The 2020 Public Services Trust Blog

A very interesting presentation yesterday by Virgin Atlantic’s Head of Design Joe Ferry, at a group hosted by the Design Council with, I think, some interesting lessons for public service reform about the power of experiences.
Virgin doesn’t compete on price or size – it can’t, so instead it competes on dreams and aspirations. Joe called it design, but, in reality, dreams and aspirations seemed to be what it boiled down to. From the design of the revolutionary flat bed to the fit out of the first class lounges the driving brief was about making a place and service that people wanted to be part of. They call it creating a future memory which Joe described as creating something new that people already know they want to buy into because it strikes chords – it’s the way they want to live. In Virgin’s case this future memory was encapsulated in the phrase ‘an air of natural glamour’. It’s not as fluffy as it sounds – they had to work with their engineering, commercial and financial wings (pardon the pun) to envisage and build new cabin layouts and seats with incredible space restrictions and the most stringent safety regulations, and build the right service. And they had to get the Board to buy in to a multi-million pound project in a downturn, in the year of 9/11, SARS, and the financial bubble imploding. But the Board also saw the importance of what people’s experiences are, how they feel, what they wish to be.
Feelings, aspirations, dreams, a sense of belonging. These are not words that public service reform is happy engaging with, much easier to shuffle rulers and sweat the, very important, technical stuff. But for users, public services are as much about our experience of them as they are about managing resources effectively. I think we need to address both if we’re really going to make a difference.

A meeting today reinforced my pet theory – debate on public service reform isn’t taking half enough account of the cultural stuff.
The meeting was with (the fabulous) Hilary Cottam of Participle, her brilliant colleague Jenny Winhall and (the totally fabulous) David Willetts.
Hilary and Jenny were talking about some of the lessons from their work with actual real people they live and work with to work out what these people need in their lives. Once they know that they design services, er, accordingly. Obvious when you put it like that, but as always the devil is in the detail.
One of the most interesting things I found was in the work Participle does with excluded people to build their confidence, their opportunities, and their ability to create better lives. A key part of this process was giving people the chance to reflect on their lives, talk about how they see themselves, what kind of life they’d like to lead, what kind of things they’d like to do in the future. This process of reflection and thinking was specifically built in to the development of services.
Stories matter not just to fiction, but to public services too. We only understand ourselves and we can only change our futures, when we can articulate who we think we are and where we think we’re going. So, the question then is how might public services build in storytelling and other cultural factors alongside the classic public administration paradigms?
I think that most of the debate on ps reform needs to be much more alive to this wider stuff. Public services exist in poeple’s lives, and these lives are social and cultural; they’re not in TextBook1 of Public Administration.
Anyway, I’m not sure how it will all end, but I can tell you that the butler did it.

It is good that public service mutuals appear to be back on the agenda. The idea was championed by Alan Milburn, the New Economics Foundation and others, several years ago. Beyond the establishment of Foundation Trusts, which are not employee mutuals, it didn’t gain sufficient traction at the time. It has to be said that this was, at least in part, because Gordon Brown appeared to be opposed to the idea. So if he has changed his position then this is to be welcomed. From progressive conservatives to
the heart of the Government, it seems that mutuals could be the new big idea (see Philip Blond “The ownership state”, http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-ownership-state/Tessa Jowell and Liam Byrne in the Guardian 12.11.09).

There are several factors driving the renewed interest in public service mutuals. The dire financial climate means there is a premium on new ways of spurring innovation and cutting costs. It is recognised across the spectrum that the state needs to change – monolithic, nationalised, mass produced public services are outdated. This in turn will require greater pluralism in service delivery and significant decentralisation. And then there is the need to establish a better relationship with public service staff. One of the great paradoxes of the New Labour era is that despite the biggest increase in spending on public services in decades, public service professionals have all too often felt alienated and disgruntled.

As Professor Gerry Stoker has argued in a paper called “The Micro-Foundations of Public Policy” much of this can be explained by the fact that successive governments have sought to manage public service professionals through the principal agent paradigm, which is at the heart of New Public Management theory. This replaced the older idea that public service workers and professionals were motivated by professional ethics or public service ethos, with the public choice assumption that staff were rational economic agents who would respond to incentives and targets. However, as Stoker argues, this does not take into account the breakthroughs in understanding how the brain works which have been made in the field of neuroscience and applied in behavioural economics. We do not act as rational economic man, but instead are bounded by how our brain computes information, so the principal agent model has hugely overestimated the ability of individuals to rationally respond to incentives and targets. Professor Stein Ringen in his pamphlet “The Economic Consequences of Mr Brown” goes further and argues that New Labour has not achieved the social outcomes it desired because it failed to mobilise citizens and public service workers to achieve social change and instead was seduced by the illusion of central power.

A new relationship with public service professionals should be based on a much better insight into what motivates them. This will be a mixture of being in greater control of the work they do and feeling valued and rewarded for the good outcomes that they help achieve. Since so much to do with the quality of public service outcomes is also about the relationship between professionals and the public, then professionals have got to believe in and feel motivated by what they are doing, otherwise the services themselves will suffer. At a time when there will be big funding pressures, getting staff to feel ownership of the challenge to get more for less will be critical.

All of this helps make the case for looking at models in which public service staff can be owners of the service they provide. Mutuals were in at the beginning of the development of public services, so it is fitting that at this time of great challenge they should once again be at the centre of thinking. They could be a way of protecting public service jobs, a 2010 version of the 1970s worker co-ops.

But there are some significant questions which will still need to be addressed. What stake will local communities have in them? How can we ensure that they don’t become another version of producer capture? What business model would they be based on and how would they be funded, especially if they need access to capital? Could they take on significant risk? How would they be affected by EU public procurement rules, would they have to bid for public service commissions, what would happen if they failed to win bids?

None of these are reasons not to support the idea, but they are issues which will need to be addressed if public service mutuals are not to join the long list of latest big ideas which fail to take off.

This afternoon I had the privilege of meeting Deborah Wilson of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol and the ESRC Public Services Programme. We had a fascinating conversation about what Deborah calls “Managing by Numbers” (the ESRC Public Services Programme published a paper by the same name today).

It has become almost a truism that collecting data on performance and making it publicly available will drive up the quality of public services, thus the emphasis on targets and school league tables. But I retained several important points from my conversation with Deborah.

First, collecting data and choosing not to disclose it but rather to use it for internal improvement purposes works better in some cases than making the data available to the public. One example of this was GP performance data in the US, which is not available to patients, but does create an incentive for GPs to do better.

Second, not all measures reveal information that actually allows citizens to distinguish between the performance of different units. Take this figure.

It shows how schools rank based on their Contextualised Value Added (CVA) score. This score was supposed to be more informative than other measures of school performance such as the number of students achieving 5 good GSCEs because it essentially controls for schools’ intake and shows only the value the school added. But what it demonstrates is that, at 95% confidence intervals, the great majority of schools do not differ from the national average when ranked using the CVA score. This means it is impossible to distinguish between the school ranked about 600 from the school ranked about 2500. If the measure doesn’t help citizens to evaluate quality, then what is its purpose?

Finally, performance measures and citizen choice based on this data will only drive up quality if everyone agrees what “quality” means. A familiar illustration for many is that if parents choose schools based on teaching quality, then more choice may increase the quality of teaching. But if parents choose based on their child’s peer group, then promoting greater choice is unlikely to influence the quality of teaching.

Look out for more ideas about targets and user choice in papers by Deborah Wilson in the coming months!

The future of public services is undoubtedly one in which the internet will play a big role.  Remote diagnosis, email conversations with your GP, realtime service performance reporting – all will most likely be elements of a new citizen-state interface that transforms traditional interactions.   My colleague Charlotte has been working on a great project looking into the opportunities and major challenges ahead in this area – watch this space for more soon.

According to today’s Telegraph, one of the more insidious side effects of this IT revolution is the potential of addiction to the internet and email.  “You never know when something is going to land in your in-box”, says the article, “so there’s a tingle of excitement every time you check.”  In my case, I think its more like a twinge of fear that I have forgotten to do something; but you get the point.

One implication I hadn’t thought of is the perverse possibility that as we interact more efficiently with our GPs to address one health problem (a cold, say), we are simultaneously creating another – unhealthy addiction to the very tools we are using to solve the first problem!  Wow – how do you solve that one?  Answers on an email.