That most celebrated Rumsfeldism, “there are unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know” – has something important to say for the way we organise government in this country.

In the past, the job of ministers and their officials was to develop and implement policies designed to solve what they regarded as the problems of the day. From the top down, Whitehall would define what they were and how they would be addressed.

That’s fine if the man in Whitehall really does know best. But in today’s world where change is so swift, society so complex, the imposition of centrally determined solutions is becoming less and less realistic. From distant Whitehall it is getting harder to perceive the problems facing our communities – let alone to know what to do about them. But that doesn’t mean they can be ignored. Rather, government has to find ways to deal with the fact of “unknown unknowns”.

In this postbureaucratic age, the people to shape our understanding of the new problems and to discover the best way to solve them won’t be ministers or officials holed up in Whitehall, but the legions of individuals, groups, voluntary organisations and enterprises that make up our communities themselves. Government needs to be turned upside-down: instead of seeking to impose its will, it must be open to being driven by a vibrant civil society.

How can that possibly be achieved? The germ of a new way of governing might just be contained in a little-known act of parliament that passed into law last year. The Sustainable Communities Act is that comparatively rare phenomenon – a private member’s bill that made it onto the statute book. Steered through the Commons by Nick Hurd MP and backed by a cross-party grassroots campaign, the act does something simple but potentially revolutionary. It gives local communities the right to demand and receive a full statement of all public money spent in the area – from welfare spending to the costs of roadsweeping. And it gives them the right to propose better ways of using that money to the benefit of the community.

Now the act itself has become too hedged by government get-outs as the price for making it into law. At present only councils can exercise this right and proposals for change have to be filtered through a central body that chooses only a few alternative ideas to put to ministers.

Just think of the possibilities of this approach if we took it further. What if public spending programmes could be exposed to the creativity of people who have good reason to think they could achieve better results by doing things differently? What if voluntary groups had the right to propose more successful ways of using money already allocated – and, crucially, had the right to have a serious alternative seriously considered? What if Whitehall lost its exclusive right to supply public services and instead this was opened up to the groups and people who could make the biggest difference?

The principles of openness, accountability and challenge contained in embryonic form in the act might just be what is needed to burst open the top-down model and begin to replace it with an approach in which initiative can truly come from the bottom up.

It could lead to a form of government geared to cope with the “unknown unknowns” of the future, as well as the “knowns” that the man in Whitehall knows now – or thinks he does.

Greg Clark is shadow minister for charities

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