The public sector doing things differently

Thursday, April 22, 2010

The old ways of working in the public sector are unsustainable. Martin Ferguson, Socitm head of policy, looks to a shift of power and previews Socitm's conference being held today

The sort of financial austerity the public sector will soon face has the potential to break key services. But there is an alternative positive future for locally delivered public services – if only we can learn to do things differently.

Socitm's national conference on 22 April has been designed to address just this – to challenge our thinking about local delivery of public services, consider how we might achieve more and better outcomes with less, examine how we might use data and information more intelligently, and to identify what role new technologies might play.

Our starting point for this, and indeed the whole initiative Socitm is developing under the banner Tomorrow's Public Services, is that old ways of working are simply unsustainable. These old ways, that have held sway since the mid 1970s, are characterised by scaled back government, competition and privatisation.

These approaches – one consequence of which is large, inflexible IT contracts – are simply unable to deliver the level of savings required in the new landscape of financial austerity or to address the growing demands of, for example, an ageing population, carbon reduction and finite resources.

We must begin by taking steps to better understand the needs and preferences of people, groups and businesses from a local perspective. We need to corral all public expenditure on services and interventions in specific localities, and fundamentally reorganise services and accountability around outcomes that matter in that place.

This, of course, is what the Total Place pilots have been about, demonstrating how things could be radically different if only we would take a whole area approach to public services, and design solutions that are locally determined and informed by local information and knowledge. These principles lead to a step change in service improvement and efficiency, opening up the prospect of better services and outcomes at less cost.

Working with the LGA, IDeA and our own Socitm Futures group, we have identified three key actions on which the sort of change we envisage might be built. These are reform, joining-up and innovation.

When we say reform we mean re-form in the true sense of the word, as in reconfigure – reconstituting the way services are scoped, designed and delivered. It will mean shifting power, devolving finance and driving decision-making down to local level to build local capability to meet identified needs and demands.

Joining-up the agencies of government, including the third and private sector, around needs, capabilities and outcomes is vital. It implies greater integration of back and front office staff, development of shared front offices, spanning for example, local authority, primary care trust, and police, streamlining governance structures, and pooling budgets.

By innovation, we mean replacing the producer-led approaches of the past. These have tended to focus on mopping up the symptoms (anti-social behaviour, poor educational achievement) and have led to overlap and duplication. We need to rethink solutions from an understanding of people and their community networks. Engaging citizens in service design and delivery and personalisation of services have a key role to play here.