I’ve spent the past 10 years of my life working in Liverpool’s social sector. I’ve got my hands dirty, fundraised, tendered, spun out and spun in. Today as I look around, there are some immutable truths, unchanged over the decade.
Communities feel “stuck”. They know that social care, healthcare, justice and education aren’t delivering what they should, but individuals don’t know what they can do to help.
My community – and probably yours – already has answers to these problems. Finding money isn’t as easy as it used to be, but the money exists. We have social investment, charitable money and public sector money swirling around social problems, yet no co-ordination between the three.
That’s why this week sees the launch of the Public Services Lab, a new initiative to support the local voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors to deliver public services in the Liverpool city region. I hope that by 2022, half of the organisations in this sector will be delivering a public service – a 40% increase.
For example, we’re supporting Transforming Choice, which delivers an alternative alcohol detox programme with a 100% success rate but has no public sector contracts to provide the programme. This is because it lacks commercial and business capability around areas such as IT and HR. We are working with our partners and others to address this missing capacity to meet procurement and commissioning requirements.
Ultimately, someone cold, hungry, lonely or looking for a job doesn’t think about our sector in terms of silos. They don’t care about commissioning, about whether it’s a local PLC or charity with the answer.
To move forward in any meaningful way, we need to remove the “stuckness” that afflicts the way we do things. We need communities and individuals to realise that they, working together, hold the key to better opportunities for local people.
The initiative is being backed by Big Society Capital, Catch22, Interserve and Clubfinance – which have all provided initial investment to start the venture and bring with them the capability of running public services of all different shapes and sizes, ranging in budget from £50,000 to £600m.
Too often, policymakers demand grand, shiny programmes to solve social challenges. A big headline, a trending hashtag. Yet in my experience, very often it’s the small, organic ideas that have most impact. Those grand, shiny programmes simply end up wasting money. Providing the conditions and capability for small community-led or user-led initiatives to start, continue and develop could be much more successful.
Who says that the private sector holds the monopoly on innovation? Why can’t we create joint vehicles between the community and local authorities, vehicles with the commercial capability to deliver a service, but that also build the skill and expertise of the organisation as they grow?
Why can’t local authorities ditch their procurement processes, and instead become incubators, developing ideas with the organisations that know the problems best?
By thinking like people, not professionals, by starting with what the community needs and designing backwards, we’ll be able to finally use what’s currently going to waste.
Chris Catterall is chief executive of the Public Services Lab.
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