Giving power to the people

April 3, 2009

Nigel Keohane, Senior Researcher, NLGN, and Andrew Warren, Managing Director, Vertex
The MJ

A desire to empower people is set to be the driving force of public service reform for the next twelve months, a commitment underlined just last week when the Cabinet Minister Liam Byrne spoke again of how the government must develop a new relationship with the citizen. He asked: ‘How do we strengthen the connections between us all?’ and how can we move ‘power from government into the hands of citizens’?.

The Minister highlighted how the Government is already radically transforming the way some services are delivered – a right to choice in health services and the expansion of personal tuition being just two recent examples of this approach.

However, a new report from NLGN suggests that we should not be thinking of blanket solutions for all government services or to expect a fragmented, ‘distant’ Whitehall to agree on the interpretation of ‘personalisation’ or to have all of the answers when it comes to delivery.

We confirm that such centralised approaches have not yet done enough. As the British Social Attitudes survey has found, while 63% of people in the UK want more choice over the schools and hospitals they attend, only 9% actually feel that they have been given this discretion.

And, as Consumer Focus has shown, many citizens still feel public services are ‘boring’, ‘difficult’ and ‘lonely’. What chance then do we have to encourage people to engage with democracy or to play a more active role within communities if we continue to approach our services in the same traditional ways?

Public services must now respond to markedly different challenges and demands depending on particular needs of communities, localities and regions, and also meet rising citisen expectations.

The good news is that some bodies are already moving to this decentralised approach. Today, forward-looking councils and providers are delivering some innovative personalised services – whether this is in accessing benefits, paying bills or receiving care. Some early applications of this approach have been used by a leading local authority in the South of England and Vertex, an international Customer Management Outsorcer. Vertex worked with the local authority to establish the contact centre and now handles calls for all of the main services provided, 85% of which are now answered inside 20 seconds: prior to the partnership, 40% of calls were abandoned. Avoidable contact, the enemy of good personalised provision, has also been significantly reduced and 96% of calls are now dealt with at the first point of contact.

We must, therefore, move away from a simplistic interpretation of the relationship between the state and the individual and, where possible, we should also devolve more decisions, and perhaps budgets, to communities and neighbourhoods.

Our research identifies 26 different practical models for personsalising services ranging from co-production techniques where individuals design and shape their own services, across voucher schemes, through to new access channels and tailored services.

Specifically, NLGN recommend a number of reforms as to how we should seek to re-design services. Vouchers in leisure and recreation services would engage young people and encourage them to be active in their areas of interest, whether this is swimming, becoming a member of a football team or hiring a recording studio.

Convenience and access should be opened up across the public sector through a National Oyster Card system, public service ‘Clubcards’ and a new ‘access-any-GP’ service.

Equally, the civic enthusiasm and social capital that reside in local neighbourhoods should be channelled to help resolve local and broader challenges by offering funding streams and commissioning powers to the street level.

All of these require wider public service reform – greater empowerment of frontline staff, smarter systems for interacting with customers and a more prominent role for citizens in evaluating services.

So, returning to how we should hand power from government into the hands of citizens. Giving power to the people should not simply be about the relationship between the central state and individual citizens. The focus should be on understanding how the best model of personalisation can be defined at the local level so that services can be moulded to the needs of residents and communities.


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