The lost language of trust

For seven years, as a schoolboy, I crossed the centre of Manchester most weekdays. But despite my abiding support for its football team (there’s only one, and it wears red) I have hardly visited since.

So there’ll be a nostalgic twinge for me as I pack my bags for the Delivering Sustainable Communities Summit at the end of this month. The Manchester I go to won’t, of course, be the Manchester I left 30 years ago. There will be some obvious physical differences, but these are only the most obvious of the things that separate the modern city from the one I remember.

Of course, the event’s sustainable communities agenda is much more about hearts and minds than bricks and mortar. The building blocks we’ll need will be a range of policies and practices that cut across a variety of disciplines, but the mortar that binds them together is language.

I’m encouraged by the way that government-speak has changed in recent years. We’ve moved from talking about “exclusion” to “inclusion”, from “failing estates” to “sustainable neighbourhoods”. We’re using a vocabulary that emphasises what we want to achieve rather than what we want to prevent. That’s healthy.

Yet there is one area of language that is headed in the opposite direction. It is our increasing tendency to speak in terms of the management of fear instead of the promotion of trust.

Fear of those around us has become the political weapon of choice. It was given its head in the “45-minute” claim used to persuade us that Iraq represented an immediate and major threat, but now manifests itself even in benign institutions such as the health service, where fear of death features more highly in official targets than the promotion of health.

I’m not advocating a stance of naivety. When I look back to my Manchester schooldays I can see that society did far too little, for example, to protect children and I wouldn’t wish to go back to that. But using fear as the driver to induce caution has had a catastrophic impact on trust. Trust has become the constituent of social capital in shortest supply, and yet we cannot make any real headway towards sustainable communities without it.

There is an alternative. We can be appropriately careful and cautious without becoming fear driven. We’ve even got a term for it: “risk management”.

At the same time, we need to begin to speak again the language of trust. We need to root action in promoting social behaviour rather than attacking antisocial behaviour. We must design estates with features that enhance the opportunity to meet and greet others as well as features that discreetly enhance security; schools must be safe but welcoming, rather than competing with each other for visible impregnability; housing staff, street wardens and police officers should be there, and be seen to be there, to enhance good, not just to tackle problems.

Social cohesion and enhanced capacity follow on from widening the circles of trust that we all have. Individuals and institutions need to reach a certain level of trust if they are to cooperate in sustaining their community. I don’t believe we’ve gone so far down the road of fear that we can’t get back, but we need to start soon, and the summit is the place.

So that’s what you’ll find me banging on about at the summit – at least, at those times when I’m not roaming the streets trying to recover scraps of my lost youth.