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Lucy’s story of trying to access advice in Bristol, and Sue Evans’ response on the ever-increasing and conflicting stresses and strains of advice, give a rich indication of the constantly shifting challenges facing advice seekers and those attempting to deliver advice services. In this chapter I examine the history, funding and regulatory environment of Citizens Advice, the largest voluntary sector advice organisation in the UK and the principal subject of our research programme. The structure of Citizens Advice – national umbrella organisations providing services, support and guidance to local autonomous charitable organisations that themselves rely heavily on a volunteer workforce – is both unique and critically important to the strength and adaptability of the service. Advice work forms the first ‘pillar’ of the service, while the national/ local structure also enables the service to deliver its second ‘pillar’: using the intelligence from its advice-giving work to influence social policy. In this chapter, I will focus on the ways in which the resourcing of the service has been changing, concentrating on three key forms of resource and support: the relationships between national and local organisations; the funding of bureaux; and the volunteer workers in advice. Each of these elements is changing in ways that have profound implications for the provision of advice and point to an increasingly unsettled future. I conclude with an assessment of the threats and further challenges to this voluntary sector advice service.
The Citizens Advice service is comprised of a network of local associations, each being, until recently, known as a ‘Citizens Advice Bureau’ or ‘CAB’, connected to and supported by the national bodies Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland.
This chapter begins with the story of the Single Parent Action Network (SPAN) and its involvement in an ambitious urban regeneration project in the early 2000’s, a venture that then fell apart under the pressures of ‘austerity’. This ‘post-regeneration’ story demonstrates the ways in which changes in urban policy shape and interact with the lived reality of the organisations, people and social structures that the policy is focused upon. The second part of the chapter uses this story to reflect on the rationale and research focus of ‘Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement’, a Connected Communities research programme involving SPAN and other community organisations in Bristol and South Wales. Productive Margins draws upon the experience and expertise of SPAN and the partner organisations to co-produce research which examines the regulatory mechanisms that enmesh the everyday activities of communities, and to experiment with ways of regulating for engagement.
There is an urgent need to rethink relationships between systems of government and those who are ‘governed’. This book explores ways of rethinking those relationships by bringing communities normally excluded from decision-making to centre stage to experiment with new methods of regulating for engagement.
Using original, co-produced research, it innovatively shows how we can better use a ‘bottom-up’ approach to design regulatory regimes that recognise the capabilities of communities at the margins and powerfully support the knowledge, passions and creativity of citizens. The authors provide essential guidance for all those working on co-produced research to make impactful change.
Drawing on data from a research study of workers who sought justice following a dispute at work, this paper examines exclusion from systems of justice as a crucial element in understandings of poverty and social exclusion. We focus on the stories of those who attempt to use the employment tribunal system, which illustrate the multiple barriers to justice experienced by these workers. Arguing that the employment tribunal system provides a crucial forum independent from the workplace which can put a brake on prejudicial and arbitrary actions by employers, we conclude with suggestions for reform.
This introductory chapter sets out concerns with the current state of theories and practice in regulation. It identifies a fundamental problem of regulatory practice, which turns more and more inward-looking, shutting out the expertise of citizens who experience the effects of regulatory systems. It was this gap that led to the five-year research programme, ‘Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement’, which led to this book. The chapter then presents a brief outline of the book, exploring both the methodology of co-production and citizens’ experiences of a number of substantive fields of regulatory practice in order that one can begin to see and know regulatory systems differently. Finally, the chapter sets the scene for explorations in regulating for engagement by illustrating some of the ways in which regulation is discussed — or not — in everyday life by drawing on interviews with participants in the research programme.
This concluding chapter seeks to build inductively from the findings of the research projects discussed in previous chapters, summarising their collective implications to address what makes it possible to regulate for engagement. It argues that the answer is a processual one. A threefold dynamic process underpins effective regulation for engagement, constituted by three factors that build upon and support each other. The chapter first elaborates on this threefold process, drawing on micro-illustrations from the preceding chapters. It follows by acknowledging the limits and perils of these dynamics, especially if they are institutionalised through traditional regulatory policy or legally enforceable programmes. Responding to these limits is the aim of the chapter’s conclusion, where it is argued that embedding these practices and processes in experientially sensitive infrastructure is the key to preserving and stabilising their creative potential.
This chapter discusses experiments in shifting understandings of expertise and in co-producing research that formed the basis of the Productive Margins (PM) programme. Those experiments were structured as the Productive Communities Research Forum, a series of gatherings that included all active co-researchers and occurred every three to six months over the lifetime of the Productive Margins programme. Before discussing this experimental method, the chapter turns to co-production as a specific set of approaches to collaborative research which involves diverse voices. It brings together the Productive Margins principal investigator, community lead, arts and humanities lead, and one of the co-investigators who worked as a link between two projects and the core management group. These individuals have different research interests, forms of expertise, values, and standpoints on collaborative working in communities.
Increasing numbers of people in the United Kingdom find themselves needing advice and support in dealing with a growing range of problems. Whether it is a dispute with one’s employer, a stop on one’s benefit payments, an impending eviction, or a default on a debt, the background to this book is the rising number of individuals with ‘civil law’ issues that can rapidly lead to situations of crisis. These growing problems have a troubled relationship to the current period of ‘austerity’. Presented alongside an increasingly familiar narrative of ‘tightening our belts’ and ‘living within our means’, a series of policies pursued by UK governments since 2010 have intensified such problems, while the reductions in public funding that they have mandated, most notably to the Civil Legal Aid budget, have reduced the range and scope of many public organisations to offer advice or support. At the same time, there has been an expectation that voluntary organisations would somehow ‘fill the gap’ left by the withdrawal of public services – an expectation exemplified in David Cameron’s image of the ‘Big Society’. As a consequence, voluntary organisations providing advice and support find themselves at a particularly acute junction of these social and economic pressures – while facing problems of their own, not least reductions in their funding as the ‘austerity’ cuts work their way through the funding system.
