Flying high for 'Easy Council' flexibility

14 October 2009

Barnet Council leader Mike Freer believes people have a right to expect the same flexible standards of service from their local authority as they get from their bank or travel agent. He explains how adopting the budget airline approach to service provision is helping Barnet to provide more choice and value

A combination of an impending election and the state of public finances means that political debate over the next 12 months seems likely to centre on a single word – cuts.

This is difficult territory for politicians and public sector workers alike. We like to talk about introducing new and innovative services, not how we can do less. But the issue is unavoidable. The public have been thoroughly "Pestoned" every night for the past 12 months. People accept that the current model of spending and debt is unsustainable and are realistic about changes to services.

However, this sits alongside a changing definition of value for money that the public, as consumers, have become used to. A greater use of technology across the supply chain has dramatically altered how services are received. The public in their role as customers expect to speak to their bank in the middle of the night and expect to able to personalise services such as holidays which previously came in a few simple models, packaged at the suppliers' convenience.

One of the reasons that politics and government have fallen in public esteem is that we have failed to reflect this changing model of behaviour in our own services.

We recently came across one family who attended 22 meetings with the public sector to access services in the borough. We estimate that only five of those contacts actually gathered new information. The others were essentially for our own bureaucratic convenience.

This needs to change. The public have a right to a similar standard from services they access as citizens as they do with goods that they receive as customers.

In Barnet our plan of action is set out in Future Shape, our proposals for the future model of the public sector in the borough. This has been widely covered recently thanks to our stated admiration of the business model of the budget airlines, described under the journalistic shorthand of "Easy Council".

This has perhaps been seen a little too literally. We do not necessarily intend to strip all of our services to their very basic and charge for every extra, any more than we intend to fly residents to a dusty airport 45 miles outside Nice. But what the budget airlines have done is to redefine the service they provide. They have legitimised a different level of service by providing choice.

Thirty years ago the airline industry was dominated by monolithic companies like TWA and Pan-Am that had a very clear definition of the service they provided. If you were going to fly with them you paid top dollar, you checked in when they told you to, you had a set amount of baggage that you could carry and you had to eat a pretty mediocre meal halfway through your flight.

These companies then scaled up to deal with every passenger arriving at once, carrying large amounts of luggage and feeding each and every passenger.

The budget airlines changed this. Your basic flight is much cheaper, but you can then pay more for extra luggage or a more convenient check-in. You can use the money you have saved to eat a better meal at the airport or you can keep the money and spend it on something else.

The airlines can scale a different sort of service. They do not have to budget for every passenger to arrive at once with several bags or to create the infrastructure to provide every passenger with a meal. Much of this saving is passed on to the passenger while the benefits to the airline can be seen in the profitability of those companies that follow this model and the challenging times facing those airlines following their traditional business model.

In Barnet we have begun to explore a similar model for our services – thus far largely in provision of support to vulnerable adults. Adults who would previously have had respite care in a day care facility are now able to exercise choice, for example saving up their support budget to have a mini-break with a member of their own family. One young person who would previously have been given cognitive therapy receives, at his own choice, guitar lessons – a far more fulfilling service to any young adult.

Public sector finances will be asking us all big questions over the coming months and years – the Easy Council model is only one potential answer. Within our own Future Shape plans it sits alongside other changes such as bringing together back office services across the public sector and the empowerment of our staff around outcomes to customers.

But if we are to be able to legitimise the reductions in services that we all face, we need to adopt an environment of choice and flexibility that a service-literate public has grown to expect and understand.