Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
We have to join up commissioning much better for this last group of people. So, should a homeless, unemployed drug dependent offender have one provider to deal with all their problems in the round, or separate providers (all specialists) responsible for each End Result? Reform suggests two possible solutions:
The idea is to let public services work like any other market with consumer choice meaning that the best services get to be market leaders and the market changes over time. To achieve this, Reform suggest doing away with the cumbersome procurement approach and introduce a licensing approach with these key features:
Another consequence of these lengthy monolithic contracts is that it is very difficult for governments to change policy direction. Reform makes the point that to implement change a new government will often have to compensate existing providers and institute new, lengthy and expensive procurement processes. Although old providers may get some compensation, all potential
Reform argues that there is a bell curve to innovation. When prices are set too high, providers make easy profits and public money is wasted. But setting prices aggressively low means that new providers are unable to innovate and tend to focus on easy to achieve results, which might not even have required a government funded intervention in the first place.
This then creates the problem of a provider who is ‘too big to fail’. If a provider under-performs, the government may not be able to remove them due to the difficulty of replacing lost capacity, undermining the threat of sanctions written into contracts.
A prime example of this is the government’s radical overhaul of the probation service – “Transforming Rehabilitation” – where new (mainly private) providers will require the active cooperation of a wide range of other agencies such as drug treatment providers etc. to reduce reoffending. Some of the new providers have already stated that they do not wish to spend any of their contract revenue on this provision but expect other agencies to provide high quality services to offenders without any additional incentives.
Reform argues that the current system does not encourage innovation or quality. Whether provision is public or private it is typically a local monopoly with limited or no incentives to improve performance. Too often national and local commissioners prioritise price over effectiveness.
