There is no reason why a local authority’s socio-economic goals should be abandoned when its services are outsourced or secured through partnership,says John Tizard
The Equality Bill currently before Parliament is creating the usual push-back from all those who see public sector outsourcing and service delivery partnerships only as a means of cutting expenditure.
This is unfortunate. There is every reason why any public agency would and should seek to ensure its core social policies are not thrown overboard when it outsources service delivery, and secures them through partnerships with the private or third sector bodies or other public sector organisations.
There is, therefore, a strong case to be made for ensuring that public procurement and partnering promote social goals, such as equality objectives, impacting on service-users and those employed to deliver public services, or to produce goods used by the public sector.
The same applies to the pursuit of decent working conditions and terms for employees for those staff throughout the delivery chain.
People delivering public services should not be discriminated against in some form of lottery, depending on who their employer is. Nor should the users of services be discriminated against on the basis of who delivers the services commissioned and procured by a local authority or other public agency.
Local authorities should not forget their community wellbeing responsibilities. Their strategic commissioning decisions should identify the outcomes – direct and indirect – which they wish to secure from any public service, however, and by whomever they are delivered.
Procuring an outsourced service should be seen only as one possible means to secure the outcomes defined by the commissioning process. Value for money must be about securing these outcomes for an affordable price, and not chasing the lowest price.
Outsourcing and similar practices must not ignore other public policy goals in areas such as personalised services, environmental, employment – including apprenticeship and professional development – equality and sustainability policies. These have associated costs which have to be reflected in contract prices. Therefore, the outsourcing provider has to be able to demonstrate not only that it can meet these policy goals and how, through service redesign, performance management and productivity improvements, it can improve quality and/or reduce the costs for the public sector.
There should be some regulatory frameworks, but local public agencies and their partners and providers should be able to decide what is best and most appropriate for their locality and its populations.
To achieve this position, it will be desirable for government, trade unions and the provider community to discuss how the Equality Bill requirements can be best applied to business and third sector providers, and addressed in public procurement practice.
How a bidder’s commitment to equality issues are evaluated in the procurement process will be challenging. As will implementing robust monitoring arrangements for the post-contract period. These matters ideally need to be agreed by all parties – providers, the public sector and trade unions.
And, in the case of equality for service-users, other stakeholders will need to be involved in developing models of good practice.
There seems to be a growing chorus of those who want unfettered market forces to determine the outcome of public procurements.
Current EU and domestic legislations recognise that these, like many other markets, require some regulation. There can be debate about the nature and degree of that regulation but it is essential that this debate recognises:
l the need to reduce costs and achieve value for money
l the wider social, economic, environmental and, indeed, political goals that society wishes to pursue
l public procurement’s contribution to delivering these goals
l the added public value which public services can contribute
l outsourcing to be one of several solutions, and not always the most appropriate solution
l the correlation between good working conditions and quality outputs and outcomes
This is a critical time for public services.
It is essential that we maintain a value-based approach to their delivery – and equality for service-users and staff serving them is an important value worth promoting.
John Tizard is director of CSPU at LGIU
