Innovation in the UK
All posts from: November 2010
Ten Steps to Transformation: 10. Don't try to save money
Over the past ten days, we’ve been exploring different aspects of the challenges facing public services and how innovation can be a way to respond to them. We’ve tried to think about how working with service users, community groups and a wider range of partners can be practical answers to real, very current questions – how can we save money sustainably, and how can we make services better.
If you take one thing away from this series, it’s the insight that the only way to make savings sustainably is to start from how services can be better, not from how to save money. This means doing things differently and finding more effective ways to prevent and solve problems for citizens. For many service providers, cuts may mean that some existing services are no longer viable. But by thinking again about the outcome you want to achieve – and the outcome wanted by service users – there is a chance that these outcomes could be met in better, cheaper ways.
This distinction can help to explain the debate around some councils’ plans for radical reform. It’s striking how councils that are perceived to be trying to save money have met with controversy and public unease. Suffolk’s plans to outsource the majority of its services to local providers, or Barnet’s future shape programme that offers ‘no frills’ services to restructure provision. There has been considerably more public support for change that is driven by outcomes for service users: West Lothian’s commitment to integrated services; Lambeth’s push to become a cooperative council, engaging the local area in different, more reciprocal ways.
Central government is being radical. There are concerns around the speed and scale of proposed reforms to major service areas – health, education, welfare. Not only will local leaders have to manage these structural and political changes, but this will happen alongside steep reductions in spending. But there is undoubtedly ambition. Radical moves by central government have granted legitimacy for big shifts in how local areas provide services. Unknown territory for many, but time to invest in how we want services to operate in the future, and the innovation needed to get us there.
In health for example, how can we stop people needing hospitals, or start to receive more care at home? In justice, how can we support prisoners to stop re-offending and build more stable lives? In social care, how can we help people to age well and maintain strong relationships into later life? These are radical, transformative questions. But it was by starting from people’s aspirations – not from saving money – that Southwark Circle decided to build a network of social support around older people in a London borough and why User Voice engaged ex-offenders as the people to help prisoners change their lives.
There will be little guidance or best practice from central government. The reduction in national targets and local performance measures mean less central control over local outcomes. One of the big questions over the next few months will be how areas can usefully share experience and learn from each other, and what sorts of evidence will determine success. There’s a risk that the only measure of innovation will be how much money was saved, not its outcome on people’s lives. But as we’ve tried to spotlight in this series, there are a whole range of approaches that can support you to achieve both, and a whole community of pioneers that are already leading the way.
This post is part of a series about innovation in public services and how it can save money, drawing on NESTA’s research and practical experience. To learn more about our work and to read our blogs visit the NESTA website.
Ten Steps to Transformation: 9. Don’t start with creating an innovation culture – culture only comes from practice
An important challenge now for chief executives and service leaders is how to create the right environment for radical innovation across the organisation, supported with the right balance of risk and reward. But this doesn’t mean creating an innovative culture for its own sake, but a culture where staff feel empowered and supported to affect change and adapt their own practice.
I was recently part of a workshop with local government chief executives and leaders discussing innovation in the context of spending cuts. What struck me was the ambition and appetite for a more radical shift in how services are delivered, not incremental change. Despite recognising that this kind of change is a tough sell – even when resources are more flexible – it is clear that streamlining and efficiency improvements won’t achieve savings of this scale (as today’s headlines illustrate). Making sustainable savings means transforming services to make them more effective at preventing and solving problems for citizens.
Necessarily then, radical innovation has to be a more distributed effort, led by those with a close understanding of the lives and aspirations of service users. It will be difficult to envisage new solutions centrally, when issues are so contingent on local behaviours and circumstance. This in itself will be a shift for many organisations, as innovation feels far from day to day practice and management. There isn’t the time to get the day job done, let alone think about new approaches. An important challenge for chief executives and service leaders is how to create the right environment for radical innovation across the organisation, supported with the right balance of risk and reward.
Often we’ve been asked how organisations can develop an ‘innovative culture’, a phrase that conjures up unhelpful images of post-it notes, toolkits and ‘think-in’ sessions on beanbags. But I think this is the wrong question. It’s not about creating an innovative culture for its own sake, but a culture where staff feel empowered and supported to affect change and adapt their own practice. Just as services need to engage more meaningfully with users to design and deliver better services, so public service organisations need to develop a culture of co-production amongst their staff.
As we’ve found in our work both in the private and public sector, innovation needs to be embedded in staff attitude and encouraged through clear and supportive management. In attitude, it’s about having the wherewithal to think differently about the challenges you’re facing and to consider new perspectives on the solution. In management, it’s about providing the scaffolding to surface and support new approaches without crushing or curtailing their development.
This same challenge is faced in the private sector, despite the common perception that it’s more innovative than its public counterpart. Managers still make the common mistake of strangling innovation efforts with rigid planning, budgeting and reviewing approaches that they use in their existing businesses – thereby discouraging people from developing or adapting innovation to circumstance.
The opportunity exists now for senior leaders to change the way in which teams are involved in innovation. As is reflected in how government should engage with communities and citizens, so efforts should be made to facilitate and support new relationships internally. This in itself will start to build capacity to operate and engage with the public in different, more effective ways.
This post is part of a series about innovation in public services and how it can save money, drawing on NESTA’s research and practical experience. To learn more about our work and to read our blogs visit the NESTA website.
Ten Steps to Transformation: 8. Help the social sector to help you.
As cuts are made and pressure on public services mounts, it is increasingly recognised that charities, voluntary groups and enterprises will be central in creating the public services of the future.
As our work has shown, social enterprises and charities are more integrated into the community and often better understand local need, providing an effective source of resources and innovative responses to social problems. Take the Northern Way pilot, for instance, which brought together a number of community organisations together to effectively tackle worklessness amongst hard-to-reach people. The UK government typically spends up to £62,000 on getting the average person on incapacity benefit back to work, but the Northern Way pilot cost less than £5,000.
Yet with government funding making up 38% of the UK charitable sector’s income, and 13% of charities getting half their income from government, charities are going to struggle to step into the central role that the Big Society has reserved for them without additional support. The Transition Fund announced to support charities facing “real hardship” may help to some extent, but there is little point developing the capacity of innovative charities if their innovative solutions cannot be incorporated into mainstream public service delivery. Rather than the state pulling back, the success of these approaches depend upon mainstream public service providers working in partnership with the social sector – something that has traditionally been notoriously difficult.
Many organisations in the social sector – and even small businesses -struggle to access public service contracts. They are seen as small scale, risky or marginal, and subsequently the demands of public contracting – such as track record of experience, size of contracts and transaction costs - tend to favour large over small suppliers. If the social sector is to be able to engage with public services, then a shakeup of funding streams and a simplification of procurement is needed, something that the newly announced Backing Small Business initiative is trying to tackle.
It is vital that the organisations that can save money in the long-term are not seen as an ‘easy target’ in a time of cuts. To provide better, cheaper public services we need to open up the innovation challenge and engage with the social sector now.
By Ruth Puttick
This post is part of a series about innovation in public services and how it can save money, drawing on NESTA’s research and practical experience. To learn more about our work and to read our blogs visit the NESTA website.
Ten Steps to Transformation: 7. Turn to your community as partners in tackling big issues
Assuming community ability to respond to local issues is the bedrock of Government’s Big Society agenda, and its forthcoming ‘Localism’ bill is expected to enable communities to run local public services. But as public spending is reduced, there are legitimate questions about how and at what point communities should be engaged in decision making and in service design and delivery. Is this just about scaling back state provision? What support do communities need to get involved? Purposefully engaging communities is not easy.
In our own experience, meaningful community participation can be a powerful way to respond to social challenges and to prompt redesign of public services. But securing engagement beyond the ‘usual suspects’ requires structured support and careful design. People need to feel equipped for participation – with the right information and means to take part. And maintaining engagement means a commitment to transparency and consistent communication, on both sides. With appropriate support, communities can and want to get involved.
Firstly, in understanding the problem, involving the community can be a powerful way of redefining the challenges faced. Drawing upon people’s knowledge of the issues faced locally can garner new perspectives on the problem and ensure that resources are spent effectively. Redbridge Council, for instance, is applying Participatory Budgetingto involve local people in future spending decisions. By catalysing community involvement and drawing upon the knowledge and resources this offers, the council is able to generate better, different, and cheaper ways of meeting local needs.
And secondly, in delivering the solution. We have already argued for public services to utilise the wealth of ideas in the community, but we can go beyond this and enable communities to develop new approaches to tackle big issues. When we were running the Big Green Challenge it was clear that communities understood local need, could tap into networks and relationships, and had the capacity to respond. Rather than big upfront investment, the communities involved created innovative new solutions as long as they were given the right kind of support. A little investment unleashed an enormous amount of additional resource.
Cheap and easy to use social media and collaborative technologies are making it increasingly easy for communities to mobilise around a common cause anywhere in the world– and for government and local authorities to join the conversation. Barnet Council for instance uses Google Alerts to be notified of online conversations amongst residents, enabling a collaborative relationship to be created. And Kirklees Council is building an online community resource to enable residents to discuss solutions to problems in the areas.
Community action and engagement has become more than consultation and is increasingly advocated as a means for delivering services. Even before the cuts it was recognised that there are issues government can’t respond to on their own. Issues ranging from complex, global challenges such as climate change, to local and personal issues such as poor public health or anti-social behaviour can be difficult to determine centrally.
Just as individual users can be more involved in services, so communities can offer a wealth of ideas and resources to support the transformation of public services. The challenge is using this in the right way – using people’s existing networks and relationships to support better services but not taking advantage of them. Processes like participatory budgeting – an approach which NESTA has based a new programme on – might offer a route for doing so.
By Ruth Puttick
This post is part of a series about innovation in public services and how it can save money, drawing on NESTA’s research and practical experience. To learn more about our work and to read our blogs visit the NESTA website.
Ten Steps to Transformation: 6. Do you really know best? Service users are experts too.
Partnership with service users is part of the day job for many frontline staff. Teachers can’t teach if students don’t learn. Doctors can’t heal if patients don’t comply to treatments. And yet public services are rarely designed with these principles in mind. The implicit assumption – in design terms at least – is that service users don’t want to play more of a role, and that it’s only the domain of professionals to take decisions and direct resources.
Yet confronted by complex and often quite personal problems such as mental health or physical conditions, isn’t every patient an expert patient? It’s difficult for even the most experienced professional to know the ins and outs of people’s lives and how they manage their conditions. Of course, public service professionals can often be frustrated by ‘non-compliance’ by users of services, but the answer must be to build new types of relationships rather than to neglect the role that users can play. Co-production – where staff and users work together in equal, reciprocal relationships – can help us to develop more effective, more preventative, and so more sustainable public services.
In health, we’ve shown how programmes can use the knowledge and experience of patients with long-term conditions to help others self-manage and prevent problems arising. We’ve seen examples of co-produced services delivering markedly improved outcomes, such as the HOPE service in Lincolnshire which ‘buddies’ patients with lung and respiratory conditions with a multidisciplinary professional team to design and deliver the programme. This award-winning service has some of the best patient outcomes nationally.
How could service users contribute to services in different, deeper ways? Scallywags is a parent-run nursery in Bethnal Green, East London. It was faced with service closure in 2005 due to changing regulations in child care. But rather than shutting down, Scallywags worked out a new framework to allow parents to be more involved in the nursery’s practice. There’s still a waiting list for places, and what’s brilliant is that Scallywags remains an affordable service. As a cooperative, with parents taking part in delivery, it costs just £2.50 per hour. Parents can afford to work, but can also join an instant community of peers and local residents.
As we argued last week on this blog, this isn’t to suggest that with state resources scaled back we can depend on voluntary time. Co-produced public services demand a very different role for state providers – and a different kind of support. Money savings come from designing better services that can harness the time and experience of service users and engage people in more effective ways.
Local Area Coordinators are a great way to illustrate this. LACs are state funded, public service professionals who are positioned within communities with direct relationships to service users. They work together with service users to really understand their needs and draw the right services around them. The approach started initially in the social care community, helping people with disabilities access a wider range of services – often more informal forms of provision than statutory services. This saved money as LACs were able to redirect demand away from expensive residential care, but it also improved the experience of services for their users and encouraged take-up and access.
How would services look different if they started from the users’ perspective? How would users want to engage in services, and what support would they need to do so? Assuming people can and want to be engaged could open up a whole number of ways to make services better. And that doesn’t just go for individual users, but communities too – more on that tomorrow.
By Chris Sherwood
This post is part of a series about innovation in public services and how it can save money, drawing on NESTA’s research and practical experience. To learn more about our work and to read our blogs visit the NESTA website.
