10 Steps To Transformation

5. Are you 'wasting' resources you don't realise you have?

Laura Bunt - 29.10.2010

Look at your services through different eyes – where are you wasting resources that could help you be more effective?

Source: OECD (2009), from The Open Book of Social Innovation (2010), NESTA and The Young Foundation.

Finding efficiencies and cutting out waste are too often the fall back for saving money in public services. Having looked at the challenges in detail in some of our previous work, we’ve seen very little evidence that narrow efficiency measures such as streamlining back office functions can meet the level of savings needed. Of course, efficient services are important. But what’s really going to save money is making services more effective in how they meet (and reduce) demand.

The predominant debate about public service efficiency is about the market economy – the financial resources, staff time and inputs that are spent on delivering a service. But using a different lens, we start to see a whole range of ‘resources’ not currently accounted for in mainstream delivery that could well be being wasted: a service user’s time or skills, their existing relationships, families and friends, community assets, space and information.

The internet, sharing platforms and the movement around coproduction in public services has brought visibility to what some have called the ‘core economy’. Public services should draw on these assets to respond to – but not replace – cuts in finance. This is an important distinction. There is a difference between asking how a service can save money by drawing on voluntary labour, and asking how a service user’s needs could be better met through alternative means. Recognising people as assets with valuable insights ought to prompt innovation in how services can best support them.

Timebanks – a mutual volunteering exchange that enables people to swap skills and support with one another – have been active in communities for a while, but we’ve only started to see them being brought into to local public services to transform how they operate. In Rushey Green in South East London, the local GP surgery integrates a timebank as a way to reward voluntary help in the practice and as a referral route for peer support and activity. The timebank has helped GPs recognise and use the wider skills and resources of their patients, and crucially, has helped patients to identify and respond to their own and others’ low-level or early stage mental or physical health conditions through increased social interaction and activity.   

As the Spending Review figures translate into local budget lines, re-thinking what resources are available could prompt new thinking about how services could meet public outcomes. Are there ‘dormant assets’ that you could re-use or use differently? Or could you introduce a way of sharing existing resources that gets the most out of them?  Next week, we’ll look in more detail at the different kinds of resources public services could draw on in a time of reduced budgets.