Civic service: what would Cicero do?

Britain needs a universal programme of youth civic service, as  Prospect argued in a cover essay I wrote with Frank Field earlier this year. Recession-era Britain also needs a massively expensive new public spending programme—whose benefits are difficult to quantify—like a hole in the head. Discuss.

Solving this conundrum is tricky. No one has run the numbers on such a civic service programme for some time. Number 10 did cost a scheme, in secret, in the early 2000s—when they looked at doing something big and bold, and ended up doing “V” instead. While they didn’t publish the result, I seem to remember being told it was “a lot”.

Thankfully, we have think tanks to help out—and so congratulations are due to Prospect’s “one to watch 2010” think tank, Demos, for picking up the ball, and moving it well down the park. They have just produced a paper on how one variant of a civic service scheme might work. And it’s a genuinely strong piece of work.

The authors — Sonia Sodha and Daniel Leighton — have come up with a compelling new model. Their approach is informed by a fair criteria to rank possible policies, and a clear reading of the evidence (full disclosure: I used to work with both Dan and Sonia in different jobs, and admire  their work.) Congratulations should also got to the Private Equity Foundation, who supported Demos—and who are currently bringing CityYear—a nonprofit organisation whose primary goal is to build democracy through citizen—service to the UK. That said, the gist of what is interesting here lies in two novelties.

The first frames civic service quietly within a liberal republican tradition, rather than a contemporary communitarian one; a subtle, but important distinction. The second looks critically at the evidence for what a plausible service scheme might do, to find some suitable criteria on which to judge one, and ask, fundamentally, whether it would work.

Between the two, the authors take a playful swipe at that tiny band of us who have argued for the benefits of a broad, compulsory national programme for all young people. “Civic service,” they say, “has been mooted as a solution to social fragmentation, disintegrating civic bonds and a general social malaise. Again, these claims have been over-hyped.”

It is difficult to claim that this last sentence is true. Almost no one has ever made a strong version of this argument. The politicians won’t make it, even those who support it in private. The NGO lobby won’t make it. A few lone voices in the US — like democrat Andrei Cherny — did make it. Indeed, it would have been splendid if it had been over-hyped.  But even advocates of civic service are overly scrupulous about not over-claiming its benefits.

Still, you can’t write something like this Demos report without seeking out a straw man to bayonet (Frank Field and I certainly stuck into a few.) To their credit, Dan and Sonja don’t hold back. You might, if you listen carefully, also hear the distinct rustle of straw figures in their “lifecycle” approach—especially the claim that “growing a culture of service will not happen through a one-off scheme.” But who actually says only that?

Let’s de-straw this claim, and put it like this — “Growing a strong culture of service from a low base will probably not happen just through a one-off scheme alone, but such a scheme (if done properly) will probably help, especially if put alongside a whole bunch of other things.” Then you might have a point worth debating.

As the former Brazilian “ideas minister” and Harvard academic, Roberto Unger, once put it to me in an interview, the point for the left is to be in favour of all service:

“I don’t think it makes sense to have a single dogmatic formula. We have to try different things. It can be two year’s in everyone’s life. It will depend on their professional specialisation, on what they can contribute, and on what can be developed for them to contribute more. But the principle is that service should be part of everyone’s life. Everyone must be responsible for people outside their immediate circle.”

Accordingly, we have a variety of possible options: six months at the age of 18, one hour a week, one month a year every half decade, the first year of your retirement, or a six month stint between jobs? To the extent Demos back this, they are surely right. But just because you back one, doesn’t mean you are necessarily against the others.

There are other minor oddities. Demos aren’t keen on compulsion—the nub of the issue for a scheme which seeks to encourage the mixing of classes and backgrounds. Here, they have new focus group data on their side. They note: “Participants were not keen on the general concept of compulsion—they saw it as undermining the ethic of volunteering, and a particular problem for young people with caring responsibilities or who had to contribute to family earnings.”

But then, only two sentences later—against the scraping sound of a bit of evidence being awkwardly fitted against a prior conviction—they add: “In a vote asking participants whether young people should be required to do a certain amount of volunteering while at school, 74 per cent said yes at the start of the convention, and 84 per cent said yes at the end.” How can these two sentences both be true?

Not only are those in the Demos groups keen on some elements of compulsion, they get more keen the more they learn. To be fair, the distinction seems to be that people back compulsion, but only at school—which is to suggest that most people back the world as it is. Schools are compulsory, and other things aren’t. Fine.

But this seems to me a timid distinction upon which to rule out floating some sort of pathway towards a future national compulsory system. There is an argument for ruling this out. It is the one former Demos chief, Geoff Mulgan, now backs. Mulgan used to want a compulsory national scheme, but (as I understand his views) he now thinks differently and argues instead for a radical change in the way schools work, so that they do the job instead. But that approach is a far more radical idea than the gradualist strategy that Demos back here.

That said, the paper is in general stronger empirically than anything else I have read. But does it work? Yes, for the most part—and especially so on the other big question. Both authors are surely right that a big-time civic service programme would be a pound-for-pound inefficient lever to try and tackle social dislocation and malaise.

As they argue, civic service is trying to hit many targets—their report cites four, which I broadly agree with: personal development, active citizenship, community benefit, and engaging the young. It is horribly difficult to design one programme that hits all four of these better than four separate programmes designed to hit each individually.

As a consequence of both these points Demos reject the Prospect scheme, even though it is backed by a majority of people in the UK. Instead, they go for a varied model which looks in parts quite similar to that in the US—an NGO-led area-by-area service programme, learning the lessons of CityYear and Americorps, but trying to integrate schools and other areas with what they call “Post-18 gap-year-style service opportunities.” Lets call this model “Americorps UK+.”

I think Demos are wrong to have pulled their punches on developing a pathway for a plausible, truly universal national six months plus service scheme, or even a one year scheme. Beyond that, I have two reflections:

Firstly, there is an intriguing tension between the two halves of their argument—between the philosophy, and the empirics. A civic republican approach, which Demos director, Richard Reeves, is keen on, makes the proposal for national service of the sort Prospect proposed, more attractive, not less. The traditional communitarian justification would want to look at the evidence closely, and see if service corrects the weaknesses of the liberal state. As Demos argue, the answer might well be: not as much as you think, so perhaps we should spend some of the money elsewhere, on early years, or what have you. But Republicans, in the tradition of Cicero and Machiavelli, would be warmer on a big national programme to “build character”. Indeed, they would have been just fine “over-hyping” the benefit of such a big scheme.

Secondly, there are interesting politics here. We have broadly two models of service kicking about. Let’s call the first one the “Steve Hilton” model; that which is being trialled by the Conservatives, and (money pending) will be introduced by the next government. This assumes three weeks of civic service for some tens of thousands of young people at first—partly residential, partly in the community—at the age of around 16, with an ongoing commitment of about 50 hours community service spread out over the following year. But the Tories aim eventually to make this a “voluntary universal” programme — ignoring the fact that there aren’t any truly “voluntary universal” programmes anywhere in the world. Their model is a “lite” version of what Demos want to say is a “one-off” major national youth service scheme.

The other model,  the Demos model, is in some ways more cautious, but in others more radical—it certainly has a broader aim of promoting civic service throughout life, not just for the young. It would see the Tory model suffering from many of the same weaknesses on the four criteria which Demos outline for effectiveness. On the upside it is probably the most realistic model to build and scale in the medium term. So, again, it has a lot of recommend it.

There is, however, more unity on the objectives here than these two models suggests. What most people want is a close-to-universal programme of world class national service opportunities, especially, though not exclusively for young people—and one which is so good, and so well run, that everyone wants to do it without being forced to. It seems both Demos and the Conservatives want this, as do people like David Lammy, and David Blunkett.

So which approach is more likely to get us there over the next generation? That, it seems, is the real question which now needs answering. The evidence seems to be with Demos. But I have the sneaking feeling, on this issue at least, that old Cicero might well have been tempted to hold his Roman nose, and vote Tory next time round.