The 21st century public servant – drivers of change

06/02/201405/02/2014 / inlogov / 1 Comment

Maria Katsonis and Helen Sullivan

In 2013 the Melbourne School of Government and the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet began collaborating on a project to explore the roles, skills and characteristics of the 21st century public servant. This blog piece describes some of the key drivers of change we identified, most of which are relevant across a range of contexts, though their impact will be shaped by local political and economic contexts.

A key external driver is the economic shift from the West to the East and the North to the South with continued economic growth in China and India, followed by the expanding economies of South America and Africa. The prospect of an ‘Asian Century’ creates new opportunities for Australia in the region but also places demands on Australian policymakers to hear different voices in debates about the role of the state, the values underpinning policy choices, and the role of public administration.

Australia’s ageing population creates challenges for service demands in healthcare and aged care, levels of workforce participation and the adequacy of retirement savings. Opportunities arise through tapered retirement models and a greater focus on positive ageing.

Digital media and new technology are both enablers and disruptors of business models, capabilities and delivery channels. The uptake of smart devices; the popularity of social media; the emergence of cloud computing; and the rise of big data and analytics each have the potential to change significantly how government and public services operate.

Consumer, social and demographic trends are driving the community’s expectation for personalised services that meet individual needs which are delivered seamlessly and cheaply. This has significant implications for service delivery in health and education as well as how the public service uses technology to provide access to services, transactions and information.

Key drivers of change

Internal drivers are also changing what the public service does and how it works with implications for the skills and capabilities of public servants. Peter Shergold, the former head of Australia’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, identified four drivers, these as:

1. A market for the delivery of public goods
Today’s public service is increasingly commissioning and contracting out service delivery to the private and community sectors.

2. Increased competition in the development of public policy
Government’s now regularly seek and receive policy advice from external bodies including think tanks, lobby groups, the media and research institutes.

3. The co-production of government services
This requires a reciprocal relationship between public servants and people using services on the basis that greater user involvement in design and delivery will achieve better results.

4. The reinvigoration of democratic engagement
Digital media provides an opportunity for increased engagement, reshaping how communities find and engage each other on political and social issues. This challenges government and public services to develop appropriate structures, work practices and approaches to citizens.

Given current fiscal constraints, it is unlikely that incremental change will be sufficient. Rather what is required is a bolder approach to rethinking and redesigning public services drawing on the experience of other sectors and services. It also means being attentive to the values that underpin the 21st century public service as well as the skills and capabilities of future public servants.

This post was originally published on 21st Century Public Servant.

Maria Katsonis is a senior executive in the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet in Australia where she leads projects that shape and influence the Victorian public sector. She has worked on a range of issues including service delivery reform, productivity, innovation, e-government and governance.

Professor Helen Sullivan is Director of the Melbourne School of Government. Her research and teaching focuses on changing state-society relations and modes of interaction including collaboration and citizen participation. She has published widely on public policy, public governance and public service reform. Her latest book is ‘Hybrid Governance in European Cities: Neighbourhood, Migration and Democracy’ (2013).

When will they ever learn?

03/02/201428/01/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Catherine Staite

The news of the death of Pete Seeger has reminded me again of his old song ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ The line ‘oh when will they ever learn?’ has been running through my head since I saw an item on the local news about police officers and mental health professionals working together to prevent people with mental health problems ending up in police cells for want of the right support. ‘Good stuff!’ you might think. Indeed it is – but it is also profoundly depressing to hear such a venture being reported as ‘new’.

In 1993 I led a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary team, which diverted people with mental health problems and learning disabilities from custody. The team included all the right skills and necessary statutory powers – a specialist social worker, two community psychiatric nurses, a senior probation officer and a police inspector. We had the backing of all the chief officers and the team went wherever they were needed, the police station, the bridewell below the magistrates court and the remand and hospital wings of the local prison.

The approach was simple but effective. By bringing the right skills into the system at the right time, we were often able to help get the right decisions and find the right services. Within a year, the prison hospital wing was no longer full of prisoners with mental illness and learning disabilities. This was a time when the local mental hospital was being run down for closure, so it was no small feat. Of course, some of our clients were very disturbed and a small number were dangerous, or had committed very serious offences so they had to stay in prison or be moved to a secure hospital but at least we knew who they were and where they were. We advocated for them. They were not dumped and forgotten.

We shared our learning and even wrote a book about our approach which was replicated and adapted all over the country. It was cheap and effective because it made better collective use of existing individual professional skills, capacity and powers and partner agencies’ budgets. It was about reducing demand, reducing costs and reducing re-offending – but most of all it was about reducing risk and suffering.

‘What’s not to like?’ you might ask and you’d be right but, somehow or other, twenty years later, police officers and mental health nurses are re-embarking on the same journey. Is it because mental health services are still the “Cinderella’ – and their budgets have been cut even when the rest of the NHS has had increases in funding? Is it because we are still so ignorant and fearful about mental illness? Or is it because innovation is generated by enthusiasts on short-term funding so it doesn’t get mainstreamed or embedded? Perhaps it is all of the above.

Whatever the reason, our collective inability to use the available evidence to guide our thinking and to take shared professional and organizational responsibility for public policy challenges means we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes.

When will we ever learn?

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

Crime on the high street goes missing

23/01/201423/01/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

John Raine

For almost two decades now the statistics for recorded crime in England and Wales have been falling. And even though there has always been a difference, of some magnitude, between the numbers gathered through the British Crime Survey – a large-scale sample of the public’s experiences of crime victimisation – and the (persistently smaller) statistics compiled by the police, there has been broad agreement at least in the downward trend.

No doubt this has given much cause for encouragement within government, particularly in these recent years of economic recession when most criminologists had been predicting a reversal in the trend – at least for acquisitive crime. The official statistics suggest this has simply not happened. But have we been seeing the whole picture, it must be asked?

Probably not, would be one conclusion to be drawn from a recent report from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) – a report that draws attention to the considerable scale and growth of crime on our High Streets. The statistics (annually collected by BRC) and were based on surveys of just thirty retailing organisations. But they were among the largest such enterprises, together accounting for just over half of national retail turnover. They show 2012/13 to have experienced among the highest levels of shop-theft for nine years, with a total of more than 631,000 such incidents recorded, and at a cost to the retail industry of around £511 million last year.

But then come the most surprising revelations – that just 9 per cent of these crime incidents were ever reported to the police, and that the reporting rate here was 12 per cent lower than in the preceding year, 2011-12. Here then, appears to be a very different perspective on crime in Britain in a recessionary period. Certainly the low reporting rate to the police indicates that the official crime statistics miss a significant proportion of acquisitive crime, and the suggestion in the report is that the main reason lies in diminishing confidence in the police to respond.

This latter point, of course, is hardly new – the British Crime Survey has consistently found high levels of non-reporting of petty crime to be due to lack of public confidence in the police to respond, still less to be able to apprehend the offender and recover any lost property. For most people, we are told, the main value in reporting property crime to the police is to obtain a crime number to assist with an insurance claim.

But what of the situation on the High Street? As well as arguing for improvements in the reporting and recording of shop-thefts and other retail crime, and for better law enforcement (from reporting through to prosecution), the BRC report presses the case for a more concerted focus on business crime by local police forces. In this respect it is interesting to note from our own research here at the University of Birmingham that an analysis of the Police and Crime Plans – the statutory strategy documents produced last year by each Police and Crime Commissioner, and which establish the priorities for policing locally over a five year period – revealed that, while almost all included generalised commitments towards the reduction and prevention of crime, specific reference to High Street crime, or to initiatives to address the problems identified in the BRC report, were few and far between. Similarly, it was notable that, while around one in three of the Plans established the improvement of public confidence in policing as a priority to be addressed, very few references were to be found to the extremely low level of confidence in police responsiveness among retailers.

In light of this report, perhaps some further reflection is called for, both on our perspectives about crime trends and on the priorities for policing.

John Raine is Professor of Management in Criminal Justice at INLOGOV. He has been involved in criminal justice research, consultancy and teaching at Birmingham for some twenty-five years and has a strong track record of commissions for the Home Office, Lord Chancellor’s Department/Department for Constitutional Affairs/Ministry of Justice on aspects of policy and practice within the criminal (and civil) justice sectors.

A reply to Fraser Nelson: the only thing astonishing is how little power local authorities have

18/11/201318/11/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Catherine Staite

Fraser Nelson’s article on Birmingham City Council last Friday was a very disappointing offering from an experienced journalist and a reputable paper – more Daily Mail then Daily Telegraph.

It was riddled with inaccuracies.

Birmingham City Council does not have ‘astonishing power’. What is astonishing is how little power local authorities have, even in big cities. Central government has as iron grip on local government. Money – how it is raised and spent – and policy – the thinking which underpins those choices – are the two key levers of government and central government controls them both.

The average amount of local authority income derived from Council Tax is 16%. Council Tax is a regressive tax based on 1991 property valuations and bears no relation to the real costs of providing local public services. LAs cannot increase CT by more than 2% without a referendum, for which they must pay.

The remainder of their income is made up of rents, fees and charges (local authorities can’t make a profit) and business rates (which central government gathers and re-distributes to a national format). The remainder comes from grants from central government. BCC’s take from Council Tax is only 7.5% because of poverty and property values, which means it is disproportionately dependent on central funding, which has been cut by 35% since 2010.

The gap between rising demand and falling resources is getting wider by the minute in Birmingham, just like it is in Chicago. The difference is that Chicago can run a deficit of billions – and has done so for the last ten years. BCC has to balance its books. It is still obliged to deliver over 1700 statutory duties – from trading standards to disposal of the dead to the protection of children. Year by year it has less and less room to manouvre.

What is really astonishing is that Birmingham and other local authorities still manage to deliver very good services. A recent Ipsos Mori poll showed satisfaction remains high. That is because authorities have protected frontline services in spite of losing 15% of their jobs since 2010.

Splitting up Birmingham City Council would make no sense at all. The comparison with Manchester is entirely spurious. The geography and demography of the ten unitary authorities in the Greater Manchester area is very different to Birmingham but the success of that area is built on collaborative upscaling not on separatism. They have banded together to create a Combined Authority. It’s the only way to get the economies of scale and critical mass to compete, bring growth and deliver infrastructure.

The West Midlands is not made up of unitary councils – it is a mixture of unitaries and two tier areas – encompassing counties and districts. This makes it harder for Birmingham and the wider West Midlands to emulate Greater Manchester’s collaborative progress. In Birmingham, some services are run at a neighbourhood level, and a district structure helps support better engagement and differentiation but there is nothing to be gained by splitting the city.

Birmingham is a global city, competing with Chicago, Melbourne and Guangzhou and dividing it up would be a nonsense. Last week senior people from Birmingham City Council were in China, drumming up business for the city. Would Beijing be interested in talking to Kings Heath District Council? I think not.

Blaming Birmingham City Council for the architectural failings of the 1950s is like blaming David Cameron for Suez. It’s entirely pointless. Most cities have some 1950s and 1960s monstrosities but Birmingham is being very successful in transforming the city centre. The Bull Ring works, New Street Station is being transformed and whatever Prince Charles thinks about the new library, I think it is truly amazing. It is beautiful and original. What is more important is that it works. Hundreds of thousands of people have flooded through its doors and librarians have had to work hard to keep up with the huge rise in demand for books. That is the real measure of its success.

People hark back to the happy days of Joseph Chamberlain who as Mayor in the 1870s and thereafter transformed the city and created the legacy of civic splendor, including the University of Birmingham. The difference between then and now is that he did have ‘astonishing power’ because he had control of both the money and the policy. In spite of the herculean efforts of Lord Heseltine, central government controls the big money for skills, growth and infrastructure. It is to the credit of Birmingham that they have done so much with so little.

Poverty is indeed a problem in Birmingham but not one which the city council can solve. National policies drive national poverty which is then concentrated in big cities. Birmingham is super-diverse and has a high proportion of young people. Ethnic minorities and the young have been disproportionately effected by the recession. Central government’s cuts to benefits to vulnerable people are shunting the costs of poverty onto local government at a time when they have few resources with which to respond.

Child protection is a stark example of this phenomenon. Most child abuse has its roots in poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence and mental illness. Local government cannot solve all those ills alone. Every serious case review and every inquest highlights a very simple lesson. Children can only be protected when all the key agencies work together – schools, GPs, mental health services, the police, the hospitals – as well as children’s social care. Cuts in public sector funding have a knock on effect on child protection. West Midlands police cannot attend all the case conferences they should. It is in those circumstances that children fall through the net.

Somehow it is always the Council that gets the blame. They do hold the ring in a complex network of agencies, professionals and responsibilities – but they cannot always be expected to hold the blame.

The paradoxical nature of being successful

06/11/201304/11/2013 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Ian Briggs

The world of social science can be an odd place at times. Much is quite rightly being made of the impact of severe reductions in public spending, but when social scientists look at the levels of satisfaction with public services, many see the general quality of services remaining high.

This seeming anomaly can seem even more confusing when we start to look at the tactical moves made by public institutions and bodies to place themselves within a market-based approach to service provision. For those in the private sector demand stimulation is a core activity. Seeking growth, market penetration and improving competitiveness are very much at the heart of sound management and leadership. But for the public sector the issue of demand brings with it issues of access criteria, rationing and strategies o deflect demand away from the most pressurised services.

The rise of strategic commissioning has been for many the key mechanism to deal with market-based approaches to service provision – this brings with it tactics that seek to make public services more attractive to market-based provision, stimulating provision rather than stimulating demand. Indeed, there are growing numbers of examples where through taking a market-based approach to provision, citizens are readily accepting that services are commissioned by public bodies but actually provided by private and third sector organisations.

Consequently, if satisfaction and contentment remain high (though it has to be accepted that is not in any way universal), why should we worry?

Having happy and content consumers for a commercial organisation is indeed something to be very highly valued and the same should be true for our public services. However, there is a sting in the tail. There are an increasing number of examples of what we can refer to as ‘needs acceleration’ – if you satisfy a demand for a good or a service then over time it brings with it an appetite for yet more. This is a phenomena that is well understood in many consumer markets; once you have provided a good product the time will come when it needs replacing and the consumer expectation is that it will bring with it an advancement in quality and increased utility.

For local councillors, the expenditure of monies on local improvements can bring with it both satisfaction and a feeling that if an improvement is made in one area then another must be close behind. This is ‘needs acceleration’ – if you can make one thing better then why can you not deal with another perceived problem? For many in local communities the history of planning gain through section 106 agreements often leads to a paradox – this is now being keenly felt with severe budget reductions.

An example of this is where developers have brought improved local facilities such as play areas with housing developments, over time the asset investment cost is overtaken by revenue costs to keep the facilities in good order. Over ten years a play area that cost £60k to build and install can bring with it equal levels of cost to ensure that it is maintained and operated to an acceptable standard. This impact of ongoing revenue costs over capital costs is an issue that is at times challenging to get across to communities who seek improvements in civic amenities but remain unaware of the longer term implications of meeting revenue expenditure obligations.

The same can be said for where we have schools that are judged to be of high calibre. This brings with it the perceived advantage of higher property values and greater pressure for development. A local school with strong OFSTEAD reports is attractive for a developer seeking to build new properties on adjacent land. For the developer the housing mix is determined by national regulation though it is clearly in the interests of the developer to build houses that are saleable and attractive to potential customers who seek to have a place in a good school for their children. Given that any new development brings with it obligations under section 106 or the CIL, the local community has the right to expect that local facilities and infrastructure improvements will follow – though, again, the actual benefit may be relatively short term. Although the open spaces and free public access facilities that come with new housing development are to be welcome and indeed seen as a necessity, over time the costs of maintaining such improvements will have to be met from somewhere. This cost can and does often fall on the local community, increasing pressure on expenditure in future years, at a level that can be difficult to calculate.

This, however, cannot be an argument for mediocrity. We need development; any community that does not seek to improve is failing in its civic duty – though we may be facing too many problems in years to come by taking a short term view of civic performance. For many councillors, the pressure to create physical improvements to a place is huge; though if we concentrate too much on the immediate future at the expense of the longer term we can see that some of our public services will fall into neglect, especially as the cost of maintaining those services and facilities increases over time.

A question that often arises in our teaching and research on the issue of strategic commissioning is what it is exactly that make strategic commissioning strategic. The answer may lie in the balancing of meeting immediate need with longer term vision – too often commissioners are faced with commissioning for the here and now and fail to see that we have to make all provision sustainable; poor short term commissioning may meet immediate needs but fail to take into account where service need will be in years to come. Most councils are willing to admit that they struggle with the very idea of having a commissioning strategic – they can see the need for it but commissioning for future needs is something that can be driven out as today’s agenda is about meeting known needs today.

Commercial organisations have at their fingertips different strategies that are perhaps unavailable to us – they can offer differentiated products and services where premium products and services can be delivered alongside standard ones. The premium charges cover the cost of research and development and the cost of the premium in the first place.

What remains is that whilst there may be growing evidence that some people are generally satisfied with what is provided in a period of austerity and service diminution, the actual demand for services does not actually decrease. We offer an increasing number of potential substitutes and alternatives, but where we make improvements or update facilities and services within the mind of the public it can and does bring an expectation of more.

Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Local Government Studies. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

Delivery of public services and economies of scale: Cooperation as an alternative for small municipalities

05/11/201314/01/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Germà Bel

The economic crisis has strongly affected many developed countries, and has caused serious tensions in government finances. These constraints are particularly important at the local level, because local governments have limited taxing bases, and fiscal competition is stronger. Policy discussion on local government reform and local cost reductions, as well as increasing efficiency in local service delivery, is widespread.

Besides the measures of suppression or reduction of intermediate local government in some countries, the most relevant feature of local government organizational reform is the search for a better scale, to be able to provide local services in a more efficient manner. A policy frequently proposed to reduce costs is merger of municipalities. In practice, most experiences worldwide have had compulsory character, given the usual reluctance of municipalities to merge. However, it is by no means clear that municipal amalgamation results in cost reduction.

An alternative reform of local service delivery increasingly which is increasingly used has been intermunicipal cooperation, which focuses on functional consolidation of services instead of focusing on amalgamation or consolidation of governments. Little is yet known about why municipalities engage in cooperation to deliver local public services.

Shedding further light on this question is the aim of our recent article ‘Why do municipalities cooperate to provide local public services? An empirical analysis’. We use a database of the Spanish region of Aragon, characterized as having many small municipalities. Our empirical analysis confirms that small municipalities need to cooperate with other municipalities so as to reduce the costs of providing services. The need to exploit scale economies, which is not possible for small municipalities individually, may be one of the main factors driving the decision to cooperate.

Of course, municipalities could also contract to a private vendor to benefit from scale economies. However, higher transaction costs with privatization seem to be particularly influential in the decision of local governments to privatise or cooperate in the delivery of solid waste collection. Our analysis shows that small municipalities prefer to cooperate so as to reduce costs, while larger municipalities prefer to privatise the delivery of the service.

The clear policy implication of our work is that intermunicipal cooperation, as opposed to privatisation, may well be an optimal solution for the delivery of services by local governments in small municipalities. Municipalities of this type have to face the problems of a lack of competition and high transaction costs, while facing the need to exploit scale economies. By cooperating, scale economies can be achieved with lower transaction costs and fewer concerns for competition than is the case for private production.

A full account of this research is available in my recent article with Xavier Fageda and Melania

Full details of this research are available in my article with Xavier Fageda and Melania Mur: Why do municipalities cooperate to provide local public services? An empirical analysis. Local Government Studies, 39(3), 435-454.

Germà Bel is professor of Economics at Universitat de Barcelona and Visiting Professor at Princeton University (Woodrow Wilson School). His research focuses on public sector reform, with a special emphasis on privatization and regulation, and he is particularly active in the study of transportation infrastructure and local public services.

INLOGOV Blog

The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham

Public performance and delivery