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Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their blackballing from their blacklisting.
In our Engagement Hub we look at self-service checkouts in supermarkets. What does a new campaign to increase the number of till staff at Tesco’s tells us about democratic participation?
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic – the moody cashier at the end of your Friday shop. This week’s loft is stuffed with maps, including a brilliant atlas of murals and other global street art.
Our eye was caught, this week, by a recent campaign started in Brentford, to stop the replacement of till-staff with machines in Tesco’s. Spearheaded by Pat McCarthy (pictured, above left), the petition calls for more staffed tills at the supermarket giant.
This will no doubt be music to the ear of anyone who has wrestled with a command that they ‘seek assistance’ or ‘check the bagging area’. But for 69-year-old Pat it’s more serious than just convenience. “These new tills are not accessible for people who don’t have credit cards and can only use cash or those with little confidence to use these self-service card-only tills – myself included,” she explains. “People such as carers, older people, disabled people with mobility problems or lifting problems have to queue waiting for more than 30 minutes.”
This issue taps into an element of engagement which is seldom discussed in the democratic process: namely how people engage with the system itself. As page 79 of our 2019 New Conversations guide on community engagement puts it:
“When people understand how the system works and find it easier to interact with it, they become more engaged. Often, this doesn’t happen... Even when they’re satisfied with the services they receive, they feel the authority is bureaucratic and impenetrable – that they’re being processed rather than engaged with as individuals. Better and more personalised service design can change this, creating systems that people understand and feel are responsive to them.”
We have actually just updated New Conversations for the LGA, in light of the changes that have happened in the past three years, during COVID-19. You can read the new guidance here. It includes a fascinating case study from Bolton Council, who teamed up with a local housing association, Bolton At Home, to roll out a Peer Navigator scheme during the pandemic. The idea was to solve exactly the sorts of problems described above, among less confident and digitally literate residents, who were struggling to use services.
Initially pioneered specifically to address COVID-19, the Bolton initiative ended up being used much more widely. It created a more personalised approach, whereby a resident was paid and trained to support fellow community members, helping them to find the services and resources they needed within the system.
With an ageing society and rapid digitisation, such forms of personalisation will be increasingly important for councils in the future, to make sure that less confident groups are enfranchised and included. As Pat put it, when explaining her campaign, “you can’t speak to a machine.”
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the perennial unrecognised item in your Friday bagging area: