Wednesday 11th April 2007, 11:12Choice, Personalised Public Services and Social PolicyA4e is probably most well known in its markets for helping people back into work. A few years ago that was pretty much all of our business. As we have grown, so we have diversified and nowadays getting people back into employment accounts for about 40% of our revenue in the UK. There were three main reasons for our diversification – as a business, we needed to work in different markets as we grew to ensure opportunity for our staff as most of our business worked on short term contracts. More importantly, we recognised as we dealt with issues affecting unemployment, we had to develop joined up services and tackle inter-related issues. Similarly, we recognised that this skill set applied to a number of related markets in working with the public sector and delivering services on their behalf.
Our work now is therefore much more diverse and we are more broadly involved across a range of public services. This will continue into the future as our markets change, evolve and develop. Our role is to tackle areas of inequality and difficult problems in delivering public services and social policy.
This is why we have such a broad range of work. Modern public services in the 21st century require a delicate balance of convergence and focus. It is a tough area to work in. We need to collaborate with other suppliers (public, voluntary and pilot) as we all focus on better ‘joining up’ services at the front line. This means we are working with central government, local government, regional bodies and national agencies to deliver services to voluntary and community organisations, business, public sector organisations and individual customers.
Day in day out, our front line services are tackling this join up to help all the people who use our services. At the same time it is important that we contribute to the future reform of public services and the policy development in each sector that we work in, in each country that we work in - and those where we can add value in the future. This is where we have to continue to make a contribution to make it easier for governments to join up inherently complex services and improve them. We need to do this in a way which makes it easy for the public to access these services provided by their governments.
And this is where we are learning the most as an organisation. Across the various countries and sectors in which we work there are some interesting things for us to learn from and observe. There are massive and major differences in the different sectors and countries where we work. Equally, and importantly, there are major commonalities. The skill in tackling these issues is to recognise what is transferable as a skill or methodology and where services need refining (and re-designing) to be locally relevant. Absolutely critical to this is then embedding these services in the local communities where they operate. This is at the heart of ‘personalisation’ and it is at the centre of ‘choice’ in public service delivery.
So, whether it’s Barker and Harker, Freud and Leitch, Wanless and Lyons, Russel and Tomlinson – the list goes on (I decided not to use the overseas examples for this bit – didn’t trust my spelling) – the approach to making these recommendations and reforms work for the customer, at the local level, can be based on similar principles. That doesn’t mean it is easy and it doesn’t imply one organisation can do it all. Far from it. Increasingly A4e’s work is to straddle the space between policy and delivery and enable implementation of high quality services for the public via collaboration. Managing these networks and the financial investment that comes from the public purse and private company investment is increasingly our core role. But we always need to ensure we remain focused on the end user and this is the key to making policy reform work.
In the same way, the work that A4e and other organisations undertake in the delivery of front line public services (and let’s be clear, this is relatively a new area for service delivery and formal public/voluntary/private sector collaboration) is independent of the government of the day. So, whether it is the Union for Popular Movement, the Socialist Party, Kadima, Conservative, Republican, Likud, Labour, Democrat, the Christian Democratic Union, the Scottish National Party, Liberal Democrats, Australian Democrats, Democratic Unionist Party, the Democratic Left Alliance etc. etc. our job is the same. Put the customer at the heart of policy development and service delivery.
Across our work in the UK and internationally we will touch nearly 200,000 individuals this year, interact with nearly 30,000 not for profit organisations, work with over 100,000 businesses and touch over 300 different public sector organisations, departments and agencies. Delivering front line, global, public services is what we do. It’s an emergent market. It’s new because it’s not infrastructure, capital or back office – it’s front of house services to individuals and organisations. We’re not huge but we are one of the larger players in this international, developing sector. And we need to work collaboratively – in partnership – with the public sector, other private organisations and most importantly with not for profit, voluntary and community organisations.
Given this is what we do, I really enjoy the whole brave new world of discussion on ‘personalised services’ and ‘choice’. These are critical issues but there is also an assumption in some of the debate that these things don’t currently happen and organisations don’t think about how to do this more. We tend to have a policy, contracting and departmental structure in public service delivery that reflects the important issue of making sure funding is deployed effectively and can be accounted for. This is crucial but it can inhibit the freedom to be responsive to customer’s needs and often focuses funding on inputs not outcomes.
However, we are beginning to see recognition that commissioning can identify suitable organisations to deliver with probity and a socially aware business ethos, so that the focus on the customer and the outcomes we need to deliver for them is influencing policy implementation more and more. This is good but we need to go further and journey is only just beginning.
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