Category Archives: Strategy and Change

Asset-based Library Strategy White Paper Launched

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Black Radley Culture has launched the BRC Library White Paper focusing on a radical new approach to strategy development in the public libraries sector.

“The public libraries sector in England has reached a crucial point in its development,”   states Jon Finch, Managing Director of Black Radley Culture.  “We believe that innovative new solutions are required to enable those leading library services to deal effectively with the range of challenges they currently face.  We have therefore produced the attached White Paper which recommends an Asset-based strategy for public libraries.  Such an approach has been successfully utilised in the community development sector for some years, and we believe the time is ripe for the process to be adopted for libraries.  Black Radley Culture is therefore circulating this White Paper to act as a provocation piece and a focus for discussion.  The White Paper initiates a research project we will be undertaking in the coming months to explore the potential of this innovative approach further.”

Further Details – Please contact

Jon Finch

Managing Director – Black Radley Culture

Email: jon_finch@blackradley.com

Tel: 0845-226-0363    Mob: 07854 077222

Public Sector Cuts Bring New Life to Old Boar

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Question: What does an inch-long metal pig, buried in Bosworth mud for 500 years, have in common with the global financial crisis?

Answer: Together they’re making Leicestershire’s cultural offer more enterprising and sustainable.

In 2011, the tough financial environment meant Leicestershire County Council (LCC ) had to plan for 40% budget cuts in its Library, Heritage and Arts service.  Councillors and officers were not keen simply to scale back libraries, arts activities and museums, which include the impressive Bosworth Battlefield and Snibston Discovery Museum.  Alongside necessary belt tightening, they asked themselves whether there was a way of generating more income.

The 500 year old Bosworth Boar, with other Bosworth Battlefield assets, showed the way.  The Bosworth team increased revenue by £40k in 6 months by bringing new focus to existing products and services, including replicas of the Boar and bespoke visitor packages.  But this was just the start.

Councillor David Sprason, Cabinet member for Adults and Communities, said, “We realised that the service could do more.  What the tough financial conditions enabled us to do was to approach things differently.  Our partners, Black Radley, encouraged us to start by being enterprising – by doing rather than planning.  They got us to focus on Bosworth, on the hidden potential in the people and products.  It worked.  And when our people saw what was possible, it was like a light being turned on.”

Black Radley’s initial work built on ideas and energy already present in the Communities and Wellbeing service in Leicestershire.  Bosworth’s early financial success has demonstrated that it can and should be treated as entirely complementary to the public service ethos.  With Black Radley’s help, LCC are now restructuring the service to bring a powerful enterprise dimension to what they do, and reframing their performance management processes so that success is defined in terms of both customer satisfaction and financial margin, ensuring a more sustainable and resilient future for the service.

Councillor Dave Houseman, Cabinet support member for the service, said, “I think some people were worried that there would be a ruthless obsession with cash.  In practice, what we have seen is that, by bringing a balanced approach to financial and public service imperatives, we will improve customer service and strengthen our performance under both headings.  It’s win-win.”

Black Radley Culture delivers a tried and tested enterprise model for the museums sector.  This unique product enables museums to diversify their funding base, creating more income opportunities and maximising the opportunities provided by their collections and buildings.

Further Details – Please contact

Jon Finch

Managing Director – Black Radley Culture

Email: jon_finch@blackradley.com

Tel: 0845-226-0363    Mob: 07854 077222

 

Black Radley Culture Launched

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Budget cuts have hit England’s cultural services hard, however a radical reduction in staffing and activity is not the only – or the best – response.  “Local government, trusts and third sector organisations possess some extraordinary assets,” says Jon Finch, newly installed Managing Director of Black Radley Culture.  “The challenge now is for services to become more effective in earning their keep.  This means generating more income through a sharper focus on customers.  It may also mean improving governance and management processes, to remove any unhelpful distractions from the business of providing a compelling service.”

Finch (41), who headed up the MLA’s work in the South West and West Midlands as Director of Engagement, and was previously Chief Executive of MLA West Midlands, chose his new role with Black Radley rather than move to a senior position in the public sector.  “I have thoroughly enjoyed my last 8 years working for MLA.  However I wanted a fresh challenge, whilst also continuing to make a difference at the front line in these difficult times.  Black Radley’s robust and business-like approach has brought considerable benefits to the cultural, and wider public, sector over recent years.  They are working at the cutting edge of the sector’s response to these challenging times, bringing enterprise and new governance approaches to bear.  To put it plainly, this is where the action is!”

Black Radley Culture will offer a range of innovative services, tools and products to customers, enabling them to deliver sustainable and enterprising services.

 

Launch of African Igloos

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by Peter Latchford

The new book for public service heroes is published this week by Wingfast Publishing Ltd.   Available on Amazon, in bookshops, or directly from Black Radley.

“Politicians and administrators alike will benefit from this book, which gives a series of practical proposals, based on real-life examples, to improve public services… a significant contribution to helping us grapple succesfully with this complex and difficult issue.“ Damian Green MP

“Peter Latchford… is a master at illustrating the big idea with practical experience. This is truly inspiring guide to public service reform.” Simon Fanshawe, Author and Broadcaster

Would you build an igloo in Africa? The UK public sector spends billions every year doing the equivalent. Citizens do not get the support they need. Politicians of any stripe seem powerless in the face of the grinding leviathan machine that is the public service system. If you are an MP, a councillor, or a senior manager; if you manage public services or work on or with the front line, this book is for you. If you work in health, regeneration, housing, benefits, social services, education, enterprise support – any part of the public sector – it will help you see where the problems are, and how you can help take a lead in solving them.

Ten Top Tips for Big Society

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From political rhetoric to implementation: ten top tips to make Big Society work

Professor Peter Latchford, CEO of specialist consultants to the public sector Black Radley

The Prime Minister has described the concept of Big Society as: “… a guiding philosophy… a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control…[and where] … government [is] more accountable.” The objective is clear and correct, so the challenge is not to define ‘Big Society’, but how to achieve it. So how does political rhetoric become practical reality?

1. Foster the UK’s natural ability for enterprise

The UK has a proud history of enterprise, both individual and civic.  The Big Society concept should be about enterprise. It’s about getting things done; about citizens making the most of their lives; about bringing new vigour into the economic, social and civic life of the country and shaking off old habits.  Most of all, it’s a focus on finding new ways of building a better, more vibrant future.

2. Embrace a new way of thinking

The prevailing public sector mind set emphasises prescription and control.  It results in inflexible services, expensive management systems, and widespread disillusion.  We need new ways of thinking about service design and delivery, which allow error and risk into the system – and, as a consequence, better and leaner services.  To be enterprising is to be pragmatic.

3. Get comfortable with shared responsibility

Where everybody takes responsibility for playing their part, everyone’s well-being improves.  But to take responsibility, a person has to be free to decide.  If all decisions are taken for you, you are not fully responsible, you cannot be enterprising, and you will not flourish. At the heart of Big Society implementation must be the principle that public service decisions need to be taken as close as possible to the person they are there to support.

4. Recognise that there are different types of public service decision, each requiring a distinct approach

Involvement based services, where the users’ individual involvement in the decision around service delivery is as important to their well-being as is the service itself.  There are many examples.  Young people need to be involved in deciding what youth services they receive.  Mental health patients do better when involved in decisions about their own care.  Communities need to be involved in the development of local land use plans.  The service design and delivery should put an emphasis on the relationship with the user, and the users should be given collective responsibility for driving up service quality through peer group communication (akin to hotel ratings websites, or Wikipedia).

Joined up services, where the needs of the individual customer are complex and service alignment is as important as the functionality of one of the services.  A doctor may simply treat a child’s bruising, or she may work with social services, education, the police and others to establish whether there are wider issues of abuse and chaos in the household.  This joining up is not achieved by managers organising meetings.  It happens when front line folk are encouraged to have a strong sense of their professional values, and are given the space to make human connections with people in other disciplines.

Technical, where a specialist understanding, and infrastructure, is needed for the service to be provided. Service delivery should be tightly controlled in-line with a pre-defined specification based on an expert assessment of need. Quality will be maintained by a robust management process based on hard performance measures and benchmarks.  Most public servants know all about this approach – it is (wrongly) assumed to be the right model for all service management.  It is clearly crucial to how an appendix operation is conducted, or a sewage system introduced – but it is not the whole story.

Framework, where there are decisions to be made concerning priorities and resource allocations; where there are difficult choices between models of service delivery; and where robust responses are required to underperformance. Activities under this heading are principally political, and should put an emphasis on examining, evaluating and deciding on the balance between competing priorities. To achieve the fairness imperative, and to enhance the well-being of all our citizens, the key test is the extent to which focus is given to those most in need.  And quality control is through the democratic process.

Each service, or aspect of a service, can be categorised under one of these headings in line with how decisions should best be made about design and delivery.  These different types of decision need to be taken by different people, supported in very different ways.

5. Take a new approach to quality control

Service quality results from adopting the right approach to understanding the need; designing a suitable response; reporting on performance; responding to performance issues; and dealing with risk and failure. Currently, there is a tendency for UK public service planners and managers to give particular emphasis to the technical or managerial approach where, in many cases, this “systems paradigm” does not result in improved service levels or efficiency.  Public sector productivity has actually declined in recent years, with problems of service delivery failure commonplace.  There are alternative ways of ensuring good service quality, through market forces, professional standards, and peer review.

6. Drive efficiency through new perspectives

Efficiency results from measuring performance in the right way; allocating costs in the right way; using information to challenge delivery and drive innovation; recognising the wider and overlapping impact of different service areas; and seeing opportunities to invest and prevent, as well as to contain or cure.

Existing approaches to public sector efficiency tend to be too narrowly drawn with a crude “bangs per buck” philosophy based on the number of outputs achieved per pound spent.  This narrow measure has some management utility. But the best and most enterprising results can be achieved not by spend but by investment – particularly soft assets, like the strength of connections between people in a place.  It is a measureable fact that the stronger this “social capital”, the lower the crime, the better the educational, health and economic outcomes.  It is simpler and cheaper to prevent problems than to cure them.  Prevention requires investment in things that are known to work, before the problems arise

Again, the standard approach to efficiency/value for money may have application for decisions of a technical nature.  But to ensure better use of public funds, different perspectives are required for decisions of the other three types.

7. Focus on fairness

Fairness is not an additional burden on the public sector; it is why we have a public sector.  Delegated decision-making is central to the Big Society theme and the civic enterprise interpretation of it.  But delegated authority can lead to factional decision making and unfair consequences. It is therefore essential for the political decisions to include a fairness framework, ensuring that decisions, regardless of level, are taken in a way which maintains a sense of fairness, and accountability for fairness, across the public sector.

8. Bring it all together in a coherent way people can understand

The Black Radley approach to Big Society makes it clear that we have no ideological commitment to any particular model of service delivery. Indeed, we see that such a commitment would obstruct the enterprising spirit we want to encourage.

This approach offers new opportunities for existing service providers – be they private, public and non for profit – to demonstrate their effectiveness against the different service type headings.  The approach also presents an opportunity to the community itself, and to the not for profit organisations that spring from it, an opportunity to offer new business models for investing in social capital and at the “involvement-based” level of services.

This approach is also a challenge to ourselves, to the politicians, managers and front line staff, to engage better, to cooperate better, to manage better – or to get out of the way and let someone else do it more effectively.

9. Prepare to pay in the short term for long term savings

A stronger, fairer society is less dependent on public support, and prevention is not only better and more effective, it is also cheaper.

However, the process of changing to the new approach will not be without cost.  A variety of financial mechanisms must be utilised to support this radical new thinking, determined by the specific issue being addressed.  These include: releasing resources through cost cutting and targeting; releasing management and bureaucratic overhead by halving the number of targets, halving the number of managers, and emphasising quality control through professional standards and peer assessment; transferring assets to the community (for example, using buildings to act as a catalyst for greater voluntary activity, and allowing communities entrepreneurially to generate revenue to pay for mutual support, in a way public sector agencies cannot); prudential borrowing against future revenue streams (using loans to support place programmes to deliver improvements in educational outcomes/obesity/re-offending etc – and paying the loan repayments out of the reduced costs of future education/health/crime budgets); working with social enterprise, charities and the private sector to develop such prevention programmes, and helping them secure funding through, for instance, social impact bonds (where the return on the investors’ cash is paid if the programme achieves its objectives and is paid a results bonus from public funds) or charitable endowments.

10. Stay true to the four principles of Big Society implementation

Pragmatism. The Parent/Child attitude of the public sector towards the citizen obstructs a move towards the Adult/Adult approach which is needed.

Decisiveness. The worst 10% of performance in any service setting should be removed every year.  Public services are not a game, they have a direct effect on the life chances, well-being and even length of life of the citizen.  In the current financial climate, we should not tolerate freeloading.

Culture Change. The central intent should be to create catalysts for a culture change towards responsibility and enterprise by returning to the principle of absolute respect for people who get things done: in business, in the community, and in public service.

Governance. Devolving responsibility can lead to its abrogation. In order for the civic enterprise model to be successful, considerable emphasis must be put on the governance and accountability of any organisation that makes decisions on behalf of others, or delivers public services on behalf of the public purse.  Profit should be suppressed, but it should be transparent.

ends

Is Outsourcing the Answer?

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Suffolk Council’s plans to outsource all services to third parties is no doubt a well intentioned attempt to reduce cost and improve efficiency in line with the coalition’s Big Society concept. However, public servants will recognise a real danger.  The best intentions of those who are charged with producing an effective contract specification, but who are removed from front line contact, can result in a more inefficient and less effective system. A tendency towards over-specification and a lack of trust in front line deliverers, leads to the leaching out of the “life” of a service and of a service manager’s ability to make cross-functional connections.

Suffolk’s approach can work but it requires a different mindset from the start. The wider public sector is learning that the best and cheapest services are delivered by flexible front line professionals, with a strong commitment to their professional standards supported by enabling managers. The key question for Suffolk, if it wants effective and low cost services, is therefore principally about how it creates the conditions in which such an approach can flourish.  This is also the question for public services as a whole.

The answers to that question are not shaped by an outsourcing ideology. The answers are concerned with stripping out the ineffective control orthodoxy which results in too many targets, too much reporting, and a management hierarchy. They are concerned with finding alternative quality assurance methodologies – including, for instance, transparent peer review – and turning managers into out-of-the-office front line enablers.

They do also include working out the governance and ownership structures which would underpin this approach – but this is the main point: that form follows function. There is no one right answer. Neither keeping services in house, outsourcing to a social enterprise or not-for-profit, nor commissioning a private sector body is the right solution in all cases. And not all quangos should be set on the bonfire.  In the real world, all these options could be considered for all the public services under review. The choice of approach should be determined by two factors. The first is relationships and the second is change. The relationship questions are: which governance structure best enables us to strengthen the key relationships of this service – with customers, with our best professionals, and with key partners? And which structure best enables us to move on from the relationships which hold us back – with poor quality staff and managers, with self-serving pressure groups, with purveyors of ineffective orthodoxies? The change questions are: who shares our vision and has the enterprise and energy to drive it through? What structure would give them the support and incentives to which they would respond well?  And how do we manage the transition in a way which minimizes disruption?

This last point is critical and is too often overlooked.  It is, of course, partly about employment and the message sent to the economy as a whole if statements are made concerning radical changes which appear to threaten large numbers of jobs.  In practice, outsourcing alone is rarely about huge numbers of redundancies (how can it be? – someone still has to deliver the service), but it looks like it is.  And perception knocks confidence and in turn knocks the local economy.  A radical announcement in response to concerns about economic trends can actually lead to the negative outcome we wish to avoid.

There is a deeper point about what the public sector is for.  If we see public service as a vast machinery, churning out a variety of interventions, we will inevitably see management as being about control; and see the improvement and change process as being concerned with rapid re-engineering.  But if we recognise the reality – that the best public services happen only when there are strong relationships in place between client and professional, and across professional disciplines – then we must also see that the machine management analogy is simply counter-productive.  The hard truth about this “soft” reality is that centrally driven change programmes, such as wholesale outsourcing, can fundamentally undermine the trust and wisdom on which good public services are based.  Committed public servants become demoralised or distorted.  To quote from Nockford’s Leviathan, “treat me like machinery, I might just act like a hammer”.  This effect can be observed in any such “systematic” approach to change, not only via an outsourcing initiative.  Since the new service model will be delivered by substantially the same people who are currently in post, maintaining their key “soft“ assets (including relationships and sense of self-worth) is every bit as important as is the shape and ownership of the new arrangement.  Your apple tree might look better in your neighbour’s garden, but you had better be careful with its roots when you dig it up.

The private sector can be an imaginative and innovative partner for public service delivery.  Its focus on the bottom line means that the best businesses have learnt the lessons most public sector organisations would do well to copy: the avoidance status-oriented management structures; the importance of flexibility at the customer interface; and the need for continual redesign of the service itself.  But these benefits do not come automatically.  Indeed, many public sector commissioners of outsourcing have found (for instance, in IT, or in PFI) that their own desire for a detailed contract specification at the outset has tied them in to inflexible and inefficient service models.  A tightly specified service now can be an inefficient model in two years time.

Part of the answer may well be outsourcing but it is unlikely to be the whole answer. My fear is, as time passes and the gap grows between those who buy and those who know what the customers need, the approach will breed a whole new set of problems; producing increased costs and a devaluation of service levels to citizens.

Policing Cuts

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Coping with the cuts: a knee-jerk reduction in ‘non-core’ policing or time to embrace imagination and bravery?

Budget cuts are a certainty for the police.  The question now is, how should they be implemented?  Is there a way of reducing police resource which minimises the impact on front line effectiveness?  Standard budget cutting approaches will not work: they tend to focus on cutting out “non-core” activities such as relationship or neighbourhood based approaches, reducing “non-essential” items, such as training budgets, and requiring managers to implement an across the board reduction by a given percentage.

All three approaches are potentially deeply damaging.  Neighbourhood policing may look non-core from a senior management level, but it has been shown to be fundamental to the change in culture amongst communities which reduces crime in the first place.  What could be more core to the policing role than to help design-out crime?  A reduction in training budgets and other soft internal spends will undermine the ability of the officer on the street to respond with increasing sophistication to the challenges faced in contemporary policing, and will reduce the diversity of people within the force.  And the management-driven, across the board reduction approach inevitably protects the management classes at the expense of the front line – after all turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

The domino effect

It’s not only police budgets which should interest the police.  Across the wider public sector, if budgets are cut in the normal manner, the most in need with suffer the most.  There will be an escalation in poverty, ill-health and social tension, particularly in our overcrowded and high maintenance urban areas.  When inequality grows, particularly when the poorest get poorer, everybody suffers, even the rich – not least through increased levels of crime.  If this coincides with a reduction in front line policing resourcing, our society will face a double whammy.

What we need instead is bravery and imagination.  As a nation we are rightly concerned to ensure that our policing is of good quality.  Over time, this has been translated into an emphasis on a command and control, hierarchical model of management, plus an audit trail process that requires hefty bureaucratic servicing.  Both activities – management and paperwork – are expensive.  We should be asking whether there are other forms of quality assurance that can be employed more effectively and more cheaply.  Wikipedia uses the customer for quality control; academics use peer review; health professionals are kept in check by professional standards bodies: do these models offer an alternative approach for some facets of policing?  Clearly the current approach is the only sensible way to approach some functions – rapid response activities, for instance – but not all.

A change of perspective

We should be looking to reduce the burden on police by reducing the number of things that are considered to be crimes.  Though this is contentious, the stakes are high.  We have to ask ourselves whether our drugs strategy has worked.  Should we, as many drugs professionals will attest, stop treating drug use as a crime and start treating it as an illness?  We could legitimise the production of narcotic drugs under licence and, by so doing, significantly increase the quality and safety of the substances, reducing the health and financial costs to users; and having a substantial impact on drug-related theft, prostitution and health problems.

We also need to cast out the false gods of planning which have dominated public sector activity for a decade or more.  For some years, senior police officers have been struggling with the default planning approach taken in Local Strategic Partnerships.  Typically, public sector plans for economic development, community safety and community cohesion, for example, are built by centralised big-brained people based on copious amounts of “objective” data, following exhaustive consultation with people who think similarly.  By the time the plan is packaged and launched, it is often irrelevant, and may anyway have little connection with what actually happens on the ground.

Investing in social capital

If what we are interested in is a reduced burden on the public purse, greater well-being amongst local people, and – yes – the recapitalisation of poor people, then we should invest in social capital.  We should be exploring new models for investing public and private sector cash in building social glue.  It may be less easy to point at than a new hospital, but if brands can be valued on a corporate balance sheet, why can’t social capital?  And we know that high social capital means low crime.

In short, there is a danger that this budget results in an underinvestment in the empowering themes that will deliver efficiency and fairness and lower crime rates.  If it does fail in this way, we will see a medium to long-term rise in the social morbidities which cost the public purse so dear.  We will only know whether we are eating the seedcorn when we see how the government departments react to the reductions in budget – with imagination or with the traditional protection of existing structures.

ENDS

Don’t Hide in the Bunker over Cuts

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It’s the scene in a movie.  A tornado sweeps in, death and destruction rules , then the dust settles and the lucky survivors emerge with their families from their bunkers.  Those who get to the bunkers survive, those without bunkers do not.

With everyone in the public sector resigned to the inevitable cuts in budgets and all the consequent threats to staff and services, there is a tendency for public servants to rush with their valuables to the bunkers – to protect core budgets and staff, as the budget storms blow.  The consequence is that the damage is done to those services and service users that are left behind.  And the risk we run is that the consequences are unfair: that the most needy suffer the most, and that social tensions and other problems go through the roof.  This is not, unlike the tornado, a natural and inevitable phenomenon.

Over the last few months, there have been many thousands of meetings across the country, nervously anticipating budget cuts, examining options, selecting preferred responses.  And few of those meetings will have show the required imagination and leadership.  As more information emerges from Whitehall concerning the actual cuts, it is predictable that the hatches will be battened down to protect the orthodox ideas of what is important, rather than on some of the better innovations that did start to emerge during more prosperous times.

In times of plenty, with considerable additional funding from government, many local authorities experimented with new services and new forms of service delivery.  These included neighbourhood management, town centre management and regeneration schemes, environmental wardens, job creation schemes, new affordable housing developments – some of which were highly effective.  The successful ones did not do things to people (“interventions”); they recognised that the most sustainable solutions come when you help people take charge for themselves.

The problem with these “softer” approaches is that the successes are less immediate, less easily attributed to the programme itself, and less easily photographed for the front pages.  They also don’t fit well with the masculine management orthodoxy of public services.  Though the results of this approach – call it empowerment, co-production, community development, social capital, or (if you will) Big Society – are extraordinary, they are not as easily managed and justified as a top-down masterplan or a new housing development.  So it is difficult to make the case for their continuation, even though the savings achieved, because they are all in the prevention game, are considerable.

These approaches, with the active support and leadership of local people, have been used to powerful effect in some of our most challenging settings: Lozells, Birmingham, for instance. This super-diverse area, home to people from 170 of the world’s 193 countries, has suffered from pronounced deprivation and social tension.  But in the last three years, during which time there has been a concerted effort to take this more responsive approach, the areas has seen a significant drop in crime rates and an increase in the attractiveness of the area, as measured by the relative rise in house prices.

But what can we do?  If the budgets have to be cut – which they probably do – then what alternative is there than to stop doing some things?

Well, the first thing to ensure is that we are stopping the right things, rather than those things which don’t sit well with the public sector comfort zone.  There is too much happening the way it does because that is the way we have always done it.  A brutal instrumentalism has not delivered results and must be replaced by a different, more relationship-oriented perspective.

And the second opportunity is to bring some innovative thinking to the way we do what we do.  This means getting away from an obsession with optimising our in-year cash revenue and capital spend, and realising that there are revenue and capital budgets out there which dwarf even Labour’s public spending.  I mean, of course, the whole voluntary and community economy which is not cash based, and the whole of the private sector economy, which is.  The real question for public budgets is, How can they help to optimise the effectiveness of these wider systems?  By freeing our public sector budgets from the constraints of the instrumentalist orthodoxy, we can spend smaller amounts on achieving more.  We could even call it “Big Society”. The following are some examples.

Adopt-a-service campaign – This can be part of a general mobilisation campaign.  Examples include neighbourhood managers, town centre managers, local libraries, park maintenance. Why not launch a campaign for public and business support to adopt some of these services? The recent campaign to secure the Staffordshire Hoard is a parallel example.

Set-up social enterprises – Instead of making staff redundant, why not use an equivalent expenditure to help them to set up social enterprises?  Some will fail, but will have picked up powerful skills and attitudes on the way.

Transfer assets on licence to voluntary and community groups to use them to attract private sector funding to develop housing and other amenities and generate income to pay for some local services.

We are still one of the wealthiest societies on earth.  We have learnt enough about human psychology and sociology to know that individual and general well-being (which is the purpose of public services) results not from cash but from a sense of purpose and from strong relationships.  Why don’t we use our cash to support those things?  The last place to find them is in the bunker.

Child Protection, Reviews and Trust in the Front Line

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Professor Peter Latchford, CEO of public sector fairness and effectiveness advisors, Black Radley

It was no great shock that the new Government should announce an independent review into child protection and social work services in England.  The stamping out of serious neglect is a proper objective for any government, and should be pursued with real energy.  But the question is how? – how should that objective be achieved?  It is not immediately obvious that a review will help.  Data collection, analysis, assessment, recommendations… these are the stuff of reviews.  But will all this stuff make even the smallest difference?  In a very real sense, we already know what the answer is.

The problem is that analysis alone is not enough.  Plans are not enough.  Commitment is not enough. Regular outbursts of public outrage and knee-jerk political responses are not enough. And finding someone to blame is not enough.  What is needed is a response which will drive progress and make things tangibly better for the future, rather than just making us feel better for the short-term.

We are very good at apportioning blame. Every time a vicious case hits the headlines, the cry goes up, ‘Where did the system go wrong?’  This is followed shortly afterwards by an identification of process, management and individual failings.  Often the conclusion of these discussions is a high profile sacking, or series of sackings, to appease those baying for blood, and an issuing of extensive guidelines to keep the replacements firmly on track.

But guess what? The constantly refreshed and increasingly rigorous guidelines and summary sackings just act to make the whole situation worse. Those charged with the protection of children and with other social services should be talented and enthusiastic people, but what intelligent person will be keen to study for a hated profession where professional and human judgement is considered to be of less importance than process compliance?  Good people are paid to make good decisions, but under the constant glare of an intense spotlight even very competent and confident people can wither and adopt a stance of risk aversion in the name of survival. Why trust your judgement by leaving a child with their family when your job is safer if you bring the child into the potentially damaging world of state care?

This review habit we have – it is just one response to a problem, and not necessarily the best response.  It is a response which deals in objectivity; in data; in words, submissions and generalized evidence.  It struggles to deal with the life blood of good and bad decision making, on the ground, with families: charismatic and flawed individuals, intuitions and professional wisdom; fashionable dogma and human insight; office bullies, workload pressures, and systems that do not fit the task.  It behaves as its recommended actions were things that exist in isolation of the people who have to enact them and the wider organisational context in which they operate.  And, as a result, it too easily results in the accretion of even more bureaucratic weight on the backs of the front line, to the detriment of the families and the children they serve.

The review habit is part of a wider public sector orthodoxy.  We live with a system which behaves as if public service challenges were engineering problems where perfection is possible, if only we could develop sufficiently fine controls.  This perspective leads to an undermining of front line flexibility, prescriptive work systems, and risk aversion.  It presupposes that all future eventualities can be predicted; that, as in the film Minority Report, the business of a social worker is to know that abuse will happen, and to step in before it does.  It may even, in the short term, save lives by taking many children from their families, a tiny proportion of whom were real risks.  But given free rein, it will result in significant levels of future social dysfunction, as the state is blamed by everybody for everything, and increasing numbers of children grow up outside of families.

We know that centrally defined process controls do not improve public service quality, and that what amount to public floggings undermine effective risk management.  On the other hand, we know that properly developed front line workers, who take pride in their profession, and are supported by hands-on managers, get the best results.  What we need is the rebirth of judgement: an empowerment of the people on the front line to use their training and experience to make the decisions they feel will improve the situation. We need to ensure that our professionals are well-trained; that their managers support, challenge and inspire them, rather than direct them.

We also know that a system which allows for this level of trust is always vulnerable.  It can too easily be brought down by the actions of the inevitable bad penny.  We therefore need to introduce a system for taking out the worst 10% every year, rather than trying to micro-manage all of them; that we all of us understand that we need these committed people to hold us together, and should show them our respect and thanks.  Footballers who suffer a loss of form are dropped from the first team.  Why should incompetent public service workers in life-critical roles be given any more latitude?

The Government has asked the right question: ‘what helps or hinders professionals from making the best judgements and interventions they can to protect a vulnerable child?’  I hope, this time, we have the courage to hear the right answer and to see it through.

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