“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

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

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.

“Easy to use, supports group working, good reporting and comprehensive”.

Version 2.0 of the tool, fully compliant with the Equality Act 2010, will be available shortly.  www.impactequality.co.uk

The light touch pragmatic monitoring is especially welcome but must not be used by organisations to avoid full implementation.

Legislation cannot achieve a fairer Britain that can only be achieved by people caring.

Interesting to note that the government did concede that it should have carried out equality impact assessments on the budget.  Hopefully this important assessment process will now get more backing from the public sector in order to deliver better services for all members of society.

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.

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

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.

The law requires most public bodies including central government to carry out an impact assessment to identify whether any decision might disadvantage people purely because they were from certain groups.  These groups include people with disabilities, people from different ethnic backgrounds or men and women.

Where there is a negative impact the government should have due regard to the need to modify the decision.  Due regard means that the government should balance the need to promote equality in proportion to its relevance.

Clearly the emergency budget decision is a major one for the activities the government funds.

Impact assessments are the process by which the government should identify and act on the need to modify decisions to have better regard to the need to promote equality.  An impact assessment comprises a number of stages including the collection and analysis of relevant data, assessment of the impacts upon people from the different groups, consideration of measures which might mitigate any adverse impact, publication of the results of the impact assessment and arrangements for monitoring for future adverse impact.

The Equality Act 2010 has tried to simplify the legislation which requires public bodies to conduct equality impact assessments although it is not yet clear how this will put into practice.

In our experience the equality impact assessment process is not carried rigorously by government and a whole host of other public sector agencies.  It does seem to be well policed and at times agencies appear to pay lip service to the requirements seen as a bureaucratic chore. It can be reframed in a more positive light of basic performance management.  An equality impact assessment asks two important questions.  Firstly, this decision, this policy this activity, how well does it meet the needs of these customer groups?  Secondly, what are we going to do about it?

If as Mrs May contends the emergency budget might have a disproportionate affect upon women, ethnic minorities, disabled and older people then clearly under the law there should be an equality impact assessment and it should have been published.