HR and Housing, latest to get the e-Government treatment.
The reason National e-Service Delivery Standards do more than add to the target fatigue experienced by local authorities is that it is the councils themselves that are setting them based on their own collaborative efforts at establishing best practice, so say two of the authorities involved in the latest initiative. Alison Thomas reports
Another week, another initiative. Local authority managers could be forgiven for feeling jaded, even punch-drunk, with the stream of advice, exhortation and admonition coming from central government. What makes e-Government different, say two of the local authorities leading the latest National e-Service Delivery Standards (NeSDS) initiative, is that the main impetus is coming from councils themselves, and the emphasis is on practical measures to join up services and promote efficiency, and while some of the improvements might seem obvious – getting departments and their computer systems to talk to each other and share information, for example – scrutinising an organisation as part of the process of getting its services online highlights all sorts of missed opportunities, and new ones as well, says Mark Porter, London Borough of Havering HR Manager for Organisational Performance.
Havering, which reorganised and streamlined its human resources functions in February, is bringing that experience to bear in developing national standards for HR, while its London neighbour Brent, an e-Government award winner, boasting an “excellent” comprehensive performance assessment rating for housing, is taking the lead role in producing a framework for housing services.” It is an exciting project to be involved in,” Porter says.
”We aim to transform the way we work and are looking at processes very critically.”
“Havering HR is a new, centralised team, assembled in February from quite disparate personnel teams across the organisation. E-enabling the HR functions and putting in a much stronger self-service element is the next big thing and links in very naturally to the reforms we have made already. ”We aim to transform the way we work and are looking at processes very critically.” Porter, drawing on his previous experience as an HR Manager with the Metropolitan Police, sees joined-up services and information sharing, both within and between local councils, as crucial. “When I was with the Met, if I didn’t know something I’d pick up the phone and ask another manager in another police station,” he says. “When I first came to Havering and asked how Barking and Dagenham, our neighbours just down the road, dealt with a particular problem, I was told ‘oh, we don’t talk to them’. Personnel teams within the organisation didn’t even talk to each other. We need to cut though the bureaucracy.”
For members of staff, moving services online will mean the ability to change
personal information such as address or bank details by logging on to a single
computer system instead of filling out separate pieces of paper for HR, Payroll
and Pensions. For managers, benefits include more timely and detailed information
on performance.
“A perennial nightmare for councils is that they can’t get their
general ledger and staff budget to balance, but if you have joined-up HR and
finance systems that talk to each other it means much easier management of
information and better customer service,” Porter says. “I expect
we’ll see smaller, better, really focused HR service, based on best
practice in local authorities.“Gershon is all about streamlining back-office
functions, so if we can look at more automation and centralising transactions,
that fits in nicely.”
And despite complaints about local government being overloaded with targets,
he sees NeSDS as an opportunity to develop new, more meaningful performance
indicators. “At the moment, it’s very difficult to benchmark because
the way each authority gathers information and counts things may be different.
If we have standardised levels of service it will make comparisons much easier.”
That kind of relevance will make NeSDS a useful tool for councils, Porter argues, while involvement of experts from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Society of Personnel Officers, the Employers’ Organisation and the Association of London Government gives it professional credibility.” We don’t want to produce work that stays on the shelf. We don’t want the ‘oh no, not another one’ response, where people think this is just the latest gimmick. We want this to be something driven by local authorities.”
The same approach is being adopted in Brent, which is working with management consultancy Mouchel Parkman, the Chartered Institute of Housing, and Housemark, as well as other local authorities, to devise a blueprint for putting housing services online and setting performance standards. The borough brings to the task plenty of experience of shaping modern housing services, having won Opportunity Borough status from the Government Office for London for exceeding London Plan levels of affordable housing, Brent is also a partner in Locata, the west London choice-based lettings system that won an e-Government award and is involved in a number of large housing regeneration projects, including the regeneration of Wembley around the new stadium development and the South Kilburn New Deal for Communities scheme.
"The service delivery standards will serve a number of purposes..."
Brent’s part of the NeSDS project involves dividing housing into two main areas: landlord functions and statutory and strategic functions. A wide-ranging remit looks at everything from strategic planning and consultation, developing choice-based letting schemes and setting up arms-length management organisations to providing a simple means for a member of the public to let the council know that the house next door is standing empty. ”The service delivery standards will serve a number of purposes: they will enable authorities to deliver the best value performance indicators on e-Government, improve the service we deliver to our customers, and help us meet the savings and efficiencies in the Gershon agenda,” says Nick Davies, Brent’s Head of Policy and Research for housing.
In the long term, Mark Porter believes the possibilities opened up by NeSDS are almost endless. “Some time down the line I can see future efficiency savings from boroughs pooling resources, sharing work and setting up shared service centres for HR functions,” he says. “And while current service delivery standards are being developed for local authorities, I don’t see them as exclusively applicable to local government. Other public bodies will be able to pick the model up and adapt it to their needs – HR, for example, doesn’t differ that much between organisations.”
