Category Archives: mutuals

Mutuals: Government must deliver on radical public services agenda, says Institute for Government

Posted on 15/07/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

Responding to the Government’s Open Public Services White Paper launched by David Cameron this week, the Institute for Government says the agenda is a radical one, but failure to deliver will come at a cost.

Commenting on the launch, the Institute’s Programme Director, Tom Gash said:

“There’s not much that is new in this white paper but it is still a radical agenda for change. Other governments have tried and failed to remodel public services. The difference this time is that the stakes are higher. With massive cuts to public spending, if these measures don’t work, the state will not be in a position to shore up services.

“A white paper by itself doesn’t change anything. To make this vision a reality, a lot of work lies ahead. Failure to take these next steps in any of the policy areas covered by the paper will lead to the risk of future u-turns, uncertainty and failure”.

The Institute argues that several key issues need to be addressed going forward. These include:

  • Mechanisms for accountability in service delivery must be thought through. Voting in a local election is very different from choosing your GP but in future there are likely to be different combinations of accountability mechanisms for different services.
  • Whilst removing top-down targets  and giving greater autonomy to frontline professionals, government must still be clear on the lowest level of service permissible before this autonomy is withdrawn or restricted.
  • Transparency – data will need to be accurate, timely and accessible if people are going to be able to use it to exercise their choices.
  • Ministers will have to be willing to relinquish power. They’ll still be held responsible for local decisions even though they no longer have control over them.
  • As public services are opened up to new providers, ministers must be absolutely clear about who is responsible for what.
  • Mutuals will need to have the scope to blend state and private investment and not be soley dependent on a single source of funding.
  • Commissioning for outcomes must focus on those outcomes that are measurable. But measuring outcomes is often harder than measuring outputs. For example, it is easy to measure whether a hip operation took place. It is less easy to measure whether or not the operation has improved the patient’s quality of life.

The Institute argues that policies in the white paper are at different stages of their development.  Ministers, central and local government and practitioners will all have work to do if they are to ensure that they are implemented in a way that genuinely improves public services and the lives of citizens. Drawing on its publication Making Policy Better, the Institute recommends that departments will need to:

  • Carry out a “reality check” on policies, involving implementers and/or users of services in testing or piloting them.
  • Consult those affected by changes and address the issues that arise as a result of these consultations.
  • Ensure that policies have been properly costed and that they are resilient to external risks.
  • Make sure the role of central government is properly thought through and that it is clear who is accountable for delivering particular services and the criteria on which they will be judged to have succeeded or failed.
  • Have plans in place for collecting feedback on how policies are being delivered in practice and the mechanisms are in place to act on this feedback.
  • Make sure that policies are implemented in a way that allows government to assess whether they have worked or not and how they can be adapted and strengthened.

 Gash added:

“In order to avoid repeating the experience of the beleaguered NHS reforms, the coalition will need to invest a good deal of time and resources in delivering its radical programme for reforming public services. To publish a white paper and then walk away will not be enough but today’s announcement, with its emphasis on consultation and analysis seems to show that government has learnt from its mistakes and is ready to take the time to deliver something which could change forever the way citizens choose and receive their services”.

Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, public services

Tagged , , , , ,

Employee-led mutuals: should the public services white paper have gone further?

Posted on 14/07/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

Some commentators believe that the Government could and should have gone further with the publication of the Open Public Services White Paper.

Writing in the Guardian, Colin Cram, the former chief executive of the North West Centre of Excellence, makes some constructive suggestions. He argues that publishing the white paper is “a bold step. It is an attempt to create a coherent and different approach to providing public services. My feeling is that the consultation will be genuine, which will provide an opportunity for criticisms to be addressed and the government to back off from impracticable ideas or change its approach. The risks for the government are that the rhetoric looks likely to exceed the scale of delivery and it could be easy for the parliamentary opposition and the electorate to hold it to account.

Under the sub-heading ‘Making a Change’, Cram makes the following points:

“The white paper places much emphasis on consultation and facilitating change rather than directing. A weakness is that many proposals are projects or programmes and should be subject to the established public sector controls such as “starting gate” and “gateway”. These are not bureaucratic, help identify what should not go ahead, whether the necessary success factors are in place at each stage of the project and whether there need to be changes. These robust approaches save time and money and greatly increase chances of success. The white paper should have provided assurance about applying these disciplines.

“The paper argues that the public sector should be a commissioner of services rather than a provider, yet appears to run out of ideas on where this might operate, focusing mainly on social care and to a lesser degree the hackneyed “back office services”. The government is attracted by employee-led mutuals, but suggests that these will be created voluntarily.

“The potential contribution of the private sector to the diversity of service providers is scarcely mentioned. Lib Dems 3, Conservatives 0? However, local government will increasingly outsource front and back-office services, and we can expect the NHS to continue to do so.”

“Critics might argue that the white paper represents little more than bringing together government policy announcements in a coherent form: health and wellbeing boards, strengthening the powers of local government over the NHS, removing excessive monitoring and oversight by central government, community budgets and retention of business rates. However, it does provide a narrative and context.”

“Absent from the paper is how one might manage the anticipated increasing diversity of service providers. The wider public sector has not been good at this, hence the Southern Cross debacle. Integrated commercial management of markets and suppliers throughout the public sector is vital.

“New commercial models include incentivising suppliers to deliver successful outcomes and assigning the risk to them, though I would question whether payments to suppliers under the work programme will be “based primarily on the results they achieve” unless the bar is set very low. Risk sharing would rule out many social enterprises.”


Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutuals, NHS, outsourcing, public sector, public services

Reaction to white paper publication concerns asset locks, finance, resourcing and support for mutuals

Posted on 12/07/2011 | Leave a comment

Much of the immediate reaction to the Government’s publication of its Open Public Services White Paper concerns issues surrounding assets, definitions of mutuals and most importantly, support for them, and financing.

Dom Potter from the Transition Institute says, “Noticeable by it’s absence is any provision in the paper to establish a mechanism for ensuring that publicly-owned assets such as council buildings or parks will remain in some form of public, common or shared ownership by communities.

“This will be taken by some as evidence of wholesale privatisation looming around the corner. But in my view the political discourse that will swirl around the issue of asset locks shouldn’t obscure the need to utilise these assets for the wider, long-term public good.

“There is also an issue that isn’t addressed in the paper around how public assets could potentially be used to leverage external investment into public services.

“As long as the assets are secured for public/shared ownership, I would be interested to see what mechanisms might emerge from the Big Society Bank and out of central and local government to enable assets to be sweated in order to raise the initial cash to get emerging mutuals up and running with a sustainable business model.

On mutuals definitions, he says:

“Thankfully for those of us who are keen that each individual spin-out is set up with the legal and governance structures appropriate to it’s unique local context, the one-member-one-vote implication of calling them mutuals is not quite as literal is it could have been.

“There is a clear indication that a variety of ownership models – ‘wholly employee-led, multi-stakeholder and mutual joint venture models’ – are mentioned, although further clarification is needed as to exactly what is meant by these terms.

On finance and support:

“There is mention of an ‘Enterprise Incubator Unit’ set up within the Cabinet Office to ‘provide advice, challenge and resources for public service providers from central government departments and their agencies who want to move from the public sector to the independent sector’. This sounds interesting, but I am wary of the idea of government advising itself on how to set up independently of itself. In my view, the Unit at least needs to be staffed by individuals who have experience of the transition to independent delivery or by individuals with experience of running independent organisations (or, ideally, both) in order to have the desired impact.”

“The Mutual Support Programme is due to come on stream in autumn 2011 according to the White Paper.  This means that there will be support available for entrepreneurial public sector staff more quickly than had been anticipated, given how quiet the Cabinet Office had become around getting the MSP up and running since it was first mentioned last year.”

“Recognised within the paper is the need to look for innovative ways of routing external finance into public services. The Big Society Bank will be a key part of this, and this may be a fruitful way of expanding, for example, the pool of social impact bonds beyond the one pilot in Peterborough prison.

CBI Director General John Cridland says:

“The Work Programme shows how companies of all sizes are successfully working in partnership with social enterprises, community groups and charities. While it is right to recognise the benefits mutuals and smaller providers can offer, the principle of any willing provider also means that larger firms should be able to bring their expertise to bear, and when they achieve better outcomes they should be able to make a reasonable profit. We think the Government could have made this much clearer in the White Paper.”

However, Peter Holbrook, Chief Executive of the Social Enterprise Coalition, takes a different view:

“We are concerned that the proposed reforms will create an unequal playing field in which social enterprises are unable to compete with large private sector providers for public sector contracts.  Social enterprises often do not have the capital or scale required to compete with big private businesses in open markets.

“These reforms must protect our public services, not put them at risk.  Without the necessary safeguards, the consequence of these proposals will be that private providers will dominate public sector markets.  Taxpayers’ money will flow into profit seeking organisations that exist only to satisfy the needs of their shareholders.  Public services must operate for the communities and people they serve, nobody else.

“The Government’s plans to extend Payment by results across a number of other public services will put private sector organisations at an automatic advantage.  The reality is that without decisive action to use public spending to improve social outcomes, the big organisations will simply use their stronger balance sheets and ability to attract private investment to win contracts.

“We only have to look to the Department for Work and Pensions Work Programme to see that when markets open up, large private sector providers move in and squeeze out smaller organisations.  A very small proportion of the contracts went to social enterprises, despite it being hailed by Government as a boost for the Big Society.”

Ed Mayo, Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, says:

“The government’s public services reform white paper presents an important opportunity for co-operatives and mutuals to bid for and deliver public services. As trusted organisations that are able to unleash the talents and energies of their employees and users, co-operatives can provide good quality public services.

“Longstanding examples of thriving and successful co-operatives running services like foster care, leisure centres and affordable housing and out of hours GP services show that the co-operative model works extraordinarily well.

“As the trade association for co-operatives we want to see co-operatives thrive in all areas of the economy, including delivering public services. Like many, however, we are wary of some elements of the government’s approach to opening up public services to outside providers.

“First, there are serious issues facing public sector employees and users looking into the co-operative option – from uncertainty about jobs and pensions to the challenge of public sector workers setting up new businesses – that need to be addressed if public sector mutuals are to succeed.

“Second, in the current context, it won’t help staff or users if all the government does is to open the door to privatisation with fake mutuals that fail basic quality tests of member ownership and democracy.

“Third, there is a gap between national policy and local practice, with a lack of understanding of the benefits of co-operatives delivering public services amongst local authority councillors and officers.

“Fourth, there is an urgent need for high quality advice and support with sufficient resource to make sure that this is in place for all who need it.”

Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, public services

Tagged , , , , ,

Mutuals: white paper offers public services choice as Cameron tells Civil Service to take more risks

Posted on 12/07/2011 | Leave a comment

It was unfortunate that yesterday’s press conference to launch the Open Public Services White Paper by David Cameron was hijacked by journalists quizzing him on the ongoing News International story.

The event, organised by Reform in Canary Wharf, also featured speakers from big business i.e. the CBI, the consumer organisation Which, and the voluntary sector – “a Coalition in support of the White Paper,” suggested Cameron.

Detailing the public services landscape, Cameron scarcely mentioned mutuals by name, though they do feature significantly in the White Paper itself.

Modernisation of public services, he said, will give people choice and control over the services they use, and end the ‘get what you’re given’ culture.

People will be given more choice to shape the public services they use, putting control in the hands of individuals and neighbourhoods so everyone can benefit from the best public services available.

“I know what our public services can do and how they are the backbone of this country. But I know too that the way they have been run for decades – old-fashioned, top-down, take-what-you’re-given – is just not working for a lot of people.“Ours is a vision of open public services – there will be more freedom, more choice and more local control. Wherever possible we are increasing choice by giving people direct control over the services they use,” said Cameron, who detailed five core principles for modernising public services: choice, decentralisation, diversity, fairness and accountability.

He also made some key points about change and also about risk-taking for those now in the public sector:

“This is the case for change. If we want to compete in the world; if we want to get value for money; and above all if we want the decent, reliable public services that make life better for people, there will be no progress if we stick with the status quo.  What does change look like? It’s about ending the top-down, big government way of running public services,  and bringing in a Big Society approach, releasing the grip of state control and putting power into people’s hands. The old dogma that says ‘Whitehall knows best’ – that is going.”

“We really need to ensure that civil servants and arms length bodies see that there is a clear set of principles to apply: about choice, about diversity, about payment by results, about the role of private and voluntary sectors.

“The biggest challenge for the Civil Service is to try and adapt to this new culture and also a very difficult thing to do, and an easy thing to say, is that actually civil servants will have to take some risks. We all know that in business it is very easy to award the contract to Price Waterhouse. They’ve done it before, they’re an enormous organisation, they won’t fail. I think there’s a similar tendency within the Civil Service. It’s safe to keep it in house and deal with one of the big providers.

“If we really want to see diversity, choice and competition, we have to take some risks and recognise that sometimes there will be a new dynamic social enterprise that has a great way of tackling poverty or drug abuse or helping prisoners go straight, and we do need to take some risks with those organisations and understand that rather like in business, when you have a failure, that that doesn’t mean that the Civil Service has done a disastrous job.

“In business, we try new things in order to do better, and when they don’t work, we sit back and think, ‘How do we do that better next time?’ We do need a sense of creativity and enterprise in our Civil Service which is clearly there….a change of culture, perhaps a different attitude towards innovation and risk and a sense that that will be a good way of driving performance.”

************

This what the White Paper says about public service mutuals:

6.14 We are doing much more than just sweeping away regulations. We are giving public sector staff new rights to form new mutuals and bid to take over the services they deliver, empowering millions of public sector staff to become their own bosses. This will free up the often untapped entrepreneurial and innovative drive of public sector professionals.

6.15 Ownership and control, through mutualisation, empower employees to innovate and redesign services around service users and communities, driving up quality. We will not dictate the precise form of these mutuals; rather, this should be driven by what is best for the users of services and by employees as co-owners of the business. Options include wholly employee-led, multi-stakeholder and mutual joint venture models.

6.16 The Government will take steps to identify and overcome the barriers placed in the way of public sector workers who want to exercise these rights.

6.17 Public sector employee ownership: the key policies we are already implementing include:

  • Right to Provide – we are giving public sector workers who want to form mutuals or co-operatives to deliver public services a Right to Provide. This will enable public sector workers to form independent, or joint venture based, mutual and co-operative social enterprises. Progress is already being made with a new Right to Provide for NHS staff and opportunities for local authorities to invoke the Right to Challenge;
  • mutual pathfinders – the first wave of employee-led mutual pathfinders was launched in August 2010 with a second wave announced in February 2011. These pathfinders are being mentored by expert organisations as well as leading figures in social enterprise and public service to support their growth and share best practice; the pathfinders will provide critical learning as more employees look to exercise these rights;
  • Mutuals Task Force – Professor Julian Le Grand, one of theUK’s leading thinkers on public service reform, has been appointed to lead a Task Force to push employee ownership across the public sector;
  • Mutuals Support Programme – we will invest at least £10 million in the Mutuals Support Programme, to support some of the most promising and innovative mutuals so that they reach the point of investment readiness. This support will be available from autumn 2011;
  • Enterprise Incubator Unit – this has been set up within the Cabinet Office to provide advice, challenge and resources for public service providers from central government departments and their agencies who want to move from the public sector to the independent sector. The unit will help management teams to restructure themselves and their teams into independent businesses, which may include partners providing finance or expertise, for example through a joint venture;
  • Post Office mutualisation – In May, Co-operativesUK published a report commissioned by the Government on options to transfer Post Office Ltd from government ownership to a mutual run for the public benefit. The Government will carefully consider this report before launching a public consultation later this year; and
  • My Civil Service Pension (MyCSP) – plans have been announced for MyCSP to become the first mutual enterprise to spin out of a central government service. MyCSP administers Civil Service pension schemes for 1.5 million public sector workers. MyCSP’s plans to mutualise, which have the full backing of the Government, will give employees a stake in the new business, alongside government and a private sector partner. The innovative ownership model will be matched by a participative management approach: there has already been a strong turnout in elections for the Employee Partnership Council, through which employees will have a meaningful say in the running of the business.
Enabling new provision

7.7  Creating open public services will require new types of investment in public services: investment of money, inspiration and entrepreneurial effort. The Government will promote the opportunities being created by open public services, tailored to individual sectors. This promotion will aim to support:

  • accessing new forms of external finance – there is an exciting set of opportunities to bring new forms of finance into public services. This includes social investment (e.g. social impact bonds); payment for results on capital improvements (e.g. energy efficiency) and the financing of modernisation programmes (e.g. joint ventures to introduce new technology). Work is under way to develop effective measures of the social impact of investment and to launch the Big Society Bank, which will catalyse the growth of a sustainable social investment market;
  • empowering public sector staff to take control of their own services in new enterprises like mutuals – the creation of mutuals is a critical step in achieving more diversity in public services. However, we recognise that this is a big step to take for both staff and the public body that employs them. We will set out a full range of support available to those who are considering setting up a mutual, in the same way that we seek to stimulate both voluntary and private sector development. This will include a £10 million Mutuals Support Programme to provide support to fledgling mutuals that are being set up to deliver public services by employees leaving the public sector; and
  • actively encouraging new providers, of all sizes and from all sectors, to deliver public services– when we say we want diversity in public services, that is exactly what we mean. We will take active steps to avoid simply switching from one type of monopoly to another. We will launch a positive action programme to improve the awareness of public service opportunities to new providers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. Many of our policy changes have already opened up attractive new opportunities, for example in the Work Programme and through personal budgets in social care. In addition, we will take positive action on procurement and through regulators to ensure that other opportunities (e.g. in central government procurement) are opened up to new types of provider, be they from the public, private or voluntary sector.

If you want more details, you can access the White Paper here – and the Government has unveiled an Open Public Services website

Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, public services

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mutuals to be at heart of Open Public Services White Paper to be launched today

Posted on 11/07/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The Government is expected to launch its Open Public Services White Paper in London today, giving details of how so-called ‘John Lewis-style mutuals’, will take over the running of much of the public sector.

The shake-up of the state will hand “choice and control” to communities across the country,  opening large parts of the public sector to the “best possible provider.”

The Open Public Service White Paper  is being mooted as the sector’s biggest overhaul for 50 years, with private firms, voluntary groups and charities cleared to take over the running of  schools, healthcare and council services.

The emphasis is expected to be put on “mutuals”, where staff control the planning and spending decisions for local services. Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has already  suggested that mutuals could have a  “transformational”  impact on service quality and morale. By 2015, it is estimated,  one in six public sector employees will be working in mutuals.

Already a ‘Mutuals Taskforce’ is in place, supported by a pilot ‘Pathfinder’ programme  to help point the way for would-be mutuals to learn from.

Maude has already pointed to the example of an intermediate care unit in Swindon which was  launched as a pilot last summer, bringing together around 900 nurses, physiotherapists, doctors and other staff previously employed by the primary care trust and local council.

“It’s a mutual where there’s no financial incentive. They will own it, but with no profit share or anything, no financial upside, they will have to take out 30 per cent of their cost over the next four years and they are really excited about it,” Maude told The Independent on Sunday.

If you’re considering setting up a mutual, what are your concerns? What questions would you like the Government to answer about mutuals?

Leave a comment

Posted in mutualisation, mutuals, public sector

Tagged , ,

Would-be mutuals must overcome fear of failure and embrace risk

Posted on 07/07/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

A lack of confidence and fear of failure must be overcome if the government’s goal of seeing employee-led mutuals take off is to be achieved.

The government believes that by 2015, one in six public servants could be involved in mutuals. The problem is giving them the confidence to use their undoubted knowledge of public service delivery and take advantage of the flexibility that running your own business brings, as opposed to the frustrations of years of a ‘can’t do’ approach that meekly says ‘..but we’ve always done it this way.”

As a number of speakers at the Civil Service event – including Peter Marsh, vice-chair of the Mutuals Task Force, My CSP head Phil Bartlett, and Mitie’s chief executive Ruby McGregor-Smith – suggested, those within the public sector, and especially the Civil Service – do have the ability to overcome their fears of failure, and indeed, as it emerged from one mutuals seminar, their worries about competing against the private sector or their discomfort about having some ‘conflict of interest’ within the wider public sector about using their knowledge to set up a mutual. As was pointed out, using that knowledge and embracing the flexibility of running your own (employee-owned) ship, is just what the Cabinet Office wants them to do.

More on Civil Service Live to follow. In the meantime, the Guardian is carrying an excellent piece on fear of failure and the acceptance of risks in mutuals.

You can read it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/social-enterprise-network/2011/jul/06/fear-failure-public-service-mutuals

Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, public services

Mutuals bring relief after the public sector moratorium

Posted on 05/07/2011 | Leave a comment

The public sector landscape is likely to be dominated by mutuals in the future.  In this guest blog, John Pendlebury-Green and John Jones of Landseer Partners discuss the outlook for service providers in this mutualised world and argue that their approach must be both innovative and flexible.

Last year was a difficult one for service providers to the public sector given the moratorium and general economic slow-down.  Despite a relatively slow start 2011 is looking significantly brighter for existing and new entrant market players.  The Government’s plans to achieve cost savings, develop mutual organisations, and use SMEs and the third sector to develop new ways of delivering services, are moving rapidly from theory to reality.  So, with the white paper on Open Public Services due out in July, now is the right time for both large and SME service providers to look at themselves and work out how they should be playing in this new world.

We wrote about the concept of mutualisation in early 2010. It has taken the Government longer to get to this point than we expected but the number and variety of public sector organisations looking at mutualisation in one form or another is impressive. The opportunities are starting to appear: from Camden Council looking at how all of its services can be delivered to Cleveland Fire Service receiving approval to finalise a business plan and a structure to establish an employee-owned mutual.   In central government the announcement that My Civil Service Pension is going to be placed into a mutual joint venture is the first major “spin out” of a central government service giving employees the opportunity to take a stake in their business.

So with Francis Maude now talking about an expectation of up to a million public sector workers being in mutual organisations by 2015, the scale of the government’s ambition for mutualisation is clear.  With these types of numbers being talked about it makes it obvious that a one-size-fits-all approach by service providers is doomed to fail.

Our view is that service providers, including possible new entrants, will need to invest time and money now by discussing with existing and new clients the art of the possible: what can be achieved in setting up mutual organisations in order to deliver jointly and successfully services that will provide the right outcomes to the customers of the mutual.

This is most likely to be in the form of working with the public sector organisation to help define the vision and outline structure, and identify the stakeholders – from users to the Cabinet Office – who need to agree the idea.  Then the service provider is ideally positioned, given its private sector experience, to help develop the business plan.  The plan needs to cover the services to be provided, the market opportunity to provide additional services and the resourcing and finances needed to make the new business work.

How this works in practice will be closely examined and no doubt later mutuals will learn from any mistakes in setting up the initial ones.  So the success of the pathfinder mutuals and high-profile examples such as My Civil Service Pension will examined very carefully.   It is clear that how the successful private sector service provider and any third sector organisations become part of these new entities, and how the governance, structure and profit share will work, will set the tone for subsequent mutuals.

Now at mid-year in 2011 it is still early days for new ways of working with the public sector.  If events to date have not spurred service providers to action the July white paper should certainly do this. Either this, or the significant number of re-tenders now coming onto the market, should provide some welcome relief compared to the slow down in 2010.

For more details, read the white paper or visit Landseer Partners’ website

Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Parliamentary Committee to discuss the role of mutuals this week

Posted on 04/07/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

Parliament will discuss the prospects for mutuals at a meeting of the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee tomorrow morning.

The session, the Committee’s fifth instalment of its Big Society Inquiry, will focus on the Government’s intention to diversify the provision of public services by opening them up to charities, social enterprises, mutuals and the private sector. The Committee will hear from representatives of the voluntary sector and the TUC, Professor Julian Le Grand and Ed Mayo from the Cabinet Office Mutuals Taskforce, and Shona Nichols from business process outsourcing company Capita.

The Committee’s questioning is likely to cover

  • obstacles to voluntary sector organisations delivering public services;
  • the work of the Government’s Mutuals Taskforce in driving forward employee ownership of public services; and
  • the role of the private sector in the Big Society.

Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, public services

Tagged , , ,

12 good reasons to mutualise

Posted on 01/07/2011 | 1 comment

By David Bicknell

There are 12 good reasons to mutualise, according to City law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse (FFW)

FFW has advised on the restructuring of NHS Hull’s community health services to became an example of how public services could be transferred to an employee led social enterprise, City Health Care Partnership CIC.

12 months into the project, says FFW, City Health Care Partnership CIC is enjoying the benefits of becoming a social enterprise which demonstrates that the drivers for social enterprise and public service mutualisation are as valid as ever.

These benefits, FFW says, include:

  1. Improved staff motivation
  2. Improved customer (i.e. patient) satisfaction
  3. Leaner and more efficient structures
  4. More responsive services
  5. Real teamwork
  6. Opportunities to grow the business
  7. Strengthened connection to the community
  8. Flexibility and agility
  9. Less red tape – ability to introduce better ways of
    working, more quickly
  10. Greater sense of inclusiveness and participation
  11. Control of destiny
  12. Ability to contribute to the wider needs of target
    communities

1 Comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals

Tagged , ,

Could a new mutuals model work for trading standards?

Posted on 30/06/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

A mutuals-like model for trading standards has been proposed by Consumer Focus, the statutory consumer champion, which in a paper, discusses the future of trading standards in light of spending cuts, the Government’s new empowerment strategy and changing consumer power.

The paper, ‘Hard times or our mutual friend’, by Paul Connolly,  is an excellent read and argues that the Trading Standards community should engage with another Government agenda:  mutualisation.

It says:

“Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude wants to see mutuals widely adopted. He suggests within 10 years they will become ‘one of the major types of organisation providing excellent public services’ in a redistribution of power and ownership comparable with 1980s reforms.

“His reasoning is clear. First, he wants to continue the process of public service reform by ensuring direct ‘in-house’ delivery continues to be ‘contested’. In the past this primarily meant outsourcing. Plainly under this administration private providers will continue to feature in service delivery. However, the Government has indicated it wants a more diversified range of providers, including more small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Further, creating mutual structures can contest services, while empowering staff and short circuiting the public/private antagonism.

“Indeed, workforce empowerment is key. Mutualisation and outsourcing to SMEs, cooperatives and charities, are both connected with Big Society thinking. Government wishes to divest itself of direct responsibility for state delivery, but to do so in ways which spread associated commercial opportunities to those who have not benefited previously.

“This includes giving opportunities to existing public sector staff. Indeed, enthusiasts for mutuals believe workforce energies can be harnessed to support reform. Frontline staff understand their services, but are often inhibited from innovating by constraining bureaucracy.

“Decoupling mutuals from bureaucracies and giving staff stakes that link productivity to personal rewards encourage entrepreneurship and improve standards.

“Mutuals are not a ‘fluffy’ option. They are run as businesses. But the staff engagement model of mutuals, where rewards are linked to innovation, service improvement and productivity gains, means there is a real prospect of harmonising the interests of service producers and the individuals and communities they serve.

“There are many challenges associated with mutualisation. Is the largest public sector retrenchment in history the ideal moment to encourage people to risk a semi-commercialised model of delivery? Should staff downsizing precede or follow mutual incorporation? And how on current trends will the numbers mutualising substantiate Maude’s claims of an importance comparable with privatisation?

“The 12 pilots on the Cabinet Office website are pretty small, niche services, mostly in the health and social care arenas. Small and mutualisation might be perceived as a natural match, but there’s nothing to stop a whole agency, hospital, or local authority mutualising, John Lewis-style, or a series of small thematically-linked mutuals being incorporated under a franchising umbrella, like the Co-Op. Whatever, a substantial increase in adopters will be needed to match Maude’s ambitions. That will mean lots of services taking a risk. The danger for this intriguing agenda – which has attracted interest across the political spectrum – is that it doesn’t fly because volunteers are few.

“Nevertheless, Government continues to signal its intent in this area. Mutualisation is being strongly encouraged in areas of health, such as community care. The Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill is intended to put wind in the sails of mutualisation, while the Localism Bill calls for staff-managed approaches to be among the options considered in re engineering local services.

“The Trading Standards profession could do Francis Maude and themselves a favour by ‘going mutual’. Under the leadership of the Trading Standards Institute (TSI) – itself already in effect a social enterprise – and the Trading Standards Policy Forum, with possible input from Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO), one of two approaches could be adopted: a national super-mutual, covering England initially, but evolving to the devolved contexts following suitable negotiations, could be formed.

“It would be a single incorporated body. It would have a national head office. It would co-ordinate the use of any resources it received from central Government (the implied new BIS monies for instance) to address complex, nationwide and international threats. It would oversee and co-ordinate the delivery activities of suitably located regional, sub-regional and local offices.

“The mutual’s services would be purchased by local and central Government to meet statutory Trading Standards obligations.

“A second option, perhaps more realistic given that some Local Authority Trading Standards Services (LATSS) partnerships have already incorporated as businesses, would be for TSI and the other players to create a mutuals confederation. This would be a franchise support hub for a national network of local mutuals, each created as and when individual LATSS departments chose to incorporate. The hub would again attract funding for national projects and but would also co-ordinate the activities of the network, providing mechanisms for collaboration between local mutuals, and new sub-regional and regional structures, where appropriate.”

It is intriguing to see the mutual model being considered in this way. I hope for those considering creating mutuals, that the Consumer Focus trading standards paper might offer some useful ideas. It’s certainly worth a read – and we’d be interested in your comments.

Leave a comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals

Tagged , , , , ,