By Robin Clarke, OPM fellow
People’s relationship with public services has been an increasingly strong theme in public policy over the past 20 years or so. There is agreement across the political spectrum that the age of paternalistic one-size-fits-all public services has passed its sell-by date and we need to develop a different more appropriate approach with members of the public playing a more active role rather than just being passive recipients of services. Continue reading
By Sue Goss, OPM principal.
Our breakfast fringe session at the LGA conference was the perfect start to Day 2 of this annual event.
We all know that local government leadership is tough right now. Whichever way we look, the media is brutal, members of staff are jumpy, the public are unhappy and managers are over-stretched.
Leaders, both politicians and managers, are handling unprecedented cuts while creating a vision to which staff and residents can aspire. Difficult choices abound. But little attention is paid to the personal toll of constant calls on our courage, self-discipline and judgment.
The stress is as great as it has ever been – which is why we are exploring new ways in which to support, nurture and equip our managers to lead, which fit the times and their needs. From our work with public authorities it’s clear that there are three crucial skills sets for coping with tough times…
Every local authority in the country is rethinking the way they work and how they are organised. For any transformation process, form follows function, and while there are a range of promising approaches to service and system redesign, there is no one-size-fits-all.
While considering commissioning models, choices need to be made to define the ‘strategic core’ authority (how many directly employed staff and which functions); and the principles of commissioning, from a mixed economy of public trading vehicles, mutuals, social enterprises, private sector and community providers.
Any ‘strategic core’ will include some support for the democratic / governance activities of councillors, but beyond that, there are fascinating arguments about what else might form part of the commissioning core and how much even of this activity, might, in some circumstances, be commissioned from outside.
It will carry out its functions in the context of the priorities and principles set by the councillors, these will set the tone for the commissioning of services from providers and other organisations. We can already see different ‘in principle’ approaches to these priorities and principles, for example, the ‘EasyJet’ view of Barnet, where users can buy the additional services that they want; the ‘John Lewis’ approach of Lambeth, focusing on the contribution (including ownership) of users and employees; and the Norfolk approach which involves the creation of a local government trading company.
It is clear that such principles will have to go further than existing statements of intent, so as to set a framework for local market making, and to guide choices between different supply systems: e.g. some authorities have stated a preference for local provision, or mutual organisations to be part of the mix.
For many, commissioning is a vital process of ensuring value for money from suppliers; others see it as an overhead – something that replicates activity and performance monitoring so that money saved in delivery is simply spent on a new ‘commissioning function’.
Commissioning itself could be carried out by a user-led organisation (as is happening with some social care experiments), or be contracted to the private sector (as may happen in health), or might be most efficiently done in house. Not all commissioning functions need to be treated in the same way – some could be outsourced while others remain part of the core.
How could the cost of commissioning be minimised, without loss of quality? Could trusted providers identify what needs doing and do it without the specification and monitoring that goes with current ‘contracting’? Or is the span of responsibility for all council services far too broad to hold delivery agencies to account without a strong in-house commissioning function. And if commissioning itself is outsourced – how are commissioners held to account?
Finally, we need to think about how the public, both as governors and beneficiaries, in a commissioning model feed in their views and their experiences. How will they inform what is provided and what is discontinued? What are the best ways to link politicians to the commissioning process – and to ensure that commissioning is user driven?
OPM is working with many top teams, some of whom are considering the implications of a radical commissioning model, as they think through options, the values that underpin their approach and the ambitions they have for their communities which they want to hold onto. Please do let us know how your authority is developing.
By Hywel Lloyd, OPM senior fellow, and Sue Goss, OPM principal
The Institute for Government has recently published a paper written by Andrew Cahn and Michael Clemence with the great title ‘The Whitehall Entrepreneur: Oxymoron or Hidden army?’ Interesting though the analysis of the civil service and government is, what excited me was the paper’s relevance to local government.
In the local government world there is the same loose use of the word ‘entrepreneur’ with the same risks of misunderstanding the culture of public service. Perhaps more dangerously, there is the appropriateness of taking the risks inherent in entrepreneurialism when the lives of vulnerable people and essential public services are at stake.
In some ways local government is similar to central government with the same need to minimise political risks for elected members and the same cultural focus on stability of employment and public service rather than on personal gain and competition. As local government considers how best to make reducing budgets go further whilst maintaining or enhancing positive impact on outcomes for citizens and service users, there is increasing discussion about the potential of outsourcing to providers outside the public sector in the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors.
Proponents of outsourcing emphasise the potential of innovation and the advantages of throwing off the traditional local government bureaucracy and culture; they say they want to attract entrepreneurs and social enterprise to replace cautious, inefficient public sector services, and they may be right at least in the short term. But Andrew Cahn is a wise and experienced civil servant and we should heed his warnings. Decisions about the proper use of public money are rightly made in the context of local democracy and it is therefore hard for elected members to delegate all their responsibilities to entrepreneurs when these decisions might put vulnerable people at risk and fail his ‘Daily Mail’ test.
The $64,000 question remains to be answered – how big does the strategic (commissioning only) council need to be in order to reassure elected members and account properly to the public about the system? And who will actually take the blame in an outsourced system if there is another Baby P tragedy?
By Judith Smyth, OPM director
Much of our experience of local community engagement work across local authorities over the past 20 years has been frustrating; neighbourhood forums and area committees have been established in many local areas without really living up to their promise.
Meetings attract ‘the usual suspects’ and can be overly bureaucratic, interest quickly dies when there is not a pressing problem. The best way to engage local people is to talk about something they don’t like – but this means that meetings are often hostile and difficult.
What we have learnt is that much of this frustration is not due to any profound underlying difficulty but with the way bureaucracies think about neighbourhoods.
A successful approach would involve a radically different approach to thinking about what we mean by localities and neighbourhoods – and ways of working that can engage local energy.
Some working assumptions about engaging localities and neighbourhoods:
Nor are they all the same size. Simply drawing black lines on a map and trying to impose a common set of governance functions misses the point of variable geography. We think differently about our ‘place’ depending on the issue – a primary school is more local than a secondary school – and we travel further for some facilities and services than for others. Localism needs to respond to these overlapping systems of belonging and identity.
Conventional neighbourhood or area forums are open to the public but in reality are highly selective because of the style, timing and content of meetings. A good way to engage people with expertise, experience and wisdom is to invite them – and to design an event that makes the most of what they can offer. By inviting people it is possible to build a richer mix of backgrounds and learn more about the place.
The conventional public meeting is set up to create a ‘them and us’ feeling – with presentations from council officers or councillors and a Q & A format rather than real discussion. Alternative designs – open space, world café, or just good facilitated conversation – make it possible for politicians to work alongside local people to explore multiple complex problems and begin to identify solutions.
Rather than creating a structure and then trying to find an agenda – it may be better to identify a problem to be solved and then bring together the right people to solve that problem. Different people may play a useful role, depending on what the problem is – there is no need to involve the same people all the time. By creating temporary groupings of people to solve specific problems we can ensure work is focused.
Local politicians could play a crucial role as community organisers at local level but they will need new skills and sometimes new behaviours such as listening, facilitation, problem solving. The ways these are learned are not in conventional ‘taught’ programmes but through action learning, practice, coaching and honest feedback. Local politicians with these skills can be very powerful catalysts. We should not underestimate the value that could be created if more community members were confident about their ability to help others make things happen.
We’ve been involved in a number of experiments across local government, engaging local people in rich conversations on a neighbourhood basis, training councillors in listening and facilitation skills, and creating ‘pop-up’ working arrangements to solve practical problems rather than setting up elaborate governance structures. And we are happy to share learning with anyone interested.
We now want to track down other successful innovators and find out about the best experiments in localism and local engagement. We hope to set up some sort of practice exchange to capitalise on learning and build on successful approaches. If anyone would be interested, do contact me.
By Sue Goss, OPM principal
One of the biggest strategic challenges for UK government at all levels is to renegotiate the relationships between public services (whoever is providing them) and service users and the public. Personalisation and individual budgets through which we can establish co-production and sometimes copayment relationships provide the answer, particularly now that we know that we can achieve better long term outcomes as well as budget savings.
In November last year OPM worked with LGID, In Control and Action for Children on a conference about personalisation and individual budgets for children and the report has just been published. In addition to young people and parents, participants included a rich mixture of service providers, policy makers and commissioners. The discussions were both broad and deep with an emphasis on practice rather than theory.
OPM’s particular contribution was to explain how leaders in children’s services could commission a system in which personalisation and individual budgets are encouraged, or even the norm. Personalisation and individual budgets do not work as a stand alone programme. They require whole system change which in turn relies on excellent leadership from people who understand that they are first and foremost strategic commissioners able to shape services round service users rather than around the needs of professionals and traditional services. Localism is potentially helpful because it removes some of the central government controls which have been identified as barriers to individual budgets. However people at this conference were worried that local leadership was not strong enough to rise to the challenge without central government support. They also worried about the post code lottery.
We had hoped to have the Minister, Sarah Teather with us and the report contains questions for her raised by groups of participants. We look forward to working with LGID, In Control and Action for Children to circulate the answers and offer any support we can to the government departments as well as local government in response to the considerable ‘social movement’ now behind personalisation and individual budgets in the coming months and years.
By Judith Smyth, OPM director
We’re really excited to publish new research into the realities of transferring ownership of public services to employees and communities. It confirms that new models of ownership have many benefits, but shows that local flexibility is essential.
At a time when the Government is actively looking to reform public services through increasing the role of co-operatives and mutuals and modernising commissioning, the report is a vital source of concrete examples of successes achieved and challenges overcome.
The research draws on the experiences of seven relatively less well-known examples of employee and community ownership, including leisure services in Oldham, children’s services in Lambeth, and health services in Stockport.
It puts flesh on the bones of many of the specific, practical questions that are often raised, for example regarding how to transfer assets, engage with staff, and develop new ways of working.
The research found that, above all else, each successful transition requires an approach that’s tailored to particular circumstances and allows for local negotiation.
This doesn’t mean that the process needs to be drawn-out or expensive, but to achieve fast-paced roll-out there will need to be a balance between making things simple and standardised and allowing for creativity in the arrangements for different services.
This new research builds on OPM’s practical guide for public bodies considering a transition to shared ownership, published earlier this year. Both reports are available for free download on OPM’s website.
You can also read the short detailed reports of the shared ownership cases studies that we’ve posted previously on this blog: about Oldham and North Dorset. For further details contact Phil Copestake, head of the research team at OPM, on pcopestake@opm.co.uk.
On 30 November 2010 OPM held a public interest seminar at which panellists and participants explored the impact that the Coalition’s Big Society reforms are likely to have on inequality.
The discussion covered everything from community organisers and coproduction to behaviour change and the role of voluntary sector organisations.
Below is a note of the key points made and issues covered at the seminar itself, which you can also download as a PDF. If you’d like to be added to our mailing list and be amongst the first to hear about future seminars please email seminars@opm.co.uk.
If you’re interested in the background to this pressing issue you can read a briefing paper outlining the key issues and policy context.
Inequality and the Big Society – Seminar Report 30 Nov
It’s been a rather busy week on the Big Society front, with some significant announcements from central as well as local government, and some important positioning announcements from the third sector.
So, with encouragement from Warren Hatter, here’s another weekly round up of Big Society reading highlights. In no particular order:
1. Chief Executive of NCVO, Sir Stuart Etherington, gave a lecture of the CASS business school, outlining his take on the agenda. While he welcomed the drive for citizens to become, ”makers and shapers’ rather than simply ‘users and choosers”, he believes the retrenching of the role of the state will not best serve this vision. ‘It should not just be about the state pulling back, but about the state and civil society working together, supporting each other through the different roles they play’. A full transcript of his thoughtful speech can be found here.
2. Points could mean prizes in Windsor & Maidenhead – the vanguard authority has announced its intention to encourage volunteering and participation through an incentive or a loyalty scheme modelled on those used in high street shops. The council says, ‘the idea is based on ‘nudge theory’ – the thought that people don’t automatically do the right thing but will respond if the best option is highlighted. Points would be awarded according to the value given to each activity. Users could then trade in their points for vouchers giving discounts on the internet or high street.’
3. New leader for the Office for Civil Society named – as the department combines forces with the Cabinet Office’s strategy unit to devise ideas and initiatives for encouraging volunteering and philanthropy.
4. The latest on the Big Society bank – while there is still no detail on the practicalities of how and when the bank will be granting access to its unclaimed assets, it has been confirmed (by junior children’s minister, Tim Loughton) that the majority of the assets will be earmarked for projects with children and young people.
5. NEF’s most recent report, ‘Cutting It‘ has warned that the outcome of the coalition’s policy in the current context of cuts will be ‘a poorer, more hard-pressed society, not a bigger one’. The question for those dealing with the aftermath of cuts is how to avoid this most bleak of outlooks…
By Sarah Holloway, OPM senior researcher
Whilst much is still uncertain about the direction of local government there is undoubtedly one window of opportunity. This is for local authority leaders to take a lead locally, relatively unfettered by central and regional government.
The coalition government has made it clear that central government will not be telling local authorities what to do or how to do it. Central government funding will seldom be ring-fenced. Therefore directors of adult and children’s services will need to work as strategic commissioners of the whole system, to develop and agree local policy and strategic plans for themselves.
This will not necessarily be easy. One of the unintended consequences of the last government was to leave adult and children’s services littered with a plethora of projects programmes and pilots each with its own strategy, partnership and performance measures. This created a burden of internal transaction costs, duplication, fragmentation and confusion.
However, the opportunity is that this can now be replaced with a clear system led by commissioners whose decisions are outcomes-focussed, needs-led and evidence-based. Well done and this will result in skilled practitioners working closer to the frontline. It will lead to cultural and behavioural change backed by excellent whole system performance management. It offers a new approach to running meetings, supervising, supporting and valuing staff. It will also ensure that words are followed by actions.
Commissioning brings together much of what local authorities have been doing for a long time into four straightforward steps: Understand, plan, do and review. Understanding needs, using evidence of what works and knowing the cost and value of services will mean that plans are credible and defensible. Full consultation on plans for change will mean that they are more likely to be supported and understood by service users and service providers. These plans will need to describe and justify the proposed changes across the system.
In order to implement their strategic plans local authorities will need to develop and agree a local commissioning policy. This policy will describe how commissioners relate to service providers, how commissioning decisions will be made and the sorts of agreements and performance management which will be applied. It should be written in accordance with any corporate commissioning policy that already exists in the local authority and demonstrate that there is a ‘level playing field’ between service providers.
Public services can be, and are provided by, an enormous range of different sorts of service providers. It helps to group these as follows:
• Public sector – where employees are employed by local or national government
• Voluntary and community sector (not for profit) – a range of ‘free standing’ organisations with governance including charities, trusts, mutuals, cooperatives, employee ownership, community interest companies, social enterprise and more
• Private business – this includes the many sole traders and family businesses which provide public services including people who foster children and manage private care homes. This category also includes most GPs
• PLCs and other for profit business – distinguished from private business by size, shareholder expectations and power in the market
Local authority commissioning policy will need to take into account the different characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of each sector. Commissioners need to understand these before making decisions about which organisations will be their best partners for the provision of essential public services. Trust and shared goals are better than the suspicion and detailed scrutiny of contract management, especially when services are for vulnerable people and children.
No-one can foresee the future shape of public services and the balance between large (perhaps monopoly) providers and small, local service providers. However, people who want to make effective decisions about how best to use limited public resources to support those in need, and improve the lives of UK citizens, need to think about the long-term effect of their commissioning decisions.
Localism provides an opportunity for local authorities to lead commissioning decisions, and the agreement of a commissioning policy is a good way of involving political leaders and others in building a transparent strategic plan.
By Judith Smyth, OPM director
