Achieving Best Value

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Achieving Best Value

• Gerry Stoker
• www.soton.ac.uk/ccd

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A short history of Best Value

• A concept constructed out of a political process
• Initial idea was for locally-driven improvements
  in services and programmes
• In the UK and especially in England it became
  wrapped up in a wider national drive for public
  service reform
• Targets and terror strategy that ultimately
  failed

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It has always contained multiple meanings

• Reducing costs of services- X-efficiency
• Like running down an up-escalator
• Achieving a best fit to consumer preferences-
  allocative efficiency
• Clarify the purpose of the service Wiltshire
• Meeting the public interest a wider sense of
  weighing up alternatives that brings politics as
  well as management into focus

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From Best Value to Public Value

• Mark Moores concept of public value has become
  popular
• Achieving outcomes that the public values
• Through an open process of authorisation
• Through an open approach to delivery tools
• Can involve strategic action as well project
  management and operational service delivery
  Manchester

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Standard lessons from NPM and their limitations

• Do market research but can be a limited and
  manipulative tool
• Use contracts and incentives but underplays the
  complexity of human behaviour
• Identify best practice-but can simply be who is
  the most boastful and difficult to identify key
  factors

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New lessons born out of experience

• Keep challenging your relationship with your
  public
• Develop policies and interventions based on a
  more subtle understanding of human behaviour
• Adopt a deliberate experimental approach
• These are the key ingredients for sustainable
  development

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Changing the relationship with your public

• Not consultation but smarter engagement
• Revaluing and linking to the representative
  process
• Engaging over strategy or operational matters
• Do more of the latter?
• PB in Porto Alegre and Europe
• UK 2008 Empowerment WP and reviews multiple
  mechanisms and options

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Audit your consultation procedures

• Use the CLEAR model
• Developed in consultation with the Council of
  Europe and various municipalities
• See engagement not as a burden but as a
  fundamental tool which has to be maintained and
  checked on a regular basis

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CLEAR
CLEAR

• Factor Response

• Can do
• Like to
• Enabled to
• Asked to
• Responded to

• Capacity building
• Community identity
• Civic infrastructure
• Diverse initiatives
• Accountability and leadership

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Understanding human behaviour

• Keynes famous advice about becoming the prisoner
  of a defunct economic model
• The rise of behavioural economics
• Barnets nudge strategy.and that of the next
  President of the United States
• Recognising the complex ways that people make
  decisions
• Important not to squeeze out non-instrumental
  motivation

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Develop an experimental approach

• Identify your own best practice
• Learn from and value diversity
• We have developed with local authorities
• Design experiments- Wigan
• Randomised control trials
• Not costly if built into policy process

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Doing it all in partnership

• Learning from peers and developing peer support
• Creating joint working arrangements to tackle
  problems and challenges at the right scale
• The complexity of locality and the governance
  task today