Three spending shifts: How the Government can propel person-centred funding
The outdated siloed approach to public services is failing to meet today’s complex challenges. Rethinking public spending can unlock impactful, person-centred solutions without requiring additional funding. Grace Duffy from Bridges Outcome Partnerships on the three shifts we need.
There is a growing consensus that the traditional siloed, deficit-based model of public services is unsuitable for solving society’s most complex problems.
There is also growing consensus around the ‘What’ we need to improve: more relational and strengths-based support, more prevention, and more place-based approaches. But to make this a reality, we now need to focus on the ‘How’.
It may be the recovering Civil Servant in me, but I believe we need to look at the structural systemic factors which are setting us up to fail, to understand how to create the conditions for success.
Informed by my experience in central government and at Bridges Outcomes Partnerships, I have identified three key shifts in public spending rules that would help create the conditions for making person-centred funding a reality.
- Liberate front-line teams: From Inputs to Shared Outcomes
Despite its strengths, the prevailing siloed, inputs-based model for public service delivery is failing to improve the lives of vulnerable people and is achieving poor value for public money. That’s because today’s complex societal problems don’t fit neatly into policy siloes, and one size will not fit all. Focusing on immediate needs and tackling problems in isolation means we treat symptoms, not underlying causes, so problems recur.
Greater personalisation and strengths-based approaches are needed for people to make meaningful, sustainable changes in their lives. Yet we typically contract services with tightly defined specifications of inputs and activities which can effectively inhibit personalisation and delivery innovation.
Instead, commissioning should focus on outcomes and the shared goals, namely making meaningful, lasting, positive changes in people’s lives. We should trust front-line teams to exercise their judgement and do what is best for the individual in front of them, rather than demand strict adherence to a service specification. This freedom is essential for relational working, and in our experience, leads to more fulfilling roles and higher staff retention.
Please see BOP’s People Powered Partnerships for more information on how focusing on outcomes can transform delivery. - Invest in prevention: From rigid, annual budgets to flexible, long-term funding
The current system is too rigid and short-term. The government’s commitment to issuing block grants for Combined Authorities (CA) and three-year settlements for Local Authorities (LA) is a necessary but far from sufficient reform. Council budgets are strictly annualised, and there is little flexibility. This works against preventative services, which typically require several years to be effective. Currently, services often need to be recommissioned annually, with huge administrative burdens and human resource challenges. This can force a focus on shorter-term activities for reporting within the year instead of long-term, meaningful outcomes.
Instead, we could provide certainty through multi-year budgets and allow flexibility across financial years so local authorities can commission services for longer, improving efficacy and efficiency. And we could provide the means for LAs and CAs to invest in preventative and demand reduction measures, for example, through a special ‘prevention’ budget category in addition to ‘capital’ and ‘resource’. Together these simple changes could transform commissioning – reducing demand, increasing value and helping to create sustainable services. - Effective partnering between central and local government: From siloed, competitive pots to holistic, strategic co-commissioning
The groups served poorly by existing public services often have multi-faceted and complex challenges that do not fit squarely into any department’s (or local government’s) priority spending areas. For example, violence against women and girls involves physical and mental health services, criminal justice, education, housing, children’s services – each has an important part to play, but they must be truly aligned in order to be effective. Helping them requires co-payment between the silos of the State which they impact in the longer term.
The current siloed system means uncertainty and additional bureaucracy for delivery teams, and sub-optimal services designed around individual aspects of multi-faceted problems. The last government’s highly competitive approach to funding wasted many people’s time and often meant additional funding often went to the best-resourced LAs.
Instead, we could build on the success of Life Chance Fund, which aligned interests between central and local government by jointly paying for agreed outcomes; and go further by pooling budgets from departments seeking to tackle different aspects of societal challenges into a central Missions Outcomes Fund. This Fund could then tackle challenges holistically, and provide strategic, joined-up funding to commission services in priority mission areas.
These three shifts alone are insufficient – they deal with the mechanics of reform and need to be supported by changes in mindset and skillset. But they are necessary for creating the conditions for place-based, personalised and holistic services.
The great thing is that they don’t require additional funding. All they require is a change in approach.
About the author: Grace Duffy is director of policy, influencing and engagement at Bridges Outcomes Partnerships, having previously spent 12 years at the civil service.
Image: Bridges Outcomes Partnerships
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