Let’s end the rigging of public service procurement and repair children’s care provision
3 min read
You’ll know that ‘greenwashing’ means hyperbolic or fraudulent claims that products are sustainable or help to reduce emissions. But have you heard of ‘social washing’? Many public service commissioners in local authorities, the NHS and other organisations will recognise its meaning.
These commissioners organise residential care for children, support for vulnerable adults, rehabilitation services and primary and urgent healthcare, to name just a few public services. They plan and design services to meet local needs and must consider ‘social value’ when choosing providers, a concept brought into law by 2013’s Social Value Act and which recognises that commissioning public services shouldn’t be like buying paperclips.
But in practice the system can be gamed or the process inadvertently rigged. I’ve heard many social enterprises and charities describe how they lost out in competitive bidding processes to well-resourced and often offshored bidders with bullying lawyers whose social value promises were fantasies. As The House has reported, the policy failures behind the children’s care business are dragging councils towards bankruptcy.
Commissioners are frustrated too; those trying to use more innovative, partnership-based approaches, such as co-designing services with brilliant local providers, report they are often – wrongly – told “you can’t do that” by their own procurement or legal departments. Yet these approaches are legally watertight and were encouraged by the ‘light-touch’ regime and other legislation. They recognise that social enterprises, co-operatives, mutuals, leisure trusts, employee-owned businesses and trading charities deliver high-quality public services that meet communities’ needs.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is currently being considered in the House of Lords, and the government has accepted the conclusion of Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care that the current system leads to poor outcomes for children, with rising costs.
The minister in the Lords has on several occasions mentioned the need to reform the ‘marketplace’. They only recently said: “We have a market that is dysfunctional and not working appropriately.”
A more diverse offering of locally based suppliers, charities, social enterprises, co-operatives, small businesses and collaborative endeavours is surely where we need to be heading. The strengthening of the regulator’s powers will inevitably mean some of the asset-stripping, profit-gouging suppliers might take flight, and that will leave local government even more exposed.
We are aware that a provider of children’s social care places suddenly closing its provision as a result of financial failure could have a significantly detrimental impact on the care and stability of where children and young people live. Currently local authorities have no way of knowing whether a private provider or its corporate owners are at risk of failing financially.
There are some examples where great care is happening. The Juno Community Interest Company in Liverpool, Social adVentures in Manchester and the Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust in London are all boosting the life chances of our most vulnerable young people. All exist for public service and benefit. They plough their profits into their social mission, often providing preventative and complementary services. Most importantly, they win tenders in open procurement processes, but this is still the exception.
What, then, needs to change? We need to use the tools we have.
More commissioners now understand how they can collaborate with social enterprise providers and that procurement regulations should be an enabler, not a barrier. And the recent Procurement Act gave commissioners many new tools and flexibilities. We need truly bold, collaborative commissioners, making full use of new flexibilities and regulations, so every pound we spend on vital public services is used to maximise quality and meet communities’ needs.
The question I am posing is whether we need to strengthen the Children’s Bill to ensure that change happens. The challenge for government, both local and national, is to be joined up enough so that collaboration, commissioners and the procurement regime can be used to effect real change to this particular mark.
