love with this time round.

We camped overlooking Holy Island in Northumberland for 8 days at the Barn at Beal – recommended to us by social enterprise structures guru and Northumberland resident Geof Cox. The views were breathtaking and the service we received – as campers and as customers in their cafe – was spot on.

The Barn at Beal is a working farm – we camped at the side of a field of barley which was destined for Timothy Taylor Landlord – and they’ve done a fantastic job of diversifying and thus keeping the farm going.

The second week we stayed at Straw Bale Cottage – a cottage in Howden, East Yorkshire, made, as you might guess, from straw bales. It’s a bit of an interest of mine – you might remember me writing about LILAC – a strawbale development in Leeds. I was intrigued to see what it’s like to live in a strawbale house.

Firstly, there’s something quite exciting (at least for me) about a house that’s built from straw. But more than that there’s a warm, human quality to the way that the house is built – corners are slightly curved and imperfect where they would be perfectly angular in a brick built house.

And as you’d imagine, straw is a great insulator and the house soon warms up when you light the living room fire – the only heating in the house. I’d be interested to go back in winter to see how warm it is then, but you do get a real sense of cosiness.

Both places reminded me of my great admiration for entrepreneurs. People with a vision who put the hard work in to turn that vision into reality. Diversifying from arable production into tourism, or building a straw bale house, requires a level of risk-taking and commitment that I really admire, and I like spending my money with people like that.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a proper holiday if it didn’t involve a few commitments to do things differently when we got back home. A few of these have been forgotten about already. But the strawbale cottage got us thinking again about our own energy use. We’ll look into solar panels in more detail soon, but with the MOT, insurance and tax all due later this month, the time has come to decide whether we’re going to ditch the car. We’ve got our mileage down from 12000 to 6000 miles a year in the last two years, so it’s looking like it might make financial as well as environmental sense. More on that later this week.

We ran a seminar with Adult Social Care at Leeds City Council yesterday exploring the idea of timebanking.

If you’ve not come across timebanking before, you can find out more on this Scoop.It site that we’ve put together – or by visiting the Timebanking UK website. You can also find out more about Just Add Spice – whose co-director, Tris Dyson, spoke at our seminar yesterday. In essence, it’s about give and take. People offer time to eachother, and get credits in return – which can be used to buy in the time of someone else in the timebank.

If you were to look inside my head you would discover the remnants of a lifetime of discussions between my sceptical self and my idealist self. I love the values behind timebanking. The idea of helping people to focus on what they can offer, as well as what they need. The concept of everyone’s time being of equal value. The importance of putting some kind of value on the social capital which makes life worth living.

But I worry that it’s one of those things which is much better in theory than it is in practice. My worry isn’t about people abusing the system – taking and not giving, or perhaps even stealing. Instead my concern is that people won’t take enough. They’ll give for a while – and then not get round to taking. For timebanking to work, we need people who are willing to accept help and support – as well as people are happy to give it.

There was a lot of discussion yesterday about how a timebank would work – in particular focusing on the role of the broker – the person who will help to ensure that people give and take. The impression I get is that in most cases we have to aim for a fairly light-touch broker, for two reasons. One is that there isn’t much money about – so we’ll struggle to sustain any timebanks which rely too much on paid staff.

Secondly, I think part of the attraction of timebanking is its DIY nature. I fear for timebanks which end up with a broker housed within a third sector or public sector organisation – unless that broker sees their role as that of a catalyst – moving on – or at least stepping back – once things are running smoothly. We really don’t need brokers who feel they need to cover their backs by routinely getting everyone to have CRB checks for example.

I’m not gung-ho about safety concerns, but I think part of the value of timebanking is the opportunity it gives us to start taking some responsibility – and making our own decisions about whether we want to accept a service from someone. I think there’s far more danger in communities that don’t talk to eachother than there is in connected communities where people are dealing with eachother on a more regular basis.

But as I say, the scepticism – and the desire to work out what might stop timebanking from working in Leeds – is balanced by a real sense of what it could achieve. There were various ideas discussed yesterday – from simple neighbourhood (person to person) based timebanks, run on a voluntary basis, to slightly more involved ones, (often agency to person) where people might be able to redeem credits not just for services from within the timebank, but for services from the local authority, or local businesses. So an hour at a Housing Association consultation might be exchanged for an hour at the local council swimming baths – which needs more customers to survive. Or a local coffee shop might want to acknowledge the efforts of local volunteers by allowing for a time-limited exchange of credits for coffee and cake.

But isn’t that going against the very nature of volunteering? There’s a discussion to be had about that I think, but my own take is that we need to lose this idea that volunteering is all about selfless giving. Self-interest – what’s in it for me – is an important part of the reasoning behind giving. If people give more because they’re acknowledged, and get something in return, then in my opinion that’s no bad thing.

Personally, I’m most intrigued by the anecdotal evidence I’m hearing time and again of the impact timebanking can have on improving people’s mental health. It makes a lot of sense. I know myself – you probably do too – that one of the best ways of dragging myself out of occasional dark places is to do something for someone else, to be reminded that I have skills to give and have a value to others. There’s far more to better mental health than that, but it could be a starting point for some.

I’ll write more about this in the future – but in the meantime, if you’re in Leeds and you’re interested in exploring timebanking more please get in touch. The Ideas That Change Lives fund that we work on is interested in investing in timebanking – and we’re planning another get-together later in the month. We’re particularly interested in chatting with individuals (not just people working in organisations) who want to see something happen in their community.

I went last night to the launch of an opportunity to invest in a pioneering strawbale co-housing community in Leeds.

I’ll let LILAC tell you more themselves.  You can also find out more on their website and on this blogpost from someone else who was there last night.

LILAC Cohousing Documentary from LILAC on Vimeo.

What impressed me last night was how the people involved responded to some fairly detailed questioning.  I talk a lot in my work about the need for activists and entrepreneurs – we need to be both if we are going to tackle some of the big social problems we face.  There’s a real passion amongst LILAC members to build something pioneering – but they’re not wishy-washy about it. This is a well-planned, well-executed development.  And, crucially, a development which seems to be meeting unmet demand – as all but 5 of the houses and flats are already allocated.  (You can contact them here if you’re interested in living at LILAC – they’re particularly keen to attract more families with school-age children.)

They asked me to say a few words last night in support of what they’re doing.  I’ve followed them pretty closely since they started looking at this idea – and a few people we know will be moving to LILAC.  I encouraged people to loan money to LILAC – and to do that, if they want to, without taking interest.  But I also encouraged people not to feel bad about expecting a financial return (LILAC are offering up to 3%).  I firmly believe that if we’re going to see more developments like LILAC, we need to encourage people to see them as viable investments – and expecting a 3% return is hardly over the top.  But clearly the people they’re last night with their cheque books were primarily investing because LILAC represents something that they believe in.

But my challenge to the people gathered last night was for us to see LILAC as a catalyst for other good things to happen. It’d be too easy to just point to them and bask in their solar thermal glow, whilst leaving our own lives untouched.  What would be more interesting would be to work with them and to learn from them about ways we too can change how we live.   Ways we can be more green and build communities where we feel supported and feel able to support others.

So, for example, we’re keen to explore whether we can collaborate with LILAC to form buying groups for solar panels – similar to the One Block Off The Grid model in the US.  And Collaborative Consumption – which will work brilliantly in a community such as LILAC – could work just as well in our street or yours – if we make the effort.  And maybe I need to take a bit more of a risk and talk to my neighbours more, invite them round for tea, and go beyond polite hello’s as we pass in the street.

We’re working on these issues a bit at the moment – for example we’re helping to run a Timebanking workshop in early July – which you can sign up for here. We’re also planning a Collaborative Consumption get-together for later in the year. If you’d like to work with us on any of this, please get in touch.

Before all of that, I’ll be investing in LILAC.  It would be great if you could too.

Research published today on behalf of Think Local Act Personal paints a pretty positive picture of Personal Budgets – you can read the press release here and a research summary here.  You can read a Guardian report into the research – which includes quotes from me – here.

I have read the research summary – but as yet I’ve not read the full report.  But I think it’s fair to say that the researchers are painting a pretty positive picture, with a few important caveats.  Here’s their brief summary of the report’s findings:

“..it seems that personal budgets are likely to have generally positive impacts on the lives of all groups of personal budget holders and the people who care for them. The likelihood of people experiencing a positive impact from a personal budget is maximised by a personal budget support process that keeps people fully informed, puts people in control of the personal budget and how it is spent, supports people without undue constraint and bureaucracy and fully involves carers.

Under these conditions, personal budgets can and do work well for everyone” (My emphasis)

I’d like to focus on that last line.  You would hope that that would be the case.  If a person-centred approach is taken, if a person and their carers are involved in their support plan, if the process isn’t overly-bureaucratic and if they end up with the support that they need, then things should turn out just fine.

The problem, in our experience, is that those ifs are not just big, they’re enormous.  As research from ADASS, published last week, confirmed, nearly all of the people who were classed as receiving personal budgets in the last twelve months (around 170,000 people) received what is called a managed budget – where the local authority continues to manage the budget.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that the majority of people who receive a managed budget end up with a package of support which is pretty much the same as what they had before.  Even allowing for the fact that some people might be happy with what they had, such an approach doesn’t feel like it fits with the principles of Personalisation.

Which leads me onto one of the other findings of the research:

“Those managing the budget themselves as a direct payment reported significantly more positive outcomes than people receiving council managed budgets.”

So, if we combine this finding with the data which suggests that just about everybody in England who received a personal budget in 2010-11 actually received a council managed budget, you could conclude that personal budgets have had limited impact in the last twelve months.

Our reading of the situation (which may or may not be correct) is that the incentives that Councils received in order to reach the 30% of people on  Personal Budgets by April 2011 target has ended up distorting the market.  Councils have concentrated on getting people onto managed budgets – which is a far easier process than going through a proper, person-centred process like the one the researchers point to above. A majority of Councils have achieved the target, so Ministers and Local Authorities can say that Personal Budgets are working just fine.

But our experience is that they’re not working just fine.  I won’t rehash the arguments – they’re detailed in this post and this post – but we would say that the research finding that “the survey revealed markedly different outcomes across councils” is an accurate one.

The research does point out that there is still work to be done – such as the following finding:

“Overall, less than half felt that the council had made it easy or very easy for people to change their support, choose the best option from a range of services, or voice their opinions or complain.”

So, if we go back to the big ifs in the research summary, it would seem that a lot of local authorities have not managed to “support people without undue constraint and bureaucracy”.

This is of particular concern if we look at who completed the research.  Nearly 80% of the 2000 respondents were from ten “demonstrator sites” – which, I assume, were local authorities which were involved in piloting Personal Budgets.  (Note, 23rd June – please see clarification on this in the comment below)  They, of course, had more money and resources to commit to making Personal Budgets work.  So, if a significant number of them haven’t managed to crack the bureaucracy nut, can we realistically expect those that follow to do much better, with fewer resources?

I really believe in person-centred services – and I still believe that Personal Budgets can work.  And I acknowledge that I’ve read the summary, not the full report.   But I’m afraid that our experience of Personalisation doesn’t chime with the generally positive tone of the research summary.  I’d be interested in your experiences and thoughts.

I wrote last week about our experience of Personalisation.  I talked you through the early stages of the self-directed support process, highlighting some issues that we’d come up against at each stage.  I’ll continue now with the next stages of the process, before considering what to do to change things for the better.  Again, your thoughts and experiences – in particular any examples of where things are working well  - would be much appreciated.

• Let’s look first of all at the support planning and brokerage stages.  We’ve witnessed a lack of creative thinking here.  There’s lots of terminology here – and how this is done differs in each local authority area.  But the basic idea is that a person is supported to work out how best to meet their desired outcomes (support planning).  They can then be supported to find creative, person-centred ways to meet those outcomes, by identifying appropriate services to buy (brokerage).

  We are finding that, even though support planning and brokerage can, in theory, be done by organisations outside of the social care system (eg an older people’s support network could do it for one of their members) the majority of this work is done by social workers.  Social workers who are under immense pressure, and have very little time.  Social workers who are accustomed, however person-centred they may be in their philosophy, to offering people what the system can offer.  It’s hardly surprising that (according to anecdotal evidence) the majority of people going through this process are ending up with pretty much what they had before.  In other words, services which the system can deliver.

  Let’s just pause and think about that for a while.  So a load of money, time and effort is being put into this, and it seems that a majority of people are coming out with what they always had.  Isn’t that a bit ridiculous, even if we accept that some people may actually be quite happy with what they had?  Well, what might seem more ridiculous is that, statistically at least, this person counts as someone who has accessed a Personal Budget (and until April 2011, councils received a financial incentive for getting people onto a Personal Budget in this way).  Even though nothing has changed for them, and the council still manages their money (sometimes spending it only on services provided by organisations with whom the council has framework agreements (contracts).  This is what is often referred to as a Virtual Budget. This statistical massage is why Ministers can confidently proclaim that all is well with Personalisation.

• One of the things councils have been charged with is stimulating  a market in social care.  They are required to produce what are called Market Position Statements – in order to communicate with other providers (third sector, private sector) how they would like to see the market develop.  In one area where we’ve done some work in the past, the consultation event on the Market Position Statement has been postponed twice, and we’re still waiting for a new date.  That’s not a great way to stimulate a market.

  But how do you stimulate a market?  I think it’s a really hard thing to do.  And to be fair to the councils where we’ve worked, they’ve each put money into encouraging third sector organisations to set up services.  But at the same time, they’ve been less than forthcoming with the kind of information which would give organisations confidence to take the risk in setting up services.  Simple information, like how many people in the city have got a Personal Budget, and how many of them ended up with services which were materially different to what they had before.

  So you can understand why, when they don’t get answers to these questions, organisations may assume that few people are being enabled to access new services.  If this is your perception, you’re hardly likely to set up a service are you?  Which, of course, means that there are fewer services to choose from – which makes it more likely that people will go for what they’ve always had.  And so we go on.

We do what we do because we want to make a difference.  I write stuff like this not to point the finger, but to acknowledge that things aren’t working as they could do.  I think, with a policy as radical as Personalisation, it’s natural that things will take a while to work out.  But you need to feel that things are at least moving in the right direction – and that issues are acknowledged.

I think that recently people are starting to publicly acknowledge that we are struggling to make Personalisation work.  I really think we need more openness about this.  But it doesn’t come naturally to local authorities to admit that they don’t have the answers.

What are we doing about this?  We’re continuing to work on Personalisation (some paid work, some speculative work) – and in particular we’re focusing on what we’ve called Personalisation – Made in…. We ran a Personalisation – Made in Bradford open space event earlier this month – and we’ve set up a network in Leeds too.  The idea is to bring different people together – who all have a stake in making this work.  Service providers, people who receive social care support, investors, service designers, social workers.  We believe that we’ll find ways to make Personalisation work by bringing people together to discuss issues openly, and then collaborating to make the system work for people.