29th June 2011
Working towards ‘smart local government’
Local authorities and their public sector partners are considering how they can set about working to the government’s new agenda for public services in the context of front loaded spending cuts and pressure to achieve “more for less”. Many organisations have already set their efficiency targets for years to come and are now tasked with the most significant challenge; to realise these targets whilst maintaining frontline services.
Local authorities will have to make difficult decisions. Some will no longer fund or deliver certain services, and may well provide less or charge more for services they do deliver. Despite the myriad of top-down reforms and reorganisations local public services are dealing with, in the medium term, the only way to ensure that the efficiency targets are met and resultant services are sustainable is to work with and through staff; engaging and empowering employees to redesign services . Councils and their partners’ staff hold the key to unlocking the creative, collective potential of the council as a community leader.
The question is, how can employers empower and engage their employees to undertake this kind of innovation and what lessons have been learned from previous reform initiatives?
Total Place
Towards the end of the last government’s time in office, many local authorities had begun working with other public services in their area to undertake a radical new approach to public service reform. Under the Total Place pilot, and other schemes like it, public services were finding new ways to redesign services around the service user and crucially, were involving frontline workers – those who were closest to service users – in the process.
Total Place describes an approach to public service reform in which a Local Strategic Partnership maps all the public service spending and activity in its area, in order to begin to eliminate the overlaps and redesign services that better meet the local population’s needs. The starting point is often for local public service bodies, such as police, probation services, NHS and local authorities to come together, across organisations and tiers to listen to and hear the experiences of end-users of services. These citizens quite often have to navigate a myriad of local agencies and the discrete services that need to identified and accessed through a range of locations and contact telephone numbers.
To take an example, Lewisham council in London found that an offender with complex needs could receive 11 different assessments from a number of agencies in order to have their individual needs addressed. Many of these assessments duplicate effort, causing inconvenience for the service user and inefficiencies in resource use. The council estimates that by rationalising the number of assessments a saving of 30 per cent (£100,000) can be made.
There are plenty of examples of where involving frontline workers has had a dramatic impact. In Pendle, Local Family Support Panels have been given a new lease of life and redesigned, with simplified, universal mechanisms, processes and protocols to free up and empower the frontline worker, valuing them and recognising their key skills in experience. They are being supported and charged with managing the Lead Professional and other direct delivery roles, alongside the role in attending the case management panel to support the best interest and best meet the needs of local citizens requiring support. The professionals are tailoring and taking responsibility for the unique package of “interventions” that are put in place by the multi-agency panel, also monitored and reviewed by them.
The pilots may have ended, but the lesson of reforming public services through collaboration between front line employees and service users is an important one. The scale of the cuts facing local government may be daunting, but the experience of Total Places suggests that there need not necessarily be a trade off between improving services for users and reducing budgets. The greater challenge is to engage the workforce at a time of uncertainty and low morale.
Total Place dissemination programme in Yorkshire and The Humber
YoHr space, the Regional Efficiency and Improvement Partnership (RIEP) for Yorkshire and The Humber, (working with the Government Office for Yorkshire and The Humber) commissioned a regional dissemination programme to share the learning from Bradford’s Total Place work, other pilot projects and similar projects nationally and support this kind of work locally.
The Bradford Total Place work mapped spending, engaged service users and brought public service organisations to work together on the process redesign. The over-arching theme was creating a “gateway to integrated services”, overcoming the obstacles to service navigation and delivery for young people leaving care, adults leaving prison and older people leaving hospital was the task set to the different streams of public service agencies, lead by the Local Strategic Partnership.
This work brought about a significant step-change in working, behaviour and overall culture from the Local Strategic Partnership down. Rather than delivering services to people, the services were designed by engaging with people. Although bottom line savings were identified as a consequence of adopting a Total Place approach, the most important outcome of the work was the real change to ways of working that put service users at the heart of improvement and reform.
YoHr space wanted to spread the lessons from Bradford throughout the region. The aspiration was for people working in localities to feel inspired, informed and empowered to take forward Total Place style work to bring quality and efficiency benefits to public services in their areas. The dissemination programme evolved through a series of sub-regional workshops that took place in early in 2010, including an event specifically for Local Strategic Partnership networking, a regional conference, with a final latest learning and support workshop.
As with the recent work from the “bottom-up” in Pendle, each of the events was attended by frontline workers and first tier employees in public service organisations, who developed knowledge, experience and confidence through the programme to develop the ‘total place’ type approach across the region. Apart from learning about the Bradford experience and other projects across the country, the workshops also aimed at identifying and sharing existing practice in the sub-region and fostering a sub-regional exchange of experiences and pooling of efforts.
Attendees engaged in learning about Bradford’s pilot work – the ‘deep dive’ and a locality-based approach to integrated services. Facilitators, through a series of structured activities, captured existing similar practice and methodologies in the sub-region and supported arising opportunities for local peer work to collaborate, develop and organise services together.
Local public sector partners also had the opportunity to access tailored Local Improvement Advisor support. The dedicated regional LSP Total Place network event took place after the workshops, addressing Total Place, partnership working and strategic governance. The progress made at the workshops and LSP event was then presented to the regional Total Place conference for executive level staff from local authorities and partner local public service providers and elected leaders, for them to respond to the staffs’ initiative, creative work and solutions-based proposals.
The result of this deep engagement of the public service workforce across the Yorkshire and Humber region was to see a whole array of Total Place type projects set up by those who had attended the dissemination programme across the region. Wakefield began programmes aimed at addressing inter-generational worklessness and alcohol issues. Similar work was set up in Barnsley (Total Family), Doncaster (Work and skills, alcohol), South Humber area (provision of a skilled workforce), Humber sub-region (joint services), North East Lincolnshire (Neighbourhood Management), Hull and elsewhere.
Senior managers and politicians are overseeing the move towards achieving service transformation and sustainable efficiencies through staff engagement. They are overcoming the inertia which has arisen from a lack of self confidence or sense of local control and are taking the risk and leading with initiative. Despite the huge challenges facing local government, there is evidence that collaborative working between frontline employees in different services and their managers is continuing.
Working together with IPA
Adam Fineberg is a leading independent adviser on local public services. He has worked with many local authorities and other public services to bring about sustainable change through the involvement of the workforce. He will be working with the IPA to offer members and clients in the public sector support in managing change with the workforce. Together we will be able to offer clients tailored support that brings together the IPA’s expertise on employee engagement with Adam’s knowledge and experience of service and process redesign. If you would like to find out more about working with Adam and the IPA, please contact involve@ipa-involve.com
About the author
Adam is a leading independent advisor on local public services. He has worked over the years with local and national governments on a whole systems approach to addressing the entire architecture around service provision - making things work better for local people.
He has recently been engaged by Pendle BC to build integrated frontline working in accordance with Lancashire’s Total Family model and completed assignments: with Wakefield on Total Place/Community Budgeting; Barking and Dagenham, addressing levels of community confidence in local public services; on the Olympics Strategic Regeneration Framework; nationally on the Connecting Communities programme; and in Yorkshire and the Humber with Bradford and in the region on the Bradford Total Place pilot, dissemination and collaborative leadership. Previously, in the City of Westminster, he developed locality Think/Total Family type integrated working and Children’s Centres provision in line with the principles of prevention, early identification and intervention. See www.fineberg.org.uk for further information.
