Meg Hillier, chair of the Commons public accounts committee, has launched the 2016 Guardian Public Service Awards.
At an event at the Guardian on Friday 20 May, Hillier, the MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, told an invited audience, including public servants and public service experts, Guardian staff and representatives from the organisations sponsoring this year’s awards, that the awards were more important than ever at a challenging time for all public services.
“On the public accounts committee we expect public servants to be aware they are spending taxpayers’ money,” said Hillier. “But we are also clear that focusing on the end user – the patient, the client or user – is core to being a good public servant. It’s no good just being good at the maths.”
Hillier said good public servants also needed to be confident about telling the truth when things are going wrong and welcomed the awards as an opportunity to highlight the best public services. “There are great public servants out there and I look forward to seeing the best examples of good public service when the winners are announced,” she said.
David Brindle, the Guardian’s public services editor and chair of the judging panel, said the awards would be the crucible for fresh, creative thinking about how public services would look in the 2020s. “Austerity has proved a long, cold tunnel – longer and colder than we imagined it would be back in 2010,” he said. “Yet we must start planning now for a post-austerity world.”
Brindle said it was now time to think about how public services will respond to homelessness, care and support, transport and the myriad social and welfare issues that the market alone could not fix.
There are 10 categories in this year’s awards, now open for nominations from teams, projects and individuals working in the public, private and non-profit sectors. The closing date for nominations is Friday 8 July 2016, and work on some element of the project or initiative entered must have taken place between 9 July 2015 and 8 July 2016.
The awards shortlist will be announced on 12 September, when voting opens for Public Servant of the Year. The closing date for that vote is 10 October. All the winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in November and details of all award winners will be published online, on the Society Professionals section of the Guardian website, and in print, in SocietyGuardian.
Attendees at the launch event included Christine Parsloe, leisure and cultural development manager for the south London borough of Merton, who was Public Servant of the Year in 2013. Several of this year’s judges were at the event, including Anthony Douglass, chief executive of Cafcass, Patrick Butler, head of education and society at the Guardian, and Alison Benjamin, editor of SocietyGuardian.
