Will Cavendish, the executive director of the Cabinet Office’s Implementation Group, said last week that the Department for Education will publish choice frameworks for early years services and schools in July, while the Department for Communities and Local Government will publish a choice framework for social housing. The Department for Health will publish a framework for health and adult social care after the summer.
The frameworks will represent the first public fruits of what Cavendish described as “a major piece of work on choice and how we could embed choice in a really significant way in all public services,” undertaken by his Open Public Services Team. During a wide-ranging interview covering his roles leading the Red Tape Challenge and the Implementation Unit, as well as his work on open public services, Cavendish told CSW that the team is also undertaking work on payment-by-results systems, and on how the government can ensure that it is “genuinely open to new providers to offer services in a different way”.
The frameworks could become central to an Open Public Services Bill, should the government bring forward legislation following its current ‘call to evidence’ on the right to choose, which closes on 22 June.
Critics of choice in public services argue that a right to choose would require wasteful surplus capacity, but Cavendish said such fears are “not a particular concern” and cited a sample page of draft legislation that would require ministers to “have regard to the availability of public resources” in their service pledges.
See our full interview with Cavendish.