MR PETER WILKINSON AND MR DAVID BELL

22 MAY 2007

  Q560  Mr Burrowes: Has the Government consulted parents about whether they really care about choice?

  Mr Bell: We have got some evidence to suggest that parents do want to exercise choice and have more control, and we touched earlier on the issue of making a choice about where your child goes to school. Our general evidence would also suggest that parents are keen to be involved, so we are working on the assumption, I think the quite legitimate assumption, that more involvement, more engagement, more choice is what parents actually want because it is what they expect to receive in their wider lives beyond just their use of public services.

  Q561  Mr Burrowes: In terms of education and choosing a school—I appreciate you are making a wider point of engagement—we talk about choices but there is little reality when one gets down on the ground; it means very little to a parent in most circumstances, given what they have to play with in their area.

  Mr Bell: What we know is that parents in the main would prefer to have a local school that they could feel confident sending their child to, that is the case, but we also know that parents are keen to have the opportunity to make a choice, to send a child elsewhere, for whatever reason.

  Q562  Mr Burrowes: But there is evidence that people obviously want a local school that is good.

  Mr Bell: Absolutely, and in some way—from my perspective it would be commonsense that they would want that.

  Q563  Mr Burrowes: Why is there a lot of talk about choice? The present reality is that it is a preference and not a choice. Why not call them preference advisers and let us just take away the illusion that there is a real choice when one out of five does not have a choice in their school, not first choice?

  Mr Bell: As I mentioned earlier I do not think parents would want to go back to a system where they had no say whatsoever where the child went to school.

  Q564  Mr Burrowes: It is the language of choice though that does seem to raise expectations. You wanted to raise expectations but the reality is that given the supply base at the moment it cannot in any way be fulfilled. Just to draw on the memorandum by the Audit Commission, paragraph 16 says "Choice can be an effective driver of quality and value for money when consumers can choose from a number of competing suppliers or from different options about service delivery."[4] In the education field that is profoundly limited in terms of supply and so in a sense the whole language of choice is fairly irrelevant to most people in this country.

  Mr Bell: I do not think parents view it that way actually because parents do say that the opportunity to legally express the preference—in more popular terminology choice—

  Q565  Mr Burrowes: But it is not, it is a preference.

  Mr Bell: It is a preference but actually I think you would still have that situation whether you had all schools that by any objective measure were perceived to be good or not; more parents would maybe want to go to one school rather than another, so there has to be some mechanism for sorting choice, choice is not an absolute freedom in public services. The notion cannot be that you could go back to a system where there was no opportunity for parents in this case to express a preference, make a choice about where their children went to school.

  Q566  Mr Burrowes: No, I am not saying that, but it is one thing saying that the option is just to close it down, it is another to raise the bar of expectation that parents have a choice when you have four out of five parents who are going to be disappointed.

  Mr Bell: Parents do accept—and our research shows this—although disappointment and anger arises, that you are going to have to have some mechanism for sorting and some people will get the choice that they expressed and some people will not. Because it is not a perfect system it does not lead me to the conclusion that it is somehow wrong.

  Q567  Mr Burrowes: But the driver in terms of the policy review document is talking about Choice Advisers helping disadvantaged parents with school preferences. Perhaps it would be best to apply them as preference advisers and perhaps you could say whether the cost of those advisers would be better ploughed into just making the local school better.

  Mr Bell: There is a lot of money that has been put in to ensure that local schools do get better. One of the driving principles behind the Choice Advisers was to ensure that all parents had the same access to knowledge and information and knew how the system of expression of preference, making a choice, worked. Therefore we said to local authorities that we want those Choice Advisers to work particularly with those groups that may not traditionally have expressed a choice or have had some difficulty working through the system. That seems to me entirely legitimate, that in any system you want every parent to have as much chance as possible, recognising that there will be limits in choice because not everyone can get the preference or the choice that they have expressed.

  Q568  Mr Burrowes: How much do they cost?

  Mr Bell: Nine million pounds to local authorities to fund the creation of a network of Choice Advisers.

  Q569  Mr Burrowes: The Audit Commission probably will not be able to do it, but how will you be able to evaluate whether that is good value for money?

  Mr Bell: That is a good question actually because it is partly about do those parents who did not have the information previously have the information. We would need to think, however, about whether you would actually measure their effectiveness by in a sense increasing preference because actually in the end it is not the Choice Advisers that will decide who gets a place in a particular school, that will be driven by admission arrangements; it seems to me the issue is much more about measuring effectiveness through access to information for those parents who previously have not had, or have been in parts of the community that have not exercised, preference traditionally. Opening up the opportunity for expressing preference seems to me to be a powerful measure of the success or otherwise of these advisers.

  Q570  Mr Burrowes: The concern is that this is process driven and the language of process does not, I do not believe, necessarily resonate with the public, they want to see outcomes, they want to see the local school improving, and in terms of the evaluation of that £9 million and the value of it is people want to see whether their choice is being fulfilled, whether they have their choice; that is what matters to parents rather than whether they have had adequate information expressing a preference.

  Mr Bell: Yes, and again you are back in a sense to where we started this conversation; in any system not everyone is necessarily going to get their choice. The notion of Choice Advisers does not stand in isolation from everything else.

  Q571  Mr Burrowes: Yes, but what I am trying to say is can you just take a step back and be realistic and open and honest with people and realise that most are not going to get their choice, so why not just acknowledge that and spend a lot more time focusing maybe on the supply base being increased and improving standards, the rigour, the discipline and the rest of it within schools.

  Mr Bell: Which we are also doing of course, as you know, in relation to standards, in relation to expanding the base of schools through academies and trust schools and the like. Equally, if we just stood back and said that is the way it is I think we may perpetuate the uneven access that some parents have to understanding how the system works. The system will not be made perfect by the fact that you have Choice Advisers, but what it may do and what we want it to do is to enable those parents who previously have not navigated their way through the system to be able to do so. That seems to me to be a reasonable policy aspiration if you want to extend the capacity of all parts of a community to express a preference, make a choice about where their child goes to school.

  Mr Wilkinson: There are examples from other sectors where that has worked, so in the case of the direct payments that I referred to earlier for social care, typically exercised by disabled people, probably under 60 to 65, with the advent of Choice Advisers it is possible to get older people to exercise similar choices and therefore get personalised services to meet their needs more accurately as well.

  Q572  Paul Rowen: Because they are actually controlling the service themselves, it is not the case of them choosing a range of services, they employ their own people.

  Mr Wilkinson: Indeed. I made an error earlier which I would just like to correct; I implied earlier, in response to the chairman, that Audit Commission had not looked at all at the issue of choice of provider, only personalisation, but of course in the case of direct payments you can choose the provider, and that is part of the choice that you get given. I am only trying to illustrate that within whatever choices are available, Choice Advisers can therefore help people exercise whatever choices they have got more effectively, and in that particular case extend the availability of choice to a group of people who would otherwise not have been able to do so by themselves.

  Q573  Mr Burrowes: I quoted a paragraph in your memorandum and there is the implication that where there is not a number of competing suppliers and different options about the service delivery, choice will not be an effective driver of quality and value for money.

  Mr Wilkinson: What you spoke about applies in a market economy where there is lots of choice and where that could come back.

  Q574  Mr Burrowes: That is the language of choice—I am trying to apply this to education.

  Mr Wilkinson: I am not dissenting at all, that is precisely correct, but also within the language of choice there are other forms of choice, and we talked about personalisation earlier. If people start to understand better—part of the argument we would use with local authorities is you have to understand what your citizens and your users want, and the way in which personalised preferences are exercised, where those are available to them, is a source of intelligence for understanding how you might be able to improve the service more broadly. So any form of exercise of choice, however we end up describing it, potentially allows those who are responsible for commissioning and providing services to improve them more broadly.

  Q575  Mr Burrowes: Just one final point, in terms of personalisation would you recognise the limits in terms of its application in areas of health, in terms of patients having control of the services they receive through financial mechanisms? If one looks, for example, at addiction—alcohol and drugs—if one follows that through would it be appropriate to apply it in all areas of user involvement in terms of the field of health? Would you recognise those limits?

  Mr Bell: I would not speak on health except that I know, for example, in relation to the services provided to young people—acute services for, for example, drug abuse, alcohol abuse and so on—there is a sense in which that has to be shared by the user, because if you offer a service in a particular way and nobody turns up to get it, actually you might as well not offer it. Even those acute services where you have extreme interventions, presumably providers are always looking to see how they can have the most impact on the users. That does not mean you have a negotiation necessarily about the intervention that then follows, but it seems to me that finding out what the users want, where they congregate, what they need and how often they meet—that all seems to me to be part of making sure you customise or tailor your services.

  Q576  Mr Burrowes: Finally though, is not the limit for taking that example through, for example, the addict to alcohol or drugs, that profoundly there is also the question whether the impact should involve the family that are involved in their community. If they are not involved in terms of helping to break that addiction it could just self-absorb them in an individualised, personalised way that will not actually lead to recovery?

  Mr Bell: I would agree. In fact, although we know that in some cases people who are at the acute end are completely separated from those family systems and so on, most professionals working in that area would say the best kind of intervention is where you are working with the client, but you are also trying to work with the family too. I would absolutely agree with you on that.

  Mr Wilkinson: If I can add a point, the other thing is that we need to be fairly ambitious about the extent to which we can involve people in the sort of services that they need and they use. I know of a hostel for people with mental health problems and alcohol dependency where they are actually starting to engage the individuals involved in what it was about their lives that would improve them and they ended up with what amounts to a self-help and self-run activities club. The evidence shows that whereas violence, for example, was a real problem at one stage and the police were being called regularly to that hostel, since they have started that the need for the police has diminished to zero, and that is about getting people who in this case are living in a hostel engaged in their own activities and their own lives in a way that probably had not been anticipated earlier, and I think just shows what people can do if they are ambitious and they are trying to do that.

  Q577  Mr Prentice: The primary task of the Audit Commission is to make sure that public money is well-spent, no fiddling, no corruption, no Spanish practices, all that kind of stuff. In this move of public services towards the voluntary sector and the charitable not-for-profit sector and so on, involving users directly, how big a threat is it that resources which are transferred may be transferred inappropriately? I am looking at your memorandum here and you talk about public participation increasing risk, this is in your paragraph 35, and "the transfer of assets to communities may lead to inappropriate use or wasteful use of public resources".[5] How big an issue is that?

  Mr Wilkinson: It is an issue which we and local authorities will need to keep an eye on. We will be publishing a report, I hope, in the next month or two on the way in which local authorities commission services from the voluntary and community sector and operate with them, and if you are trying to move into a more sophisticated relationship with the voluntary sector then you need to understand where they are coming from and ensure you have appropriate checks and balances in place to make sure the public resources are well used. I do not think that I would draw a particular distinction between that from any other form of commissioning; the issue is about how you take a view across an area of public services within that area and then allocate resources and ensure they are appropriately used in order to meet the needs of the people who live there.

  Q578  Mr Prentice: Do we have any hard information at the moment about public facilities or resources that have been transferred over and have not been used as they should have been? Something must have triggered this paragraph 35?

  Mr Wilkinson: I cannot recall the precise details. Forgive me, I will go back and do a little more research on why we wrote precisely that, but auditors regularly report in the public interest on issues where there is misuse of resources and that is a fact of life and always has been.[6]

  Q579 Mr Prentice: One final thing, going back to your Seeing the Light publication—we are doing a separate inquiry on commissioning and you are familiar with that—you talk about "Recent research has suggested that innovative capacity in the voluntary sector is variable".[7] Does the Audit Commission have any kind of remit, should it have any kind of remit, to look at voluntary organisations and the charitable sector if the Government is determined to transfer a lot of services to, or co-produce a lot of services with, that sector?

  Mr Wilkinson: We do not have a statutory remit to do that.

5   Ev 197 Back

6   Note by witness: Paragraph 35 of the Audit Commission's written submission is a general statement, based on our experience of dealing with relatively small organisations such as parish councils, rather than one based on specific examples. Transferring assets from a public body, which is subject to certain checks and balances, to a new body with less well developed governance and assurance systems, is likely to increase the risks to which the paragraph refers. There should be early consideration of which safeguards would be appropriate. Back

7   Audit Commission, Seeing the light: Innovation in local public services, May 2007, p 34 Back