Will Tanner: Mutuals require clarity and guidance if they are to change the public service landscape

Will Tanner is a Researcher at Reform.

The Government has made the creation of public sector mutuals a cornerstone of its public services reform programme. Last month the Cabinet Office announced the creation of eight new Pathfinder Mutual organisations in addition to the existing twelve launched in August. Francis Maude has predicted that by 2015 up to one million current public sector workers, 15 per cent of the existing workforce, will be employee owners and partners in mutuals delivery public services.

Yet this ambitious attempt to open up public service delivery and give public sector employees a stake in the ownership and governance of service providers faces significant barriers to success. A recent Reform roundtable seminar explored the opportunities and challenges presented by these new models for public service delivery. It was Chatham House, so contributions are anonymised. But what came out of this was a complex of worries – about whether these organisations will be truly different to the ones they are replacing and whether the public service reform framework is constructed in the right way to deliver maximum value.

Of course, there is a good deal of evidence about how well employee-owned companies can perform. The employee-owned organisations and service providers represented around the table advocated the significant improvements to productivity, efficiency, and both user and employee satisfaction made possible through employee ownership. A significant body of academic evidence supports this view, with some studies suggesting that giving staff a stake can boost productivity and lower staff turnover.

Will Tanner: Some police forces are tackling inefficiency but others are slow to reform

Will is a Researcher for the Reform think tank.

Last week, the Home Secretary rightly set out the need for wide-ranging reform of policing in order to improve efficiency, to give police leadership more flexibility and to make forces directly accountable to the public. This morning the Winsor review of police pay and conditions is expected to outline recommendations to give Chief Constables greater freedom to structure their forces appropriately and reduce the unsustainable cost of the police workforce.

Yet the Government’s efforts to reform policing may face difficulties unless Chief Constables grasp the opportunity of reform to embed a culture of efficiency in the working practices of policing at every level.  A roundtable debate hosted by Reform and chaired by Jan Berry, who recently completed her appointment as Reducing Bureaucracy in Policing Advocate, last week explored the challenges facing policing and the level of response so far. The scale of the challenge is significant, with spending cuts in the region of 20 per cent over a four-year period that includes an Olympic Games. However, as Jan Berry found in her final report into Reducing Bureaucracy in Policing in October, a third of all the police do is waste; in that activity is either unnecessary, over engineered or preventable by a more effective response first time around. In Cheshire a recent survey of calls for assistance found that 41 per cent of police responses could be cut out due to inefficiency. As the discussion bore out, there is a need for common sense to be restored to policing, so that systems and processes are based upon both policing demand and a greater level of interaction between public and police.

However both police practitioners and industry specialists around the table suggested that a fragmented picture of reform is emerging. While some forces are realising significant gains by reconfiguring processes, restructuring their workforce or sharing services with neighbouring forces, the trend is far from universal. Indeed, a number of delegates spoke of a “sit tight” attitude among some forces, expectant that funding levels will be reinstated within the cycle. As a result, strategic planning has been limited to one or two years, budgets have been “salami-sliced” and forces have failed to identify or address the long-term drivers of policing demand. The failure to implement system-wide reform also became apparent with regard to collaboration between forces. While a number of forces have successfully applied economies of scale in procurement, IT and back-office services, partnership has too often been seen as a way of shifting operations and financial risk off the balance sheet. In short, the current funding crisis for police forces has not been enough to deliver the wholesale cultural shift necessary for an efficient and effective police service.