Member News
By Tom Levitt - 5th February 2010
Not many years ago the public, private and third sectors got on by themselves and didn’t engage with the others too much. Public sector workers regarded the private sector as voracious predators, and when they regarded the third sector at all it was as amateurs who threatened their jobs by doing stuff for free.
The experience of the DWP shows how much things have changed. Today the third sector is regarded as a source of expertise built on different experiences, outlooks and values from the other two sectors, whilst the need for cost effectiveness is universally accepted. The third sector itself has adopted an increasingly professional approach to co-working, developing new skills and recognising the need to operate in a marketplace. The private sector is changing, too, in ways which may not have been predictable.
The history of the Flexible New Deal has not been 100 per cent happy. It is wise to accept that when someone is out of work for 12 months, ‘more of the same’ support is unlikely to reap the best reward for either the jobseeker or the taxpayer. Payment by results can protect both, whilst encouraging individual, intensive and sensitive intervention. But the enthusiasm with which the third sector accepted these challenges was numbed by the frequency with which they failed to win contracts for which they had bid, or the experience of not being re-engaged as partners to the private sector.
What we are now seeing is a further evolution of the tripartite relationships. The Improvement and Development Agency and the Office of the Third Sector are aware of the need for the sectors to understand both what each expects of the other and what each needs. Bringing together government departments, local authorities and third sector organisations on a steering committee to advise on commissioning practice, we are raising awareness, organising training and identifying good practice. I say ‘we’ as I am chairman of that advisory body.
In the meantime, the DWP is developing its own approach to ensure maximum mutual benefit from its relationship with the third sector.
Those early days of the private sector exploiting the commissioning opportunities at the expense of the third sector, as some saw it, are ending. Private companies, like public sector bodies before them, are starting to appreciate what voluntary organisations can offer. Helping to build the capacity of the third sector to bid successfully, develop a mission and deliver an outcome is now seen by enlightened companies as an important tool for achieving their own goals.
The playing field is crowded following an explosion in the number of social enterprises, bodies which genuinely merge the values of the third sector with the practices of the private, playing their own role as independent or commissioned players in service delivery.
The creation of sustainable jobs is essential if Britain is to leave recession behind and generate a tax base sufficient to provide for world-class services. The market will provide most of those jobs, in traditional ways. But the market cannot do it quickly enough to head off the serious social problems that a generation of workless youngsters could face. Nor does it have the imagination to provide work for the growing numbers who face discrimination in obtaining work through their disability, mental health problems, learning difficulties or long term unemployment – or following their release from prison or care.
This is where new relationships between the sectors, new economic structures, new practices and attitudes will come into their own; delivered by the third sector, powered by the private sector; and commissioned by pubic sector bodies such as the DWP.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd