The Commissioning Joint Committee Guide to Open Public Services

This guide is directed to the decision-makers and practitioners who will be responsible for major changes in the commissioning of services if the proposals in the White Paper go ahead. Its main purpose is to make an early assessment of how much authorities may in practice be able to do to effect real change; and of the other initiatives which will have to accept lower priority if higher priority is given to open public services. These considerations differ widely from proposal to proposal.

Decision-makers and practitioners will, for example, need to:

• judge how far they can afford to diversify their service providers (the intended purpose of several of the proposals) thereby discarding some of the economies of scale previously secured by bigger packages and by rationalising lists of providers
• plan for the (always great but often misunderstood) effects of greater personal choice
• identify the applications for which payment by results might be highly constructive, those for which special precautions would be needed, and those best avoided altogether
• contain the extra administrative work and other side effects of the right to challenge, the right to buy, and (if authorities adopt the same changes as central government) open commissioning
• identify the proposals from which nothing, or nothing more, is likely to be achieved.

This publication is available as a book and a bookmarked PDF.