Governments facing austerity should really heed Mark Johnson’s advice
Mark Johnson is a social entrepreneur who worked tirelessly to improve rehabilitation over the past decade of austerity in the UK. His story provides instructive insights as to what makes social entrepreneurs special and why we should be wary of the wave of rushed public service reforms that might come our way as governments try to deal with the budgetary fall-out of Covid-19.
I must admit, I have been a huge fan of Mark Johnson ever since I met him through our Ashoka Fellowship. His background couldn’t be further from the startup founders our society all too often glorifies. Mark’s upbringing had no privilege, was marred by domestic violence, followed by addiction, prison and recovery. His bestselling book Wasted is an account of that journey. Without knowing this story, you cannot fully understand the secret sauce of Mark’s approach to prison and rehabilitation reform through his organization User Voice. It’s empathy from first hand experience and optimism of the kind of change people are capable of.
Mark founded User Voice in 2009, just as the financial crisis began to bare its teeth not just in UK public service cuts, but in the prison and probation services in particular. Mark’s idea was simple: allow people in prison and on probation to provide feedback about services inside and after prison and participate in prioritizing what the underfunded prison and rehabilitation system is offering. In 2014, I had the chance to witness the first prison council meeting in Pentonville Prison’s 200 year history, organized by User Voice. Prisoners had elected representatives, who in turn had been trained by User Voice to make proposals after they had engaged hundreds of other prisoners for what would improve their experience. For example, broken payphones caused frustration among inmates who in turn got into fights. Fixing them would help improve access to speak to family, safety and the atmosphere for all.
Recently, I had a chance to catch up with Mark. He had been on my mind a lot as I wondered about the impact of Covid-19 on government finances and the likelihood of prolonged austerity in our communities in the coming years. I wanted to know what we could learn from his experience of serving some of the most vulnerable populations during the past decade of austerity in the UK.
The innovation that failed to fix austerity
Right from the outset, Mark pointed me to the disastrous attempt of the government to implement Transforming Rehabilitation (TR), an effort launched in 2013 to marketize public rehabilitation and probation services. The program privatized 70% of rehabilitation and probation to reduce costs, stimulate innovation and bring more diverse organizations to provide rehabilitation services. Crucially it departed from the evidence-based ‘what works’ method and encouraged flexibility for private sector providers to do as they saw fit and get paid for results.
The UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) evaluation said that the ‘government set itself up for failure’ by rushing untested reforms, cutting short pilots, following a contracting ideology of ‘pay for results’ unfit for rehabilitation services and grossly overestimating the market opportunity created. With some minor exceptions, the entire program has been rolled back with all rehabilitation and probation services being renationalized in 2019.
The missed opportunity: Mark’s giveaway offer
But nested within this story of misguided public management reform was another story: How Mark offered to integrate User Voice into the reform to make sure that the ex-offenders’ point of view was heard when planning and fine-tuning reforms. By this time he had become a leading advocate and practitioner who demonstrated how you can provide more effective rehabilitation services if you engage service users. And User Voice went above and beyond by hiring only ex-offenders to deliver these high impact services (85% of User Voice staff in all positions were ex-offenders).
But unlike other types of entrepreneurs or charity leaders, Mark did not seek a big grant or contract for his organization. He believed that the best way forward would be to make user feedback a standardized approach that would be mandatory when procurement. His proposal was to create an independent government function to deliver user feedback to the reform process, making User Voice redundant. Mark reminded me of the choice he and many other social entrepreneurs have to make every day: am I doing this for myself, or for those I am trying to provide a service to people less fortunate. It was obvious that a big part of him wanted to sustain and grow the organization he built out of his own investment. And yet he also knew that he would be able to help many more people by joining the public service. This kind of move would be unthinkable in business, startups or even the non-profit sector for whom staying in business, growth and market share are goals in their own right.
In the end the government didn’t want this to happen and Mark stayed with User Voice. In his view, it went to show that despite it being both morally and operationally valuable, the reform did not want service users to provide feedback. It missed the opportunity to learn about user needs, optimize quickly and scale what works across the system. The opportunity to change the system was lost, a decade wasted. User Voice continued to thrive, help prisons and deliver a great deal of innovation. As a procurement nerd I absolutely loved their Health Councils, through which prisoners not only provide feedback on health services but receive training on public procurement and administer 10% of the evaluation score in NHS procurement processes.
By 2016, User Voice were commissioned by NAO to publish a report on how probation users experienced the past three years of reforms. Feedback collected by User Voice is special because the interviews are carried out by trained former service users and people with lived experience among their peers. This trust and shared language among peers reveals more honest views and root causes, for example their impression that under TR probation officers had become more stressed, miserable and deflated. Overall, only 23% of service users reported that probation actually works to support rehabilitation. Reading this, I wonder how much better things could have turned out if TR had brought Mark on board from the start to make these voices heard.
See the bias in our ‘doing good’ ecosystem
Mark emphasized the importance of not just the big picture policies or moves governments make, but the small biases that can play out within these policies. For example, the Big Society, a major policy launched by the same government in 2010 to diversify social services away from government to more local, societal, market and volunteer provision did not offer a workable framework for rehabilitation reform. Dissolved public services were rushed through procurement into contracts that in the end only large providers and charities could win. Overall it has contributed to a broader market of what Mark calls ‘Interceptors’, or umbrella charities that is harmful in two ways. First, large charities are winning delivery contracts and then squeeze out smaller, grassroots charities, by delivering most (if not all) services themselves. Second, non-delivery organizations are getting funded to represent the sector and advocate on behalf of grassroots organizations. As a result, they have developed a cosy relationship with government instead of giving voice to the legitimate challenge many social organizations would otherwise provide.
This is quite the opposite of diversity and community asset development. And Mark agrees with the NAO that instead of leading to innovation and greater accountability, these narrowly specified contracts and absence of independent user feedback undermined positive change.
Like other social entrepreneurs, Mark also found some less explicit forces bearing on his efforts to bring positive change. As User Voice grew as a service and movement, government clients began to treat User Voice like as just another contractor serving them instead of empowering people to gain a stake in their rehabilitation. User Voice was being pushed into the role of a band-aid to treat the symptoms of a flawed system, instead of fixing the root causes. Like so many other social entrepreneurs, Mark worries that governments keep losing out on the opportunity for systemic change by pushing solutions to the edges.
Ultimately, TR was austerity done wrong, sinking hundreds of millions of scarce finance and undermining rehabilitation and wellbeing of tens of thousands of offenders on probation for a decade. The reasons were a not uncommon mix of poor policies, rushed execution and not empowering beneficiaries to participate in the process.
Giving the outsider a place on the inside
To me, though, Mark’s story of a decade of austerity is about more than the misled TR policy. Listening to Mark, I ask myself how governments could be better at detecting ideas like User Voice and social entrepreneurs like Mark. You can see how leaders in government might have seen Mark as an outsider, someone with his own agenda despite his deep commitment to make their public services more effective. Based on an impact evaluation by the Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund, Mark estimates that engaging service users could have saved the government £500m per year. To me, it seems that Mark has been an unpaid public servant all along who could have been super-charged by being invited in.
As I look into the future, I see many governments looking at ways to save costs and maintain high quality service outcomes in rehabilitation and just about all other public services. I hope that public leaders will keep Mark’s five take-aways in mind:
- We should not jump into rushed, untested public service reforms based on tech, ideological or new public management promises. Chances are that they will fail, cost more and cause beneficiaries some degree of suffering, especially when they have no structured way of listening to the user.
- We need to withstand the temptation of cutting corners when it comes to community and user participation. The right way of doing this is to make sure the process is truly independent and unfiltered, empowers users, makes all voices heard and keeps happening at high frequency.
- We need strategies to embrace social entrepreneurs like Mark who want to bring their proven innovations into government. Mark is not looking for business, but positive systems change. Where is the red carpet to bring such proven talent and ideas into the fold, to deliver lasting change to government functions?
- Ideas to improve systems, like User Voice, have to be given an honest, accountable and nuanced hearing in the process of reforming public services. All too often this is a one-way process in which an idea is rejected outright, instead of a collaborative exploration. Government leaders should be aware of their biases in considering options.
- For society to get the most out of the talent and tenacity of social entrepreneurs like Mark we need to improve the power dynamics, contractual and funder biases to make it easier for social entrepreneurs ‘stay on mission’. Since systems change may feel counterintuitive in the short term, we need to be intentional about making it to the longer term goals that will bring us transformative benefits. Mark proposes that funding for innovation needs to be more open, not treated like a service contract with set outputs.
