State of loneliness

Often young people who drop out of school and feel at a loss need a relationship with someone to support, motivate and inspire them. That is why councils in Croydon and Brighton are working to redesign youth services so they rely less on bringing young people into youth centres and more on creating networks of peer support, so that young people can sample experiences and reflect on them together. The long-term cost of the thousands of young people who each year leave school with no qualifications, employment or training would be reduced if they had coaches, peer mentors and personalised development programs.

Wider network

Swindon has a project aimed at families in chronic crisis, often in receipt of multiple services, from social workers to health visitors, and sometimes in and out of courts as often as they go to the supermarket. Again, the key is to provide a supportive relationship and a wider social network, to help people shape and take more charge of their lives. Services for the average family in chronic crisis in a town such as Swindon cost about £250,000 a year. An intensive, upfront investment in mentoring, advice, coaching and motivation, helping families to change how they live, would cost less and be more effective.

Older people in Southwark, south London, told social enterprise developers that what made them happy, fit and healthy was staying active, participating in society around them and keeping connected to other people. So now an enterprise called Southwark Circle is being created to provide a neighbourly network to help people with practical jobs around the house and social activities. Most older people want relationships that keep them active and give them opportunities to contribute, not necessarily day care centres that cut them off and "service" them.

The key to getting people to change their behaviour - perhaps to stop smoking, take up walking, or start recycling their waste - is whether they know and respect other people who do the same thing. In any areas where lifestyle change is critical to public policy - for example, helping people to tackle diabetes - peer-to-peer networks, often organised through mobile phones, will be vital. Relationships change the way most people think and act.

Effective spending

Of course, focusing on relationships and mutual self-help cannot be the solution to every public service challenge. Often, people need and want an effective service, delivered to them to collect their bins or provide an expert diagnosis.

The best way to make public spending more effective is to reduce long-term dependence on repeat service solutions by helping people devise alternative ways to meet their needs that will mean they do not need a public service. The key to that is not in tougher targets or new rights and entitlements, but in better relationships.

For most of the last decade, we have seen public services as systems and standards, to be managed and rationalised. Instead, we should reimagine public services as feeding the relationships that sustain us in everyday life.