Citizen centred services

The Transformational Government report for 2007 has as one of its three key themes to “Deliver citizen-centred services, reshaping them around the needs and preferences of users”. Unfortunately the report's expansion of the theme focuses more on channel access preferences e.g. Internet, visit or phone than on genuinely reshaping services so that they work for users. There is mention of a feasibility study into “Tell us once” and local authorities having one stop shops, but that really isn’t good enough.

The report goes on to talk about customer insight and journey mapping and uses the complexity of applying for free school meals as an example. What’s missing from the report is an analysis of who uses government services and how the services they use should be grouped together. For example families on low incomes get a range of benefits from of number of Government bodies and are also being encouraged to earn more, I’m sure that administering the package of benefits and interventions for the family as a whole would be cheaper, more effective and would be more encouraging than what we do now. Local Government one stop shops etc. help but are really a façade behind which the inefficient and uncoordinated services can hide.

One cannot argue with statements in the report like “we must be relentlessly customer-focused” or “citizens must be at the heart of everything we do; I want us to move from a process-driven system to a people-driven one”. But with fragmented service providers, such as the DWP, HMRC and Local Government, operating services that they are separately trying to make look citizen centric it’s going to take a long time before the citizen experience changes significantly. Even successes, such as being able to tax a car electronically, illustrate that to give citizens a positive experience someone needs to make sense of the individual bits (insurance, MOT and vehicle information) on their behalf. Sadly it’s easier to envisage a natural owner for a joined up vehicle service than a service for poorer families.

Wouldn’t it be good if there was a body that acted on behalf of citizens and commissioned and joined up individual services to meet their needs; so that tax credits, housing benefit, social fund loans and school meals etc. were all provided to meet a families needs. Making this happen would be hard, it would involve moving budgets to customer champions so that they could guide the development of the right sort of services and replace the others. It would mean moving staff from their existing organisation and career structure and almost certainly result in redundancies (it takes fewer people to do something well). For my next entry I’ll look at how we get from where we are now to a place where services really are designed around the needs of citizens.