Examination of Witnesses (Questions 194
- 199)
TUESDAY 10 JULY 2007
MR MARTIN
NAREY, MR
PHILIP CULLUM
AND MS
ALISON HOPKINS
Q194 Chairman: Welcome to
everyone, particularly welcome to our witnesses this afternoon:
Martin Narey, Chief Executive of Barnardo's, Philip Cullum who
is Deputy Chief Executive of the National Consumer Council and
Alison Hopkins who is a Senior Policy Advocate for the National
Consumer Council. Thank you for coming to help us with our inquiry
into third sector commissioning. We particularly wanted to talk
to you, Barnardo's as a big provider and NCC as a big observer
of these things; thank you for the memoranda that you have submitted.
Would you like to say anything by way of introduction or shall
we just get into some questions?
Mr Narey: I am very happy to start,
Dr Wright, thank you.
Q195 Chairman: Shall we just
head off and see where we go? Could I start with this business
about evidence; what we have discovered is that there are a lot
of arguments in this area and a lot of claims made for what the
third sector can offer as a public service provider, but the evidence
is slightly more complicated, is it not—and I am looking
at Alison in particular because you have done the work. We have
all read the summaries of the research that you have been doing
on comparing user experience across sectors. Could you tell us
first of all in general about the research evidence that exists
on this and then what you discovered when you did the piece of
research that you have reported recently?
Ms Hopkins: Certainly. First of
all on the general evidence there is a host of anecdotal evidence
about third sector delivery and third sector organisations, and
by that I mean lots of case studies, lots of quotations. Each
organisation collects its own feedback from service users but
it tends to fall into what would be the qualitative evidence heading;
it is little stories and quotations. It was all very convincing
and all very inspiring, but when one wants to stand back and try
and assess and quantify that evidence it is very difficult to
do so, there is very little quantitative, statistical evidence
on the third sector, partly because it is so difficult to define,
it is a huge spectrum of organisations of different sizes and
different governance arrangements operating in different sorts
of areas. It was one of the reasons why we did our piece of research,
it was partly to have a think about how one might add to the evidence
base and acquire some quantitative data, but it is quite complicated
to do. In part we were trying to find a way of developing some
quantitative data, but we also wanted to look at was there something
about the third sector that was different in the way it delivered
service, so we were looking for distinctiveness from the user
perspective. As you know from the summary of the report we chose
three service areas to look at, each of which has a slightly different
service delivery model: social housing, employment services and
domiciliary care for older people. We selected a random sample
of providers from the three main delivery sectors—public,
private and third sector—except for housing where we did
not do private. What we found about the variation within the delivery,
or indeed how the third sector stood out from the other sector
providers, was that it is just not possible to generalise about
third sector, so although third sector organisations hold a well-earned
reputation, perhaps, our evidence showed that it was not always
the case that third sector organisations were highly innovative,
responsive to users, flexible and indeed they did not always make
people feel part of the community which we were expecting would
stand out quite strongly. In some service areas such as employment
services third sector organisations really did stand out, they
excelled at being very responsive to users, dealing with problems
as they arose, that kind of issue. In domiciliary care that was
not the case, it was the private sector providers who were seen
to be the strongest on user responsive factors and things like
treating service users with dignity and respect. In social housing
we did not find a lot of difference at all between third sector
providers and public sector providers, and indeed in both areas
responsiveness to users was not a great strength. Overall none
of the providers really performed very well in terms of listening
and responding to their users, they tended to be much better at
the nuts and bolts of service delivery, providing one-way provision
of information, but not necessarily in listening and responding,
which we were surprised about, we thought third sector would stand
out in that area.
Q196 Chairman: You went around
asking people.
Ms Hopkins: Yes.
Q197 Chairman: How many people
did you ask?
Ms Hopkins: It was 1,230 people
altogether, divided between the three sectors and the three services,
a quite small but robust sample which we built up using random
selection from given populations in the different service areas.
Q198 Chairman: If a policy-maker
said to you "As a result of doing work of this kind what
conclusions would you draw about where the third sector could
most appropriately be used to provide public services, what would
you say?"
Ms Hopkins: From our evidence
certainly the strengths of the sector would seem to be in niche
services, niche specialist services, where third sector organisations
have lots of scope to be innovative and flexible and responsive,
the kinds of services like the employment services that they are
contracted to provide, possibly in partnership with others. That
seems to be where their strength lies.
Q199 Chairman: I am not entirely
sure what a niche service is?
Ms Hopkins: By that I mean a service
that has been commissioned, usually for a particular need or for
a particular user group, so perhaps with people who have been
out of work for an awful long time or particularly groups such
as young black males or something like that. It is a very specified
service.
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