For whom the bell tolls

On the need to diversify delivery models, and prioritise people over processes
By Chris Wright, originally featured in Public Service: State of Transformation Report published by the PSTA in 2018

I’ve worked in public service delivery for 30 years and every day I see the painful impact of an underperforming and, at worst, failing system. Our public sector is one of the most centralised – monopolised – among advanced democracies. Our services are less than the sum of their considerable parts: the able and dedicated public servants within them. We have some of the best hospitals and schools in the EU, but also some of the most expensive and least effective. We’re being let down as people who need those services and who work in and with them. However, to conclude that more state control and direction is the answer means you’ve asked the wrong question and misunderstood the problems.

A ‘carillon’ is a peal of bells. The name Carillion was chosen in 1999 to symbolise a new direction for construction business Tarmac, reflecting its ambition to expand into facility management and maintenance, transport, and energy. On 15 January 2018 Carillion went into compulsory liquidation and its bells tolled for all of us

Many words have been written about Carillion’s collapse, its financial difficulties, and the immediate implications for schools, prisons and hospitals. The aftershock is ongoing for small and medium sized businesses waiting for payment, and employees hoping for future stability. These are direct costs. We may never be able to measure the cost of diverted resources in Whitehall or City Hall, from managing Brexit or supporting vulnerable people to designing a sustainable rescue package.

Our public sector is one of the most centralised – monopolised – among advanced democracies. Our services are less than the sum of their considerable parts: the able and dedicated public servants within them.

A high-profile contract failure places yet more strain on an already straining system but once the initial press coverage subsides, the memorable label for our collective experience file is ‘Carillion Collapse’, not ‘System Failure’, or ‘Death Knell for the Status Quo’. This is our opportunity to rethink everything about public services: what we do, when we do it, how we do it, and, crucially, who does it.

Join over 200 thought leaders and public service transformation practitioners at the PSTA’s annual conference on Thursday 23 May 2019, where we’ll help each other understand what works and what doesn’t in achieving better outcomes for citizens. Click here to register for the conference

Public vs private:a meaningless distinction

The collapse of Carillion, some commentators say, proves that the private sector must never run essential public services. Education, health, justice and transport infrastructure should only ever be delivered directly by the state. We believe this position is neither feasible, nor desirable.

Just because Carillion and other private companies have failed us doesn’t mean the principle of delivery by organisations not directly employed by central or local government is wrong, just that this is being governed ineptly: process is prized over purpose and perverse incentives drive the wrong kind of behaviour.

We must forget about the meaningless distinction between ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘charity’. Pitting private against public, outsourcing against in-house, ‘for profit’ against ‘not for profit’ is ideological and unnecessary. The distinction that matters most is the level of freedom to do what works, and the level of accountability to prove it.

Public services must be transparent and accountable to their users: voters and taxpayers. No shareholders should be getting rich from the state’s duty to administer justice, security, health and education.

Beyond these fundamental principles, the delivery of a public service can and should take any form suitable to make that service the best it can be. The state should have the default responsibility for overall coverage, consistency and quality, but there should be no default delivery model. It’s this mentality that at best tolerates and at worst mandates mediocrity, from private, charity and public providers. A system whereby the current providers are Big Business or Big Charity, in hock to Big Government, is the least innovative and least transparent.

A handful of organisations are locked into rigid, transactional, contracts, which can’t be disrupted from within or without, nor can they be responsive or agile in a changing context. Trust in the corporate establishment – which increasingly includes large charities – is collapsing, because people are not stupid. They can see the difference between the organisations or systems that serve producer interests, and those that are putting their own needs first – for cheaper clothes, food or travel, for better schools or healthcare, for quicker maintenance in their buildings.

Given how much we know about what works, why can’t we both raise the quality bar overall and narrow the gap between the worst and the best? Why can’t we design an enabling and self-improving system which supports existing and new provider ‘entrants’ to perform as well if not better than these current outliers? The answer lies in the rigidity, perversity, and vacuity of national and central public service commissioning.

Systemic, chronic weakness

Carillion’s collapse is just one more acute manifestation of systemic, chronic, weakness. The immediate consequences have been catastrophic: for hospitals requiring urgent maintenance, for prison officers and prisoners surrounded by litter and rats’ nests, for small plumbing or catering businesses who won’t be paid.

But Carillion was simply doing what the market demanded. Its contracts showed economies of scale on a Treasury spreadsheet but not a sophisticated approach to real short and long term costs, or ‘positive externalities’. Generalist officials in Whitehall were incentivised to transfer risk and responsibility to large providers, through artificial competitive exercises. These big organisations were perceived to be ‘safe’ because of their scale and market exposure. The exercise rewarded the same magical thinking through spreadsheets and formulae that was found in the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe, and formalised monopolistic and monolithic delivery. The output that was measured and rewarded was the project management paperwork in Whitehall, not the efficacy of frontline practice.

The sheer scale, cost, and complexity of modern public services mean that their design and management cannot be the sole responsibility of Whitehall and City Hall. The state can’t be the default deliverer for the vital services we need to flourish as citizens and humans. Its cumbersome machinery struggles to be responsive, agile or transparent.

The answer is diversity
To correct systemic failure we need systemic change.

1. We must diversify our models, to unlock capacity.
We need to create new financial vehicles and ways of working that don’t have the same constraints as commissioning processes. We need insurgents to take on the incumbents: small teams representing all sectors who behave like startups, liberated from bureaucratic mind-sets. Why shouldn’t a Trust governed by a board of local people take on a Community Rehabilitation Company?

In many cases we don’t need legislation or even new policies to do this, we just need the courage and confidence to battle the constraints of an inflexible system and risk-aversion. Britain prides itself as a nation of small businesses, with 99% of all private sector business in the UK classified as SME. We need to harness this energy and agency to design and deliver our public services.

West London Zone case study:

What: WLZ is a place-based collective impact project, a partnership of organisations which together deliver support to children and young people living in three square miles of inner west London, inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone in the USA.   

Who: WLZ is currently working in two boroughs North Hammersmith and North Kensington, with plans to grow. They work with local schools, nurseries and children’s centres (‘anchors’) to identify the children and young people who would benefit from a range of new opportunities to improve their outcomes.

How: The work with the anchors is coordinated by Link Workers, based in the anchors, who work closely with children and young people to help them make use of the opportunities on offer. Behind the scenes, the WLZ ‘backbone’ team manages the finance which supports the partners and collects data on their performance.

Impact: The initial results show that the children engaged with support to a high level in 2016/17- from October to December, West London Zone gained consent to participate from 132 children – beating their sign-up target of 120 children. The results also showed strong academic results and a positive correlation between the number of sessions attended, and improvement in both maths and reading.

Doncaster Payment by Results case study:

What: The Payment by Results (PbR) pilot provided ‘through the gate’ support to offenders released from Doncaster prison; the overall aim being to test the impact of a PbR model on reducing reconviction levels.

Who: The HMP Doncaster pilot targeted, for cohort 1, adult male offenders that were released between 1st October 2011 and 30th September 2012. The results are based on a 12 month re-conviction measure that tracks offences committed in the 12 months following release from prison. Who: WLZ is currently working in two boroughs North Hammersmith and North Kensington, with plans to grow. They work with local schools, nurseries and children’s centres (‘anchors’) to identify the children and young people who would benefit from a range of new opportunities to improve their outcomes.

How: The pilot involves the provision of ‘through the gate’ support to offenders released from Doncaster Prison. This involved the introduction of case management in custody and community t o enable a proactive, holistic, and offender led approach. It also provided community based case management support to offenders sentenced to less than 12 months, which they would not otherwise have received. How: The work with the anchors is coordinated by Link Workers, based in the anchors, who work closely with children and young people to help them make use of the opportunities on offer. Behind the scenes, the WLZ ‘backbone’ team manages the finance which supports the partners and collects data on their performance.

Impact: The introduction of the PbR contract resulted in the support provided to offenders shifting from a reactive, ‘first come, first served’ basis to a proactive delivery model facilitated by case management. The reconviction rate for the first cohort (October 2011 to September 2012) was 5.7 percentage points lower than the baseline, although lowered to 3.3 percentage points for second cohort.

2. We must diversify our commissioning, to drive local accountability
People are complicated. The systems built to support them must be flexible enough to adapt, grow and change to account for complexity and personalisation, and the conditions must be created to allow this.

The Social Value Act was passed in 2012, requiring commissioners to think about how they will secure greater social, economic and environmental benefit. Where it has been used, it’s had a positive local effect, mandating quality and best value through innovation and a more responsive way to deliver public services. But it hasn’t nudged behaviour overall. Some procurement processes score against social value, some not, with no clear pattern of who and why.

Effective local commissioning holds the key to solving the current tension between localism and quality. We have a real lottery in public service provision at the moment because we claim to have national standards but regulators and inspectors show who is failing to meet them. More importantly, the individual experience of ‘adequate’ in one school or hospital varies widely. Transparency that gently encourages good competitive behaviour is proven to be effective. When we say that the state has default accountability for consistency, coverage and quality, we mean that it provides the accessible technology and requirement for real-time, accessible, performance data.

Alongside supportive inspection frameworks, central teams can step in to correct failure as soon as it is evident, but can also let successful institutions continue to flourish and understand and share why they are so successful.

3. We must diversify our delivery, to prize people over process
It doesn’t really matter what the form or structure looks like: partnership, CIC, social enterprise, mutual. What matters is whether the structure allows the human relationships to work in the right ways.

Source:
Learning from the Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme – Seven Features of Practice and Seven Outcomes – Catch22 delivered Project Crewe in the first round of the Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme Practice measures

Practice measures

• Strength- based practice frameworks
• Systemic theoretical models
• Multi-disciplinary skills sets
• High intensity/consistency of practioner
• Family focus
• Skilled direct work
• Group case discussion

Outcomes

• Create greater stability for children
• Reduce risk for children
• Increase wellbeing and resilience for children and families
• Reduce days spent in state case
• Increase staff wellbeing
• Reduce staff turnover and agency rates
• Generate better value for money

This is the moment

If public policy response to Carillion – and indeed the Grenfell Tower tragedy – is to place even more contracts for maintenance or catering or specialist services in the hands of generalist civil servants, would our experience as carers, patients or passengers, improve? It’s unlikely. Choices would become even narrower, risk avoidance and transactional behaviour would increase, and processes would mandate mediocrity, not unleash innovation and improvement.

In the same way that the financial crash was the opportunity for entrepreneurs to take on rentier capitalists, this is the moment for social sector organisations to recapture their confidence and radicalism, and reassert the right to be a disruptive, not a reactionary, force in the world. The real opportunity is for these two groups to identify their fellow travellers in public sector bureaucracies and form common cause. The bell is tolling, louder than ever.

Our public services are failing:

49 per cent of young men under the age of 21 in the Criminal Justice System have spent time in care

86 per cent of young men in YOI had been excluded from school at some point in their life 86 per cent of young men

Just 11 per cent of children in care gain five GCSEs compared to the national average of over 60 per cent

In 2013, 34 per cent of all care leavers were not in employment, education or training, at age 19, compared to 15.5 per cent of 18-year-olds in the general population

11 per cent of all young people in the UK are NEET

Our public sector is also one of the most centralised – monopolised – among advanced democracies:

• Of the five million people employed in the public sector three million are employed by central government and two million by local government
• Just over a third, or 250 billion of government spending went to external suppliers in 2015- 20167, of which the lions-share sits with Interserve who won £938 million of contracts issued by the Government this year (11 per cent of the total), Amey who won £928 million, and Carillion with £897 million

We must forget about the meaningless distinction between ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘charity’. Pitting private against public, outsourcing against in-house, ‘for profit’ against ‘not for profit’ is ideological and unnecessary. The distinction that matters most is the level of freedom to do what works, and the level of accountability to prove it.

Fact22 case study:

What: Fact22 (Families Achieving Change Together) offers an innovative children’s social care model which engages family practitioners, peer mentors and volunteers, with a range of skills and experience who work with children in need to prevent their potential escalation or return into the child protection system.

Who: Fact22 is delivered by Catch22 in partnership with Cheshire East Council. They work with families with children aged 0 to 19-years-old who are identified as Children in Need in Crewe and Macclesfield.

How: By using strength-based interventions, the service seeks to strengthen the family unit, instigating change where possible and necessary to reduce factors contributing to concerns around risk and need. This solution-focused approach offers targeted and intensive engagement for children and families, dedicated keyworker support, coaching and mentoring and planning, delivering and reviewing individual programmes.

Impact: Achieve positive sustainable outcomes for families with children who are identified as Children in Need.  

Switchback case study:

What: Switchback provides an intensive rehabilitation programme, helping young adult offenders – known as Trainees – make real, long-lasting change after their release from prison.

Who: The organisation works with young male offenders aged 18-30, with the majority from East and Central London.

How: Switchback provides employment at a training cafe as soon as a prisoner is released; learning in a real work environment. They are supported by a Switchback Mentor throughout their journey who will help them to learn how to make the right choices, be reliable, get the required help and practice trying new things. Switchback works closely with a wide range of employers, arranging mock interviews, visits and work placements to build stability and rewarding and sustained employment.

Impact: The reoffending rate for Switchback Trainees currently stands at 9 per cent. This is a fifth of the expected rate for prison leavers (44 per cent). More than 80 per cent of those that successfully move on from Switchback have secured a permanent job.

Just because Carillion and other private companies have failed us doesn’t mean the principle of delivery by organisations not directly employed by central or local government is wrong, just that this is being governed ineptly: process is prized over purpose and perverse incentives drive the wrong kind of behaviour.

Redemption Roasters:

What: Redemption Roasters aims to help address the state of reoffending by running a roastery and barista training centre at Aylesbury Prison.

Who: Redemption Roasters were approached by the Ministry of Justice to help reduce reoffending rates.

How: As part of their mission to help young offenders reintegrate into society, Redemption Roasters provide training to achieve competitionlevel barista skills. They roast specialty coffee in small batches for wholesale and retail customers, and run a café for the prison community and visitors. On their release, they also help ex-offenders find work using coffee industry contacts.

Impact: Assignment to the roastery is highly oversubscribed and offenders feed back positively: ‘I wake up and I’m so excited to get to work. I’ve never had a job before; I’ve never felt that before. And I get here and I forget I’m in prison the whole time. The feeling in here is what a road [out of prison] must feel like when you’re not from bad ends. I

Ashwood Academy:

What: The Ashwood Academy is a small, supportive alternative education centre for learners aged 11 to 16-years-old. The national curriculum is delivered within a flexible and nurturing environment that recognises individual needs.

Who: The Ashwood Academy provides short-term placements for young people in the Basingstoke area who need additional behavioural, emotional or medical support.

How: The strong wrap-around approach at the Academy enables learners to build their confidence, overcome barriers to learning and progress to a positive next step. The school’s curriculum and extra-curricular activities fosters pupils’ enjoyment of learning and facilitates success.

Impact: Since opening, the school has worked with 228 young people who have been excluded from mainstream education, supporting their academic and pastoral development until they are able to move back into mainstream education.

At the time of writing, Chris Wright leads Catch-22’s team of 1,340 staff and 314 volunteers that this year has supported 44,090 people through 138 services, across 144 sites nationally. He originally trained as a probation officer and in 1999 established Nottingham’s first multi-agency Youth Offending Team. From there he moved to the Youth Justice Board as Head of Performance. Chris is an advocate for the social enterprise sector playing a key role in the delivery of public services. As a result, Catch22 is known both for its innovative and collaborative approach to justice, education, employability and social care.