It's been a while since I had a chance to update my blog. Over the last month I've spent time working with our teams on a range of interesting stuff with different governments, as well as different parties in different countries. This work revolves around us making sure we take every opportunity to input into service design and policy review of the services we are involved. For me, the most important thing is putting the customer at the heart of policy design. Sounds a lot easier than it sometimes works out to be!

As a company that's grown up delivering public services we have a responsibility to feed into these discussions - it's a pay back for the fact that we are trusted to deliver them. It is also an area where we have developed a lot of expertise over the years. Transferring policy into practice, strategy into delivery. Moving between the strategic and the tactical, making sure we deliver what customers need.

We don't get it right every time we do it, every day, for every customer, whether they are an individual or organisation. Across four countries, over 2,000 staff and 120 locations, there are going to be times when we need to improve. What we do make happen every day - and 2,000 people work very hard on this - is that we attempt get 'it' right every time and we look for ways to do 'it' even better tomorrow.

This value - of always trying to improve public services - is the soul of the organisation. It is the same aspiration we share with people in the public sector and voluntary sector. Someone said to me the other day we need to work hard on having 'one labour market'. Being thick I said I didn't know what that meant. The point that was being made to me - in delivering public services - was that people need to recognise that there is not some magical boundary between 'private and public' and that you can move freely across public, private and voluntary organisations delivering world class public services as you develop your career.

I took it for granted that we should do that, hence me being thick. But as you talk to people you realise that we do sometimes create this artificial barrier - implying that somehow we have different motives for doing the work we do. Like difficult partnership working, the solution in my opinion is about focusing on the shared goals and values and recognising that all organisations and people have wide and variant agendas. We will have differences but crucially there are many similarities and common themes. Focus on those, recognise the differences and it makes it a lot easier to move forward and progress. This approach underpins a lot of cross departmental, cross party and cross government working that I tend to do as well as labour market imperatives.

And finally, a quick response to John - thanks for your note. I tried to e-mail you back but your e-mail address wouldn't accept a response. If you mail me I'd like to see if I can help.

Mark