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More here: https://medium.com/@jamestplunkett/the-practice-of-policymaking-4549fbd08866
And here: https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/social-justice-digital-age-new-ideas-more-digital-capitalism

A big thankyou to @jamestplunkett for inviting me & to James and @GraemeCooke3 for expertly chairing/synthesising the discussion. Government badly needs less knee-jerk rhetoric in the current climate & more of this kind of thoughtful debate.

…and that requires a re-framing of the narrative around public services towards support, advice & behaviour change rather than just providers of ‘blue light’ delivery.

Spiralling costs become a self-fulfilling prophecy/ political football. If we want to make care more ‘productive’ my belief is that we can dramatically reduce the overall cost by making progressive investments in earlier, positive interventions...

But budgets are finite. We do need to think in some senses about efficiency. The incremental tightening of public service budgets means the centre of gravity inexorably shifts to hyper-expensive, acute delivery by which time people’s life experience has been severely impacted.

So care costs as a rising proportion of GDP could (and arguably should) be regarded as a *good* thing. Progress, in fact.

In fact, it’s a perfectly reasonable view that childcare, healthcare & social care should be amongst the *most* valuable things that society produces.

But only the most libertarian view would be that childcare or end-of-life care should be ‘unproductive’. Or that we should not put a high value on the state making positive interventions.

So if you think about this through the lens of economics - and that is how policymakers and governments tend to see the world - then care is low productivity & therefore a problem.

How we value carers, charities & the time of families and neighbours is the clue here. As a society we’ve decided that this kind of work is low value & not a good metric of growth. You only have to look at wage trends amongst care-workers to see this playing out.

That’s the paradox: the most human aspects of care - helping someone out of bed, taking the time to talk to a child or an elderly person, making someone comfortable or calming their fears - don’t ‘scale’.

Care costs are a rising proportion of GDP. Why? Because an ageing population, increasing wage inequality, stress-related mental health issues etc. lead to more demand. By contrast products & services are getting inexorably cheaper, largely through digitisation.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5h7UxU1mQ1pXnF83OjiRDG?si=CxsuTjleTleVAY24BZDH-A

🎧 Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/what-it-takes-to-deliver-public-services-at-scale-in/id1646958320?i=1000580647556

appearance too.

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