'Pulling together for the customer' - ERSA conference report

ERSA held its annual conference earlier this week, with organisational support from Inclusion. There were a range of breakout sessions, plus plenaries with various industry luminaries. Many of the sessions did not have PowerPoint slides, but those that did are available here.

As always, it's impossible to provide an adequate account of the conference, so I've put together a few highlights.

ERSA's perspective

Matthew Lester, the vice chair of ERSA and Director of Operations for Papworth Trust, was one of the first speakers of the day. His speech highlighted ERSA's commitment to outcome based commissioning and the black box approach. He also quoted Samuel Johnson: 'The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.'

Social Return on Investment

Much of this session mirrored the content and discussion of the following day's SMF event (report here). Further content was provided by Debbie Scott of Tomorrow's People, who pointed to the evaluation reports that her organisation commissions to analyse the social return on investment of their projects. The reports estimate savings in public spend on benefits, crime, government administration and many other areas, plus benefits such as increased tax revenues, and frequently show a very high rate of return. The point was clear: procurement that takes the full range of benefits into account would drastically increase the delivery budget. There was also a passing snipe at the perpetual pilots approach to procurement.

A side point in the Q&A was a brief discussion of whether private providers are better than public sector ones. The only example that anyone could cite was the Australian model, where the public sector provider was driven out of the market within a few years.

Joined up government

Sir Robin Wales, the directly elected mayor of Newham, represented the local authority side of things at the conference, and was passionate about the importance of devolving the powers necessary for local areas to meet their own needs. Top tip for future events - he was also the most entertaining speaker of the day.

Keynotes - Yvette Cooper and Theresa May

As usual, the keynote speeches didn't contain much that wasn't already known - it's inadvisable to announce a new policy every week. The Q&A threw up a couple of responses that added depth to what we already know:

• Yvette responded to a question about raising the state pension age by committing Labour to a gradual increase, arguing that too fast a rate of increase would mess up people's retirement planning, and could lead to higher youth unemployment.
• Theresa alluded to the policies outlined in more detail by Freud the following day, stating the FND2 contracts would not be signed, but that they would try to avoid restarting the procurement from scratch. She also said that they would work with providers to secure the funding needed to run the Work Programme.

Terry Rooney

Terry, in his role chairing the Work and Pensions Select Committee, spends a lot of time immersed in the detail of DWP operations. His recommendations were specific and to the point:

• The hand-offs between JCP and providers need to be improved. Customers often arrive at a provider without knowing why they're there or what they're expected to do
• Pathways to Work has been less than spectacularly successful. This was the nicest thing anyone said about the programme all day
• Welfare to work is psychological warfare - its job of persuading people that they can get back into employment is occasionally undermined by media doomsaying
• The adverse publicity around fraud early in the summer has damaged all providers, even though they were isolated incidents without any intention at senior level
• The first JSA interview is now around 7 minutes, which is not long enough
• There is no meaningful customer choice at present
• There's no reason not to devolve Access to Work budgets to providers to enable instant access during the transition to work, and prevent the dropouts that occur during processing delays
• 'More broadminded people have appeared in Sheffield, who understand the way the world works'

Alan Cave

Alan, the DWP's Delivery Director, paid tribute to providers for their roll-out of FND despite the attendant difficulties, and referred obliquely to current issues with security. He was cautiously optimistic about provider performance, and noted that PRaP was on track to roll out within a couple of weeks. He also pointed out that 'we know what bad looks like', but that the characteristics of and measurement processes for good delivery were not widely agreed.

Open contract information

Mike Harvey of EAGA raised the issue of publication of data, questioning the DWP's blocking of providers who wanted to publish their performance offers for FND.

• Terry's response was that he was worried whether any provider could reach target. While he had no problem with publishing the data, he predicted that it would lead to headlines calling the new delivery a failure.
• Alan's response was to argue that it's the right way to go. He felt that openly published Star Ratings, plus sharing of the raw data in local Provider Engagement Meetings, would provide the necessary information.
• Keith Faulkner of Working Links was also on the panel, and said that while maintaining the secrecy of performance offers was vital to developing a proper market, it was necessary to have total transparency on actual performance, i.e. number of starts, job entries etc.