Debbie Power

No slides accompany this paper

Debbie Power - Speech To PSSM, 24.9.02

Introduction

Kia ora everybody, my name is Debbie Power and I am the Regional Commissioner for Work and Income, working for the Ministry of Social Development in Northland.

I bring to today's forum some 20 years experience of working as a regional public servant. I have never worked in Wellington and I have never worked outside a regional structure, so I bring a completely biased view, from a regional perspective!

Northland is a region of stunning natural beauty, strong cultural identity and huge economic potential. It is also an area of social contrast, with extremes of huge growth and significant rural poverty.

I need to say how privileged I feel to be part of this forum. I am aware of the calibre of the people here today, and thrilled that someone thought I might be able to offer an insight into the future of the public service.

My job here today is to challenge you with my views on how the public service needs to respond now and in the future, in order to meet the challenges looking to 2020.

What I have to add to the range of perspectives you've heard today is my view on what I see and experience within one region of NZ every day - and what needs to happen to ensure the public service is in a position to respond in the future.

As I am almost the last speaker, my challenge is also to make sure you don't fall asleep! - and to add a different perspective, hopefully without teaching you all how to suck eggs!

History - 1984 To Present Day

Eighteen years ago, in 1984, I was at the beginning of my public service career and was very, very young!!

I think it's fair to say that the general working mentality at the time did not particularly value the client - in those days beneficiaries or service users were often seen, not as people who needed help, but as people who interrupted our working day and put us behind with our paperwork!

So how did we deal with the public then? Easy! We would let our clients queue up, let them get to the front, then send them off to a different floor, or to another building entirely - where, yes you've guessed, they would queue up again, only to be sent back to where they started!

A slight exaggeration, you think. Maybe!! But in those days a public servant simply did what they thought was "the job". Client-centred service was somewhat unknown.

We were very much the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff picking up the pieces - being proactive or intervening to prevent problems arising was quite outside our brief.

While there is always room for improvement, these days things are a great deal better. The public service, as we all know, has gone through massive changes.

It has considered its role, retrained its staff, focused on its service delivery and restructured itself silly! This has led to major service improvements, with staff having a much more professional approach to their jobs.

So now we as public servants have become very good at our core business, delivering a high quality service, or so we think. We still, however, work within the rigid boundaries of our organisational structures, funding and policies.

We continue to shape the way we work by our own view of the world, and how much we meet the real needs of our communities is still debatable.

So - what are the real needs of our communities? What is the reality out there now, that will impact on the future? From where I sit, what I see is:

• An increasing number of high-risk individuals and families, with multiple issues and barriers
• Third and fourth generation welfare-dependent families
• A growing number of very young, single-parent families, and
• An increasing number of people for whom the compounding results of poverty mean that it is not enough, or even appropriate, for one intervention to be the answer.

In my region this translates into a significant number of people experiencing a range of difficulties. They are affected by:

• An unemployment rate consistently above the national average
• The country's highest morbidity and mortality rates
• A significant level of mental health problems
• Low levels of educational achievement, including problems with basic literacy and numeracy
• Lack of transport compounding rural isolation
• Limited access to telephones and email
• Drug and alcohol issues, and
• Sub-standard housing, compounded by poor infrastructural support.

Geographic isolation, inadequate infrastructure, natural resource dependence, withdrawal of key services and uneven distribution of funding have left many disadvantaged provinces far behind the progress made by urban areas.

In my view the gap between "the haves and the have-nots" will increase, not reduce, as a result of advances in technology. A percentage of our population will have very high qualifications and excellent earning potential in the future.

However, an increasing percentage of the population will live in communities like those in parts of Northland, which still have no access to telephones, let alone computers.

The social capacity of these communities will not improve unless there are radical interventions to create the necessary change. Without intervention, regions such as Northland will struggle to be in a position where they can take advantage of any opportunities that come with technological progress.

The issues we now face are increasingly complex, and agencies have realised that they cannot solve social problems by working alone. This has facilitated a shift from a single-agency approach to inter-agency working - which has started to happen in the regions at an almost unprecedented level!

These forums are often ad hoc, however, with participants unclear about the objectives and still bringing their siloed thinking.

From a regional perspective many feel interagency cooperation has gone somewhat mad - with the result that regional managers are bombarded with a range of meetings, from Strengthening Families and Heartland to LECs, NIFs, RIFs, CLAGs and LAGs, with a few Intersectoral Forums, Safer Community Councils and WOGs thrown in for good measure. (Aren't WOGs furry Australians??)

Anyhow, I am at times overwhelmed with the effort required to make these meetings work and be able to add real value. And if that's not enough, government's expectations with regard to increased regionalisation have led to many local authority structures being redesigned. Yay!!

So for me in Northland, that means there is a whole layer of structures being created to enhance regionalisation, on top of the vast array of inter-agency forums.

Our three mayors AND the regional council all have their own economic development committees. On top of that, there is the mayoral forum, which has created another regional development agency, and this one has five sector reference groups. The complexity of the links and overlaps between all these forums is mind-boggling!!

I have deliberately not mentioned the iwi structures that also exist - not because they are not important but because I do not feel qualified to comment, other than obviously most iwi authorities are looking at ways of increasing their social, cultural and economic base for their people - and in Northland there are at least eight!!

The result of this is still a range of fragmented services delivered in silos, with at best some joined-up solutions that are often achieved through good luck or accident, rather than by good management.

We see the development of parallel systems for delivering services. That is: public sector organisations, operating within their institutional, political and jurisdictional frameworks;
and non-governmental groups, which are usually based around specific geographical areas, problems or issues.

The problem here is that different sectors are primarily driven by differences in core missions and structures, rather than shared interests in improving the lives of residents.

By default, therefore, we often enforce similar siloed thinking on our community groups. Where their intention might be to deliver holistic services to individuals and families, they are often driven by our requirements to deliver siloed or narrowly-focused services.

Our agency structures and legislative frameworks reflect administrative convenience and tradition, rather than the grouping of relevant services to suit an individual or community.

Current inter-agency work is still limited in its scope by a variety of factors, which we are starting to see emerging:

• Leadership - who leads each group? With blurred boundaries, who is in charge?
• Projects - most inter-agency work is based round specific projects, rather than the overall alignment of service delivery
• Delegation and decision-making - do processes and protocols exist to enable this to happen?
• IT systems - in the main, incompatible
• Accountability - who to?
• Contribution - this brings to the fore issues of capability and capacity
• Privacy - the inability of agencies to share information will be a major limiting factor
• Community involvement - this is not just about government agencies.

All I have said so far is supported by feedback from stakeholders. They tell me they think the public service's performance has improved generally, but that a considerable change in style and focus is still required.

Despite improvements in collaborative working and customer service, stakeholders still find the public service fragmented, with too many agencies and insufficient alignment.

Future

I've now worked for the public service for 20 years and my commitment to it is real. I have a passion for what I do and what the public service delivers to our clients and communities, and what it can deliver in the future.

Ensuring that the public receives the best service, though, involves more than just my commitment and the commitment of my Ministry. The quality and the level of service relies on the support of the wider public service; consecutive governments committed to an inclusive service; and improved economic development to raise the status of NZ in comparison with other OECD countries.

These factors, along with improvements in technology and with the well-regarded innovation that this country has long had a history of, will go a long way to ensuring that we are successful in designing services that meet the needs of communities.

The public service of 2020 will, in my view, be one where the changing role of government, combined with rapid social, economic and technological innovation, ensures that the service has adapted to meet the needs of communities.

The challenge for the public service is to genuinely engage with communities to meet the diversity of their needs in real terms. This will require true partnerships, collaborative working, and changes to culture and policy.

Stakeholders see a disconnection between the things government departments do and the way people live their lives, and the results they want.

The public servants who best understand the needs of communities are those who are in the regions and have these issues in our face daily. Policy, for example, MUST begin with the people, and those who understand the needs of the people must be involved in policy development.

The future of the public service working with the community will be one where agencies assist the community to develop its leadership capacity and develop true partnerships, in which the partner organisations act as mentors to each other.

Just like a good marriage, the relationship should empower the partners to draw on the strengths and experience of each other without sacrificing their individual beliefs, identity and worth.

And like a good marriage, when troubles arise there is the relationship to fall back on to enable issues to be worked through, rather than a trip straight to the divorce court! (Consider this your marriage counselling lecture for the day!)

If there is commitment to true regionalisation - which is the age-old term for devolving decisions to the coalface - policies and programmes will need to be designed and supported by:

• Devolved decision-making ability
• Incentives to collaborate
• Flexible funding
• A focus on outcomes, rather than outputs
• Integrated policy and delivery, and
• Privacy legislation that allows collaborative working.

We have to stop what I call the "clip-on policy response", whereby policy is constantly manipulated to take account of changes, until it loses its original intent and becomes so multi-layered that it is incredibly complex to administer and access.

Who does this benefit, when frontline staff need complicated navigational tools to work through multiple layers of policy?

If staff can't understand the policy, the risk is that public servants will be thought of as either thick or deceitful in our administration, thus affecting our credibility and reputation. Sound familiar?

The challenge for the public service is how to get a clear policy response out to the regions and communities. We need to ensure that whilst the public service has a centrally-driven structure playing a key role in providing support and linkage to government, it has the ability to respond fluidly and quickly to the needs of the communities it has been set up to serve.

This brings with it the question of alignment of services, and this includes regional structures and authorities. For me our biggest challenge lies in developing a common sense approach, based on reduction of overlap and duplication.

This means not just tweaking the existing processes, or - God forbid - creating new ones, but looking at an overall alignment of structures within regions.

If this can be achieved, whole of government or collaborative working has the potential to deliver a revolutionary public service of the future, that will be viewed by the citizens of NZ as one where:

• The frustrations of clients having to navigate services is a thing of the past
• Government agencies seriously participate in and are comfortable with their community
• Design starts with client outcomes in mind and replaces passive consultation, and
• Services are grouped around individuals and communities, rather than for the administrative pleasure of the public service.

Finally, we, as senior managers, need to be courageous and be prepared to lead from the front.

To ensure the integrity of the public service and our ability to meet the challenges that lie ahead, as the citizens of New Zealand will demand, clearly our Gliding On days are over!

We need to be brave in valuing and investing in our people, and in leading significant cultural change that will enable our people to think and operate in terms of the delivery of holistic government services.

Ends

New Zealand State Services Commission