Centre for Local Policy Studies

Radical Efficiency: Different, Better, Lower Cost Public Service: Some Early Thoughts

Professor John Diamond (the University’s Centre for Local Policy Studies) discusses some of the key ideas in this report from NESTA:  ”There are 2 linked (but separate) discussions going around at the moment: first one says that we could (must?) use the current cuts crisis to re-imagine what a public sector could look like – and that in order to develop that idea we should avoid opposing the Coalition Cuts for their own sake. We need to look at what could be done differently and to think creatively about alternative ways of producing and managing public services. This idea is also reflected in recent reports from the New Economics Foundation who together with NESTA have published reports – see The Challenges of Co-production (2009) and Mass Localism (2010). Many of these ideas were prefigured in a paper by Geoff Mulgan (2007) – Ready or Not? Taking Innovation in the Public Sector Seriously. The second discussion says: very few public sector managers have direct experience of making the kind of cuts set out by the Coalition. You would have to go back to that generation of managers who were working in the late 1970s/early 1980s to get a sense of what it might mean and, as a consequence, we need to help them plan (and cut) sensitively or at least in awareness.

It seems to me that we need to be careful that in reading these papers, exploring the ideas they set out and reflecting on our response we remain “in awareness”. In other words, we need to link the constituent bits of the conversation: Can we think about providing public services differently? Do we think that the “centre of gravity” (as it were) of public services is rooted in the “professional” view of the world – that is to say the way services are framed (schools, health and social care) start from the way “professionalised and professional” social workers/teachers etc see the world? And do we think that particular way of seeing the world needs to be challenged? And, at the same time, there is another part of the discussion which some managers/agencies are having which is: Help us make cuts…..or as in a number of countries – we need you public sector workers to take pay cuts or worsen your conditions of employment to pay for the crisis. It is this bit of the conversation that I think we need to avoid.

The value of the Radical Efficiency Report is that it does open up a discussion on different ways of thinking about/planning/organising public services. I like the way it argues for a localised/grounded sense of place; I think its stress on the concept of innovation is powerful. And I like the way it seeks to redress the power relationships between users of services and providers of services. There is much here to think about and discuss. There are some direct connections with those who worked on the Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder initiatives and where there were attempts to remodel services along the idea of the needs of the child. This kind of thinking is clearly going to challenge existing power relationships and vested interests. But, there needs to be that reminder  – for me – of rooting these discussions in a context of a commitment to social justice and challenging oppressive practice and being open about the choices that are being made – and why. In other words recognising the structural/economic inequalities and not running away from those. And this needs political and social conversation too in which ideas are contested and tested. What that might be I will return to in a later blog. But joining the conversation is a good start.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Regeneration, Research and Evaluation. The entry is tagged under efficiency, NESTA, professor John Diamond, Public Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.