The role of the third sector in delivering public services: what we know and what we’d like to know

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James Rees

Inlogov and TSRC recently held a stimulating and well attended seminar involving guests from University of Illinois at Chicago. It was a great opportunity to share knowledge on the role of third sector organisations in public services, and to compare the ways in which there are similarities facing TSOs in both the US and UK.

But as so often it begged many questions as well and I want to reflect a bit on both the state of what we know and what we ought to know about the third sector’s role in delivering public services (in the UK!).

When I talk to people about the research that I do, the usual response is “what on earth is the third sector?” followed by “do they really deliver public services?” I’ll come back to the first question but the second is certainly very interesting.

There is a very long history to the involvement of what we now call the third sector in meeting welfare needs and providing services. Many are aware of early charitable and philanthropic action in the 19th century (Barnardo’s, RNIB and RSPCA for example); there was an explosion of mutual, co-operative and associations in the early industrial period; and before the dawn of the welfare state many health services were provided in voluntary hospitals that worked in partnership with local government.

Pete Alcock pointed out how these forms of the third sector had waxed and waned in response to political and economic change, leading right up to the 1980s Conservative interest in the third sector as alternative providers, the influence of New Public Management, and New Labour’s commitment to ‘partnership’ with the sector, written into a Compact.

In my discussion I suggested that it was useful to look at different levels or ‘strata’ of the third sector in relation to service delivery.

There are the big national charities (for example Barnardo’s, NSPCC, RNIB and the Salvation Army). It’s probably fair to say that the public perceive that these organisations rely on donations and fundraising, but they also hold very significant contracts to deliver services. For example Barnardo’s and Family Action run ‘Sure Start’ Childrens Centres. Action for Blind People, part of the RNIB Group, deliver a number of publically funded services to people with sight loss including schools, supported housing, and tailored health services within the NHS. This of course is only a tiny snapshot of what is by far the most visible part of the sector.

All of the mentioned organisations, and many more of varying sizes, large, medium and tiny, are involved in the Government’s controversial Work Programme, which aims to help benefit recipients into sustained employment. Our recent research drew attention to the difficulties charities were facing in terms of the strictures of the payments system, the lack of resources, and the prevalence of perverse ‘creaming and parking’ behaviour.

The work programme experience shows how public service delivery can be controversial and risky for charities, both financially and reputationally. But the costs are balanced by the opportunities contracts provide for charities to lobby government (where involvement can equal ‘insider status’ and credibility); and many charities argue it is consistent with their mission to bring their expertise to bear to improve services for their own client groups.

In my view there is a ‘missing middle’ as far the third sector and its role in public services is concerned. Missing only in the sense that we know less about it and there is a huge variety of experience so it is difficult to make generalisations about what is happening at this level.

Many organisations are much smaller than the ones mentioned above and tend to operate at the level of a region like the north-west, across a small number of local authorities, or even within a neighbourhood. They might have contracts with a local authority or a PCT (soon to be a CCG), and this part of the sector delivers a bewildering range of services.

We have been studying just these sorts of organisations as part of current research into public sector commissioning of the third sector. I have been struck firstly by the immense variety exhibited by organisations at this level, in terms of the types of services that they provide, their size and scope of operation, and seeming difference in their ethos, culture and degree of professionalism.

Secondly I have been struck by how vulnerable some seem to apparent threats in the current environment, most obviously loss of existing contracts and grants as a result of (mainly local authority) cuts, but also the possibility of competition from other TSOs and private sector organisations, and a wider sense of uncertainty, verging on fear.

Perhaps in some sense this is par for the course for the sector, and no organisation has a special right to exist. But I do wonder if we fully understand and value what might be lost if we start to lose these organisations in any great number, as they undoubtedly play an important role for many communities and individuals.

Finally, TSRC has done a great deal of research on organisations ‘below the radar’. Arguably again little is really known about how grassroots groups might interact with public services, enhance them, or what impact austerity might have on this vast ‘ecosystem’ of organisations. Much the same can be said about the important role of volunteers in public services. At the same time there is growing interest in how small community groups can be part of the co-production of public services.

Back to that first question: what on earth is the third sector? As soon as we start talking about different levels of the third sector, the huge diversity it contains, and the porous boundaries between in this case the grassroots and community sector, it begs the question of why we use the label ‘the third sector’. Are we dealing with a sector at all?

In an esoteric but influential paper in 1997, Perri 6 and Diana Leat argued forcefully that the sector had been ‘invented by committee’, in other words it was a social construction that suited the interests of some key political interests and society might have been better off without this invented sector and an obsession with the ‘politics of organizational form’. Pete Alcock takes a softer line, suggesting that the sector is held together in a ‘strategic unity’ in which tensions and disparities are sometimes played down in order strengthen the sector’s hand in negotiations with the state. These might seem like questions designed to keep academics in jobs, but it is interesting that people in the sector seem to keep asking similar ones as well: what makes our sector distinctive? What are our unique values and ways of working?

The seminar was interesting because even in the short amount of time we had available participants began to pose some really hard questions for academic research. I hope we can return to many of these:

  • What is the ‘right’ role for the state in providing public services?
  • Is the third sector just a foil for ongoing privatisation of the public sector and wider public realm?
  • Is the third sector doomed to be under-resourced, vulnerable and ‘under-professionalised’? Or can innovations like social finance and social impact bonds make a revolutionary difference?

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James Rees is a Research Fellow at the Third Sector Research Centre at the University of Birmingham. His recent research concentrates on transformations in UK public services including the role of the third sector, but his longer term interests have been in the governance of urban and regional governance, with a particular focus on the politics of city-regionalism; critical perspectives on urban housing market restructuring and housing policy; and more broadly on issues in urban regeneration, neighbourhoods and community. Follow him on Twitter: @jamesrees_tsrc.

A relational revolution in local public services

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Chris Lawrence-Pietroni

On June 13 2013 BBC News broadcast CCTV footage of 83 year old Muriel Price suffering in her own home. Like so many elderly people receiving local authority care, Muriel relied on a private provider to send care staff to look after her basic needs. Taken over the course of one month, the footage revealed a pattern of neglect: carers turning up late or not at all; Muriel suffering the indignity of having her incontinence pads changed in full view of her neighbours; her food being prodded by a carer to test its temperature.

Yet despite her treatment Muriel still found a reason to be grateful: ‘It’s terrible the way they treat old people. I’m lucky I’ve got a family to look after me. Those that haven’t got a family – God help them, poor Devils’.

Public concern over the treatment of vulnerable people supposedly being cared for by public services has increased as a number of scandals have hit the headlines with Winterbourne View and the Mids-Staff Inquiries being only the most high-profile. Shocking as these cases are, anyone working in health and social care knows that it’s casual neglect like Muriel’s that is far more common. And with the ageing population and financial constraint that is the backdrop to any contemporary discussion of local public services, the likelihood of others facing similar experiences is growing.

When confronted with these tragedies the question that lingers is: how could anyone treat another human being in this way? How is it possible to knowingly leave an elderly person alone for 13 hours? How could you expose an adult to the shame of having their incontinence pads changed in public when all that is required is that you draw the curtains? Why stick your fingers into someone else’s food? Would you treat a member of your own family like that?

The answer to this last question is (one hopes) “no” – and that of course is the point. As Muriel so rightly points out, she is lucky to have family that care for her and look out for her welfare. It is these relationships that not only give her life meaning (the regular visits of her grandson and trips out in her wheelchair) they also keep her safe (it was her grandson who installed the CCTV). These relationships, built up over years of mutual exchanges of love and practical support, mean that Muriel and her grandson see each other not as ‘clients’ or ‘tasks’ but as human beings to be valued.

The challenge of enabling genuinely relational services is not new, but it is growing and becoming more urgent. It is a simple fact of demography that personal social care is going to become an even greater part of public service and (for the foreseeable future at least) a political reality that the financial resources available to support it are going to be even fewer. Working out how to meet the needs of vulnerable older people with humanity is one of the most pressing issues facing local public services. The relational challenge, however, goes much further.

Firstly, enabling relationships to flourish between public service providers and those they serve – individually and collectively – is an absolute necessity if our aspirations for co-production and behaviour change are to be realised. It is increasingly understood that achieving significant change in so many of the challenges facing society – obesity, living well into old age, educational attainment, training and employment in an uncertain job market (to which you can add the pressing issue of your choice) – requires the active engagement of all of us as citizens. It is therefore at this point of interaction between citizens and the public services they use that we should focus our attention. As the new model of public services presented in Chapter 1 suggests, effective relationships, building trust and behaviour change are intimately connected.

Secondly, we know that the quality of the relationship between citizen and service provider can be a key determinant in the quality of the outcome of the service: evidence from fields as diverse as education, employment services and healthcare all suggest this.

Finally, we are slowly coming to understand that the complexity of organisations like those delivering local public services and the rapidity of change that they face mean that only those that are flexible and adaptive will excel. The process of constant learning needed to enable success itself requires a fundamental shift of attitude towards the nature of work – a shift of attitude that takes seriously the need to create meaning for staff within our organisations such that they carry with them the motivation, courage and adaptability needed to face the challenges of their daily tasks.

In this context enabling genuine relationships – relationships that carry with them more than a transactional or instrumental benefit – are not a soft option ‘nice to have’ but a hardnosed prerequisite for effectiveness. What we need is a relational revolution in our local public services.

This blog draws on ideas in Chapter 2 of a new book ‘Making Sense of the Future’

lawrence-pietroni

Chris Lawrence Pietroni joined INLOGOV as an Associate in September 2012. His work focuses on achieving sustainable systems change cross public services in the UK and the US. Building on over 15 years’ experience in local government working with senior leaders on the design of innovative service improvement and community engagement strategies, his work now focuses on the intersection between service design, leadership development and community empowerment. Much of Chris’ current work provides accessible ways for leaders to draw on systems thinking to enhance their collective effectiveness. Together with Mari Davis, Chris is pioneering the application of insights drawn from social movements and community organizing to achieve sustainable systemic change.

Towards a model of sector-led improvement in UK local government

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This post is based on Iain Taylor-Allen’s MSc dissertation, which he completed at INLOGOV earlier this year.

Iain Taylor-Allen

New policy is emerging from a political doctrine espousing the need to re-engage society in governance through the decentralisation of power, responsibility and accountability to the lowest possible level. In addition, fiscal reality serves to accelerate the desire for change. Whilst the new order is still emerging, the extent of reform to date has brought local government organisations front and centre.

Despite an exhaustive review spanning three decades, and covering both the public and private sector improvement literature, I could find little suitably developed theory on sector-led improvement pertinent to the current (or comparable) context of the UK local government sector. In response I designed and undertook an original piece of inductive research with the purpose of establishing an understanding of local government sector-led improvement in the UK, and identifying the key components of a sustainable model of sector-led improvement.

The research revealed a dynamic understanding of local government sector-led improvement, providing a provisional, high level definition of the phenomena focused on three key themes:

  • Mutual responsibility for the local government sector to support itself to improve and to share learning and best practice
  • Securing effective and value-for-money improvements to achieve better outcomes for service users
  • Ownership for improvement with a focus on local priorities.

Following further analysis three headline themes emerged, each comprising of key components identified by interviewees as critical to establishing a sustainable model of local government sector-led improvement:

  • Leadership (engagement and ownership)
  • Credibility  (assurance and improvement
  • Environment

Taken together the themes identified comprise the key components of what is referred to here as a provisional model of sustainable local government sector owned and led improvement, set in an environment that embraces the values identified to support the sector to realise improvement from within.

The model highlights the key components required for sector-led improvement to achieve the primary aim of positive citizen and service user outcomes, and be sustainable. These core components of leadership and credibility must exist within a reciprocally supportive, transparent and action focused environment characterised by a culture of mutual respect and ‘positive’ challenge from within the sector on behalf of the sector. Expressed in terms of establishing engagement as a basis for securing ownership for improvement from within the sector, effective leadership is a pre-requisite for developing and establishing the necessary level of credibility both within and outside the sector for the approach to be sustainable. Here, credibility is understood in terms of a cycle of assurance and improvement, focussed on robust performance base lining as a basis for securing the understanding and confidence to engage in improvement activity.

The findings highlight enthusiasm from within the sector to take on the challenge and responsibility of improvement, as well as drawing attention to the raft of potential benefits of a widespread adoption of the approach. Moreover, it provides researchers and practitioners alike a glimpse of the potential of a local government sector-led approach to improvement to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of local service provision, and hopefully the much needed stimulus for consistent, applied research to develop policy and practice to realise the potential benefits.

taylor-allen

Iain Taylor-Allen is an Adult Social Care Performance Manager. He has a keen interest in public management – specifically focusing on leadership, organisational culture and transformation; sector-led approaches to improvement; and the use of qualitative and quantitative measures to drive service/ contract/ organisational performance.

How do undergraduates construct their view of a public service professional?

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This post is based on Sarah Jeffries’ MSc dissertation, which she completed at INLOGOV earlier this year.

Sarah Jeffries

Working in a University Careers Service you get to hear a lot of voices, particularly those of students and employers. The students are preparing themselves to enter the workforce, develop their careers, and have an impact within their chosen sector. Whilst having a discussion with one such student, the subject of his skills and working within the public sector arose; his response was: “No, I want to work somewhere professional”, which he then identified as the private sector. 

That was a powerful statement, however it was by no means unique. There are often misconceptions about the types of skills currently being sought in the public sector (and that’s not limited to students), particularly those for graduate-entry roles and graduate recruitment programmes. This is also in addition to the ‘professionalism’ of public sector workers being called in to question.

The modernisation agenda and increasing comparisons with the perceived efficiencies of the private sector have also given rise to unfavourable judgements in comparison. Conversely, how are students with ‘public sector motivation’ perceiving the skills and understandings required from a role in the public sector? Are they developing the skills required for the changing public sector landscape?

The modernisation agenda has also brought an increase in public-private partnerships, and the reality is that many public service professionals work across sector boundaries. This is reflected in the skills being sought by public sector graduate recruiters, for example: the 2012 National Graduate Development Programme (NGDP) ‘Bright Future Report’ stated: “Increasingly councils need skills that have not been developed before, including commercial acumen and commissioning ability in order to deliver services through partners” (P.9). These are skills traditionally viewed as private-sector related.

Using Q-methodology, I researched how students constructed their view of a Public Service Professional to make sense of how we can best prepare students for the realities of public sector life, and the changing nature of the workforce.

Q-methodology allows the researcher to explore the concourse of debate surrounding a topic, and provides a mechanism to understand how an undergraduate student perceives representative statements, in relationship to each other. This provides an illuminating picture of how their reality is constructed.

The concourse in this area was broad with a need to capture a range of voices (media reports, social media, job descriptions, student discussion boards, literature review, and interviews with students, graduate and non-specific graduate recruiters (multiple sectors)), and it highlighted the conflicting messages being presented. These ranged from “seeking ambitious graduates” to “outdated”; from “popular graduate destination” to “huge job losses”; to “crossing sector boundaries in role” and “working in silos”.

Students completed a sorting exercise using statements that encompassed the range of debate, and participated in an accompanying interview. The results reveal seven different factors or viewpoints, reflecting the complexity of the changing working landscape.  These included polarised positive and negative perceptions of public sector professionals, in addition to idealistic and stereotyped interpretations that do not necessarily reflect reality. These findings highlight the potential difficulties in recruiting the best, and most prepared candidates for positions. The research recommended that further sector specific research be undertaken to increase the understanding for public sector recruiters. This is hopefully, where my application for a PhD comes in…

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Sarah Jeffries has just completed a part-time MSc in Public Management with INLOGOV. She works for the Careers Network at the University of Birmingham, managing the University’s optional employability programme: the Personal Skills Award. Sarah also chairs the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services’ Skills Award Task Group. Follow her on Twitter here.

Harnessing the resources of social enterprises for local authority savings

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This post is based on Sam Tappenden’s MSc dissertation, which he completed at INLOGOV earlier this year.

Sam Tappenden

In recent years a broad political consensus appears to have developed around the argument that social enterprises have an important role to play in the future of the United Kingdom. Yet despite the political rhetoric, the field of social enterprise research is still relatively under-developed. One major gap as perceived by the UK Social Enterprise Coalition is in understanding how social enterprises use their resources; how social enterprises mobilise resources that other organisations see as liabilities; and how social enterprises are able to integrate resources to formulate strategies and exploit opportunities. For this reason I decided to use Grant’s Resource-Based View (RBV) of strategy as a theoretical framework to explore whether HCM could develop a new strategy for achieving sustainable competitive advantages.

The apparent gap around social enterprises and resources is precisely why I decided to focus on this area for my INLOGOV MSc dissertation. Furthermore, I am currently on secondment from Hertfordshire County Council (HCC) to Hertfordshire Community Meals (HCM), a successful social enterprise which was set up and commissioned in 2007 by HCC to deliver a ‘Meals on Wheels’ (MoWs) service to disabled, elderly, and vulnerable people across Hertfordshire. The very nature of the organisation means that difficult planning, logistical, and resource issues run at the heart of the business, which provided an excellent opportunity for an in-depth case study.

Grant’s theory allowed for the ‘discovery’ of a wide range of under-utilised resources. For example, the research suggests that HCM has:

  • A broad range of transferrable ‘tacit’ and ‘non-tacit’ skills
  • A family-oriented, task-focussed, and tightly-knit organisational culture;
  • A motivated workforce which is primarily driven by ‘intangible’ benefits;
  • A range of under-utilised physical resources such as vehicles
  • A secure and stable financial position

Of particular interest were the findings into HCM’s intangible resources. For example, the culture of the organisation appears to be the source of some of its key capabilities, including its skills in caring, its reputation as a ‘likable’ organisation, and relationships with local government. As a direct result of its positive culture, HCM appears to have an inherent ability to both attract and retain a particular ‘type’ of person that is motivated to ‘make a difference’, attracted by the family-oriented environment, and inherently caring. In this sense it could be argued that the culture of HCM is self-propagating.

Yet more significant is the ‘transferability’ of HCM’s resources: Using Grant’s framework, the research suggests that HCM could achieve sustainable competitive advantages by diversifying into the community care industry through better-utilising its existing resource infrastructure. Furthermore, with HCM’s corporate status as a charitable and not-for-profit social enterprise, it is very likely that in diversifying its core business model HCM could help HCC find considerable financial savings in, for example, the council’s homecare budget. In sum, in the case of HCM, the evidence suggests that social enterprises can draw on a wide range of both tangible and intangible resources which could (and should) be utilised to help balance the budgets of local authorities.

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Sam Tappenden started his career in local government in 2010 through Hertfordshire County Council’s Graduate Training scheme. As part of the training scheme, Sam read for an MSc in Public Management at INLOGOV. Sam is now seconded to Hertfordshire Community Meals as a Business Development Manager where his role is focussed on improving the efficiency of the current business model and assessing options for business diversification. Before moving to Hertfordshire Sam read History at Cardiff University, worked as a Special Constable for South Wales Police, and taught English in rural China.

Street-level bureaucrats and the UK’s Better Regulation agenda: are the two compatible?

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This post is based on Harry Barton’s MSc dissertation, which he completed at INLOGOV earlier this year.

Harry Barton

Since Michael Lipsky’s seminal 1980 text ‘Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of The Individual in Public Services’, which argues that public policy can only be understood in the crowded offices and daily encounters of the street-level public servant, an extensive body of work has been established on the subject.

The regulatory arena, and the important role of inspectors at the front-line of regulatory activity, is one area of study that this literature has only recently begun to capitalise on.

‘Better’, ‘responsive’, ‘risk-based’ regulation, as extolled by the twin reviews of Hampton and Macrory, has become the accepted operating model for many British regulatory bodies. This has had an impact on the organisation and operationalisation of their street-level staff, with the potential to marginalise their role, at the same time as the rise of ‘managerialism’ in public bureaucracies more generally.

However, because of their enduring relationship with ‘clients’, street-level bureaucrats continue to influence public policy. The changing face and form of front-line (or ‘near-line’) regulatory staff elucidates an increasingly more nuanced and subjective typology of street-level bureaucrat.

In order to unpick this, my research study focused on three broad themes of analysis adapted from the literature:

  1. The dynamics of the regulatory encounter (key relationship: bureaucrat-client)
  2. How regulatory standards are determined in field practice (key relationship: bureaucracy-bureaucrat)
  3. Pressures and demands on the individual inspector (key relationship: bureaucracy-bureaucrat-client)

Interviews conducted with regional regulatory staff evidenced a broad conformation with three explanatory variables found in the non-regulatory literature for the autonomy of street-level bureaucrats:

  • Professional values and ‘institutions’ and the extent to which groups lock themselves into strategies either of resistance or accommodation.
  • The rules and regulations embedded within the organisation and the degree to which decision-making responsibility is delegated along hierarchical lines.
  • The complexity of the tasks undertaken and the extent to which role clarity is present in the workplace.

A number of case-specific factors cut across the analytical themes under investigation, suggesting a compound effect on street-level bureaucrats: ‘Structural conflicts’ caused by the perseverance of the previous bureau-professional culture, at odds with the imposition of the paradigm of responsive regulation and causing confusion for regulated firms; discord with regards to certain policy positions adopted as a result of a more ‘responsive’ and streamlined approach; and an ambiguous legal framework – responsive regulation is predicated on the mutual recognition of what the law requires of regulatees.

The conflict and indeterminacy from a number of angles provokes classic ‘coping mechanisms’ due to the pressure this creates on street-level bureaucrats in fulfilling what they see as their primary regulatory role (e.g. protecting the public). Street-level bureaucratic behaviours (discretion and coping) were apparent in front-line staff as well as ‘near-line’ management, albeit on an inconsistent basis – in congruence with the inconsistency with which staff may have been managed and processes executed.

These findings lead me to make the following recommendations:

  • Staff need to be given the opportunity to deal with indeterminacy by building confidence in their own position and judgement.
  • Would-be responsive regulators need to ensure the buy-in of their people on the ground, through full involvement in change processes to give them ownership of the new responsive regime.
  • Staff need to be clear not just about the range of compliance activities and actions that may be taken (the ‘regulatory smorgasbord’), but the breadth and depth of the portions of its regulatory ‘pyramid’ (see Macrory) and the regularity with which their organisation dare venture to the summit.

Otherwise there is a risk that susceptible staff are pushed away, discretion and coping behaviours take over, and that cooperative and collaborative relationships that have been built up with clients lead to negative regulatory outcomes and/or regulatory capture.

There is seemingly a lack of consideration in both the street-level bureaucratic and the responsive regulation literature for the establishment and development of bureaucracy-bureaucrat-client relationships over time (within the regulatory environment), whereby shifting internal and external social, institutional and individual factors could, for example, subvert or short-circuit the decision making and processual elements of the traditional street-level/regulatory experience.

Just as there are peaks and troughs in the economy, natural oscillations occur over time in the regulatory spectrum from self-regulation to command regulation (as witnessed recently in financial services regulation), creeping up and down the regulatory pyramid, placing different levels and forms of indeterminacy on bureaucrats at any one time. This is a difficult journey to predict or plan for, but scenario or strategic planning could be attempted, whilst regulators need to continue managing regulatee expectations to balance ‘regulatory certainty’ with programmes of ‘developmental regulation’. If not, responsive regulation will not fulfil its promise: as regulators wait for risk analyses and assumptions to do the work for them, the industry moves on.

 In a regulatory environment, street-level bureaucrat ‘professionalism’ has traditionally been built on the ability of bureaucrats to identify and assess risk and to employ the appropriate response using judgement. The onset of the risk-based approach to regulation has merely introduced a ‘system-level’ method of considering risk which if implemented incorrectly could disempower street-level bureaucrats and trigger coping mechanisms and discretion in different ways amongst front-line staff and at management level. This could create unintended consequences, undermining the credibility and effectiveness of regulatory regimes. In the UK, recent scandals, such as horsemeat in beef products, suppression of whistleblowers and cover-ups in the NHS and CQC, as well as the introduction of a ‘judgement-led’ regulatory regime in financial services regulation, have begun to reflect poorly on risk-based regulation, while its arbiters continue to ruminate rather than regulate.

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Harry Barton has worked in local government and for different regulatory bodies. His research interests include the construction of public policy, participative democracy, project, programme and change management. The biggest motivator in choosing this topic for his research project was to understand more about how the public sector should go about developing the skills and personnel it needs to be effective in the future. Follow his Twitter feed here.