Principle Eight: Trust is the glue of life

Trust is a little word, the presence or absence of which has huge ramifications. And distrust – the outcome of the breakdown of trust – is extremely expensive at every level of society.

Trust in government and its statutory services is an essential foundation of social cohesion. But in recent years continued revelations of mismanagement, bad behaviour, poor governance, scandals and cover ups in Whitehall and the town hall, have soured that trust.

One symptom of this lack of trust is the way that so many people choose to avoid statutory services whenever they possibly can. ‘Don’t you dare tell a social worker about us. The last thing we need is them interfering,’ is, for instance, a sentiment I hear expressed too often.

Rather than feeling empowered or supported, we feel that the authorities are spying on us, reporting on us, judging us and, worse than that, judging us by their own distorted criteria. And at the same time, lacking any sense of accountability to us – the payers of tax and council tax – they appear aloof and officious, while also undervaluing, or even completely disregarding, our efforts to contribute.

This breakdown of trust has been hugely exacerbated by the move to the so-called ‘efficiency’ of online communication. For example, it’s frustrating to find yourself lost in an unintuitive website that refuses to give you the choices or information you need, and then freezes you out; or to be asked by a robot voice to wait in a long phone queue, listening to piped music, only to be told eventually that the service is shut, and that you should dial another number or call again tomorrow. Complicating things even further, countless people can't use a digital device, which means our new ‘efficiency’ can’t reach a lot of the most at-need people at all. It turns out that being efficient is not the same thing as being effective and sometimes it is the exact opposite. Ironically, therefore, in losing their human dimension, these ‘support’ services also lose the very efficiency they were seeking to create in the first place!

But there’s a double irony in this. Often it turns out to be the poorly and inconsistently funded local charities – staffed by volunteers with local knowledge and lived experience of trying to access these very same services – that end up stepping in to offer the advice and advocacy to those who have lost trust in the very expensive statutory systems that supposedly exist to support them.

One of the core issues when it comes to partnership between government and communities is funding. When the government looks to the voluntary sector for partnership, what it hopes for is a very steady camel. A camel can go for days without any water, and for weeks without food. It comes with its own nutritional supplies courtesy of a hump or two. More than that, a camel can carry a heavy load and yet still walk many miles each day through the harshest desert climate: burning heat by day and freezing cold by night. What’s more, a camel’s unusual gait and wide feet allow it to move quickly through the toughest terrain without sinking into the sand.

The problem, from the government's point of view, is that what it often gets when it attempts to partner with the voluntary sector feels more like an unruly group of wild and spiteful cats, who refuse to work together and fight over any available food. The collective noun for wild cats is very appropriately a ‘destruction’!

But there are two sides to this story. Charities are often compelled to compete with each other, rather than to cooperate, because of the short-sightedness of both national and local government funding systems. These often lack any sense of clear vision, are overly bureaucratic, administered by people who don’t understand the nature of the communities they are making decisions about, and offer nothing more than short-term funding focused on superficial outcomes. On top of this, the big national charities, with full-time professional fundraising and bid-writing teams, regularly outbid small local charities, even though their understanding of and commitment to the communities and issues the funding is trying to address is nowhere near that of those grassroots movements.

Small but effective, local, grassroots charities who are already doing the job on a shoestring end up working crazy hours to answer stupid questions in order to meet unrealistic funding bid deadlines, only to be informed by impersonal emails that their applications have not been successful. And then, once the funding is gone, and those who won it are gone with it, that same little charity – if it’s managed to survive – is once again left to pick up the pieces. So it is that the depressing cycle begins again. It’s all a ridiculous waste of time, money, passion, talent and expertise; as well as the cause of huge frustration, local anger and the erosion of trust. The real issue is, of course, not simply funding but even more than that, the continuity of delivery.

By its very nature, government both national or local, is blind to the specific needs, fears, hopes and concerns of a local neighbourhood. It lacks ‘street knowledge’. Too often the policies that it seeks to implement have been worked out in a lecture room, on a laptop, or in a committee room, before being ratified in a boardroom – all far removed from the reality of a coalface operation. But these ‘quick-fix’ solutions, imposed from outside, are almost guaranteed to create more harm and hurt than good. And, even when as part of this strategising, the users are consulted, this too easily becomes a paper exercise. Though it has the effect of making the decision-makers feel better, it leaves those who were ‘consulted’ frustrated and feeling unheard rather than understood.

The only way of overcoming this Achilles heel is for government and local councils to forge new and deeper partnerships with the voluntary sector and especially with grassroots communities, deliberately moving away from the failed master–servant attitudes of the past.

Any local, as opposed to virtual, healthy community where relationships flourish, necessarily exists in a small geographical area: a neighbourhood, a housing estate, a town, a village or a parish. That’s why national government agencies and local authority statutory services, which cover large areas, struggle to understand them and therefore to get things done well in them. Grassroots voluntary organisations have strengths that no bureaucracy can ever match, because they’re responsive, locally accountable, small and flexible enough to respond to individuals with individual attention, and to put real needs before the rules of the system.