A million little betrayals

I recently led a piece of research into the impact of a pilot service that tried to help some of the most vulnerable individuals in society. The service was delivered by a charity, with funding from central government, and was designed to get a better deal for individuals who needed support from a number of local public agencies.

I say ‘was’ delivered and ‘was’ designed because, like many other valuable and valued initiatives, the service closes this month as a direct result of departmental spending cuts. The deletion of the service will reduce the support available to some very needy people, and put a group of qualified and dedicated professionals out of work.

I worry about both of these groups. But this isn’t a straightforward story about the nasty coalition bashing public services and persecuting the poor. The research revealed as much as about the need to reform local public services as about the need to ‘defend’ them.

The service helped vulnerable individuals by recruiting professionals to advocate on their behalf, on issues like re-housing, claiming the right benefit and getting a correct medical diagnosis for physical and emotional problems.

The demand for the service was only created because the frontline public services who were paid to help these people in the first place were repeatedly failing. At the most basic level, calls were not returned, case details were lost, administrative processes and just plain, simple courtesies were ignored.

The fact that some of the people needing help were, put simply, difficult to deal with was used as another reason for avoiding them, not as a signal that they probably needed more help, not less. In case after case, people were required to meet the needs of the system – not vice versa.

These were not individuals who had ‘slipped through the net’ of the welfare state. The charity wasn’t bringing these people to the attention of the state for the first time, a role that charities have traditionally played.

No, they were registered with three, four, five or more local public services: all of which found ingenious ways to play pass the parcel with their problems.

Nor were the local services, in many cases at least, under-funded. Most had received increased resources in recent years. Again and again, however, the services ended up spending more staff time avoiding problems, and then dealing with the subsequent complaints and appeals, than tackling the initial problems head on.

These failures don’t just betray vulnerable people looking for help. They betray the fundamental civic notion that government will repay people’s taxes with a basic level of service and responsiveness.

They feed directly into the widespread suspicion that, under the last government, too much money and time was spent covering arses instead of facing up to systemic service failings.

The passion and activism generated over the past 12 months by the campaign against the coalition’s cuts has been remarkable. I felt it myself when I joined the march through London.

But I can’t help thinking that if the same energy had been directed at service failures over the past twelve years, then the public as a whole wouldn’t be so quiescent about the cuts, and generally sceptical about the value and efficiency of public services.

The poor and the vulnerable are most likely to suffer most from the cuts. But we should resist the false logic that says because the vulnerable will suffer most from the cuts they are the ones who benefit most from current arrangements.

Some of the people campaigning against the cuts in the name of the poor need to think about some of the practices and attitudes they are defending before they demand more money. Unless they’re alert to existing system failures the impacts could be even more catastrophic.

The poorest and most vulnerable were being betrayed in a million little ways during the time of plenty. And we can’t blame the coalition for that.