📜 Outcomes are made by complex systems, not by individual actors

Let me tell you a story about why change in public service is needed. If you fall into debt on your council tax, the system raises an automatic flag and generates a letter saying ‘please contact this team and arrange payment’. After a while the council will chase you and say ‘if you don’t pay we are going to send the bailiffs around.’ At that point, some people phone up and make arrangements to pay in instalments. But the majority of people who haven’t paid, can’t pay. As soon as the bailiff’s knuckles touch their front door, that adds more debt in fees. But what the bailiffs find when they get there is people with nothing. So the entire process is a really expensive way of making vulnerable people’s lives much worse, and there is no financial gain for the council at all.

Eventually a couple of people at Gateshead Council said ‘we don’t want to do this anymore’. They didn’t go into public service to make people’s lives worse. So they found the Director of Public Service and they said ‘Okay, let’s take a cohort of 50 people who were in this system who’ve had the flag and let’s do something completely different.’ Their hypothesis was that most people’s lives tick along pretty well most of the time, but occasionally something causes a wobble. Can we hear the signals of someone’s life starting to wobble and is someone getting into council tax debt one of those signals? Instead of a punitive response, the idea here was to phone people and ask ‘Is there anything we can do to help?’

Somebody got one of those phone calls offering help and put the phone down. They phoned the council switchboard and said ‘I’ve just had a prank call from someone pretending to be from the council. It couldn’t have been someone from the council… they offered to help.’ Think about what state we’ve got ourselves into, when a member of the public thinks someone offering to help cannot be from the public service. Public service should be a source of freedom and flourishing – not state control. We need to change it.

The whole mindset of ‘delivery’ is the wrong framing. If we believe that public service should help people to create good outcomes in their lives, we need to ask ‘How is an outcome made?’ ‘Delivering’ public service to people is not how outcomes are made.