Memorandum from the Metropolitan Police
Authority
PART 1: OVERVIEW
The Metropolitan Police Authority welcomes the
opportunity to offer this submission on how public services can
improve by listening to the experiences of service users.
The Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) itself—in
its policies and strategic priories—is committed to strengthening
the public voice in the design and delivery of policing services
in London. The MPA is therefore particularly pleased and supportive
of the Select Committee's focus on this important issue.
From a police authority perspective, it is clear
that the inclusion of the public in delivery of its policing services
delivers considerable benefits. A policing style that secures
public support does help to reduce crime and increase public safety.
Policing, perhaps more than any other public service, is more
effective when it has the trust and cooperation of the public,
and when the police can work with local communities to help identify
potential criminal activity, problems and priorities.
In strengthening the public voice in the policing
of London the MPA and the Metropolitan Police Service have moved
beyond Robert Peel's concept of "the police are the public
and the public are the police" and the traditional notion
of policing by consent. For the MPA, strengthening the public
voice has come to mean a much more pro-active, dynamic and accountable
process of cooperation and collaboration between the police and
the public in the delivery of policing.
Strengthening the public voice is therefore
is no longer merely a reactive activity of gaining community support
and consent. It is not a discrete, separate programme of activity;
it is not a public relations exercise; it is not a complaint driven
activity; it is not community relations programmes; and it is
not an institutionally managed consultative tick box exercise.
The MPA encourages the Select Committee to view
the strengthening of the public voice in the provision of public
services as entailing not merely the identification of problems
and holding the public sector to account, but also the active
involvement of the public in negotiating and influencing the priorities
for action and participating in and shaping solutions.
Within this framework, the MPA encourages the
Public Administration Select Committee to consider strengthening
the public "voice" by requiring a much fuller, clearer
and robust spectrum of public participation processes and methods
in the provision of public services. This entails basic information
provision, accessible and transparent complaints system, increasing
participatory levels, through to real and meaningful community
partnership and collaboration in public sector decision-making.
This emphasis on citizen focus, on social cohesion,
and community engagement makes for more effective public services.
And as the National Audit Office has said:
"Community participation is vital in ensuring
value for money in public services. Services designed and delivered
without community input risk wasting public money because they
will be unused or underused if they are not what people need."
(National Audit Office 2004)
RESPONDING TO
DIVERSITY
Strengthening the public voice must also recognise
and address the implications of the rapidly increasing diversity
of the country. Communities experience wide differences in the
levels and impact of public services according to disability,
race and ethnicity, faith, sexual orientation, gender, lifestyles
and life chances. The high rates of population turnover and mobility
are also important factors that must be taken into account in
designing and implementing public services.
NOT JUST
LOCAL
Strengthening the public voice is not just a
local activity but needs to be pursued at all levels of a public
sector organisation.The MPA itself, established in 2000 is a definitive
example of this. The UK's strategic police authority has given
the public—Londoners—a proper, professional, accountable
governance framework for policing in London.
THE BENEFITS
OF STRENGTHENING
THE PUBLIC
"VOICE"
The evolution of a professional, managed and
technocratic public sector has in many ways hampered democratic
ownership. The public sector has become, in a sense, "colonised"
by the civil servants. This trend must be reversed.
The MPA urges the Select Committee to recognise
that strengthening the public voice requires:
— first, community members who are
informed, willing and able to get involved;
— second, a public sector willing and
able to involve and be influenced by the public; and
— third that equal attention needs
to be given to both these dimensions.
Linked to the two sides of this interface, the
MPA considers there are two types of beneficial outcomes—those
that bring improved decision-making within the public sector and
secondly, those that bring an increased sense of trust, confidence
and sense of ownership by the public over the public services.
In terms of decision-making, strengthening the
public voice will improve policies and services, bringing the
experience of public service users into public policy and service
development. A strengthened public voice will allow policy and
service decisions to be made that better reflect the perceived
needs and demands of users and citizens. Secondly, an effective
community voice will increase the openness, transparency and accountability
of the public sector to the public. Lastly, a strong community
voice can help to avoid wrong or unpopular decisions being made
which in turn could provide possible savings in time and money.
Part 2 of this submission, on the following pages,
consists of the MPA's responses to the specific questions raised
by the Public Administration Select Committee.
1. Can public services learn from the way
that either non public sector organisations or overseas governments
make use of user experience in service delivery and design?
Yes. BT (British Telecom) was one of the first,
if not the first, large corporation in this country to set up
Consumer Liaison Panels, in the mid 1980s. These consisted of
invited representatives from various local community groups and
other interests. Their value to BT in providing a "critical
friend" viewpoint can be judged from the fact that they are
still going strong after 20 years.
BT's website entry on its Consumer Liaison Panels
says: "Feedback from panel members provides valuable insights
into consumer thinking and informs the policy-making process within
BT." (BT 2007)
2. Is it possible to set minimum standards
for public services? If so, how is this best done?
The MPA is of the view that it is essential
to set minimum standards for public services. A combination of
minimum standards to set a floor, with freedom to set local standards
on top is critical to achieving this. See for example the chart
in the report of the Lyons Inquiry Public Deliberation Events
for contemporary confirmation of this general point (OPM 2006,
p 45 Graph 21).
Minimum standards are generally expected to
be set by central government, or possibly a national expert body.
Most people will accept this so long as the centre is felt to
be responsive to democratic pressures, and so long as there is
full involvement of local people in setting the local standards.
A critical component to the success of police authorities, for
example, is their ability to set flexible and local priorities
to compliment national targets. Whilst supportive of a localised
approach to performance targets, this approach must have a coherent
structure. An overly complex arena for accountability and priority
setting may result in a double negative, disengagement and a widening
gap between communities and their public services.
3. What role do measures of customer satisfaction
have in assessing the standards of public services? How should
user views be monitored? How can the cost effectiveness of user
surveys and feedback mechanisms be assessed?
It is a well established principle of services
marketing theory that when evaluating complex, technical or professional
services, consumers rely on the "soft" aspects of the
service encounter, such as the quality of the environment in which
they received that service, the quality of the inter-personal
interactions with the service providers and so on. Similarly,
the professional/technical aspects of public services—such
as the competence of an NHS surgical team—are best measured
by those competent to assess them.
This is not to say that the consumer aspects
of the service encounter can be ignored, or even relegated to
second place behind the professional assessment. The public are
the best people to judge the service aspects of the services they
receive—how well were they treated, how clean/accessible/appropriate
was the place in which they received the service, how they rated
the outcome (as opposed to the process). There is both a marketing
argument (shaping services according to consumer feedback is essential
for the survival of the providing organisation) and a democratic
argument (the public own and pay for public services as well as
consuming them) for building customer satisfaction into assessments
of the standards of public services.
4. What constitutes best practice in responding
to complaints about public services?
The golden rule is to provide feedback at regular
intervals, from the first acknowledgement that a complaint has
been made, onwards. It is also good practice to invite complainants
to have a say in the future design of the service complained of—although
it may be necessary for practical reasons to limit such an invitation
to a random sample of complainants.
5. Is information about complaining easy
to find and accessible?
This varies hugely from service to service,
and very often between different locations within services. A
national minimum standard for access to complaints systems would
be a good thing.
6. Should users be more directly involved
in service delivery? If so, how can this be achieved?
This depends very much on the service. Some
services by their nature lend themselves to co-production while
others do not. However, with a bit of imagination it is surprising
what can be achieved. Take two examples: policing and healthcare.
While the Police in this country aspire to be
citizens in uniform, in practice there is a distinct "them
and us" feel to this service. At their best the Neighbourhood
Watch schemes represent co-production of local policing services,
adding value to local policing services by relieving them of the
lowest level surveillance duties while reducing communities' fear
of crime and sense of insecurity.
A good example of structured yet flexible involvement
is the network of 32 (Police) Community Engagement Groups, one
in each London Borough. (The City of London has its own police
force and Police Authority). The Metropolitan Police Authority
invests over £1 million every year in supporting these groups.
They provide a mechanism of local police accountability and are
a means of reporting back to local community groups. As independent
voluntary groups, they are managed and chaired by members of the
local community.
A new addition to the service user involvement
scene as far as policing is concerned is the number of Safer Neighbourhood
Panels that are being set up in each electoral Ward in London.
There are 630 of them, each with a brief to hold the local police
to account for the delivery of the kind of policing that local
people want.
In the Health field, the MPA is aware of a growing
"expert patient programme", whereby the approximately
one third of us who live with a chronic medical condition have
the opportunity to manage the condition alongside and in conjunction
with the professionals. Evidence shows that patients on the programme
actually visit the doctor less frequently, and report feeling
better as well.
Co-production is not the only option. User (and,
more broadly, citizen) involvement in service delivery can take
the form of involvement in both the "before" of service
delivery (ie the design of the service and/or its delivery mechanisms)
and the "after" (ie the evaluation of the service).
This is the province of "traditional" consultation processes.
For details of consultation techniques see for example the compendium
"People and Participation" (Involve, 2005) or the consultation
methods page on the IDeA (Improvement and Development Agency)
Knowledge website (IDeA 2007).
7. Are there certain types of decision which
are more suited to consultation than others?
This isn't really the right question. In practice
the determining factor is more often the intention behind the
consultation exercise than the type of decision itself. Arnstein's
Ladder of Participation, as updated by Wilcox's "Five Stances"
(Wilcox, 1994 p 8), and May's "Star of Participation' (May
2006, p 312) makes the point that the intention behind a consultation
might be simply to give information "we have decided, and
this is your notification that it is going to happen" (the
decision to switch TV from analogue to digital for instance).
Or it might be an invitation to co-production. Or something in
between.
The point is not that one rationale for consultation
is "better" than another, but that the rationale in
each individual case needs to be thought through and then clearly
communicated. Otherwise there is a danger of a mismatch between
the perceptions of the consulter and the consulted, which "goes
a long way to explain the frustration, cynicism, disillusionment
and consequent reluctance to sustain or repeat involvement that
is familiar to most practitioners of public participation."
(May, 2006, p 310).
8. Do official consultations typically manage
to capture the views of the right people? What kinds of consultation
are most effective in engaging with the appropriate people?
In professional consultation and involvement
circles there is much talk of a group of people (or rather series
of groups) known as "the hard to hear" (formerly "hard
to reach"). These are the people who find the barriers to
engagement (whether linguistic, cultural, financial or anything
else) too high to climb.
There is also another group, known as "the
usual suspects", those members of the public who frequently
respond to consultation and engagement invitations, and are regular
attendees at public meetings and frequent responders to other
forms of consultation.
The principles and techniques relating to the
"hard to hear" are becoming well established, (see for
instance Home Office Police Research Series Paper 138, Home
Office 2001, p vi) even if these principles appear to be honoured
more in the breach than in the observance.
The "usual suspects" on the other
hand have only recently begun to be treated with something other
than contempt, their views ignored because they are "not
representative" of the general public.
May (2006, p 316) argues that to disparage and
ignore the usual suspects is to miss a fundamental point about
consultation and engagement, namely that there is a trade-off
between representativeness and capacity. Most of us, most of the
time, have very limited capacity for engagement. We might fill
in a short questionnaire, but that will be it. We don't have the
time, or the inclination, or the knowledge, or even the confidence,
to engage with the more problematic policy issues regarding service
delivery, which are often exactly the issues that are of most
interest to policy and decision makers.
The Triangle of Engagement (May, 2006,
p 315; copy attached as Appendix to this paper) illustrates the
point that the greater the demands on the participants' time and
energy the fewer people there are with the capacity to respond—"the
higher the fewer". May argues that one consequence of this
trade-off is that public service providers should cherish the
"usual suspects", and give them support in carrying
out their difficult task. (Cf the MPA's network of Community Engagement
Groups).
9. How valuable are advisory panels in the
design and delivery of public services?
The BT example has already been cited, as have
Community Engagement Groups (CEGs) and Safer Neighbourhood Panels
in the context of local policing. (Interestingly, the CEGs started
at round about the same time—the mid 80s—as the BT
Consumer Liaison Panels, and they too are still going strong.)
The medical profession is commonly thought of
as being conservative and resistant to change, and yet the British
Medical Association (BMA) has had a Patients Liaison Group (PLG)
for the past two years, after carefully examining the impact of
similar groups on the British Royal Medical Colleges, most of
which have had such structures for some time.
The BMA PLG provides the doctors' organisation
with "an informed patient view on healthcare and works to
ensure that the patient voice is represented on many of the issues
being addressed" (BMA 2007). The PLG is actively championed
by the most senior members of the BMA and its contribution is
regularly acknowledged by the leaders of the medical profession.
Advisory Panels in the public sector are not
restricted to policing and medicine. A completely different type
of organisation in the public sector, British Waterways, is about
to set up a Citizens Jury to consider design aspects of the Cotswold
Canals restoration, and may commission more Juries in the future.
In addition, many local authorities have long
established service user panels, especially in the personal care
sector.
10. How does user influence relate to wider
issues of democratic accountability?
User influence is just one of the influences
that need to be taken into account when making decisions relating
to public services. It is not usually the only influence, and
should not be, except for the special case of a referendum.
There are three principal means by which user
influence can link into the wider issue of democratic accountability.
These are inclusivity, feedback and evaluation. The Metropolitan
Police Service is currently in the last stages of consultation
on a checklist for effective community engagement, developed in
conjunction with the MPA. This checklist includes helpful statements
on all three of these principal means (items 6, 24 and 25 out
of 25):
"6. Make sure your activity is inclusive
of all members of society, if appropriate. If you're only involving
certain groups, make sure you give a clear explanation why (if
it's a specialist subject, for example). Being inclusive also
means making sure everyone can take part. Have you made things
accessible for disabled people, for example?"
"24. Give feedback to the people who
took part. Tell them how their input has affected the way we police.
Choose a method of communicating that suits the scale and scope
of your event, but reaches the widest possible audience."
"25. Evaluate how effective your event
has been, based on your own aims and expectations, as well as
those who took part." (MPS 2007)
11. How should measures of public satisfaction
take account of complaints about policy rather than administration?
See Part 1 of the MPA submission.
12. Are there situations where the views
and experiences of service users are irrelevant?
It is difficult to think of any situations where
the views and experiences of service users are irrelevant, although
"irrelevance" is sometimes used as an argument for not
taking them into account. When this occurs it will often be found
to be an excuse for not being transparent about the rationale
for consultation. (We touched on the dangers of not being transparent
in our answer to Question 7 above.)
In practical terms, one might imagine that criminals,
for instance, have no right to be consulted on their experience
of the criminal justice system, or alternatively that it is practically
impossible to consult them in any meaningful way.
In fact the service experiences even of this
section of society are routinely monitored and have a direct influence
on service delivery. Independent Custody Visitors make unannounced
visits to the custody suites in police stations to ensure that
those held in police custody are being properly treated (and Independent
Monitoring Board members perform an analogous function inside
prisons and immigration removal centres). In both cases there
is a direct feedback loop from the custody visit to the managers
of the custody facility.
It is also worth noting that back in 1997 Avon
Probation Service and Bristol Business School had developed a
means of assessing user-defined quality of service provision in
the Probation Service (Broussine and Wakefield 1997).
Ultimately though the question of relevance
of public service users' views is one of democratic rights. If
one believes that public services, paid for from public money
(and irrespective of who the provider is), should be under democratic
control then it surely follows that user views and experiences
must be sought out, aggregated, analysed and transmitted to those
who commission, design, deliver and oversee the services themselves.
In the case of public services it is mostly true that we only
spend part of our adult lives as service users, but spend all
of our adult lives as the paying public.
APPENDIX 1
THE TRIANGLE OF ENGAGEMENT
Key:
Establishment:
The highest level of public participation, eg
Metropolitan Police Authority member, local Councillor, School
Governor, non-executive director of an NHS Trust, lay member of
a Non-Departmental Public Body ("quango").
Office-holder:
Chair/Vice Chair/Secretary/Treasurer of a community
group such as a Community Police Consultative Group, Residents
Association, patients forum or a non-locality based interest group
such as a minority ethnic association.
Activist:
As the name implies, but without taking on the
executive responsibilities of office.
Semi-regular:
Engaged enough to attend more than one event
or take more than one opportunity to have their say.
Ad Hoc:
The majority of the public, who will engage
if and when the issue is sufficiently pressing and/or it is on
their doorstep. May or may not also engage in passive continuous
monitoring of the service.
January 2007
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