civica

Councils can make better use of data

Data can mislead us. This needn’t be due to any malign intent: data can sometimes fail to highlight important details, as groundbreaking analysis in Warwickshire showed recently. A close look at data at a very local level revealed severe pockets of deprivation in what was perceived as an affluent shire county, and this led to a major change in the regeneration strategy.

As recent research for DCLG has shown, councils across the country don’t make use of this type of information in a systematic way. The research, focused on so-called Local Information Systems, found just 69 of these systems in use, primarily in counties and metropolitan boroughs.

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Security is not just a technical issue

The days when there was an obvious distinction between working in the office and out in the community are disappearing fast. This is particularly true of council staff such as children’s social workers, the focus of a new chunk of funding from the DfES.

Some £13 million has been set aside for councils to invest in new mobile technologies, such as laptops and Personal Digital Assistants. This is a welcome development, but procuring the technology is likely to be the easy part. Ensuring the security of these new systems will also be an essential part of using these new technologies responsibly. “The conditions of the grant are explicit on the subject of security - any mobile devices will need to have the appropriate security capabilities, and staff training must address this issue,” says the DfES.

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Organisational change needed as well as technology

Failure is the likely outcome for many public sector projects to develop services focused on the needs of citizens, according to research carried out by Brunel University and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance.

“We think there has been too much emphasis on developing services that use new technologies and too little on preparing organisations for change. Technology is only part of modernisation, you need to have the people and structures in place too,” said Professor Zahir Irani, Head of Brunel’s Business School, who supervised the research.

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School meals in Glasgow

Given the choice, would the kids of today choose clothes or music over Turkey Twizzlers? We may be about to find out, with the growth of school meal schemes such as Glasgow City Council’s Fuel Zone project. Devised by the council’s Direct Care and Services department, this reward scheme enables schoolchildren across secondary schools in Glasgow to accrue ‘points’ for healthy school dinners from a special ‘Fuel Zone menu.’

The technology behind Fuel Zone is fairly simple, and so could be deployed by local authorities across the country: meals are purchased using a pre-pay smartcard, and the points collected are redeemed a registration form on the Glasgow City Council website, which also arranges for the prizes to be dispatched. It may well turn out to have loopholes, but Fuel Zone seems to have a realism about it that other well-schemes, such as the crusade led by Jamie Oliver have lacked.

Flexible working a pointer for shared services

What is the link between flexible working and shared services? It’s not obvious at first: flexible working is a relationship between an organisation and staff, offering them a more congenial work-life balance, while employers benefit from having less office space to maintain. Shared services, on the other hand, is a partnership between organisations for the provision of basic support functions.

But as Stephen Fellowes of London Connects has pointed out, the willingness of a public body to consider flexible working is a useful pointer to how well prepared it is for sharing services. As Fellowes says, an organisation that seems unwilling to its own staff to work remotely is probably unlikely to be willing to trust a completely separate organisation to do so. Fellowes identifies this “Fortress Mentality” as being a significant barrier to shared services in the public sector. It’s time some of those walls came down.

Thirteen steps to cut red tape

Although traditionally unlucky, the number 13 could bring good fortune to local authorities. At present, councils are sinking under the weight of bureaucracy imposed by central government, having to report up to 1,200 pieces of information, ranging from Best Value Performance Indicators, Comprehensive Performance Assessment indicators, social care Performance Assessment Framework indicators, quality of life indicators and Local Area Agreement indicators.

But not for much longer. The Lifting Burdens Task Force brings together a group of chief executives from local councils specifically to tackle the overall burdens placed on local government by Whitehall. Over the coming 18 months the task force will make specific recommendations for change that will lessen this burden, providing more flexibility for local authorities to deliver and report on the services that matter to their local communities.

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Efficiency pressures changing relationships

The pressure on local authorities to deliver both more efficient and more responsive public services is changing relationships between suppliers and partners, according to an interesting piece of research by Peter Clarke, Principal Analyst at the Ovum consultancy.

Suppliers as well as their public sector customers need to learn some important lessons if they are to form satisfactory partnerships in future said the research, drawing on interviews with senior figures in eight leading English authorities. “Too often the ICT industry has promised too much. This leads to a jaundiced relationship,” said Peter Gilroy, Chief Executive of Kent County Council. “It comes in two shapes. Either they say ‘you can’t do that it will be too expensive’ or they say ‘this product will be all singing and dancing’ and it is not.”

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E-petitions can work

The e-petitioning system on the Prime Minister’s website has been variously described as an empty gesture offering the public no genuine involvement in policy issues, or as the first step on the slippery slope to mob rule. So time is up for this way of engaging the public then? Well, not quite.

Bristol City Council has run a system successfully for two and a half years, and in that time 60 e-petitions have been submitted, collecting a total of 20,000 signatures. The result has been improved policies, more transparent decision-making, and closer links between elected members and the community, according to the council.

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Government Connect could start an online market

Does the Government Connect (GC) infrastructure just offer councils a way of exchanging data about services and citizens, or is there more to it? Definitely more, argued Frank Moyer in an article for E-Government Bulletin this week.

As well as routing data between public bodies, GC could host an online marketplace, Moyer suggests. Private sector suppliers would compete for council business and deliver their services to their public sector customers through the GC infrastructure.

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The Tories and ‘open source’ politics

When thinking about progressive, modernising agendas, the Conservative Party doesn’t always spring to mind, but that could change if George Osborne is as good as his word.

Equal access to information, new social networks, and “open source politics” are the foundations of efforts to bring the Conservative Party into the digital age, the Shadow Chancellor told delegates at the ‘Public Service 2.0’ conference, staged by the RSA.

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Help for the Third Sector

The last phase in joining up the public sector is going to be difficult to get right, but it’s essential we do get it right if we are to see the improvements in services we all want. The third sector – the complex web of community groups, charities and voluntary organisations – is closest to our communities and so well placed to assess the needs of citizens, and the impact of policies.

Ed Milliband, Minister for the Third Sector, has appointed the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) to run a £2 million programme that will help local authorities harness the potential of the third sector to improve people's lives. IDeA will work with 2,000 commissioners from across the public sector - including staff in Jobcentre Plus, health authorities, the National Offender Management Service and local councils.

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Sunderland shows the way

Sunderland’s winning bid in the Digital Challenge, a competition to find new ways of using technology to tackle social exclusion, is notable for two main reasons. It gives priority to the practical needs of citizens, shaping the technology around them, and it also uses a diverse range of technologies, recognising that there is no single “magic bullet” for all our needs.

The Sunderland bid, which netted £3.5m in central government funding, included a proposal for Community e-Champions, who will help vulnerable people access computer and internet services, support children at risk of underachieving at school, and deliver an e-mentoring scheme for children and young people.

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Data management is a growing concern

Data can seem as cheap and plentiful as air. But managing it properly certainly does have a price tag, and with the quantity of data we produce set to rocket over the next few years there are serious policy implications for all of the public sector.

According to research carried out by IDC, the amount of data produced worldwide in 2006 totalled around 161 billion gigabytes, equivalent to about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. By 2010, this is expected to increase six-fold, to around 988 billion gigabytes.

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More texting

E-services don’t need to be complicated to be useful. Sometimes the less glitzy and sophisticated services are adopted more quickly and fully by the broad mass of people than services that flaunt their technical sophistication. SMS is a good example, with an explosion in usage across the world that surprised most industry players and analysts.

So why aren’t we offered more text message services by the public sector? But maybe they are on the way. A pilot project drawing together police, local authorities, health care trusts and government departments will help to ensure that visitors to the UK cannot break their visa restrictions. As part of this, text message notifications will inform visitors that they must leave, or renew their visas.

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ChildLine online

One of the great new challenges facing local authorities is to communicate more effectively. Unlike the private sector, councils don’t get to choose their target audience, and finding the repertoire of voices needed to talk to all parts of society would stretch any organisation.

One way that government bodies can deal this is to partner with an organisation that has already gained the trust of the target audience. Reaching young people is notoriously difficult, and so when the NSPCC looked at extending its ChildLine services to the internet, it looked to websites that young people visit anyway.

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