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Compact Week: How was it for you?
Nov 12 2008Posted by NICK DREW
Commission staff have been all over the country spreading the word. Compact Awards have been presented, speeches given, new documents released (including the Concise Compact Guide - get 'em while they're hot!) and views on the Compact heard loud and clear. I've been to Leicester (twice), Shrewsbury (as warm-up act to the inestimable Paul Barasi of Local Compact Voice), Harrogate and Leeds on my Compact tour, so I've had a few train journeys to reflect on the Compact ten years on.
What's struck me most is the amount of passion the Compact still stirs up, whether people believe it works or not. When it comes to the Compact, even indifference is quite stridently expressed! This makes me confident that the Compact has a future over the next ten years - whether you're a convert or a sceptic, it's generally conceded now that it's a good idea at least in principle, and that if there wasn't a Compact, people would have to invent one.
But one thing that's come through loud and clear from a policy perspective, for me at least, is what we need is a Compact that really works for real people. The risk when you work at strategic level is that you get too wrapped up in the documentation, the technocratic emphasis on process, the machinations and politicking. A delegate at one of my Compact Week events, a former teacher, took me to one side and told me that she didn't need to be consulted to the nth degree or to be drowned in jargon about principles and strategies - she just needed something like the rules she used with the kids in her class: Be nice to each other, remember to bring your PE kit, no fighting, that sort of thing. It was those simple rules, in her way of thinking, which set the framework for getting the job done - anything more complicated would simply have bogged the whole process down. "I just want to get on with what I do, without worrying about all of this other stuff."
Whilst I'm not advocating that we can dispense entirely with the fine detail in the Compact (although there's probably some room for slimming-down) - I think there's a lesson in that for us at the Commission. It's very easy for policy people to get tunnel vision about the process and forget that, at heart, it's about making things better for people by working better together. The Compact document, the Codes, the guidance notes, the research and evidence base should not be ends in themselves, useful as they are. We should perhaps keep reminding ourselves that we need to keep it simple so that people can agree to live the principles of the Compact and then use it as a basis to "just get on with what they do".