Tackling Social Exclusion

• Peter Ryder, president of Socitm, working for Preston City Council
• Sir Chris Clarke, senior advisor in the Benefits Realisation team, IDeA

Peter Ryder, president of Socitm, working for Preston City Council

The transformation agenda gives local government a significant opportunity to address social exclusion.

Transformation is about many things: it's about joined up services; it's about the citizen; it is about efficiencies; it is about benefits and performance. But at the end of the day it boils down to finding a better way of delivering services to the citizen.

Re-designing the services, getting out there in the community and actually delivering those services into the community to those socially excluded; that is the real key to the whole transformation agenda for me.

So far we have spent a lot of time and effort producing e-services used by people who could use them anyway – people who have the nous, the ability, the PCs and the internet to do so. The real issue is actually getting a dialogue going with the socially excluded – those people who wouldn't normally have that dialogue with authorities.

We need to take services out there, get among the people who need these services and give them the tools, give them the expertise, give them the opportunity – take the technology to them and show them how to do it.

Here in Preston we have got wireless networking, free to use kiosks and a programme working with groups such as the blind, deaf, Help the Aged, women's refuges, ethnic groups, men's missions and so on. We are actually getting out there, having dialogue with these people, providing technology, showing them how to use it and trying in a limited way to support them.

One extremely popular facility is that of video email. You don't need to be able to read and write – you just need someone to set up the email for you and talk to the camera. This has been extremely successful in engaging with our Indian and Chinese communities, providing support to communicate for free with relatives back home.

The beauty of it is its simplicity – and the fact that people really engage with what we are doing. Our 14 kiosks have had over one and three quarter million user sessions in the last year, and zero vandalism.

But the aim at the end of the day is to get people in to training. We are finding that people engage with us, and that perhaps the first qualified bit of paper they have had in their life has come from training with us via Wi Fi and a lap top. This can make a real difference in people's lives – it is not just the ability to access services but the opportunity to learn, to break the cycle and move on.

I think that social inclusion, breaking down the divides, should be built in to the transformation agenda.

We have got to look at what transformation is really all about. If we can actually do that and start looking at what transformation means to authorities, to members and to citizens, then I think we can actually start to get the message out there a bit more.

Socitm has made great inroads in transformation. It has produced a lot of good publications via the Insight service about transformation and shared services - case studies and advice to help councils. There is a lot going on but people don't know about it. Socitm's publications can go some way to showing what authorities are doing.

Sir Chris Clarke, senior advisor in the Benefits Realisation team, IDeA

What is increasingly clear is that the people who most need our help and support are the least able to get it, because they tend to be less articulate, less mobile, less self confident and less able.

When the UK is the fourth or fifth strongest economy in the world, to still have one in four to five children and families at or near poverty is a disgrace.

If there is real ambition to deal with social exclusion and deprivation then intervention closer to families and individuals is absolutely critical.

We need to, and can, be more forensic in where the resources are focused. I am very excited about social marketing – an example of which is the recent use of a supermarket loyalty card database to analyse buying habits and identify those most likely to be suffering from diabetes, and offer them advice. Social marketing – analysing the data we hold to identify areas of need - is an interesting concept that could be applied within transformation.

Local authorities and the wider public sector have to make a decision, however, about where - or not - it oversteps the mark on data protection and privacy if it is for ‘the greater good'.

The debate on this front – whether it is legal and desirable to share data across the public sector or create a ‘super-database' of citizens – will no doubt rumble on for some time.

But I believe that the government must take a stance, tackle the pressure groups, and clarify the law.

If Varney's recommendation for a ‘once only' change of address service for the whole public sector is ever to become reality, the issue of sharing information across the wider public sector must be dealt with.

But it is not just at this ‘high level' that clarity is needed. Some councils are in absolute confusion about what they are, or are not, allowed to do when it comes to using the information they hold on their citizens to help improve their citizens' lives.

And when it comes to shared services the basic disparities in different councils' interpretation of the law is in danger of creating insurmountable barriers.

Transformation offers us the opportunity to tackle these issues, re-designing services for the citizen and targeting support where it is most needed. If done correctly, delivering efficiency savings should be an inevitable outcome - vast amounts of waste and duplicated effort can be cut from the process of simplifying service delivery.

The process of transformation will take time. But officers can start the process in their own areas today by thinking more about their citizens' needs and abilities. For example, it is an absolute scandal that so many councils create forms and documents written in confusing language – set at a level too high and complex for most of their audience.

In the work I have undertaken recently in take up it has been disturbing to see that while the public talks about ‘dustmen' or ‘bin men' councils persist in referring only to ‘refuse collectors'.

Likewise, real people talk about problems with rats or mice or bees – but councils talk about rodents, vermin or pest control.

The opportunities for inclusion offered by the transformation agenda should be taken on board by every officer in every council. We should all be asking ourselves, how can I best communicate with MY citizens and help them, wherever they are, to access the services that they need – and have a right to?

With its constant reviews, policy changes and audits, the climate in which national government makes local government operate can leave people frightened of their own shadow and nothing innovative emerges. It is time to have the courage to transform our sector.

This is an exert from the January/February 2007 issue of Local Government IT in Use magazine's Special Feature on the Local t-Gov Programme. To download a pdf of the full feature click here. To read the web version click here.