The delivery of public services is "misguided" and "inappropriate", Acevo has said in a report that calls for a “comprehensive redefinition” of the relationship between government, charities and the public.
Released today at the umbrella body’s annual conference, the report Remaking the State: A Call to Action is calling for legislation to enshrine a Public Service Constitution, which would be “focused on ensuring that the primary aim of any public services is to deliver meaningful improvement to the lives of those who need it most”.
It also calls for 5 per cent of all government spending on major delivery departments (initially health, welfare, justice and education) to be spent on preventative services. It wants this to rise to 10 per cent by 2020.
The report says that realising this will require structural change. It said that this includes the implementation of “longer-term accounting cycles and social programmes whereby the responsible minister justifies the choosing of a particular impact and accounting cycle for a social programme on the floor of the House”.
The third recommendation from the report is for a “Community First” test, to ensure that the commissioning environment is a level playing field. This test would be designed by the Cabinet Office and introduced to major commissioning projects in the delivery departments that deal with services affecting vulnerable people.
This test would involve, for example, the radical redesign of the Work Programme so that “services for the hardest to help are placed in the hands best placed to help rather than within monolithic structures”.
It would also require “localisation of work programmes and other large-scale procurements to make them more locally responsive”.
Sir Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, said: “Public services are no longer always working in the best interests of the people. Too often, government prioritises keeping the books balanced over working to improve the lives of the people whom they serve. This is simply not a tenable situation to carry forwards. Instead, major changes are needed.”
Bubb said that the Commission’s findings represent a “roadmap for the future of public services”, and called on politicians to work with the public and the voluntary sector to help “realise a more meaningful future for public services”.
The report comes from the Better Public Services Commission, created in 2014 by Acevo, and co-chaired by Rob Owen, chief executive of St Giles Trust, alongside author Will Hutton.
The Commission argues that the existing emphasis on meeting short-term targets frequently “loses sight of the delivery of meaningful cost-effective public services to those most in need”.
Owen and Hutton said: “We believed and still believe in the values and aspirations of the Big Society, in which strong civic and social institutions take their place alongside traditionally funded public services to deliver care and quality that deliver great long-term value, rather than cheap, poor mirror-image services that have sadly failed in the past.
“We believe that the real solutions proposed in our report can form the foundations for a new social contract which represents the original aspirations of the Big Society.”
