- November 14, 2012
Listening to two of the authors of the joint Fiscal Fallout report – Ian Mulheirn and Ben Lucas – at the RSA prompted a couple of observations.
The format of the event is deliberately kept to one hour and, to my perception, around 55 of the 60 minutes available were taken up with an admirable and entirely familiar analysis of the problems facing any Government trying to implement reforms whatever the fiscal climate. Some examples being:
- too much centralisation in the UK without enough local or city region decision input let alone autonomy;
- inability to overcome long held silo mentalities and cultures in addressing complex social problems;
- poor commissioning skills and accountability structures that hinder any innovation;
- no service design skills anywhere in Whitehall and few in local government;
The list is longer and the challenge appears so overwhelming that any solutions proffered in the 5 minutes when they were discussed effectively defaulted to arguing for wholesale change with an “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you” at their heart.
Despite these observations on the presentation session, I recommend reading the report as it at least tries to set the challenges in a framework that breaks it into more accessible chunks – what the report calls “Pillars of a Social Productivity Spending Review” (how think-tanky is that?)
One of the themes within the Pillars is to “Commission for Social and Economic Value”. This theme is of great interest to me and my colleagues, particularly the use of public sector commissioning to foster greater public service innovation. We have written on this topic before
To my mind, commissioning practices designed to allow for service innovation is one area that actually can be addressed as a point solution within the overall challenge. It doesn’t need every other part of the answer to be in place first – just some imagination and vision.