Ratio Talks

Clare Farrell is my guest on the podcast this week, the penultimate episode in the series On Religion. Clare is co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, known as XR.Non-violent resistance lies at the heart of XR, and Clare notes how those drawn to the movement, and especially those able to train on civil resistance are often explicitly religious or spiritual.In the podcast Clare refers to the work of Catholic theologian Carmody Grey, and in particular this lecture What Do We Want To Sustain? She has also drawn on the work of Buddhist psychologist John Vervaeke, and to this series of conversations and lectures. Both Clare and series collaborator Liz Slade are part of the Hard Art Collective that has experimented with new ways of thinking about religion.Clare’s latest work includes the Humanity Project, a collaboration with Nick Gardham, and the Do-tank Absurd Intelligence. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

Nick Spencer is the guest for this episode of Ratio Talks, part of the series On Religion. Nick is Senior Fellow at the think tank Theos and well known for his books on science and religion including The Landscapes of Science and Religion, Playing God, and Magisteria.In the episode, we also refer to Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.The discussion includes a reference to the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee on the teaching of evolution in schools. David Runciman’s podcast Past, Present, Future devotes an entire episode to the trial and is well worth a listen.Liz Slade, co-creator of this series On Religion, gives her reflections on Nick’s work at the end, and refers to Unitarian Church member and the man who discovered oxygen Joseph Priestley.Nick’s next book Christianity and the Future of Welfare is due out with Cambridge University Press in 2026. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

The podcast this week is in the safe hands of Chine McDonald from the think-tank Theos. Chine continues the series On Religion by bringing together her colleagues Jagbir Jhutti Johal, Joy Madeiros and Laura Marks to talk about the Women’s Faith Forum. Jagbir is Professor or Religion at the University of Birmingham. Joy is Founding Director of Oasis UK, a group of organisations delivering education, housing, health, anti human trafficking and a wide range of local community projects. Laura is a social activist, policy adviser, and writer. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

This week’s contributor to the Ratio Talks series On Religion is Liz Slade from the Unitarians. Liz helped shape the series.The Unitarians have been a radical force within and outside of organised religion. Joseph Chamberlain’s work to bring utilities under municipal control in Birmingham in the 1870s, to take just one example, was in part inspired by the liberal traditions of the Unitarian Church he attended.Liz is leader of the Unitarians at a turning point in their history. On the one hand church attendance is declining. On the other hand, a new generation are seeking spiritual outlook and meaning in life, and some find in the Unitarian Church a space that can adapt and be shaped to accommodate new ideas.In the podcast, we explore what this means for the future of organised religion more broadly.Simon Duffy from Citizens Network and a man of faith, joins the podcast to reflect on the conversation with Liz. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

The idea of a relational social policy that responds to a powerful civil society, one comprising relationships between people, is built from my own research and experiments, learning from Ratio’s partners, and a lot of reading. At the core of the reading are a dozen or so seminal texts. Robin Dunbar is on that list. Over the last eight years, I keep coming back to his work.Robin’s research explains why we build social networks, the limits of those networks and their function. His recent book How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures shows how religion built out from ancient rituals designed to manage conflict and maintain strong social networks, and the benefits they bring to our health and wealth.Today’s episode barely scratches the surface of Robin’s work. But it provides the foundation for the rest of this series on religion, and hopefully will encourage listeners to read his work. (It is relevant not just for understanding religion, but also for thinking about work on place, building community power, and recovering trust in democracy).Here are 10 lessons I take from Robin’s work into the rest of the series.* Relating is difficult for all animals, including humans. Once we get beyond groups of 50, we are predisposed to violence.* This has been a problem for our evolution, and we have been trying to solve it in many ways, two of which, first the political and judicial institutions of the state and second religion have proved highly influential.* (Religion has evolved from communal religions bound by trance like experiences; doctrinal religions that rely on merciless gods, sacrifice, and shared moral codes, and eventually into monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam that now dominate and are characterised by a single god, formal places of worship, priesthoods and rituals.* All religions fire up the endorphins, and make us feel good. They also increase our sense of bondedness and proliferate the numbers of -to use Robin’s words- ‘shoulders we can cry on’ in times of difficulty.* Societies are more religious when their members are under threat. When there is a war, religious observance rises, as we see in present day Ukraine. Under peaceful conditions, religious observance declines. The enduring peace in Europe after centuries of war may explain the decline in religious observance.* Religion is an emotional response, not a cognitive response. But the emotional response, the sense of shared moral order, the sense of collective agency, the idea that together we can, the sense that we have a common language, these perceptions are real in their consequences. At scale, the shared emotional response boosts health and wealth.* Religions are most effective when they reflect behaviours that participants value, certainly more so than when they use a policeman in the sky type god to impose order.* Religions scale by building up from the bottom, building on local rituals, local places of worship, existing shared moral codes. They then add on the top a shared discipline, things that we all do at the same time, and at least weekly, and also by offering shared vision.* At the same time, religion has a tendency to colonise civil society and undermine natural social order, hence the potential for religion to be a force for ill as well as a force for good.* The active ingredients in religion -the routine endorphin inducing activities- mean that religious groups endure longer than secular groups, irrespective of the truth of the religion’s doctrine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

This episode start a new sub-series on the relationship between religion and civil society. The series is a collaboration with Chine McDonald from the think tank Theos. We have benefited from help and insight from Liz Slade, head of the Unitarians, and who also contributes to the series.At its core, the series explores the ways in which religion extends and restricts civil society. The impetus is Robin Dunbar’s recent book How Religion Evolved. It is built on what is known as Dunbar’s number -which is 150- that refers to the number of people that the human species can meaningfully interact with at any one time. Robin’s book explains how religion has contributed to our evolution and extending social networks beyond that number. Robin joins the podcast next week to explain these ideas.In this episode, Chine and I simply and briefly set the scene and outline what is coming. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

Josh Bilton is a community artist -he explains what this means at the beginning of the podcast. He has been working in the Brunswick Centre where, until recently, I was living. The Brunswick Centre is a megabuilding -a complex of buildings that serve several functions- in central London. It is home to several thousand people, it is a shopping centre, and it offers workspace for designers and craftspeople. It is a building that people can either love or hate. To someone like me, interested in modernism and community it is a love affair. To many who live in the Brunswick, fighting the council and utility companies for basic rights and services, and to onlookers more at home with Georgian Bloomsbury, it feels like a struggle and/or looks like an eyesore.I bumped into Josh at the exhibition of his work, and was so fascinated by what he had to say I recorded a podcast with him then and there.Josh’s insights into life in The Brunswick are a metaphor for life in England. He talks about the need for repair. About acts of care. About recovery. To me, he is talking about the groundwork needed for England to mend the divisions that have set people apart over the last decade and a half.Josh’s exhibition Repair was shown at the Brunswick Centre on the 12th and 13th of July 2025. It is the latest in a series of projects known as Passengers conceived and curated by Julie Hill, in partnership with Gauld Architecture. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

This week’s guest on Ratio Talks is Cormac Russell, one of the leading thinkers in community development. Cormac learned his trade with John McKnight, and Jody Kretzmann and other leading lights of the community development movement in Chicago, and the community power movement across the United States. Cormac is perhaps best known in the U.K. for ABCD -Asset Based Community Development- but his understanding of community is far deeper -such as his knowledge about community power- and his interests are much wider -for example his 2020 book Rekindling Democracy. Cormac’s work is now applied across the world.Podcast regular Pritpal S. Tamber gives his reflections on Cormac’s comments. He brings the conversation back to the seminar work of S.Leonard Syme and, in particular, his early work on control. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

In this second episode of my conversation with Simon Duffy, we talk about the policy and practice implications of the concept.In the podcast, Simon refers to the work of philosophers Hannah Arendt, particularly her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Simone Weil. Simon also draws on Guy Standing’s 2014 book The Precariat.I asked Simon about three books: Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Granddaughterabout the rise of the right in Germany. (I will review Schlink’s novel in the coming weeks); Claudia Rankin’s extraordinary book length poem Citizen: An American Lyric; and Dieter Helm’s Legacy: How to Build the Sustainable Economy.In the second episode, Simon refers to several networks developing power shifting practices that build on his work on citizenship. The European Municipalist Networkmaps and connects initiatives in this area, including Barcelona en comú mentioned by Simon in the podcast. The Fearless Cities is a similar network. Simon is heavily involved in Fearless Cities South Yorkshire.If you find these episodes interesting, you may want to listen to Simon’s previous contribution describing his role in the fight to de-institutionalise people with intellectual disabilities.There are multiple additional sources and resources at Citizen Network. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

In this and the next episode of Ratio Talks, Simon Duffy talks about the foundational concept of citizen -not in the sense of citizen of a nation, but in terms of the rights and responsibilities of every person who lives in a country, regardless of their nationality.In the podcast, Simon refers to the work of philosophers Hannah Arendt, particularly her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Simone Weil. Simon also draws on Guy Standing’s 2014 book The Precariat.I asked Simon about three books: Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Granddaughter about the rise of the right in Germany. (I will review Schlink’s novel in the coming weeks); Claudia Rankin’s extraordinary book length poem Citizen: An American Lyric; and Dieter Helm’s Legacy: How to Build the Sustainable Economy.In the second episode, Simon refers to several networks developing power shifting practices that build on his work on citizenship. The European Municipalist Network maps and connects initiatives in this area, including Barcelona en comú mentioned by Simon in the podcast. The Fearless Cities is a similar network. Simon is heavily involved in Fearless Cities South Yorkshire.If you find these episodes interesting, you may want to listen to Simon’s previous contribution describing his role in the fight to de-institutionalise people with intellectual disabilities.There are multiple additional sources and resources at Citizen Network. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

This week’s guest on Ratio Talks is a political theorist, leader of the UCL Policy Lab, and former speechwriter to ex-Labour Party leader Ed Milliband.Marc Stears grounds his work in the meaning that we all find in our ordinary lives. The proposition is set out in his book Out of the Ordinary, an analysis of the work of British writers such as George Orwell, J.B. Priestly, Dylan Thomas, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.The most vivid representation of the idea is Dylan Thomas’ insistance that a stumbling squirrel is at least as important as Hitler’s invasions. When Thomas was writing, politicians understood the importance of everyday life. The relentless centralisation of power has loosened the connection. Democracy is suffering as a result.During the conversation Marc and I mentioned several books, TV shows and podcasts including:Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy, Verso BooksJames Graham’s TV series Brian and Maggie on Channel 4Ordinary Hope: A New Way of Changing Our Country and Ordinary Hope: A Mission to Rebuild from the UCL Policy LabRichard Galpin’s work on conversations as discussed in a previous podcastMarc’s book Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How it Can Again, was published by Belknap/Harvard in 2021. It is beautifully written and full of love for life and culture.We are joined at the end of the conversation by Alice Robson, Head of Communities at The Winch, a well established and highly esteemed civil society organisation, deeply rooted in community in Swiss Cottage North London. Alice links Marc’s words to community work, and reflects on what she learned as one of Marc’s students.Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and is engineered by Nik Paget Tomlinson. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

Jon Cruddas, until the last election the Member of Parliament for Dagennham and Rainham, wrote a book to mark the centenary and provide a new perspective on the history of the Party.A Century of Labour is a masterclass in the complexities of modern party politics. Labour is not bound by a single political objective. It is a community of competing ideas about how we live together.For Jon Cruddas, the competition revolves around three perspectives on social justice. Over the last 100 years, those ideas have evolved. Some have proved apposite for the social and economic challenges facing the U.K. at successive moments in its history, and became the bedrock of social policy at that moment.Success for Labour, like success for any political party, is the product of deep conversation, pluralism -balancing competing ideas-, tolerance and political strategy. The picture Cruddas paints of the party has two sides. One looks a lot like civil society. There is social infrastructure to connect people. There are conversations about how to live peaceably. There is an unwritten almanac, continually updated, recording the shared moral order. There is natural mutual aid.The other is mechanical. Looked at from this side, the Party is a machine geared up to win.The conversation with Jon in this podcast explores what can be learned from A Century of Labour for the future of progressive politics, an effective balance between state and civil society, and finding new solutions to the existential challenges of climate change, managed migration and ethical A.I.Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack.Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

In the last episode of the podcast, we talked to Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council during a quarter of a century of policy and democratic reform.Richard was part of a double act. For most of the time he was leader, Sir Howard Bernstein was the Chief Executive.Howard sadly died in the summer of last year. To understand his contribution to the Manchester story, and how he worked with Richard, I turned to my brother.Geoff Little worked with Howard for nearly three decades.In the podcast you will hear Geoff refer to the Memorial website and the many tributes to the man and his work. If you are in any doubt about Howard’s capabilities, renowned Manchester born economist Jim O’Neill, Baron O'Neill of Gatley, recently described Howard as the most important civil servant of his generation.Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the SubstackRatio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

If you skim through the domestic news headlines in British papers between 1996 and 2021, you will be reminded of the Blair years, the effects of the global economic crash, austerity, Brexit, pandemic, and the cost of living crisis. The pattern is very much rise and fall.If you look very carefully, you will discover variations in the pattern. One of those variations is Manchester. For while we all obsessed about Westminster politics, the politicians and officials of Manchester worked hand in hand with civil society and the market and obsessed about what was right for local residents.The remarkable story of Manchester’s exceptionalism is told this week by one of its architects, Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester Council for a quarter of a century. Working with his colleagues in the nine other boroughs that make up Greater Manchester, and supported by his officials, not least Chief Executive Sir Howard Bernstein, who features in the next episode, Richard oversaw economic success, urban regeneration and improvements in population health that bucked the U.K trends.Devolution was a totem of the approach. Manchester assumed powers and duties from Westminster, and pushed democratic structures into neighbourhoods. As the podcast was being recorded, the current U.K. Government was preparing to publish plans to spread the Manchester model across the country.Richard is a stickler for accuracy, and asked us to correct a few errors in the recording. The health legislation of 2002, is actually 2022. Richard was succeeded as leader of Manchester Council by Bev Craig. The Combined Authority of Greater Manchester never had a leader as such. Tony Lloyd became interim Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2015, and was succeeded by Andy Burnham in 2017.The reflection on this episode comes from Jon Cruddas, former Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham. Jon will be back in a few weeks to talk about his latest book A Century of Labour.Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack, Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

Richard Galpin works at Pembroke House, the settlement described by Mike Wilson in the previous episode. Richard leads a classic settlement project, a conversation that connects local people, local government officials and central government policy makers. It is known as We Walworth after the neighbourhood of which Pembroke House is a part.As Mike Wilson explained, settlements facilitate students from private schools or universities coming to live alongside people living in economically disadvantaged communities. This experience transformed the outlook of many students, including Clement Attlee, leader of the radical post-war U.K. Government and William Beveridge, author of the report that laid the foundations for the Welfare State.In settlements, these students are described as ‘residents’. They are from a school or academic institution but they reside in the settlement. They live alongside residents in the community.We Walworth extends this idea by creating a context for civil servants to spend time alongside and get into conversation with the people they serve.As Pembroke House is just a few miles from Whitehall, home to most U.K. Government departments, We Walworth includes both central and local government officials.I am interested in this work for what it can tell us about the future of civil society organisations. But Richard also brings to light many of the weaknesses of the state, its propensity to colonise civil society, the systemic imbalance between state and civil society, and the low level frictions that, I would argue, contribute to declining trust in the state and its institutions.Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the SubstackRatio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

Mike Wilson is the Chief Executive of Pembroke House Settlement in Walworth, South London. That single line alone demands lots of explainers.Pembroke House was established as a mission by the students of Pembroke College at Cambridge University in the 1880s. The students built the mission -it looks like church- and gave their time to live and work in the community.Walworth is a neighbourhood of about 40,000 people in the London Borough of Southwark. It features in Dickens Great Expectations, an indication of its economic disadvantage, also reflected, as Mike remarks, in the maps of poverty drawn by Charles Booth at around the time that Pembroke House was built.Despite being a mission, Pembroke House functioned more like a settlement, more secular and more orientated to social reforming. Mike explains the difference, and the transition in the podcast.What does all this history have to do with contemporary challenges of by now gentrifying Walworth, never mind the future of public policy? That is Mike’s expertise, and the subject of the conversation we had in the turret of the settlement building last year.When talking about his experience as central government policy maker, Mike picks up similar themes around the Troubled Families model explored by Gavin Jones and Geoff Little on earlier editions the podcast.In his reflections, Pritpal S. Tamber refers to Jennie Popay’s work on de-radicalisation of community empowerment. In fact, in the article Power, control, communities and health inequalities I: theories, concepts and analytical frameworks published in Health Promotion International in 2021 (Vol 36, pages 1253 to 1263), Jennie and her colleagues use the word ‘depoliticisation’.Pritpal also referred to this publication from the Shelia McKechnie Foundation in which civil society leaders call for a new settlement between their sector, government and business.Pritpal referred to two articles dealing with what he describes as ‘deaths from despair’ First, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century by Anne Case and Angus Deaton published in PNAS in 2015 (Vol 112 (49), pages 15078 to 15083). Second, They're not mentally ill, their lives are just s**t, a provocatively titled article by Timothy Price and colleagues in Health and Place, Volume 90, November 2024.Finally, Pritpal refers to Clare Wightman at Grapevine who has appeared in the podcast and Chris Dabbs at Unlimited Potential who has not appeared on the podcast, but hopefully will!Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the SubstackRatio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

Jason Stockwood co- owner of Grimsby Town Football Club was my guest on the last episode of Ratio Talks.Consistent with the format, I invited Grimsby Town supporter and teacher Adam Howard to reflect on what Jason had to say. But it soon became clear that Adam had much to offer that a short commentary. As a Grimsby resident, highly committed to his town and region, he identified a lot of the missing ingredients and wrongheadedness of public policies to rescue so called left behind places.It wasn’t a difficult decision to give Adam a full episode of his own. The first, by the way, that required no editing whatsoever.I found Adam from the View from the Findus podcast (available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast hubs), to which he contributes.Football club podcasts are proliferating. They are revealing. Radio stations have been begging football fans to contribute to phone-ins for well over a decade. They are designed as a sort of entertainment. A couple of hosts ridiculing each other, and encouraging their guests to make outlandish claims -sack the manager, buy a player the club cannot afford, or welcome the billions that comes with State sponsored owners (never mind the annoying human rights issues).Podcasts like View from the Findus have a different flavour. The hosts are football fans. The conversation is intelligent, ranging from tactics, the economics of the sport, the culture of the club, and the emotions of winning and losing. They comprise conversations not sound bites.If you want to know something about Grimsby, you could do worse than listen to episodes of View from the Findus. Or, for understanding Doncaster, check out podular STAND. (Apologies to Grimsby fans for mentioning Doncaster).At the end of this podcast I bring the conversation back to David Goodhart’s book, The Road to Somewhere, published by C Hurst & Co. and mentioned by Jason Stockwood last week.I am grateful to Chris Mills and Paul Savage at View from the Findus for introducing me to Adam, and of course to Adam for his contribution.Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the SubstackRatio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

These days, when people talk about civil society they mean civil society organisations. These are important. And we will get to them as this series develops.But then there are the relationships across society facilitated by social infrastructure, expressed in conversations about how to live peaceably with each other, and generating a shared moral order and mutual aid.A football club is a significant part of the social infrastructure. Each fortnight, in Grimsby, a town of 130,000 people, between four and eight thousand people will gather. Next week’s episode with Grimsby Town fan Adam Howard will give listeners a good sense of the shared meaning and belonging football brings to a place.Jason Stockwood is a tech entrepreneur, social entrepreneur and a Grimsby fan. So he knew the value of the football club to the town and surrounding area. Together with current Chairman Andrew Pettit, he became a major shareholder. It was an investment not only in success on the pitch, but the revitalisation of a community ravaged by the collapse of the fishing industry.In describing the story, Jason references David Goodhart’s book The Road to Somewhere published by C Hurst & Co. Jason’s decisions about how to support his hometown were strongly influenced by the work of Robert Putnam, and in particular his book The Upswing written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett and published by Simon & Schuster. Jason’s decision making reflects the evidence presented by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux).The English Football League -or EFL as it is commonly known- one of football’s governing bodies in the U.K., has published a series of reports on the impact of the sport on English life.For those who want to know more about Jason’s work with Grimsby Town Football Club, he has published a series of articles in the Guardian newspaper. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

In the last episode Gavin Jones, Chief Executive of Essex, reflected on his experience of and learning from working with Hilary Cottam, and the Family Life project, one of a series of experiments that paved the way to a more relational approach to public policy.In this episode, my brother Geoff Little picks up the story. Initially I asked Geoff, as a former local authority Chief Executive, to reflect on what Gavin had to say in the round. Which he did. But it turned out Geoff was also heavily involved in similar work to Gavin and Hilary, about which he has a lot to say. Hence a full episode of reflection, not just a 10 minute postscript.A lot of this episode is about the U.K Government’s Troubled Families Project. As Gavin said in his podcast, Eric Pickles the Government Minister responsible for Troubled Families -and Louise Casey the official responsible for national delivery- rejected Family Life as too expensive. Geoff describes a later similar Government rejection of the Manchester approach.I realise having listened to the episodes that I don’t explain Troubled Families to the international or non policy listener.After the Global economic crash, English government, national and local, focused on a small group of families with multiple problems. These families swallowed up disproportionate amounts of state funding. Individual services were no match for them.Places like Swindon and Manchester sought to innovate.Both places took a relational approach. The work rested on the relationship between a single worker and a family, a tonic for families used to seeing half a dozen agents of the state regularly knock on their door. It centred on relationships within the family, and with neighbours, often resolving years of conflict and disputes. The work focused on the potential of families more than their needs, on what Hilary Cottam -after Amartya Sen- would call their capabilities. One objective was to keep family members connected with the world, with school, with work, and with play.The national programme has a mixed reputation. The language of ‘turning around families’ didn’t accord with the known complexities of family life, troubled or untroubled. The commissioning incentivised local authorities to tell the Government what they wanted to hear. Evaluations were pilloried in the media and there was an investigation by the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament.But in Manchester, as Geoff describes in this episode, they took evaluation very seriously, and the results were extremely promising.Writing this I can see how some readers and listeners might see this as an interesting but largely irrelevant side show. But I take some messages about the prospects of a relational social policy from these conversations.First, there was a moral agent, Hilary Cottam, going against the grain long before anybody else was thinking about the problem let alone a different kind of solution.Second, there were politicians and officials in Swindon, Manchester and other jurisdictions ready to take a risk on a novel and unproven approach.Third, it is ideas that change the world. Hilary’s idea turned up in Manchester without her even visiting. Manchester applied, delivered and evaluated the idea differently, but the core was the same.Fourth, effective policy demands precision. I have failed because the idea was wrong. Too often I have failed because the idea was lazily applied. In England, we are prone to lazy application of good ideas. Think population level public health. Think place. Think community power.Fifth, the evaluation in Manchester was not designed to show success, it was designed to identify what didn’t work, and inform the correction of mistakes. And, thanks to the local government researcher Sarah Henry, backed by her policy and political bosses, it was done rigorously.Sixth, the lasting learning and impact was designed and managed not at the centre of government, but by politicians and officials in local government who knew the people delivering and experiencing the policy change, and the places where they lived.Interest in relational social policy appears to be growing again. If we are exploit its potential we have to learn from Hilary, Gavin, Geoff and others.The how will be just as important as the what. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com

Gavin Jones is this week’s guest on Ratio Talks. Gavin is the Chief Executive of Essex County Council -one of the biggest local authorities in England- and Chair of Solace, the network of local authority chief executives. Early on in his local government career, Gavin worked with Hilary Cottam who was thinking about, experimenting with and developing relational approaches at least a decade before anyone else (as summarised in her book Radical Help).That was the impetus for the podcast. But we were recording just before this years U.K. general election. Gavin was in the mood to chat. And I was in need of guidance. So the conversation shifted quite naturally into Gavin helping me with my work on Inclusive Statecraft to inform the new government.For the postscript I had invited my brother Geoff, a former local authority Chief Executive, to reflect on what we learned from Gavin. Geoff was very engaged, particularly in the way that Gavin and Hilary’s work informed U.K. Government policy from 2010 onwards. In fact, he was so engaged that we talked for longer than anticipated and we decided to publish that conversation as a separate, short episode next week.One of the joys of the podcast is discovering the gifts and interests of my guests outside of their working life. Gavin Jones is a musician, with a significant following in the United States. He plays us out of the episode. If you like what you hear you can find his work by searching GibsonGav on Apple or Spotify.Join us next week for Geoff Little’s reflection on today’s episode.Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the SubstackRatio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. The show’s theme song is by Luca Picardi. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisisratio.substack.com