13 October 2006
The public should be able to influence the quality of services through the greater use of choice mechanisms such as the NHS's payment by results, the new chair of the Audit Commission has told Public Finance.
Michael O'Higgins, giving his first interview since taking up the post on October 1, told PF that 'enabling customers to have a more direct impact on services' would be a powerful force for improvement.
O'Higgins said that PBR made it possible to identify what users want from the health service and then adapt provision to meet these demands.
PBR-style mechanisms, in conjunction with customer satisfaction surveys, could be applied to a wide range of public services, he added.
'If you could introduce more ability to understand what's happening and to react to it in real time you would improve public services. In that sense what is going on in health is quite a unique experiment in social policy,' O'Higgins said. 'If that experiment succeeds, I think it has significant implications for other areas of public policy.'
O'Higgins said the key thing would be to ensure that public bodies put in place comprehensive data and information systems so they could monitor which services were being taken up, which were being spurned and why. This would allow managers to identify and take the appropriate action to rescue failing services.
'It is a real opportunity,' he said. 'If we can find ways of building in real information about customer satisfaction and customer preferences that will allow organisations to respond… by having a local manager adapt the service to what's needed.'
He identified a range of mechanisms that bodies could use to gauge the public's opinions. These could include customer satisfaction research and the involvement of service users in contract tendering exercises, 'through to allowing people to say: “I don't like that service, I'm going to take my custom elsewhere”.'
O'Higgins signalled that in future the Audit Commission's inspection regime would be looking for evidence that public bodies were moving in this direction. Work is getting under way on designing the successor to Comprehensive Performance Assessments, due in 2008.
'The commission has stated that one of its priorities is to get more information on customer priorities,' he said.
PFoct2006
