Speech to the World Social Marketing Conference, Brighton.

30 September 2008.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today. This unique gathering not only brings together some of the leading experts in social marketing from across the globe it also showcases the many ways in which your expertise is bringing about positive social changes, often in the most disadvantaged communities in each of our countries.  So I want to begin by thanking you for what you do. 

From its beginnings in government public information campaigns and through its development since the 1970s into a formal discipline, social marketing is today a life-changing movement. Here in the UK the National Social Marketing Centre has become a repository of good practice and real support to those leading a legion of local efforts to reduce teenage pregnancy rates, tackle alcohol abuse and support sustainable living. Led by the Department of Health, the UK Government has recognised the potency of social marketing in bringing about desirable changes in society. Social marketing is at the heart of many government-backed campaigns, supported by substantial resources from the public purse, on issues like drug awareness, road safety and healthy eating. 

Until recently, however, much of your work took place under the radar, ignored by politicians and journalists alike.  That is changing. Books like Nudge and Yes have hit the best sellers lists. Their contents are devoured by politicians and public policy makers. Their thinking now finds its way into how policy – from pensions to organ donations – is being constructed. Some even argue that the convergence of insights from social marketing, neuroscience and behaviourial economics forms the basis for a new paradigm for social change. 

So social marketing has become fashionable. You are no longer in the shadows. You are firmly under the spotlight.  And of course it’s always nice to be popular. But before we all get carried away it’s important to recognise the limitations as well as the opportunities inherent in what Robert Cialdini calls “the new science of persuasion”. Social change is complex. Behavioral change even more so. It is rarely amenable to a simple single solution. Getting people to eat well and smoke less are desirable social outcomes. But they require a mix of policy tools. 

So today I want to make the case for social marketing becoming a core part of the public policy-making arsenal. But to fully realise its potential as a force for social change it should do so as an adjunct and not an alternative to what the State does. This is where I believe those on the Right of politics are making such a fundamental strategic error.  By rejecting the role of the State they have drawn the wrong conclusion from the modern world. To meet today’s policy challenges requires a new balance between what I will call soft power and hard power. Improving health, beating crime, regenerating communities cannot happen if society has to choose between either having an active state or having active citizens. It is not either/or that is needed. It is both. So I will make the case for a politics of change that has at its core the empowerment of individual citizens and their local communities. And I will argue that social marketing’s biggest contribution lies not simply in persuading people to change but in helping empower them to do so. 

Social marketing has risen up the agenda because there has been a growing recognition among policy-makers across the political spectrum about the limitations of traditional forms of state action. I am proud to have served in a Labour government that has made a priority of tackling poverty and unfreezing social mobility. And the 2 million children and the 1 million pensioners who have been lifted out of poverty since 1997 in Britain stand as testimony to the difference a progressive government makes. Notwithstanding the current economic problems, in the last decade people as a whole have seen their living standards rising while poverty has been falling. But here we have to be candid. The inequality gap remains stubbornly and persistently wide. And while the decades-long decline in social mobility has been halted, it has not as yet been reversed.  The poorest services still too often are in the poorest communities. And the range and complexity of the social problems they face appears sometimes to be intractable.

And then there are the new challenges. Global warming and global terror. Mass migration and community insecurity.  The new desire that people have for greater control in their lives. In this new world faced with these new challenges the old top down approach to governance will no longer work. It is not just that the public have reached the limits of what they will pay in taxes, although they have. But it is also that, just as the global credit crunch and its consequences have exposed the limits of untrammelled free markets, so the entrenched problems of social exclusion in so many communities and unfulfilled potential among so many of our citizens expose the limits of centralised State action. 

What made for progress in the past will not secure progress in the future. One example. When New Labour came to power in 1997 the most pressing health challenge was to rescue and reform the NHS and in particular to cut what were then the appallingly long waits that patients had for treatment. A decade on and that old bugbear of the NHS – long waiting times – has more or less been beaten through a mix of extra resources and top-down reforms. The challenge today is different – and an altogether more complex one. How to improve health by beating obesity and tackling alcohol abuse for example. Or by helping the growing numbers of patients with a chronic condition to manage their diabetes or their arthritis. The problem is different – and so must be the solution. 

We can glimpse what that new future could look like. During my time as health secretary I championed an expert patients programme to give people, mostly those with chronic conditions, the tools to better manage their own care. By putting the individual patient in charge of managing their conditions – the food they ate, the exercise they took, the medicine they used – the programme succeeded in reducing physiotherapy visits by 9%, hospital outpatient visits by 10% and accident and emergency visits by 16%. And as we seek to increase the proportion of spending on public health from a miserly 5% across the developed world - by focusing on preventing not just treating illness as I believe we should - the way to do that is not by preaching at people but by empowering them. Giving people, through our unrivalled UK primary care network of pharmacies, GP surgeries and community services, the practical help they need – blood pressure monitors, testing kits, food co-ops – to improve their own health.  To do that we need to convert patients from being passive recipients of care in a system that denies them both power and responsibility to being in charge and more responsible for their own health. That will require a new focus on providing accessible information and proper support to empower individual citizens. And, given that different people have different starting points, it will require a national drive to grow social capacity so that across all communities, and not just some, people can make the choices that are right for them. It is here that your expertise and insight about what drives change is so sorely needed.

We know for example from a number of US studies that parental behaviour is a key determinant in the outcomes their children achieve. This insight should inform future policy-making. So that alongside existing efforts to raise standards in schools and some welcome new initiatives to improve parenting skills, we need to think about how parents can be encouraged not just to read to their kids but be seen by their kids to read to themselves. Perhaps national reading week for parents could run in parallel to those for children. And then we need to enlist your efforts to make this drive one that happens in poorer households as well as better-off ones. The point is that tackling disadvantage and promoting social mobility needs a bottom up approach to run alongside a top down one. 

I know this is a huge challenge but I believe it to be an enormous opportunity. Because I think that what we are now witnessing is the emergence of a new relationship between the State and the citizen in which doing things with people rather than to them becomes the key to unlocking progress. Both Right and the Left are toying with this notion. Indeed it is striking that the new generation of political leaders – whether Obama in America or Rudd in Australia – are advocating change based not just on new policies but on a new politics: one that is open, engaging and that favours dialogue over monologue.

They recognise the growing gap between politics and the public. Britain is far from alone in witnessing record levels of cynicism and disengagement. Average turnout at national elections across the OECD has fallen by 10% in just twenty years. Yet in many respects public involvement in civil society is increasing not diminishing.  Half of Britons volunteer regularly. Over a third of people who don’t vote at general elections do participate in a charity, community group or campaign. Alternative forms of political activity, whether boycotting goods or lobbying MPs, is rising, not falling. My conclusion is that the public is not so much turned off by politics, as the way politics is done. Or for that matter, the way public services are run. Public disengagement is a symptom of disempowerment. Too often we shut people out when we should be letting them in.

When we find new ways of doing the reverse the impact can be enormous. A small example: the concept of Young Mayors. The Campaign Company designed and pioneered the first Young Mayor election in Middlesbrough in 2002. At a point where voter apathy, particularly among the young people, seemed entrenched these elections were designed to introduce young people to democratic participation at an early age. By mirroring the process of the first ever elections for adult directly-elected Mayors the idea was to normalise voting behaviour in young people and at the same time raise awareness of the process in the wider population.   Young people get to vote for a Young Mayor with a budget, a clear representational role and real authority.  They choose the electoral system that best suits their needs and they promote the election to each other. Six years on, there are now Young Mayors in Lewisham, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Melton, Wyre Forest and Lambeth and there will soon be Young Mayors for the first time in North Tyneside, North East Lincolnshire and Camden. Over 100,000 young people have taken part in these elections across the country. Turnout in these elections is higher than the equivalent turnouts in adult elections. The Government thinks that this is such a great form of youth participation that it has recommended that all local authorities should do it.

Such a change is in keeping with the times. In a world of massive insecurity and constant change people are looking for greater control in their lives. At the same time public expectations have rightly moved up a gear. People nowadays are more informed and inquiring. Ordinary consumers a getting a taste for greater power and more say.  The problem is that while people may have become more empowered as consumers, they do not yet feel empowered as citizens. Ours remains a ‘them and us’ political system. It was framed in an era of elitism. Rulers ruled – and the ruled were grateful. Economic advance and universal education have swept aside both deference and ignorance.  Now the internet redistributes knowledge and offers us the chance of being active participants rather than passive by-standers. Representative democracy worked for the last century. It is a more participatory democracy that will work in this.
 
And equity demands that it should be so. The sense of hopelessness that clouds the poorest communities in our country grows out of disempowerment.  Of course beating crime, creating jobs, rebuilding estates can help. But I have come to believe that this cloud of despondency can only be dispelled through a modern participatory politics which allows both local communities and individual citizens to more evenly and directly share in power. By cutting taxes for the low paid.  By giving more people a real stake in society. By enabling people, regardless of wealth or status, to take greater control over their lives. By changing the balance between the citizen and the State. 
 
From the mid-nineteenth century the State took on more responsibilities.  In large part this accretion of power was necessary and it was right.  State action was needed to guarantee clean water and safe streets.  The expansion of a market economy relied on legal rights and clear rules which again only the State could uphold.  And in the creation of the Welfare State – with its jewel in the crown the NHS – the State offered equity and security as an antidote to the deprivation and injustice of an era of economic upheaval and total war in a way that charitable endeavour and employer philanthropy could never hope to match.  And yet by the last quarter of the twentieth century it was becoming clear that too much State could be as bad as too little.   The Berlin War was about to tumble and with it the ideological perversity of state-communism.  In economic policy Western Governments had demonstrated a poor record of picking winners but losers had developed a consistent habit of picking governments.  State regulation had come to stifle market innovation.  So in the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s – most notably the privatisation programme – power was moved from the State to the market.  And in the New Labour reforms of this new century – most notably the creation of new institutions like an independent Bank of England, NHS Foundation Hospitals, City Academies and now Trust Schools – power has been moved again from the State to new service providers.  But what neither Thatcherism nor Blairism have successfully done is moved power from the State to the individual or to the community. 

Too often governments – including New Labour – have fallen for the fallacy that once the commanding heights of the state have been seized, through periodic elections, progressive change automatically follows.  In truth this works neither for citizens nor for governments. People are left confused and disempowered. Governments end up nationalising responsibility when things go wrong without necessarily having the levers to put them right. Progress in the future depends on sharing responsibility with citizens so that they become insiders not outsiders.

Let me give one example of what I mean.  As a teenager I lived in Benwell in west Newcastle, slap bang in the middle of a decades-long failed experiment in urban regeneration. It’s not through lack of effort, whether from local councils, development agencies or national governments.  It’s certainly not through lack of resources.  In the last thirty years this four mile stretch of urban Britain has received £500 million in regeneration monies much of it from the public purse.  It almost breaks my heart to see what has gone wrong.  I’ve seen houses rebuilt and refurbished only to be knocked down.  And then seen the process repeated in a bewildering array of projects and programmes.  Some scored success but overall they missed the mark.  Benwell’s population has fallen by 33% in twenty years.  Neighbouring Scotswood’s by 40%.  One in four people live with a limiting long term illness, four in ten adults have no qualifications and one in two women are economically inactive.  It is officially classified as amongst the most deprived communities in Britain.

There is no single reason why it all went wrong.  Thatcherite recession broke the relationship between employment and housing that had conceived West Newcastle in the first place.  As jobs left the area so did families, attracted by better schools and new homes springing up in more desirable parts of the city.  And as the housing market slumped – at one time you could buy a flat in Benwell for £1 and a whole street in Scotswood if you had a few thousand – landlords moved in.   They lived off the housing benefit system and many cared little for who their tenants were or how they behaved.  Meanwhile, the battery of successive government initiatives too often left skills, schooling and support for families playing second fiddle to rebuilding or refurbishing housing.  But most importantly of all they failed to secure community buy-in. There were, of course, worthy attempts to involve local residents. The complaint is not so much lack of consultation – people complain of feeling consulted to death – as of ownership.   The people who were supposed to benefit from these schemes were never fully involved either in their formulation or their implementation.  It is striking that across the city in the east end of Newcastle an earlier housing development – the award-winning Byker Wall – avoided many of these pitfalls.  Led by architect Ralph Erskine it was a revolutionary approach to rehousing people from the old terraced communities in Byker.  Erskine set up office in an empty corner shop to listen to local people’s views about what they wanted and then reflected their ideas in his design.  Today the Byker Wall has its fair share of problems but the disintegration seen in West Newcastle is largely absent.
It might be a leap of faith to give communities control over housing estates, local parks and childcare centres but the tragedy of West Newcastle makes me believe the old top-down agenda has run its course.  It is time for a new bottom-up approach.  It is already starting to emerge.  Over recent years there has been an explosion in community-run organisations and social enterprises.  Elsewhere in the world there has been an upsurge in finding new ways of successfully engaging people with decision-making. There is the referendum culture of Switzerland and America.  There are the mutually-run housing, childcare, elderly and school services of Denmark and Sweden.  There is the experience of cities as diverse as Chicago in the United States, and Porto Alegre in Brazil where local people control local budgets and services. And there is all the learning you have gleaned from experiments across the world about how society can be changed from below.

None of this suggests the State has no role.  Quite the reverse.  Even the most laissez faire American Presidency of modern times has felt compelled to intervene in the financial markets in response to the current global turmoil.  Without state action – indeed without states agreeing to pool their actions – global problems, whether economic or environmental, stand little chance of being solved.  And when it comes to social change it is surely inconceivable that poverty or disadvantage can be overcome without the State or politics playing its part.  Poor people are hardly able to spend their way out of poverty.  They need help with education, housing, training, childcare. So it is no more acceptable for today’s Conservatives to blame poor people for failing to live healthier lives and urging them to get on their exercise bikes than it was for a previous generation of Conservatives to blame people for being out of work and urging them to get on their push bikes.  There is a danger of a new naivete: that the science of persuasion can replace the art of public policy-making when it comes to tackling what are deep and complex social problems.  Worse still, that nudging becomes little more than an excuse for rolling back the State and disinvesting in public services. This is a blast from the past, not a politics of the future.

No one denies, of course, that individual citizens have responsibilities.  But so so do politicians.  The trick is to get the balance right between what each does.   Take one example.  Over many years campaigns that exhorted people to stop smoking and warnings about the consequences of doing so undoubtedly helped many smokers quit.  And in the process these social marketing techniques helped create a permissive climate for political action.  In turn that political action, in the form of tax rises on tobacco and smoking cessation on the NHS, helped shift the climate of public opinion still further in favour of tougher action culminating in a legal ban on smoking in public places.  The smoking ban could not be nudged into existence: State action had to bring it into existence.

But here I want to sound a note of caution.  Those expressing glee that the current global financial turmoil exposes the limits of free markets need to remember that there are equally limits to the role of centralised states.  It is right that there should be a new global regulatory framework to prevent any repeat of this credit crunch.  And I for one strongly support the action the UK Government has taken to stabilise our financial institutions.   What would be wrong is if government intervention here became the foundation for a wider creeping policy programme in which the State assumed responsibilities that properly belong either to markets or to citizens.  The challenges of the modern world call for the State to play its part but also to know its place.  It is only the State that can equalise opportunities throughout life and empower its citizens.  Equally only citizens can seize those opportunities and realise their own aspirations to progress.  So just as the Right is wrong to reject the State’s role, the Left must avoid the trap of countering an argument about less state by making a case for more State.  What is needed is a different sort of State: one that empowers, not controls. 

This I believe is the basis for a new politics which has at its core a modern progressive cause: the empowerment of citizens.  That can only happen if we get the right mix of policy instruments.  In foreign policy circles the contemporary debate following the West’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan is about the necessary balance between hard power and soft power.   Hard power is expressed through military force and economic sanction; soft power through careful diplomacy and economic or cultural engagement.   Some argue a preponderance of one approach to the other, but the lesson of history is surely that a mix of both approaches is necessary. In the Cold War mutual assured nuclear destruction and NATO may have provided deterrence and safety, but the fall of the Berlin Wall owed at least as much to the attractions of a dynamic mixed economy, blue jeans, the Beatles, the Voice of America and the BBC World Service.

Similarly I think the concepts of soft and hard power can be used to delineate the various instruments that are needed to bring about desirable behaviour and social change in a complex modern society.  By “hard power” I mean the use of laws, regulations and formal incentives to reinforce social norms. By “soft power”, I mean the array of community engagement and social marketing tools that you are so versed in.   In my view getting the right balance between soft and hard power is the key to unlocking social progress and opening the way to a modern relationship between state and citizen.

I welcome the fact that the National Social Marketing Centre is taking a leading role in this debate through its own reviews and the growing recognition within the social marketing profession of the need to achieve the right balance.  The soft power/hard power distinction finds an echo in the contrast the Centre draws between “strategic social marketing” (that is upstream work using your insight and evidence base to influence public policy making) and “operational social marketing” (that is downstream work implementing social marketing techniques on the ground).  It is when the two are allied that most progress is most.  Conversely as a recent research report into the effectiveness of UK government funded social marketing campaigns highlights, a lack of integration between a campaign and broader governmental strategies can undermine its potential impact on positive behavioural change. 

This suggests to me that public policy makers have not as yet fully appreciated the benefits that social marketing and behavioural change techniques can bring to bear on making social change happen.  One way of correcting this understanding deficit would be to make training in social marketing and behavioural change part of the package that public officials in health, education, estates management and local government automatically receive.  So that those officials engaged in community regeneration, for example, would have their focus as much on hearts and minds as bricks and mortar. 

To take one example, the poorest communities tend to have a high turnover of residents.  Social norms tend to be in flux as a consequence.  But elsewhere in the world people have found good ways of promoting social capital and establishing community norms in such areas.  In France there are voluntary associations that welcome people to a community.  They find an echo in the private sector tradition in the US and Canada of the welcome wagon.  We should be prepared to test such approaches in this country. 

More broadly, I believe the whole thrust of government policy should be to empower people and their communities. So both local police and health services could be made directly accountable to local people through the ballot box.  Local councils would be freed from much central government control as their system of financing moved from national taxes to local ones with local communities having the right through referenda to determine locally-decided tax rates.  As in the USA, Canada, Australia and many other countries locally elected bodies would be able to borrow either from the markets or through local bond issues.  The aim would be to get local services better attuned to the needs of local communities.  Where local services are failing communities would have the legal right to have them replaced. Community courts and restorative justice should spearhead a reinvigorated effort to deter and prevent anti-social behaviour.  A new form of public ownership - community-run mutual organisations - could take over the running of local services like children’s centres, estates and parks.    And as individual citizens parents would get new powers to choose schools and NHS patients to choose treatments.  People in old age, those with a long-term condition, families with disabled children or people in training could choose their own publicly-funded budgets instead of conventionally provided services.

Each one of these changes would help give citizens and communities greater control over their lives.  Just as at other points in our history an old orthodoxy has been swept away by a new so I believe this is an idea whose time has come.  In 1945 the new idea was for power to be vested in the central state and its policy expression was nationalisation.  In 1979 the new idea was for power to be vested in the free market and its policy expression was privatisation.  In 1997 the new idea was for power to be vested in reformed institutions and its policy expression was modernisation.  Now the new idea is to vest power in the citizen and the community and to make its policy expression empowerment.  This is the new political territory.  Neither the Right nor the Left have in truth, yet fully come to terms with it.  Whoever does so first I believe will win both ideologically and electorally.   I hope you will play a leading role in making it happen.