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Media, transparency and privacy
by Kate Murray
Public sector leaders are still too secretive over the information they are prepared to share with their citizens, according to campaigning journalist Heather Brooke.
Brooke, who mounted a five-year battle to gain access to the details of MPs' expenses, said the public sector had the choice of being proactive and giving out information responsibly, or defensive – in which cases scandals would "blow up in the worst possible way".
"The attitude remains in a lot of British public services that we know best and the public can't be trusted," she told a session at the public services summit.
Brooke said her interest in freedom of information was sparked by her dealings with her local council, Tower Hamlets, which, she claimed, treated her in a "patronising and insulting" way.
In a lively session, Brooke and Guardian special projects editor Paul Lewis were challenged by delegates, who complained that the press did little to build trust with the public sector.
One delegate said: "It feels like you've written the story before you speak to us," while another complained that "vast sections of the media have distorted the coverage of public services – public servants are daily vilified in the press."
But Brooke said that did not mean it was right to withhold information. "It's not up to you to decide who can be trusted or not. Who are you to be the gatekeeper?" she challenged.
Lewis claimed public sector organisations were spending too much on press officers and communications directors. "For the most part, they obfuscate, they mislead and they present as obstacles between the journalist and the people they want to speak to," he said.
Steve Wood, head of policy delivery at the Information Commissioner's Office, said freedom of information legislation could help deliver more accountability and transparency in the public sector. But he added: "In some organisations, the penny hasn't dropped about the benefits of cultural change."
Private responsibility vs public services
by Kate Murray
Labour MP Frank Field has called for a new definition of public services to allow people to work together for the common good.
Field, who led the recent review for the government on tackling poverty, said the traditional divide between a private market on one side and a "ration book approach" to state provision on the other had to go.
"We need to break out of the thinking that if it's not run by the state it's not a public service," he said. "If we had more a generous definition of public service, then people might club together and work in common."
Getting communities and new providers more involved did not have to mean "extreme privatisation", he added, but a more co-operative approach founded on a strong ethos.
Hilary Cottam, founder and principal partner of the consultancy Participle, which pioneers new approaches to public services, said communities had to be at the centre of plans to change the way services were delivered. "You have to work with the grain of people's lives and you have to design new services that go with that grain," she said. Finding new ways of engaging people could "unleash a huge amount of energy", she added.
Speaking at the same session on personal responsibility, Peter Marks, chief executive of the Co-operative Group, said a "massive cultural shift" would be needed for citizens to take on more responsibility for the delivery of public services.
"We have been conditioned to expect central government and local government to provide everything," he said. "If something goes wrong in our lives, they get the blame."
Co-creation and innovation in public services
by Harriet Minter
Heading into the end of the first day is possibly not the time to expect delegates to feel at their most creative and innovative but half an hour with Christian Bason, director of Mindlab, the Danish government's innovation unit, transformed the room into one bursting with creativity.
Bason explained how in his work he not only listened to what users wanted had also lived with them, creating possible scenarios for them in his lab and then playing them out; he sometimes builds little stick men to act out the scenarios until he is sure that what he is designing is a product that meets real life needs.
When faced with budget restraints it is easy to simply cut and not look at how the end result of those cuts works for users. Instead public sector leaders have to see this as an opportunity. An innovation challenge brings together cuts, increased productivity, better service experience and better outcomes – achieving all of this is what we should now be working towards.
Inspiration should be taken from Finland. Despite having the best primary school system in the world, the government has already sat down and looked at how it will change in the next century; how it could be made better. They aren't resting on laurels but instead innovating from the beginning, even when they don't need to.
Bason ended with a warning: public services that continue in the same way as always may survive but they will become remote from those who want to innovate, remote from those who want to make things better and remote from those they serve.
Leadership and managing talent
by Harriet Minter
Flexibility and resilience were two key skills all the speakers in the leadership session agreed were going to be imperative for public sector managers in the coming months.
Given that how you feel about your job can change from minute to minute, let alone day to day, resilience is essential for leaders explained Anthony Douglas, chief executive of Cafcass.
He added that as a whole the sector needed to be more ruthless in its leadership. When a delegate asked him to give an example of this ruthlessness, Douglas explained that if five minutes into an interview he knew the candidate wasn't going to get the job he'd terminate it right there and then – an idea which seemed to hold a great deal of appeal for attendees.
Caroline Shaw, chief executive of Christie NHS Foundation Trust, also spoke about the need to be ruthless with employees, and explained how a little charisma could keep staff on side when the going got rough. Talking about her experiences with the trust, she explained that when she'd initially felt the organisation didn't believe in her or want her to succeed but by being clear about her objectives, and fighting back when necessary, she'd slowly won them over.
It was left to Sara Williams, strategic adviser at Local Government Improvement and Development, to sum up what appeared to be the main fear of many conference delegates – will cuts lead to an exodus of talent from the sector?
The floor echoed this fear, asking several times how it could be resolved. The panel acknowledged that there is no definitive solution, but the best thing was to get the right people into the right jobs. Another piece of advice was not to overlook candidates who had been made redundant; one of the few upsides of budget cuts was that a lot of good people were now on the jobs market.
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