Bureaucracy and form filling are characteristics of public services. Police forces are no exception and beat officers have been spending almost half their time at the police station. The problem is being tackled vigorously and one approach is to introduce helmet cameras which record incidents and remove the need for a detailed report.
Read more on CUTTING PAPERWORK MEANS MORE BOBBYS ON THE BEAT…
By Mike Aiken, Ben Cairns and Stephen Thake.
Community assets go back some 400 years and they sound like a good idea. But there is a downside to the community owning and managing assets. The authors look at the challenges that community ownership of assets bring to the organizations charged with the job of managing them. They suggest a way forward to securing the benefits of community assets for the community. There has been a high degree of policy interest in community ownership and management of assets such as buildings and land in recent years, and a significant amount of community activity has taken place to justify this interest. It has been less clear how much was known about the issue, particularly from independent evaluations and research. This study reviewed the evidence base to identify gaps in existing knowledge. It was undertaken by analysing a wide range of documents from policy, research and community organisation sources and through discussions with practitioners in the field.
To what extent will an entitlement disperse power to service users?
Little. No difference. Great deal.
All categories 45% 26% 28%
Council members 45% 33% 22%
Council officers 30% 30% 40%
Civil servants 50% 0% 50%
Read more on FROM TARGETS TO ENTITLEMENT POLL 17 JULY 2009 – FINDINGS…
By John Tizard
This article was first published in Public Management and Policy and is reproduced by permission of the Association. http://www.cipfa.org.uk/pmpa/index.cfm
Joined –up government has become a key feature of the public sector. Moving the focus of public services away from the provider and on to the user has changed the perspective. Not only is the user disinterested in who provides the service, it is critical that the different providers get their act together and combine their resources, working as an integrated team. The author describes how the University of Birmingham is promoting partnership working.
By Fiona Hudson-Kelly
When budget cuts are introduced the first thought is frontline services must be protected. One consequence of this is that training is often the first casualty because its impact is rarely measured and the only numbers available relate to the costs. Another approach is to tackle the problem in an innovative way. Review, rather than cut is a better way forward. Here is a framework for reviewing training to get the best value from a reduced budget.
By Kathryn Ray, Maria Hudson, Verity Campbell-Barr and Isabel Shutes
Community involvement in local services is widely recognized as desirable, particularly if the services are to meet the real need. The role of officers and their managers is crucial to making involvement work. The authors examined the challenges facing officials in securing involvement. They also describe measures that might be taken to support officials in meeting the challenge. The role played by public officials – paid officials employed by public bodies – is important in affecting the extent to which community views can have an influence.This includes the way they interact with communities and their role in influencing what happens to the views expressed. The research explored this through a case study of one London borough (Haringey).
Officials’ attitudes, views and feelings
By Jeremy Wight
Health, wellbeing and attainment are closely bound up with each other and all three have to be promoted at the same time. Poverty of aspiration underlies failures in areas such as teenage pregnancy, drugs and alcohol. The National Healthy Schools Programme, which tackles all these issues, is celebrating its tenth anniversary year. It has become well-established as one of the country’s most widely embraced non-statutory government initiatives in schools.
Read more on CELEBRATING TEN YEARS OF HEALTHIER LIVING AND LEARNING…
Irene Lucas
This article was first published in Public Management and Policy and is reproduced by permission of the Association. http://www.cipfa.org.uk/pmpa/index.cfm
Public services must innovate if they are to meet expectations and the warning of budget cuts in the future have served to place greater emphasis on doing things differently. The author presents a view of innovation from the local government perspective. She describes how innovation has been fostered and calls for a public service wide initiative to change the culture away from risk aversion and towards creativity.
Chemotherapy cancer treatment is a complicated business and introducing new drugs can take months. In a move to tackle this problem the NHS, the drug industry and the IT sector collaborated to develop software, now available on the Internet, that has reduced development time for new drugs from three months to a few hours.
Collaborative Procurement, part of the Treasury’s Operational Efficiency Programme is expected to deliver savings of £7.7 billion by 2013-14. Publicnet provides an overview of the Programme. This figure is credible using arithmetic as the basis for calculation, but there is concern that reality has not been properly factored into the equation.
Read more on COLLABORATIVE PROCUREMENT SAVINGS LACK CREDIBILITY…
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