MR PETER WILKINSON AND MR DAVID BELL

22 MAY 2007

  Q494 Chairman: Let me call the meeting to order and welcome our witnesses today, Peter Wilkinson, who is the Manging Director, Policy Research and Studies at the Audit Commission. We are very pleased to have you. I think you have been—

Mr Wilkinson: I think this is my third time before the Committee.

  Q495  Chairman: So you are an old hand. Thank you very much for coming. And David Bell. I think you have not been to us before. You have been to many other places before?

  Mr Bell: I have indeed.

  Q496  Chairman: You are the former Chief Inspector and now Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education. Thank you very much for coming. This is the last evidence session in an inquiry that goes under the heading of Putting People First, trying to look at the user end of public services in a number of ways. We wanted to talk to you because the Audit Commission knows about all this in a research sense and the Department for Education is doing a great deal on this front. Thank you for your memoranda, both of you. Do you want to say anything by way of introduction?

  Mr Bell: Just go straight in.

  Q497  Chairman: Let us begin then. Peter, could I turn to you first and ask you this. We have had all these evidence sessions and all these documents submitted to us, all saying what a wonderful thing user involvement is and the splendid consequences that flow from it. What is quite hard to find is hard evidence about consequences. Maybe you think this is an impossible question, but the Audit Commission's job is to provide us with answers to questions like this. What evidence exists for showing that public services work better if we seek to involve users more directly in how they operate?

  Mr Wilkinson: I certainly think it is taken as an article of faith that engaging your users and being close to your citizens is something which a democratic institution should do, but I think there is also quite a lot of evidence to show that good engagement does make a difference. I could come up with quite a range of small case studies where things have changed as a result. Let me give you a flavour of two or three. One we quoted in a report some years ago was from an NHS hospital near Oxford where the professionals had assumed that old people having cataract operations would like to have them during the daytime in order to get home during daylight. By engaging with those people and understanding better their perspective, they discovered that actually quite a lot of older people preferred to have them in the twilight hours so their family could come and collect them when it was suitable for the family, who could take them back home afterwards. As a result, at that time that particular hospital was struggling to get its day-case surgery rate up to the national average, and this was one of a number of ways in which they discovered that the services that they had assumed the users would require were not quite the ones that the users welcomed. So, there is one small example, but I can find a fair number more.

  Q498  Chairman: That is interesting. Thank you for that. That is a powerful argument which says that users have knowledge which people who provide services need to have in order to provide a better service, but you can acquire that knowledge by giving users surveys, by all kinds of things, you do not need to necessarily involve them in service delivery to do that.

  Mr Wilkinson: I gave you a simple answer to start with. Let me take you to a more complicated one. We published a report earlier this year on road safety, and in there we had a case study from Morice Town in Plymouth, an area of deprivation which needed substantial investment. I think about 2.3 million was spent on it, heavily involving the residents of the area there in terms of trying redesign the area, which not only led to a substantial reduction in the speed of traffic going through and, therefore, an improvement in the quality of life and safety for the people who lived there in respect of road traffic, but also led to a reduction in crime and to much stronger community cohesion and community identity. That was a very extensive programme. It took them over three years and heavily engaged the residents of the area and produced a home zone that has been very successful. So, that is a much higher level of user involvement. I can quote some other examples to you, if you would like.

  Q499  Chairman: That is very helpful. To be absolutely clear, as far as the Audit Commission is concerned, you think there is demonstrable evidence that involving users is not only a desirable thing to do but is a beneficial thing to do in terms of how public services perform.

  Mr Wilkinson: We do and, as a result, within our Comprehensive Performance Assessment the concept of understanding your users and your citizens, engaging them in a wide variety of different ways to help you shape and deliver the best services to the public, runs through our methodologies, all the way through all of the themes.