Dale Bassett: Real example of public service freed from its shackles

CUTTING public spending, improving the quality of public services and increasing the number of private sector jobs: these are three of the key tasks that the coalition has set itself.

The problem, critics cry, is that they are mutually contradictory. But, in fact, you don’t have to look further than Doncaster to see these three principles being brought together in everyday public service delivery.

John Biggin, director of the local prison, is achieving the seemingly impossible. He has cut the cost per prison place by £2,500 in just two years.

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He is, in the words of an independent evaluation, “leading the way” in the so-called rehabilitation revolution to reduce reoffending. And everyone who works at the prison is employed in the private sector, not by the state.

Last year, Mr Biggin was named as The Guardian’s Public Servant of the Year. So how has he done it? His prison, HMP Doncaster, is owned and run by Serco, a private, for-profit company. Serco has run the prison since it opened in 1994.

It’s quite a challenge. The prison is overcrowded due to a shortage of places; in March 2011 it was 55 per cent over capacity. It also suffers from high prisoner turnover; the population is turned over more than three times a year.

As a result, initiatives to address the causes of offending behaviour, improve health or educational outcomes and intervene to reduce post-release reoffending are especially difficult to implement.

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Serco has adopted an innovative operational strategy that places reducing the rate of reoffending at the heart of its work with prisoners, both within the prison itself and after release. Mr Biggin says that reducing the rate of recidivism is “the central reason and theme around which the prison is run and organised”.

This is manifested in innovative partnership working with charities and even the local football club, and the creation of a positive prison environment complete with comprehensive education, skills and resettlement services.

There are particular focuses on improving prisoners’ family relationships and tackling substance abuse.

The results are impressive – 92 per cent of prisoners are released to suitable accommodation, against a government target of 85 per cent.

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Some 23 per cent of prisoners are released into education or training, more than double the official target.

A prisoner survey conducted by HM Inspectorate of Prisons found marked improvement in the number of prisoners confident of gaining employment, finding accommodation, continuing education and managing finances upon release. And all of this while cutting the cost of each place by £2,500 a year.

This is not the only such example of success. Profit-making companies are delivering public services successfully in the core areas of health, education and policing too. They are doing so at greater value and with equal, if not better, quality.

Under the last Government, for example, Islington outsourced its entire local education authority to a private company to address significant underperformance in the borough’s schools. Its contract was renewed twice and, a decade later, results have nearly caught up with the national average, having previously been among the worst.

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Yet the critics of change have put the coalition the defensive and Ministers have become as critical of competition as their opponents with the Government’s NHS reforms likely to be watered down in the face of opposition.

There has been a clear sense since beginning of the year that the Government was first on back foot and is now in full-scale retreat on its plans to get new providers into public service delivery.

But the fears raised by the critics have not materialised. The German healthcare system has not “fragmented” under competition, for example.

In fact, the involvement of the private sector has added to the richness of German healthcare and provided new services from which every German citizen can benefit. Competition has strengthened the fabric of the UK prisons system in the same way.

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This is not to say that private organisations will always be better than public providers or that public monopolies should be replaced by private ones.

It is to say that Ministers are right to base their policies on the principle of competition. As Alan Milburn, the reforming Labour Cabinet Minister, said recently: “Monopolies in any walk of life rarely deliver either operational efficiency or customer responsiveness.”

In March, Serco was re-awarded the contract for HMP Doncaster for a further 15 years, this time on a payment-by-results basis to drive even greater value for the public pound.

The Government and its critics should learn from these examples of reform that are already working, in the UK and abroad. They will then be on the path to both tackling the deficit and improving public services.

Dale Bassett is research director at the independent think tank Reform (www.reform.co.uk)

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