Hi, I'm Mike!

Following a debate some years ago a group of students suggested that I should create a website to share some of my experiences and insights about public services. How could public services be much more democratic in the way they are designed and delivered? Is the often called-for radical transformation of services possible and what might that look like? Why is the hallmark of some services continual panic and never-ending emergency provision?

When I first worked for social services, I was stunned by the conditions some children were raised in, and blown away by the complete lack of regard some parents had for their own children. I had thought all parents were as loving as mine. Even though I was a working-class boy who went to the roughest senior school in the city, I had never imagined that the home life of some of my classmates could be so awful. I saw that sometimes these services were essential, and at others they were simply in the way.

When I became the CEO of a unique community-owned charitable company, I knew that the solutions for the many problems faced by communities often described as 'the most deprived' were not to be found in the corridors of power. They lay hidden, waiting to be unlocked, in the heart of the most affected communities themselves. It seemed strange to me that the tendency in local and national government was to fire-up the steamroller of public service intervention, rather than have a frank conversation with the communities themselves.

As a Swansea Councillor and Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, I hope this website will be of interest to anyone with an interest in taking a relentless grassroots, bottom-up perspective to the design and delivery of public services, especially in those communities where we tend to have a concentration of incredibly costly problems to deal with. With dwindling budgets and increasing issues this should be a central priority for us all.