John’s Idea

Now we are getting down to anticipating the timing of the next election in terms of weeks rather than months its difficult to know how seriously to take the recent Smarter Government White Paper.  It is however interesting, if nothing else, as a measure of where the debate has moved to on a range of key issues and this could be important irrespective of the outcome of the election.  A number of elements of the debate are of particular significance to the IDeA.

The first one is confirmation that despite the terrible forward look on public spending in the PBR the “Tell Us Once” project is going ahead.  This is brilliant news and a credit to all those in central and local government who have worked to get us to this point.  I had a small role on the Steering Group and, as discussed in an earlier blog,  witnessed the problems it faced as it tried to secure spending across tiers of government, across government departments and across spending rounds.  The fact that a commitment has been made reflects the basic strength of the proposition which I’m sure will only be built upon.  The IDeA and the Local Government Delivery Council will I know continue to be activity involved in the implementation of the programme.

The next one relates to opening data.  Again this has been the subject of an earlier blog but the White Paper will add further impetus to the work on a new integrated approach to national addressing which the IDeA and its partners across local government, through the National Land and Property Gazetteer, are central players.

The White Paper also makes a number of helpful references to reduced inspection and reduced top down performance management.  In the context of Freedom to Lead, the discussion about a reduced number of top down priorities in the context of a defined number of entitlements, is helpful and may go someway to addressing the post-code lottery issue. 

The issue of comparative data, benchmarking data, is an interesting one.  The White Paper refers to work Capital Ambition and the IDeA are doing around the London Efficiency Challenge (another earlier blog) and even advocates the wider use of local government’s peer challenge approach to other parts of public sector.  More contentiously, and perhaps less well thought through, is the use of the same data to improve accountability to the public.  This makes sense to a point (and there are echoes of opposition party statements) but councils learning and challenging each other on performance will not necessarily work in the hard glare of public scrutiny.

Total Place (and now Total Capital) sets the tone and direction of the White Paper.  Despite its publication so close to the general election I thought it was an interesting read and significant in terms of a lot of the work the IDeA does.

The Audit Commission’s recent report “Nothing but the Trueth” is important given the current emphasis on access to public data.  While Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt rightly highlight the enormous opportunities associated with making public sector data readily available, accuracy and consistency are still a challenge.

There is a lot going on at the moment around public data and a number of themes overlap.

Both Government and Opposition see the freeing of public data as part of broader effort to make government accountable.  Public scrutiny, enabled by accessible data, will drive out costs and inefficiencies. 

Linked to this, but not the same, is the argument that more accessible public data can create economic and social value.  If you can get hold of public data easily and at low cost, you can re-purpose it, integrate it with it with other sources of data, and create products and services lumbering public sector bodies can only dream about.

The Ordnance Survey sits neatly at the cross-hairs of both themes.  Managing large parts of core geographic referencing data, its terms of trade critically influence the ability of other providers to create new products which include an element of this core data.  Because of importance of geography in performance data, its terms of trade can also provide a block to the scrutiny developments Government and Opposition are both looking for.

The IDeA and local government have been a “victim” of Ordnance Survey’s terms of trade which have provided a fundamental block to the exploitation of the National Land and Property Gazetteer now generally recognised as the best national source of address data.  But although the IDeA is no fan of the Ordnance Survey it does recognise the core points being made by the Audit Commission.   Reliable data is important and although the processes associated with collecting and distributing data can be transformed, processes to define and maintain data standards still have to be in place.    As the experience of the National Land and Property Gazetteer proves, quality involves effort, and if we want this quality it will have to be paid for.

Attended a really interesting meeting of the Local Government Delivery Council (LGDC) yesterday.  The LGDC was set up by the LGA three years ago to provide the interface to “Transformational Government” and central government’s Delivery Council.

Central government’s arrangements for transformational government has been, and still is, in a constant state of flux (we were briefed yesterday on a new role for the Contact Council) but dispite the lack of clarity at the centre the LGDC has continued to develop as the channel for central/local service transformation discussions.  Brilliantly chaired by Janet Callender and supported by the IDeA (Siobhan Coughlan was unfortunately missing as a victim of swine flu yesterday) the LGDC influence and workprogramme continues to grow (see the annual report for details).

Several things came out of yesterday’s meeting which I found particularly interesting. 

Firstly, and dispite the doom and gloom of the spending prognosis, the members of the council remain ambitious.   In particular there is a real desire to move from a portfolio of interesting projects to more fundamental service transformation.  The vision of the LGDC, which was always about building services around customers, has perhaps been lost in the detail of the projects and there is now a real desire to restate the vision and use it to pull things together.

Secondly, and in the context of initiatives such as Total Place, there was a recognition that the central importance the LGDC had placed on data management and data sharing was right and that now is the time to exploit the developments that have been made in this area, particularly Gov Connect. 

Thirdly there was a recognition that we need to do more on transferring practice, learning from each other, and indeed learning internationally.  I’ll try and make sure that the next meeting of the LGDC provides some challenge to the IDeA work in this area.

Finally the meeting demonstrated the enormous demand from central government for a joined up voice in local government around some of the more detailed, often technical, service transformation issues.  The number of central government requests at the meeting for a “local government voice” on various projects was almost overwelming for the resource which the LGDC has at its disposal. 

Really successful workshop at the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (Solace) conference last week where a number of the chief executives who have pioneered running two councils with one CEX shared their experience.  Given that the number of CEXs at the conference, and the growing public and political interest in their pay, it was not surprising that the workshop was packed.

The context for the workshop was the publication of the IDeA report “Shared Chief Executives and Joint Management Teams - A Model for the Future?”.   For me the report was interesting both in terms of how it was produced and what it said.

The approach to the work was genuinely one of co-production.  Although not actually writing it, all the pioneering chief execs were closely involved.  This guaranteed a really rich report with fresh insights into the benefits of the approach and the issues involved in implementation.  More importantly it put the chief execs,  rather than mediators (like the IDeA), on the podium as advocates.

Secondly the report has generated for me some fresh insight in terms how shared services can be made to work.  Its a simple point but its clear that things really start to move when change starts from the top and moves downwards.  By sharing a chief executive, and than a management team, the really big obstacles to shared services seem to melt away.

Given the pressing need to reduce administrative costs the savings already generated by the councils involved are significant.  These are small councils and with some of the partnerships projecting savings of up to £3million per year you don’t need to be a mathematical genious to project the savings nationally.  If you want another more public take on this from me please go to Guardian Public. 

The Tell Us Once programme highlights both the potential of service transformation and perhaps the  obstacle.

Tell Us Once (TUO) is piloting a new type of service.  As the name suggests the ambition is that customers tell government once about a change to circumstance and its government, rather than customers, that are responsible for delivering the change across public service activities.  The two changes of circumstance selected were births and deaths. 

The approach to designing the new service has been excellent.  A partnership between central and local government, the design team has explored its way to a proposal which generated a detailed business case and widespread enthusiam. 

Core to the proposition is that customers access the service in a way that suits them.  With bereavement there has been an understandable preference for face-to-face contact and the pilot councils have been able to provide this service as part of existing front office facilities.  Other channels (telephone and digital) will be provided centrally - a business model which could clearly be extended to other services.

14,000 customers have used the pilots so far and feedback has been impressive, both from the people using the service (99 per cent satisfaction) and the people providing it (97 per cent satisfaction).  TUO has shown that contacts are reduced by 7.1 for death and bereavement and 2.1 for births.

The pilots have also demonstrated a hard business case.  The financial benefits for government derive from a reduction in overpayments, reduction in recovery costs, reduction in fraud and error and efficiency savings.  Government will get all its costs back in four years. 

While TUO tackles many of emerging themes around service transformation (identity assurance, cross-government IS/IT infrastructure, and data sharing) the toughest is yet to be overcome.  How do we get agreement across government departments and between government departments and local government to invest in the service when there are winners and losers in terms of costs and benefits.  

Behind the Total Place initiative is the assumption that radical service transformation, built around the customer, provides the way of navigating through the anticipated reductions in public expenditure.  TUO presents a small but perfectly formed test case for this assumption.

The title of the CLG’s paper “Effective Partnership Data Management” (EPDM) is not exactly welcoming and guarantees a small readership even in local government.  This is a real shame because it’s an interesting report and addresses an important issue.

If we are honest the detail of performance management in the public sector is a nerd’s paradise.  The language used is often inaccessible.  This is a problem because it is a mainstream issue.  By and large I found the EPDM report easy to read (although I struggle with terms like disaggregate data) but I’m not convinced that others are looking at it even in the CLG.  Perhaps I need to look harder but I haven’t seen any read across, either way, from this work to the Total Place initiative although the synergy seems obvious.

Sentiment around performance management in local government feels delicately poised.  On the one hand there is a general recognition that performance management has improved and the capacity to monitor inputs and outputs has had a major impact on service performance.  There is also the recognition that devolution, the pursuit of outcomes and the leadership role of local government in a locality generates the requirement for a new performance management approach.  Sustainable Community Strategies (SCS) and Local Area Agreements (LAAs) are the embodiment of this.   We are only at the beginning of a long journey however and stamina will be tested when the Audit Commission starts to evaluate performance through the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA).  Sentiment about the old performance system also provides a difficult legacy for the new system.  The general desire to reduce targets easily translates into getting rid of targets and measurement altogether.

Getting it right will be crucial  but getting it right is not easy.  In public sector we constantly beat ourselves up with private sector comparisons which at best are only partially valid.  Tesco is clearly a brilliantly managed business (other brilliantly managed super markets are available) but their performance management challenge is relatively simple in comparison with the leadership of a place.  Tesco can generate detailed information about every element of its business, from suppliers to stores, to customers. Despite its size this information enables it sell different product lines to different populations and more recently to manage of portfolio of different types of stores (from small “convenience” to superstore).  Crucially leaders at Tesco can use this information to direct and innovate in a fairly straight forward way and methods of reporting progress to their key stakeholder (shareholders) are tightly defined.  

Hardly any of the above applies to the public sector, particularly when we view the public sector as a group of organizations delivering “outcomes” to a local population.  Even within councils we don’t have the equivalent process derived data which flows from each element of the Tesco “fulfillment” process.  The disparate nature of the services provided and the range of “customers” these services are delivered to (and the different types of relationship involved) make a unified view of fulfillment impractical if not impossible. While the electorate is the ultimate stakeholder for a council leader the reality is that there are a whole host of other stakeholders (government in particular) who need to be convinced that progress is being made.

Devolution and deregulation doesn’t remove the need for performance management it just changes the requirement.  The EPDM report breaks the requirement down into four categories:

Strategic management: • How could sharing of detailed disaggregate (unique citizen) data be used to support evidence based, citizen centred planning of service delivery?

Performance management: • What solutions need to be put in place to streamline the flow of aggregate data across central, regional and local government agencies? How could disaggregate data be used to reduce the performance reporting burden on local government agencies? What approaches should be used to drive more effective knowledge sharing and benchmarking across LSPs and partners?

Operational delivery: • How could disaggregate data and intelligence be used to improve front line delivery of services both in terms of improved service for customers and increased operational efficiencies?

Citizen engagement: • How could the solutions being proposed to improve service delivery more directly support the citizen empowerment agenda? How could these solutions improve the flow of timely information to citizens?

These requirements are challenging but have to be addressed – to some degree – if we are going to realise the ambition of devolution.  Responding to them is complex and even contentious (for instance around re-use of personal data) but the report does suggest a way forward.  The fact that the report doesn’t seem joined up with other initiatives (Total Place) suggests an urgent need to raise its profile and make sure that its not just the performance management enthusiasts who get involved 

The Cabinet Office publication “Power in Peoples Hands” talks about how online technologies extends the potential of citizens to hold the public sector to account.  It sites examples from around the world that are “breaking down government monoplies in information presentation and use”.  Achieving a new relationship between citizens and services involves public servants:

1. counting what counts: collecting high-quality data in the first place, and combining performance data with information on wider social outcomes so that citizens have reliable and balanced information at their fingertips;

2. opening up information for use: making information (including performance and financial information) available so that citizens can compare services and make informed decisions, drive improvements in services, and hold government to account from the bottom up;

3. opening up information for re-use: making information and data available so that it can be easily re-used by citizens – mobilising a wealth of expertise to facilitate innovative use of data by citizens; and

4. harnessing the power of networks: using interactive technologies, such as web 2.0, to break government monopolies on information creation and open up dialogue between and among citizens and professionals.

David Cameron is making a similar point when he talks about “post bureaucratic government” and perhaps more controversially “google government”.  As he states “technology can be put information that was previously held by a few into the hands of many”.

A great place to see how this might work is the “Help me Investigate” web site.  Essentially you set the community using the site a challenge and you and others collaborate to get the answer.  Its first ”big win” was the identification of the worst place to park in Birmingham. 

A lot has happened at the IDeA over the last few months.  Lucy de Groot has left and Paul Roberts has taken over as interim Managing Director.  My own role has changed and, in addition to existing responsibilities, I’m now leading on the development of the strategy to take things forward over the next 18 months. 

The first stage of this work is now complete.  After intensive discussions at a senior management level, the Board has this week agreed the initial strategy statement.

The strategy is designed to respond to three features of the external environment:

·         the worst outlook for public spending for 30 years;

·         a likely change of government;

·         the growing consensus on the direction of public service reform.

While expenditure on improvement activities is going to be much harder to sustain, and a new set of people are going to need to be convinced of its value, the direction of public sector reform provides the argument for some continued investment.  In particular a new government will still need the assurance that local government’s improvement can be maintained and, in the context of consensus on deregulation and devolution, this assurance can be provided by a joined up convincing proposition on sector led improvement.   Sector led improvement can also be used to justify a reduction in expenditure on both inspection and government directed improvement.

There are six streams of work in the proposed response.  In a nutshell these aim to demonstrate how the Agency, probably much smaller, supports a growing role for sector led improvement.  The unifying theme is an even stronger focus on the core peer methodology pioneered by the IDeA. 

Having established the Strategy we are now moving into an intense period of design and the aim is to present an implementation plan to the Board in October.  A key input into this design will be thinking around social networking and Web 2 and how we can use this to extend further the core peer working methodology.  Without anticipating the output too much, it is essential that whatever emerges takes us quickly towards an organisation which is simpler, leaner and more flexible and even more organically linked into local government.

Apologies for not having posted a blog for several months but now seems like a good time to re-start exposing my stream of consciousness around all things IDeA.