This week Adam Lent started an important conversation at the New Local Government Network, about how we enable a system shift away from a highly centralised mode of government to one which is community driven. He writes; ‘Currently it takes a rare combination of courage, persistence and vision on...
Articles by Hilary Cottam
Balm in a Tea Cup
I received an email last week – from Norway – with an image of a green tea cup and a message that read as follows: “I just wanted to tell you how much you inspired me that day in Arendal. I had never thought about loneliness or solitude that...
Humanising the Inevitable? C21 public service.
What is the role of the modern state in creating the good life? Are we, the public servants of today, simply humanisers of the inevitable, those who must mop up the fall out of rapid techno economic change. Or can we be the radical architects of a much-needed social revolution? Everywhere...
Ode to Odense
Five years ago almost to the day, I made my first visit to Denmark. At a conference on public service design hosted by MindLab, I was struck when Jorgen Clausen, the chief executive of Odense (Denmark’s third largest city) began his presentation talking about the city’s 1,000 leaders and...
Social Work? Policing in the 21st century
I was honoured this week to deliver the annual Newsam Lecture to police leaders from across the country. ‘Is modern policing social work?’ I asked in the title of my lecture. The police are facing something of a perfect storm. They witness every day the increasing vulnerability in the...
Rooms of Our Own
I’m moving this week – into a small studio in a car park. I will be working above a cello maker, next door to architects and just down the corridor from the women of colour collective gal-dem. So I will have good company, a window that opens and a...
We don’t talk (about the welfare state) anymore …
Since the 1980s the term ‘welfare state’ has fallen out of use and out of favour. No recent government papers have used these words in their title. That was the claim made last week by the journalist and biographer of the Welfare State Nicholas Timmins. Timmins searched government records...