You might have missed this news amidst the din of alleged phone hacking and corruption – but the long-awaited Government White Paper on ‘Open Government Services’ has been published. Most of you won’t be engaged in providing services to the public sector – but everyone will be affected by receiving these services. For the creative, arts and cultural sector this paper will have a fundamental (the rhetoric calls it ‘transformative’ ) impact on how we work so Cyprus Well will be thinking about how the services we offer could rise to the challenge of new ways of working with Local Authorities.
The White Paper describes how Government will be “opening public services because we believe that giving people more control over the public services they receive, and opening up the delivery of those services to new providers, will lead to better public services for all. Whatever the circumstances, this Government would be modernising public services in this way.But in this economic climate, when times are tight and budgets are being cut to stabilise the economy and reduce our debts, opening public services is more important than ever – if we want to deliver better services for less money, improve public service productivity and stimulate innovation to drive the wider growth of the UK economy”.
The White Paper sets out a new policy framework for public service provision over the next few years as well as setting out their ambitions and assuring us of further consultation to arrive at informed solutions.
As a publicly funded charity which provides reading and writing development activities the new paper offers Cyprus Well opportunities to flourish and to fail – but whatever happens it will certainly have a huge impact on our organisation, and all other arts/culture organisations which have a relationship with government. Three key areas we will need to get a grip of are:
- Public service tendering. Local Authorities have, for the most part, already chosen their preferred tender partners for service provision, including those for cultural services. For those who haven’t started this conversation with their local government the process will be more complicated, and sub-contracting to other suppliers may be the only avenue open to you. Find out who your local service contractors are and make them a pitch about how you can help them deliver.
- Competition. As a contracted or sub-contracted service supplier you may not be able to get all your costs covered in your tender. Margins will be cut to a minimum some charities may not be able to compete since we don’t have capital reserves which allow us to take as many risks as larger commercial organisations. But the specialist expertise of our staff and contacts gives us the edge when measuring the impact of our work so we need to be more bullish about the ‘intellectual property’ of our long histories of successful service delivery and charge a realistic price for them. Remember, the clients, communities and members that we talk to everyday could be other organisation’s ‘hard to reach’ niche audience.
- Monitoring and data collection. Impact and the old chestnut of how to measure and quantify it is likely to get more complicated. This brings the additional burden of costs and staff resource, and too much collected data remains buried on a spreadsheet never to see the light of day again – but we all need to be more savvy about understanding the motivations of the communities we serve, and the difference our services make. Start thinking in terms of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘evidence of impact’ and work out how you can provide this as part of your offer. There will flocks of overly complicated and technology led toolkits, resources, maps, ratings and methodologies abounding in the coming years around evaluation and evidence and I predict an entire industry will be created to cope with it. Charities and arts organisations need to keep pace in order to stay in competition so start looking at your data or gather together in consortia to collect data with others in the same line of work to make the most of your assets.
And I can’t end without our own quick pitch – Cyprus Well works to support writers’ careers and to get communities enjoying the benefits of reading and writing – and we’d love to work with anyone who wants to help us provide more! Give us a call if you want to discuss any aspect of literature work.
For more information on Open Public Services go to: http://www.openpublicservices.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
