Public Services

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for this timely debate. I have spent the past 35 years demonstrating in practice how the voluntary sector can play a crucial role in innovation and in delivering public services in new ways that focus on the customer. How can it use its position, sitting between the often large bureaucracies of the public and private sectors, to bring much needed innovation in the delivery of public services?

The Health and Social Care Act eloquently mentions this. Integration, innovation, and enterprise are found in the legislation that encourages us to go local. These are important words, but words alone will not make this happen. New thinking and hard work are required. So how do we enable more voluntary sector organisations to win and deliver more public service contracts in a way that is a game changer?

First, you should start small and learn how to innovate and deliver public services well in one place before you exercise that overused phrase, “Roll it out”. The micro and the macro are connected. The Government should choose six projects located in specifically identified areas in the inner city, suburbia, the countryside and the north and south of England, and get it right in a few places and really understand what the blockages are, and not roll out a national programme before this has been done.

Steve Jobs obsessed about creating his first Apple store. He hid away for nine months in a warehouse and was fanatical about the small details. Apple is now one of the most valuable companies in the world. If the voluntary sector has a role, it must be in innovation, creating integrated customer-focused services and lifting the game. I worry that the Government have become very adept at talking and simply putting old men in new clothes.

My second point focuses on how best to get the voluntary sector to deliver. Simply encouraging it to play a role in delivering public services will achieve little. The rules, specifying to the nth degree how a contract is to be delivered rather than enabling the supplier to propose different solutions, possibly by integrating different services, constrict much needed flexibility and creativity. The VCS plays this bureaucratic game as well or badly as the public and business sectors. You are not good at delivery just because you are under the banner of “voluntary sector”. Flexibility is desperately needed, and I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, makes this point in his important report.

If you want innovation, you need to create space for it to happen and reward it. It is amazing how the new academy infrastructure for schools, for example, is quickly starting to look exactly like local authority education departments by another name. This happened 30 years ago when the Government got hold of housing associations and dumbed down their entrepreneurial flair. The business community moving into the health sector is starting to look like a public sector response with a few more bells and whistles. Working relationships with social entrepreneurs are not cementing fast enough because the Government are not commissioning services to create new, lean, innovative relationships. Bureaucracy speaks to bureaucracy. It does not understand any other language. The procurement systems of this country are broken. I have tried to raise these concerns with the Government. The noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, and I have talked about this, but no one seems to follow through on the practical detail. We have tried, but I have received no practical response that is interested in getting hold of this detail.

Generally, the gap in expertise and imagination is in the statutory and public sectors. While there is a procurement college now for large contracts, will the Minister tell us where is the support for innovation in the £20,000 contracts and for the hundreds of thousands of statutory and quango staff? Real change in public service must involve senior leadership. Otherwise it will quickly be regressive. In relative terms, contracts to the VCS are small and so the senior staff—the CEOs—do not often get involved themselves. What would happen if the procurement processes encouraged this engagement?

The Prime Minister once talked about the big society but, like the third way, it seems to have lost its way. I am interested in small societies and those teams of local players who can make all the difference. In order to see results, we need to understand the practice of what people on the ground do, and we need to help them to grow and up their skills in an organic way. They must be encouraged by us to innovate and deliver more, but we must not put elephants on their backs. We should incentivise this joined-up leadership, encourage these relationships between business and social entrepreneurs and build them into the procurement contracts. This is how we will create social value and innovation and move it to scale. It is all about relationships.