Memorandum submitted by Northgate Information
Solutions
INTRODUCTION
Northgate welcomes the Select Committee's inquiry
into Every Child Matters.
Few individuals or organisations could have
been left untouched by the news of the tragic death of Victoria
Climbie and the profound failure of society to protect her. Lord
Laming's report clearly demonstrates that poor information sharing
and a failure to take responsibility by any one agency lay at
the heart of the system's failure.
Northgate supports creation of a statutory framework
for local co-operation between local authorities, key partner
agencies and other relevant bodies including the voluntary and
community sector to improve the well being of children in an area.
There is a clearly identified need for such
measures as: early intervention and effective protection; the
introduction of a lead professional responsible for ensuring a
coherent package of services to meet individual need; and the
use of multi-disciplinary teams based in and around schools and
Children's centres.
Northgate believes that the priority for children's
services must be to improve front-line delivery and children-centred
services through enhancing communications, improving risk management
systems, joining up services and encouraging collaboration at
a local and regional level through the development of incremental
partnerships.
COMMUNITY WELL-BEING
AND JUSTICE
1. Whilst government has a duty to improve
and protect children's quality of life, we all of us have a responsibility
to do so for the future well-being of society as a whole. If children
are to be safe and secure in the future we need to promote community
justice and well-being. A safe and secure community promotes social
cohesion and economic progress as the guarantors of sustainable
long-term success. The foundation of community well-being is community
justice in its broadest sense.
2. Community justice—in the sense
we use it—promotes social inclusion and enforces the administration
of civil and criminal justice to ensure that everyone regardless
of their experiences and circumstance can achieve their potential
in life. As the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion states:
"To achieve inclusion income and employment are necessary
but not sufficient. An inclusive society is also characterised
by a striving for reduced inequality, a balance between individuals'
rights and duties and increased social cohesion".
TECHNOLOGY AND
PUBLIC SERVICES
3. New technology has the potential to drive
through future radical improvements in childrens' services but
only where people are placed at the heart of new and existing
systems. This is not only about placing children at the centre
of the system but also prioritising, preparing and energising
front-line staff and enabling them to make a real impact.
4. Technology should be first and foremost
about serving people - about tackling problems within their local
communities, enhancing relationships and improving communications.
New technology is no panacea for bad communications. Communications
can't be improved by simply buying new "idealised solutions
which are difficult to implement in practice. There needs to be
an end to `technology for technology's sake'". Technology
is constantly on the move. It's the social problems that are deeply
embedded.
5. New technology adds value when it provides
the best practical solution and enhances relationships between
people. New technology can assist in managing scarce resources
and in joining up services. Our experience of working within public
services is that information technology is too often seen as an
end in itself rather than a means to an end, with political imperatives
being the driving force rather than citizens. Technology should
assist in reducing bureaucracy to allow public authorities to
focus on serving the citizen.
PREVENTION AND
RISK MANAGEMENT
6. In the past, children and their communities
have been let down by the fact that local service providers do
not share intelligence and information in a timely and cost effective
manner and failed to connect with their communities in delivering
permanent change.
7. Partnership, prediction and prevention
are crucial to improving children's services. The real core to
prevention is ensuring timely information, accurate analysis and
improved problem solving and investigation to ensure that speedy
action can be taken by the relevant agency.
8. The Green Paper proposed the development
of local information sharing systems. Every unitary and county
council has been allocated funds to develop information sharing
and to have a project manager with specific responsibility for
the development and implementation of identification, referral
and tracking projects.
DATA MATCHING
DIFFICULTIES
9. Whilst there are clearly resource and
highly complex and legal data protection issues, associated with
this proposal, on a much more practical basis the difficulties
of matching data should not be under-estimated. An information
hub is only as effective as the quality of its information. And
poor quality of data matched with poorer quality of data compounds
the problem of information sharing. A match rate between two different
data sets is rarely more than 70%. The bigger the data sets the
bigger the problems that are compounded.
10. The government proposed to remove technical
barriers by defining a single identifying number to support electronic
transfer building upon existing identifiers such as the NHS number.
Yet according to media reports, when Hammersmith and Fulham council
came to match its data with local NHS data it found a 48% mismatch.[37]
Similarly local authorities have found the task of establishing
local land and property gazetteers—creating a master from
different local held address based datasets—far more time
consuming and far harder than ever anticipated. To date 256 local
authorities are signed up to the National Land and Property Gazeteer.
MOVING FORWARDS
THROUGH INCREMENTAL
CHANGE—ADOPTING
A MODULAR
APPROACH
11. Although ultimately desirable a one
size fit to IRT would appear to be impractical at the present
time. More worrying still is that undue focus on developing new
organisational structures and introducing new systems, may take
the focus away from what we believe must be the priority—improving
frontline services.
12. Northgate considers that the government
should encourage local services to adopt a modular approach to
IRT with each element being viewed as a distinct part. This will
give local agencies greater flexibility, allowing them to employ
a "plug and play" approach.
13. For many local agencies, the NHS will
not necessarily be the natural identifier. IDeA states that 80%
of all datasets use addresses as a key reference so some agencies
are likely to be better placed to perform matching against addresses
in the first instance. What is essential is to ensure that any
modular approach is flexible enough to work with multiple identifiers.
NATIONAL INITIATIVES
AND IMPROVING
FRONT-LINE
DELIVERY
14. Our concern is to combine local flexibility
with an effective national response. The green paper proposals
in relation to identification, referral and tracking, however
rational they may appear on paper, are likely to take a long time
and be difficult to achieve. In the meantime some local authorities
are delaying taking action and the government has suggested that
they should wait before investing in IT for the results from the
IRT trailblazers. These will not be released until the end of
2004. Yet local authorities should be beginning to take some action
now. A national approach without strong leadership from government
to support local initiatives may encourage lack of immediate action
by local services who are waiting for national solutions.
15. Our belief is that if we are to enhance
front line delivery and children's services then government must
provide clear and strong leadership which promotes innovation
at a local level; practical collaboration between agencies; and
incremental change and partnership based on the notion of continuous
improvement in improving the outcomes for children.
16. Government should use a number of levers
to encourage practical implementation and reduce the implementation
gap that exists between national policy and local services including,
for example, using procurement as a means of encouraging greater
collaboration.
ENCOURAGING COLLABORATION
17. Government needs to provide clear leadership
in encouraging local and regional schemes and incremental partnership
both between public authorities and with the not for profit, voluntary
and private sectors.
18. Collaboration is an essential part of
encouraging innovation at both a national and local level. At
its best, collaboration encourages an open learning environment
where people can experiment, learn from experience and share information
to help drive through continuous improvement to add to the public
value. Collaboration should be based on recognition of what works
well and what needs changing. There is both a need to build and
share best practice as well as to identify and solve problems
relating to national and local issues.
19. Our experience is that IT projects are
delivered well, but that overall programmes are often delivered
badly. Too little consideration is given to the joining up of
systems and the impact of new working methods on communication—to
employees, to public service users or the general public. Only
if the relevant change management strategies have been put in
place can technology add value to services. Prior to new services
being introduced, staff need to be prepared, the impact on service
development analysed and planned and pre-emptive measures put
in place to deal with any new demand. This is particularly important
in relation to service development issues.
20. Many agencies are pressed to deliver
and collaboration may require investment in time, resources and
effort. That is why government needs to promote measures which
offer practical opportunities for collaboration. For example,
through the procurement process.
JOINING UP
BACK OFFICE
SYSTEMS
21. We believe that local agencies could
refocus their activity and improve front line delivery of children's
services by establishing more joined up delivery of back office
systems. All too often, individual authorities are failing to
develop economies of scale by not joining together to purchase
back office systems from suppliers, wasting public money on individualised
procurement processes.
22. Identifying synergies and partnerships
for aggregating demand within communities based on geographic
boundaries, or for multiple agencies operating across issues such
as children's services where responsibilities are shared by different
public authorities, makes sense. Increasingly a multi-agency approach
is necessary for tackling a wide range of public service delivery
issues including children's services, tackling anti-social behaviour,
preventing crime and promoting public health. Government needs
to take a far greater lead in encouraging and stimulating collaboration
and cultural change within public authorities. Collaboration can
sometimes sit uneasily with the government's desire to promote
trailblazing.
23. We welcomed the National Strategy for
procurement for local government which identifies a range of actions
that local authorities should take to improve procurement and
to encourage partnership. We believe that there is a need for
government to stimulate further action for aggregating demand
between multiple agencies responsible for delivering joined up
services for citizens. For example, promoting the establishment
of e-procurement brokerages within the public or not for profit
sector.
24. Far greater use should be made of independent
accreditation and the use of approved reference sites to encourage
collaboration. The reference site is typically used to validate
the supplier's claims about service delivery. It is rarely used
as an indicator to judge real business impact and benefits. Some
public authorities are already delivering radically improved integrated
children's services. These achievements could be built upon, using
the procurement process as a means to identify best practice and
to facilitate speedier procurement.
25. Secondly, public authorities do not
currently give full recognition to the potential or consequential
savings or service improvement. They will use a comprehensive
"whole of life" cost evaluation of the competing bids,
but are not mandated to take into account the impact that different
proposals might have in improved citizen service. Whilst the Local
Government Act 2000 allows local authorities to account for community
well-being, in Northgate's experience this is not widely used
by authorities and is not available to some other public authorities.
INCREMENTAL PARTNERSHIP
26. The government rightly wants a joined
up approach for children's services at a local and national level.
Far from undermining joined up government, encouraging collaboration
and partnership at local and regional levels between public sector
authorities and with the not for profit, voluntary and private
sectors should strengthen it. Key to this is to recognise the
value of incremental change and partnership. Incremental investment
and a measured pace to change is increasingly recognised to be
a more effective method of transformation than the big bang approach.
27. Incremental change is change within
the box of what is known in order to strengthen and improve what
currently exists through a series of defined steps. An effective
incremental partnership will enable a progressive relationship—based
on trust and confidence—to flourish. The pace and of change
can be dictated by stakeholder concerns and resource issues. So
for example, the pace may be quickened as the relationship grows.
Incremental partnership offers organisations step changes in service
provision without comprehensive commitment and with lower risk.
It means working with partners normally on a long term basis without
an all-inclusive arrangement. And it allows organisations to build
up confidence with partners, working with them to change existing
processes, but without the expense and risks associated with a
big bang approach.
CONCLUSION
28. Prediction, prevention and partnership
are crucial to delivering improved children's services within
local communities. Poor co-ordination between agencies and a failure
to share information are critical areas that clearly need to be
resolved, and a partnership approach to these are vital. We hope
that the government's bill will pave the way to allow flexibility
and innovation at a local level, whilst working to implement a
national strategy that safeguards our children and protects them
against a postcode lottery.
ABOUT NORTHGATE
Northgate is a technology services company with
a difference. It is committed to high quality public services
and understands the public sector. That knowledge is core to its
business.
Northgate's task is to enhance public sector
value through intelligent use of people and information technology
systems and to share in the economic and social benefits that
this brings.
Northgate assists the fire and rescue service,
local authorities and the police to promote community well-being
by helping them provide citizens with accessible and responsive
one-stop services based on clear and accurate information.
November 2004
37 Computer Weekly, 11 November 2003. Back
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