Category Archives: public services

Public Services Should Value And Respect Citizens – They Are Not Supermarkets With Consumers

Over the last few decades, all governments have seen their stewardship of public services as requiring them to introduce/adopt more and more practices and the language of commercial businesses. This approach does not fit easily with public service and a public service ethos. One specific problem is that when combined with political expediency, an impatience… Read More...

Listen to, and above all involve the real experts – service users, tenants, staff…

There is absolutely no excuse for not involving and listening to critical stakeholders when the public sector is developing policy or designing, commissioning, procuring, monitoring and reviewing services. At a practical level, for local government this means ‘involving’ local communities, service users, local businesses, and voluntary sector bodies – all, in their own way, representing… Read More...

The Political Parties Should Commit To An Enquiry Into Public Service Outsourcing

It is both interesting and encouraging that senior politicians have already spoken about public sector outsourcing and contracting in the first week of the 2017 General Election. Jeremy Corbyn has committed to using public procurement to drive up standards of employment, ensure trade union membership for employees and timely payments to suppliers especially smaller companies,… Read More...

Public procurement should be delivering opportunities for people with disabilities

Reading the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ)’s report on employment for people with disabilities (or perhaps more aptly ‘lack of employment for people with disabilities’) Rethinking Disability Work http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/core/wp-, I was reminded that although we have made progress in this country in terms of rights for people with disabilities there is a long, long way… Read More...

John Tizard: Procuring from the VCSE is different from procuring from major corporates

How often do I hear from voluntary and community organisations and small social enterprises (VCSE) that they are scarred and damaged by incredibly bureaucratic public procurement processes? The short answer is “far too often”! I find this both disappointing and frustrating. The position has with a few honourable exceptions changed very little over the last… Read More...

Opportunity to showcase progressive public procurement

I am delighted to be a judge for the National Government Opportunities (GO) Excellence in Public Procurement Awards 2017/18 (National GO Awards). Having judged these national awards on several previous occasions, I am expecting to evaluate some exciting entries. If past years are anything to go by, I expect that I will be disappointed when… Read More...

Nobel Economics Laureate’s academic work could prevent inappropriate public service outsourcing

The awarding of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Economics to Oliver Hart of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA and Bengt Holmström of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA was a recognition of their excellent work over decades on the significance of contracting to economic institutions including companies and the public sector. Modern economies are… Read More...