Demands for public service delivery shake up in the UK

An experienced social entrepreneur has called for a system overhaul in order to improve public service delivery in the UK. 

Matthew Pike's new report, in association with the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), finds that public services in the UK are currently being delivered through a ‘top-down’ system of governance that is ineffective and in need of major restructuring that would enable communities to be more involved in decision-making processes. 

The Mass Collaboration: How we can transform the impact of public funding report, which was launched at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s London offices this week, also finds that public service delivery systems need to start by addressing what the social need is, rather than by looking at what resources are available.

Matthew Pike, who has been involved in the creation of more than 50 organisations and programmes with social values at their core, including Big Society Capital and Unltd, said: “What we need to do is reinvent the model. We need to put social value centre stage in a future model of public funding."

He argues that the current system fails to address simple social needs, meaning that they go on to develop into bigger, more expensive problems. "What we see constantly is...funding the wrong things in the wrong ways,” he said. 

The report also criticises the ‘payment by results’ method used in public service contracting in which an organisation is paid based on whether the service they deliver meets a series of targets. Matthew Pike said: “Payment by results works to create narrow and misguided incentives, warping the priorities of providers – in terms of prioritising easier to help customers and parking others who are more difficult to help. It also creates the temptation to over report results.”

Nick Pearce, director of IPPR, asked: "How can we approach next year’s spending review differently – how can these ideas trickle into how the parties think about their manifestos, but more importantly how can the treasury as an institution think about supporting this kind of change in how it allocates resources to departments in the spending review?”

Matthew Pike admitted that there is no overnight solution that will drastically improve the delivery of public services. He said that the government must, “grow more effective, evidence-based practise over time" and over a three to five year period they must "redesign how systems can enable and support new, more effective ways of working."

"There is no big idea - there is simply a different way of thinking and a different way of working,” he said.

The report sets out five recommendations to incorporate the idea of mass collaboration into public service delivery:

1. Invest in shared institutions that build social capital and engender supportive working relationships across sectors and hierarchies, such as teams of supporters around individuals, community anchor organisations, children’s centres, extended schools and more. Above all, invest in new ‘backbone organisations’ that can mobilise and organise whole-system change across localities.

2. Understand what help people need in order to help themselves and discover the existing strengths within people and communities, through an immersive programme of listening and learning.

3. Harness the new power of ‘big social data' of  to turn public funding into a real-time process of action learning, understanding as much as possible about activities, outcomes and costs in an area to help design new systems that give people the help they need in a much smarter way.

4. Provide funding, investment and support to test, grow and scale up what works better in a local context and cut what isn’t needed or is less effective.

5. Work progressively to use new insight and evidence to help redesign the wider systems, rules and regulations that hamper local achievement.