Tag: value for money

On being in my sub-prime

Or, 5 steps to make yourself feel middle-aged:

1.  Take impossibly glamorous 12-year old daughter clothes shopping.  Hear your mother’s voice coming out of your mouth as you  ask if it’s big enough/long enough/warm enough/waterproof enough and with enough pockets to be worth buying?

2.  Remember with a pang exactly how those questions made you feel when you were that age (if not – ever – that glamorous), and know you should save your breath.

3. Watch the pity in her eyes as she  answers, politely, that it’s fine.  Know that it could be tight enough to cut off circulation and flimsy enough to disintegrate in a thick fog but she’d still want you to buy it.

4.  Realise that the chap on the cash desk who was flirting outrageously with the leggy 19-year olds in front is calling you Madam.

5.  Pay up like a lamb.  Go home.  Water tomatoes.

Demonstrating value

I’ve been thinking again about how public services demonstrate their worth.  As the cull of quangos continues apace, more organisations are looking to see how to prove their value to government before it’s too late.  I’ve a presentation to write about this today, so I was interested in an item on the Today programme this morning on the subject.

The gist of the piece was that  although quango-cutting may be currently popular and demonstrate a macho approach to saving money, government should think about what’s worth keeping and be careful before it embarks on wholesale cuts.  The evidence shows high costs connected with cuts but often little in the way of added efficiency or long-term cost savings.  Jobs still need to be done, they’re just done by other agencies or bought back into government, leading to  a lack of focus and  reduced accountability.

I sympathise with my mate Menthol Dan’s theory that over the next few months we will see a mass cull of NDPBs, a slow disintegration of services, a realisation that something needs to be put back in place and then a process of re-assembling the pieces again.

I’ve said here before that the lack of hard evidence of achievement is a major problem for lots of quangos who don’t have the evidence up their sleeves to show how valuable they are.    It’s an issue for lots of voluntary sector bodies too – especially those who receive direct grants from government.   NCVO have been looking at the issue as part of their Measuring Outcomes for Public Service Users (MOPSU) programme – there’s a useful summary of the arguments here

The programme is starting to identify possible principles for voluntary sector bodies to use when they’re trying to manage the notoriously difficult job of measuring outcomes – maybe these could be transferred to NDPBs too ?

  • Any assessment must be based upon the experience of users rather than the interests of commissioners or providers.
  • Outcomes should be directly attributable to the intervention
  • The service should be assessed across different ‘domains’, which in turn are weighted to ensure that the service is making a demonstrable difference to the user, and that any difference reflects the different dimensions of any service
  • Any measures should carry as low a burden as possible, which in practice leads to the usage of regulatory data collected for existing purposes, if possible.

Burn baby, burn

The bonfire of the qangos might not be such a popular rallying cry if the quangos themselves could  point to some hard evidence of their own achievement.  As David Cameron gets his matches ready, there’s a desperate need for NDPBs (and grant-funded voluntary sector bodies too) to be able to demonstrate that they represent value for money.  Sadly, in my experience, staff in bodies like this are happiest when they’re talking about the (undoubted) social need for their services and the benefits they were set up to deliver.  Mention of evaluation, demonstrating value for money, even – heaven forbid – the need to become self-supporting by selling commercial services, makes them come over giddy as a Victorian vicar accidentally catching sight of an uncovered table leg.  They should all be in a tearing hurry to get measures in place which demonstrate hard evidence of their usefulness.  If they can’t it’ll be hard to grieve too much when they start to smoulder.