A case study of a council and place that scores higher in this aspect
Increasingly, all our commissioning is done across partners, with providers and in co-production with people who draw on services. This means that we are putting much greater emphasis on getting a good and legally compliant process in place – but we see that as a platform to work together on ongoing learning and practice. In a recent homecare contract, we were participating in weekly sprint meetings at one stage as service patterns were developed jointly with carers and service users. We were paying close attention to the implications for cost, but it did come in within the budget envelope, and we learned a lot. We have found it useful to blend different sources of data to understand what a service can provide – from service users, practitioners, population data, things we’ve picked up from elsewhere, and so on. Extra Care housing was a major capital investment, so that side of things was a much stricter, more formal process, however we want to go back to prototyping how the service actually works once the buildings are ready to run.
A case study of a council and place that scores lower in this aspect
We follow the classic commissioning process. The challenge is that we never have enough time. When we can do it, we really go to town and thoroughly analyse high-quality data to identify needs, current provision, gaps, opportunities for innovation etc to come up with a ‘perfect spec’. The challenge is that, often, we just get squeezed out of time to do that properly and by the time we go to market we often find we are having to make in-year savings, so a lot of that work can feel insignificant.
Even in less-than ideal contracts with problematic providers, we often end up running the contract for an extra year to give ourselves time to run a proper OJEU process. As part of trying to stretch budget to meet needs, we are increasingly letting very long contracts to try to support lower prices and meet some of the needs of the voluntary and community sector. Because we want to start at the start and get the specification right, and because of all these challenges, we probably are not great on contract management. When we get the time, we do a thorough lessons learned exercise at contract close – part of feeding into the needs specification. Overall, I think we could be closer to practice, and we find co-production hard to get right. We have also found it hard to align our processes with those of partners, who seem to operate in very different ways.
Equality and equity considerations with this aspect
A strong process needs to build in the following elements:
- Understanding of unmet and marginalised need
- Access for those who may be excluded
- Strong equality and equity in specification and contract management
- Co-design and shared learning with excluded groups