The Big Interview MARK BRAMAH OF APSE
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Austerity is already driving sweeping change in local government and threatens the very real improvements made in school meal provision
ark Bramah has seen the future and is a worried man. His not- for-profi t organisation, the Association of Public Service Excellence (APSE), works with 300 local councils in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, helping them drive up standards of service, as well as provide
value for money for taxpayers. It’s a tall order and one that is likely to prove ever harder in the current environment. Not all of those councils have education catering services in situ, but those that do are facing increasingly unenviable decisions about their future. There are a number of forces at work: devolution, localisation, fragmentation of education caused by the rise of
April 2012
academy schools, austerity, and, perhaps most signifi cantly of all, Westminster’s determination to surgically divest local authorities of most of the services they currently provide themselves. There is a view prevailing at Westminster that it no longer matters who delivers public services, just as long as they are acceptable and delivered to cost.
“The point I have been making,” says
cabinet offi ce minister Francis Maude, “is that we have moved away from the old model where there is a binary choice between public services being provided by monopoly, in-house public sector providers, or by fully for-profi t commercial providers.” But will members of the ‘Big Society’ be ready and able to decide local priorities, seek out potential providers, organise delivery and establish a performance network? This is one of the issues that concerns Bramah, one of whose roles it is to benchmark local authority services against the performance of other providers of services.
Words JANE RENTON
“There is a clear risk that the local authority role will be reduced to that of commissioning agent,” he says. While APSE has no issue with any commissioning role, it should not be confused with procurement, and APSE does have concerns about local government losing the ability to deliver what Bramah describes as “core capacity” and become wholly reliant instead on outsourced services.
“The danger is [local government] loses valuable in-house know how and expertise… the very sharp end of frontline service delivery.” Under the Compulsory Competitive Tendering regime in the Eighties and Nineties, councils lost the skills, knowledge and capacity to deliver
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