The Mutual Moment: Tweets from Tessa Jowell’s Progress Speech

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Tessa Jowell will give a speech to Progress tonight to launch a government commission to look into how public services can be run with greater involvement of both users and staff. The commission will be chaired by Will Hutton.

Ms Jowell is expected to ask Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and John Healey to look at their respective portfolios for ways to extend mutualism, ear-marking Sure Start, social care and housing.

The Minister for the Cabinet Office will say:

“By bringing users, employees, and other stakeholders together as members of the same establishment, mutualism transforms the organisational culture and embeds real democratic accountability. “As well as promoting greater levels of trust, it is a model for co-ownership that allows communities to effect genuine change in an organisation.”

In an article for the Guardian today, she added:

“Public services exist to serve, and are paid for by the public, so it is the public that has the right to influence how those services are delivered, to build shared responsibility for them, and improve them by harnessing the efforts of both professionals and those they serve.”

I’ve contributed to Progress’ Progressive Voices series on this initiative today, saying:

“Collective ownership has always been an important part of the Labour vision, but at this time of economic and democratic fracture there’s seldom been a better opportunity – or a more urgent need – to refocus our public institutions so they may benefit everyone they are built to serve. By refocusing on mutual ownership and collective stakeholdings in our services, Labour can seize that moment to disperse control, to empower citizens and to secure and democratise our proudest heritage – and our future.”

The series also features contributions from Michael Stephenson, Anthony Painter, Will Straw, Sunder Katwala and Andrew Pakes.

I’ll be Tweeting from the speech this evening, below, so stay posted here for more information and content from the speech: