Smooth service delivery requires public sector organisations to work together – but that's not always as easy as it sounds. CSW teamed up with NS&I Government Payment Services for a frank discussion about departmental collaboration. Gill Hitchcock listened in
Ours is arguably the best civil service in world. But to remain in pole position, it needs to keep pace with the growing expectations of citizens for simple, seamless public services.
Greater collaboration between departments using common platforms and shared resources is a route to this, and to considerable savings. Yet despite obvious benefits it is not easy for public sector organisations to work together effectively: organisational structures, differing cultures and risk aversion can all get in the way.
Civil Service World recently teamed up with NS&I Government Payment Services to bring together civil servants for a frank discussion about this issue. They debated the benefits and risks of more joined-up public services, why services should be delivered around the needs of citizens, how departments can get a better understanding of the potential for shared capabilities, and why leadership can make or break initiatives.
Paul Chinn, director of next generation shared services at the Cabinet Office, began by setting out some examples of cross-organisational collaboration from outside central government. A key factor in their success, he noted, was that one of the organisations involved had a significant underspend and so the ability to take financial risk. Secondly, these projects were led by an individual with an appetite for risk who championed an initiative and saw it through.
“The struggle we have is that the minute you start collaborating across departments with different funding capabilities and risk appetites, it becomes almost impossible to reach a decision on anything. The run rate of the project and the decision-making costs more than what you’re deciding about,” he said.
Seán Holland, deputy secretary and chief social work officer in Northern Ireland’s Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety, identified another key issue: appointing the right people to join in talks with other departments on potential collaborations.
“Sometimes you can move forward quicker on an opportunistic basis without waiting for that big scale change” – Dax Harkins, NS&I GPS
“Sometimes the people in decision-making bodies are almost sent in as: ‘You will represent our interests in this group, you are our vanguard, you will hold our corner’,” he said. “Whereas, actually, what we need is people who will rise above that, stay focused on citizen outcomes and not be entrenched in a departmental defensive position.
“I know this might sound cynical, but you have to pick the right people. You have got to have people who care passionately about the end user and what you are trying to achieve. If you appoint [decision makers] by position or experience, that is not going to cut it.”
If departments and agencies want to join up their services in the field, they have got to learn how to join up their central functions, and budgets. As Chinn noted: “A cross-governmental strategy needs cross-government money.”
The discussion then turned to departmental culture and whether financial challenges have been a catalyst for openness and willingness to collaborate.
“It is important to recognise that there are differences in departmental cultures, but also in departmental objectives,” said Ian Whitehouse, deputy director of resilience capabilities in the Cabinet Office’s civil contingencies secretariat.
“As long as we a have cabinet government, departments point in directions that are not necessarily aligned with each other. It is just a fact.”
However, he believed this could be positive and creative, and said that in any case trying to change the situation would not work. The challenge, according to Whitehouse, was to identify the common cause, the evidence, and who was in a position to “stand above and beyond” narrower departmental issues to play a leadership role.
Dax Harkins, B2B director at NS&I Government Payment Services, admitted: “It still astounds me how different departments are, and if you try to proceed in the same way with all departments you will create issues for yourself. And that is part of strong leadership.
“We always hear ‘we are a unique department’, ‘we have unique challenges’, and when you start to work with them, and do it in a way that resonates with them, you can show where the similarities are and where you can work together. But it does mean you have to be quite flexible when you’re dealing with multiple departments – change your hat, almost.”
“Creating a narrative that everybody believes in is what gets that collaboration going” – Paul Chinn, Cabinet Office
The meeting heard that it was important for the civil service to send out clear messages that individuals can lead this kind of activity and make collaboration a reality.
“It’s about empowerment,” said Whitehouse. “Because we’re the civil service, we like to formalise these things, but let’s make it a bit more part of our discourse to say that part of leadership is enabling and identifying and raising the profile of change in this area. I think that would be really powerful.”
Creating a strong narrative, particularly around improving user experience, over and above savings, is vital to accelerating collaboration, the event heard.
Chinn spoke about the Cabinet Office: “One of our systems provides user services to a 250,000 civil servants. That’s a pretty big customer base. And their expectations of user experience at work should meet the same levels as they would want to experience when they go on to eBay and other online services.
“So creating a narrative that everybody believes in, sharing the vision and sharing the delivery of that narrative is a more effective way of doing it and gets that collaboration going.”
Data is a powerful element in creating a narrative, argued Jeremy Welch, business development director at NS&I Government Payment Services: “If you take the data that exists across different departments and you start bringing that together, you then end up with a really strong story.
“We have had discussions with departments where they are really interested in that data and how you can use it to change what they do and how they engage.”
Holland spoke about a “change fund” in Northern Ireland and how it has been used over the past two years to shift the focus of children’s services to early intervention, and towards being more evidence-based.
The fund is overseen by a cross-departmental group of officials and has had some significant successes, he said, including a new model of health visits for young children. And he cited two reasons why it had worked well. Firstly, officials focused only on work that would transform services, rather than using the money to fill funding gaps. In this case, the involvement of Irish American philanthropist Chuck Feeney, was a key way to maintain this focus, since his money was only unlocked if civil servants stayed true to the principles on which he had donated.
“He was only interested in funding transformation,” said Holland. “So whenever we as civil servants tried to say ‘well there is a bit of money there, we could fill that hole with it’, this external scrutiny kept us very straight and honest.”
The other factor, he said, was that the change fund had created a cadre of officials who were immersed in gathering evidence for transformation. “When we got into the hard places in discussions, they kept on bringing us back to, ‘well we understand your different ministerial priorities, your different departmental cultures, we understand your historical pattern of service delivery, but remember the evidence we talked about’.”
When NS&I GPS’s Harkins asked whether it was easy to get clear cut evidence to drive decisions, Holland replied that the biggest challenge was getting the evidence adopted. Many interventions were “relationship-based”, for example where officials were working with troubled families. He said: “You can’t throw a randomised controlled trial on the table and say ‘you are wrong, stop doing that’. You have to work at winning people over.”
The group then turned to structural reform, noting that joining up government on the basis of departmental structures or statutory duty was nowhere near as effective as doing so on the basis of citizen expectation.
“I think one of the enablers is that there is more demand put on us by the public,” said Liz Robinson, head of work and wellbeing in later life at the Department for Work and Pensions.
“That is quite a driver, because people want their experience [of public services] to be good, they expect it. And we have traditionally been a nation which has accepted poor service.
“It’s interesting that we are talking about greater departmental collaboration, when actually there are more and more other players, like philanthropists for example, and other organisations that are delivering services which a few years back might have been delivered solely by a public sector body. It creates huge opportunities.”
Chinn pointed to opportunities to use the talents of experts who were offering to give their time to government for free. “It amazes me that I can pick up the phone to my peers in the private sector and they would love to talk to me and come in and help me, as much time as I need.
“The way we have traditionally bought that expertise has been from very, very expensive consultancy firms to help us make one big decision, but I think there is a lot of expertise that people would willingly give to us.”
The participants agreed about the potential for IT to enable joined-up government and that some very good shared systems had already been implemented, including in finance and HR. They also agreed that joined-up delivery had to focus on users.
Chris Doutney, head of government services at the Post Office, said his organisation worked with a number of government departments providing services to citizens.
“Many people use the Post Office a lot,” he said. “They quite like us because they can do a lot of services at once, whether its postal, collecting benefits, or drivers’ licences. And I think there’s a logic to that.”
However, he warned: “Some demographics, younger ones, use other ways to address the same problems. Ultimately we could end up with a younger generation coming through who are not interested in public sector interaction. That’s the biggest risk of all, I should think.”
When the issue came up of how the public sector could keep up to speed with advances in technology, Welch said that sharing knowledge and platforms was key: “If every department, every agency, tries to do that themselves they will potentially fail.”
The DWP’s Robinson raised the problem of legacy systems that are near-impossible to connect. For example, real-time data from HM Revenue and Customs could dramatically cut the time it takes for people to get a benefits reassessment when their wages changed or they got a job. She added: “But it is such a huge undertaking because the infrastructure is so old, big and costly.”
In Harkins’ view there was a way forward: “Understandably, because of our desire to push forward, we look at the big, ground-breaking changes. But we can look for opportunities in a new policy and update something around that. Sometimes you can move forward quicker on an opportunistic basis without waiting for that big scale change.”
How can the civil service identify and act on small opportunities for collaboration? Robinson said the DWP and health department had a unit which was looking at preventing ill-health at work. And permanent secretaries are sponsoring discussion groups for civil servants. But these discussions may stall unless risks are shared, Chinn said: “I think if I was a perm sec I would think ‘I am happy to do this, but the moment I am carrying your risk that is where I draw the line’.”
As the event drew to a conclusion, Doutney summed up by saying: “Put user experience right up front of public service design, which I think will lead to greater collaborative working. And secondly make sure you work out the means by which the money flows along the chain so everybody gets the appropriate recognition. Otherwise collaboration just won’t work.”