Campaigning principles for transformation in public services

Stone King’s lead on social enterprises and public services is partner Julian Blake. He promotes collaborative commissioning models, including Innovation Partnerships and Alliance Contracts, and is a member of the VCSE Crown Commissioner’s advisory panel to government.

Our campaigning principles for transformation in public services are as follows:

• Commissioning public services is social economy stewardship – not market purchasing – meeting actual social needs (based on enquiry, analysis and consultation with communities & experts), as a critical foundation of the social economy.

• Commissioning is a wider responsibility and function than the public procurement of service contracts.

• Purpose is the only legitimate driver (necessarily within limited public sector resources, enhanced by mobilised community resources).

• Public value is the only determinant of purpose (wider than financial value and the commercial version of additional social value). This links to the social foundation and non-overreach concepts of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and the mission-driven public policy principle of Prof. Marianna Mazzucato.

• The huge public value inherent in the misunderstood and underestimated public benefit sector, including social enterprises, charities, co-operatives and community businesses, needs to be properly understood, unlocked, and embraced.

• Purpose-aligned collaboration between the public sector and the public benefit sector is core to public services and any commercial provider must be required to deliver according to public value imperatives, based on social enterprise principles.

• Initiation, innovation and commitment from the public benefit sector in public services is substantially/potentially bottom-up from within the community/place, and this needs to be recognised and facilitated, but narrow commissioning that is limited to process-driven public procurement has the contrary, top-down, restricting assumption that requisite knowledge is with top-down public sector service purchasers.

• Relational agreements are required for facilitating purpose-driven, public value collaboration. These focus on the mutuality, arrangements, communications, and flexibilities required to meet service aspirations. They contrast with standard, transactional, commercial contracts, where the focus is risk and maximising institutional protection and a process-driven narrow concept of “value for public money”, mainly concerned with cost minimisation, not public value maximisation.