Public Commons

Part of Literature - Public Administration Public Value Literature

Extracts from the Executive Summary (bold emphasis added):

Public value argues that public services are distinctive because they are characterised by claims of rights by citizens to services that have been authorised and funded through some democratic process. Simply expressed, public value is the analogue of the desire to maximise shareholder value in the private sector. It is designed to get public managers thinking about what is most valuable in the service that they run and to consider how effective management can make the service the best that it can be. This approach presents a way of improving the quality of decision making, by calling for public managers to engage with services users and the wider public, it seeks to promote greater trust in public institutions and meet head on the challenge of rising expectations of service delivery.

In simple terms, public value poses three central questions to public managers, which form the backbone of the full report:

• What is this organisation for?
• To whom are we accountable?
• How do we know if we have been successful?

Public value tells us that public managers as well as politicians have to explain and justify what they do to the public. Successful public service delivery depends on a continuous dialogue with citizens, who should be thought of as stakeholders on a par with government, experts, industry representatives, the media, the judiciary and service users. In the language of public value, organisations must therefore seek democratic legitimacy for their actions by engaging with their 'authorising environment'.

But engaging with citizens is not an exercise in giving the public what they want or slavishly following the dictates of public opinion polls. Public value offers a framework for how the information gathered using these processes should be used to improve the quality of the decisions that managers make. It calls for a continuing dialogue or conversation between public managers and citizens. In other words, if resources are constrained then that should be explained. If tough choices about priorities are required then that should be described. The intention is that public managers share some of their dilemmas with the public, seek citizens’ views and adapt their decisions accordingly. This is what responsiveness to refined preferences is all about.

In practice, creating public value relies upon taking a pragmatic and non-ideological approach to the delivery of public services, giving real effect to the principle 'what matters is what works' viewed through the lens of the principles of equity and accessibility.

Several conditions must be met if public services are to develop a model of continuous improvement to meet rising expectations:

• More effective public sector commissioning, strengthening the capacity of staff to manage relationships, projects and contracts; developing more sophisticated models of procurement that build in a public value element and reward providers for responding adeptly to public preferences; establishing effective ways of determining and measuring performance against outcomes.
• Building a better evidence base, since examples of innovative approaches to commissioning and contracting that meet these criteria are rather few and far between.
• Identifying where it is appropriate to involve the public directly in public service delivery (without presuming that the public want to be involved in every aspect) before piloting new models of delivery, supporting users to give their input, training staff and facilitating culture change.
• The development of a workplace culture where staff are focused on how to best deliver services that are responsive to the public. Staff must adopt an 'outside-in' standpoint, viewing their work from the citizens’ perspective. Good employment relations are a prerequisite for service innovation.

Public value does offer a systematic framework for a new approach to goal setting and measurement because:

• Managers will have thought constructively about the purpose their service is supposed to serve.
• There will have been a conversation with the public to ensure that these purposes are consistent with citizens’ expectations – understanding of course that these expectations can be reshaped by politicians and public managers.
• These expectations can be transformed into clear goals against which performance can be measured.
• This represents a very different approach, with a strong emphasis on the devolution of power and authority. It assumes, for example, that objectives are not set at the centre through national targets but can be fixed at local level. It also assumes that managers have the authority and capability (with locally elected representatives) to set these objectives. And it opens the way to some trade union and employee involvement in the process.

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