The Third Sector Delivering Public Services

Developments, Innovations and Challenges

James Rees, David Mullins, Rees, James, Mullins, David, James Rees, David Mullins

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781447322399
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447322436
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Social Sciences

This important book is the first edited collection to provide an up to date and comprehensive overview of the third sector's role in public service delivery. Exploring areas such as social enterprise, capacity building, volunteering and social value, the authors provide a platform for academic and policy debates on the topic. Drawing on research carried out at the ESRC funded Third Sector Research Centre, the book charts the historical development of the state-third sector relationship, and reviews the major debates and controversies accompanying recent shifts in that relationship. It is a valuable resource for social science academics and postgraduate students as well as policymakers and practitioners in the public and third sectors in fields such as criminal justice, health, housing and social care.

PART ONE

Policy, politics and organisations

TWO

The history of third sector service delivery in the UK

Pete Alcock

This chapter provides a short overview of the history of the developing role of third sector organisations in the delivery of public services in the UK. This is a long and complex history, made more so by some confusion over some of the key terms, which is explained and clarified below. The nature of third sector involvement in public services can be traced back over three centuries, and has been structured by broader changes in relations between the state and the third sector, which are discussed here as a series of phases of relationship change. The most recent ‘partnership’ phase has been associated in particular with the political and policy initiatives introduced by the recent Labour governments to both broaden and deepen government engagement with the sector. This has created opportunities, but also challenges, for third sector organisations involved in public service delivery, which are outlined here and taken up in more detail in some of the later chapters of the book.

Public services

What a review of the history of the role of third sector organisations in the delivery of public services reveals, therefore, is that this is a long history. It is a history in which this role has changed to adapt to the differing influences of economic pressures, policy shifts, user needs and new forms of practice. But the engagement of the sector, or rather elements of it, with the needs for and provision of public services is a deep-seated feature of the development of these services, extending over three centuries or more. Those who suggest that it has all come about in the last few decades of policy reform are therefore failing to appreciate this longer history, or choosing to ignore it. However, this is also a complex history; and at the root of this complexity is some confusion, or at least debate, over the meaning, or the application, of some of the key terms involved.

First, there are different understandings of what is included within the notion of public services, and in practice these need to be appreciated within this longer-term historical context. The most obvious, and the most extensive, understanding of public services is those services that are provided to the public, either collectively or (on an open access basis) to individuals. This understanding also has the longest history. Services for people have been provided for centuries, from housing and sewerage to health and social care – and long before any formal commitment to the provision of these services was recognised as a welfare need or a responsibility of government. In the 19th century in particular, the range and scale of these services expanded significantly, with public agencies, private companies and voluntary organisations all playing important roles in their development, as we will return to discuss briefly below.

However, the argument that governments should be responsible for the provision of certain services for the public led to the development of a rather different notion of public services as those services provided by the public agencies of the state. At the end of the 19th century, the political campaigning of the Fabian Society, and other social democratic organisations, focused on the need for the state to intervene to provide a range of welfare services, in large part because of the failure of the market and voluntary action to ensure that comprehensive protection was available to all. And at the beginning of the 20th century, state provision of these services began to expand, in particular under the reforming Liberal governments of the 1900s and 1910s. What is more, it was not only national government that expanded the scope of state public services, local government played a major role in this. Indeed, in education, housing, health and many other welfare services it was local government that, initially at least, was at the forefront of the growth of public services, most notably in the large municipal authorities such as Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham (Stoker, 1991).

The welfare reforms of the 20th century resulted in the gradual extension and improvement of state-provided public services, culminating in the major national programmes of the post war Labour government, sometimes credited as establishing a ‘welfare state’ in the country (see Timmins, 2001; Lowe, 2005). Despite the establishment of the comprehensive services of the welfare state, however, private provision of welfare services did continue, as did the provider role of voluntary organisations, as discussed below. Indeed, within the welfare state, the activities of non-state providers have flourished, and this gives rise to a third notion of the meaning of public services, as those services which are provided to the public and paid for out of public resources (predominantly taxation), but may not necessarily be delivered by public sector agencies. Over the latter decades of the last century and the early decades of this, the use of private and third sector organisations to deliver services funded publicly, usually under contracts agreed with public sector commissioning agencies, has grown significantly.

It is this understanding of public services as those services paid for out of public resources that has in practice underpinned much of the recent debate, and controversy, over the role of third sector agencies in delivering these, and which forms the focus for much of what is explored in more detail in the later chapters in this book. This is also an area where there have been the most rapid and significant changes in recent years. However, it is nevertheless a rather narrow conception of what could, and arguably should, be understood by the use of the term public services. It may be that the concerns that some commentators have expressed over the role of third sector involvement in public services are primarily a product of an assumption that it is only this narrower notion that should be the focus of debate about the role of the third sector in public service provision.

Second, there has also been some confusion, or at least lack of clarity, over what is understood to be the state or the public sector, in particular, if this is assumed to be one actor. Most discussion of the state in the UK tends to focus on the national government in power at Westminster, and the central government departments (largely based in Whitehall), which are charged with implementing public policy. Westminster is the seat of UK government, and the major departments (such as Work and Pensions, Health or Education) remain responsible for implementing, and to some extent delivering, public services; but in practice the picture is more complex than that.

Most significant perhaps, is the impact of the devolution since 1999 of many major welfare services to the separate administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The parliaments and assemblies here now have responsibility for determining policy in areas such as health, education and housing; and separate national administrative departments have been established to implement these. What is more, this has led to some significant variations in welfare policy across the four nations within the UK, including, in the context of this book, the extent and the terms of commissioning of services from independent providers. And in the light of this, unless where explained separately, the focus of discussion and analysis here is on what has been happening in England only.

There has also been another form of devolution from the central state over recent years, at least as regards the implementation of policy in different fields of welfare. In social security, for instance, delivery of benefits is now in the hands of quasi-independent agencies such as the Pensions Agency or Jobcentre Plus; and health policy is delivered by the National Health Service (NHS), which itself operates through separate clinical commissioning groups and foundation trusts. What this means is that in practice, decisions about the extent and the operation of commissioning of services are frequently taken at the level of these quasi-independent agencies, rather than nationally in central government departments, as the research reported in a number of the later chapters reveals.

As mentioned above, however, in a number of areas of welfare provision, it is local government rather than central government which is responsible for delivering services, or for the commissioning of other providers. Social care, education and housing are largely the responsibility of local government, and third sector agencies providing services in these and other similar fields need to engage with the departments or directorates within local authorities and the officers working within them. The structure of local government across the UK is also itself complex, and in England there are still some rural areas where there are two levels of local authorities operating, with responsibility for different services areas (Wilson and Game, 2011). And, although, as Stoker (1991) discusses, there has been an increasing level of control over the powers and resources of local government in recent decades, policy and practice still vary significantly across different authorities as a result of variations in political control and management practices.

There is a further dimension to the structure and operation of the state in the UK, and that is the role of the supranational agencies of the European Union (EU). Britain’s membership of the EU means that the country must abide by the regulations and procedures laid down by the different directorates of the EU Commission in Brussels. In practice, these mainly exercise a bureaucratic, or procedural, influence over welfare policy, with policy decision making still operating primarily at national government level. However, in some areas these procedural controls can have an important influence, in particular, in the context of this book, over the legal regulation of practices for commissioning and procurement of services. The EU may not be interfering in UK policy making as much as some Eurosceptics allege, but it is still a relevant dimension of public state structure and action.

Third, and finally, there are different, and indeed contested, understandings of what is meant by the third sector. A range of different terms are used to describe the sector, including the non-profit sector, the non-government sector and the voluntary sector. All have slightly different meanings and may be intended to identify different types or ranges of organisation, but they are often used interchangeably to refer to the sector as a whole, even if there is no complete agreement about what they are referring to (see Alcock, 2010). The Coalition government have also used the term ‘civil society’ to refer to this broader sector, although in practice this concept has a rather different, and more extensive, intellectual pedigree focused on social interaction rather than organisational form (Evers, 2013).

This book uses the terminology of ‘the third sector’, in part to include within this a wide range of organisations such as charities, social enterprises and community groups; but it is important to recognise that it is this very diversity of organisational forms and purposes that makes discussion and analysis of the sector so complex, and so controversial. There are many different kinds of third sector organisations, and although many are engaged in different ways with the delivery of public services, there are many more (indeed a majority no doubt) who are not; and we need to be careful to avoid assuming that all face the challenges, and the opportunities, that some do.

There is a danger, therefore, in engaging in what some commentators have called ‘sectorisation’ (Rochester, 2013) when examining the role of third sector organisations in the delivery of public services. This is the assumption that there is a unified third sector within which all organisations share similar characteristics and concerns. It is compounded to some extent by the prominent role played by some of the leading infrastructure agencies operating in the field, and seeking to speak on behalf of organisations – for instance, the NCVO and ACEVO, both of which have been active in promoting the role of third sector organisations in public service delivery and of lobbying on their behalf with government agencies. As critics have pointed out, these agencies do speak for some organisations, but they can never speak for all.

While we should be cautious about the risks of sectorisation, there is, however, potentially a converse problem. That is the assumption that because all third sector organisations do not share the same concerns, then none do; and that because collective voices cannot be unanimous then they can have no value or influence. In practice, this is obviously not the case, as the influence of agencies like the NCVO and ACEVO over national policy making and practice testifies. It has been argued that even within a diverse and disparate third sector, there may still be a ‘strategic unity’ over certain important issues, and in particular over the forging and managing of relationships with the major agencies of the central and local state (Alcock, 2010). Such a strategic unity may be partial, and fragile, but it does mean that we can, to some extent, talk about the role and interests of the sector when examining relations with government, and engagement with public services.

Changing relations with the state

The history of the role of third sector organisations in the delivery of public services therefore needs to be informed by the different understandings of what is meant by public services, how the different aspects of the state exercise their responsibility for these, and how within a diverse third sector those organisations engaging in these activities are able to act, and be understood, collectively. As mentioned, this engagement has a long history, and over the span of the last three centuries it has been altered in form and content, as different organisations have played different roles, and as public policy has changed direction. As Harris (2010) reminds us, however, while this has been a changing relationship, it has not been a new one. The involvement of the third sector in public service delivery and partnership with state agencies has been a continuous, if changing, feature of the development of these services.

One way of seeking to understand this history, and the legacy that it has left for current policy makers and practitioners, is to summarise it as a series of phases of engagement, mirroring to some extent the broader development of welfare services within the country as a whole. This was the approach adopted by Lewis (1999) in a review of the changing nature of state and third sector relations. She identified ‘three major shifts’ (Lewis, 1999: 258) in this, each reflecting a greater range of control by the state. Here, these are discussed as four phases in the development of state and sector relations.

The first phase was characterised by the role of third sector organisations primarily as direct providers of services. In the 19th century, when public provision through the state was limited or non-existent in most areas of welfare provision, and private market provision was at best able to meet the needs of only a relatively small section of the population who could afford to pay for services, then it was largely third sector organisations who moved in to fill the gaps created by this public and market ‘failure’.

Nineteenth-century third sector providers included major charitable organisations responding to the needs of abused and abandoned children, such as the NSPCC and Barnardo’s, both of which still operate to provide these services today. In health and education, the leading early providers were the voluntary hospitals and voluntary schools. Third sector organisations were also innovators in developing mutual protection, in particular for workers, through the Friendly Societies providing insurance-based income support for sickness and unemployment (Harris, 2004). In the second half of the century, much of the work of organisations providing welfare services was coordinated and promoted by the Charity Organisation Society (COS), which sought to provide a more ‘scientific’ approach to philanthropy by trying to overcome the rather haphazard distribution of charitable activity, and to promote an ideological challenge to what leading COS figures saw as the threat of of ‘pauperisation’, by encouraging charities to provide moral as well as financial support (Davis Smith, 1995).

The objectives of COS included not only shaping third sector provision of welfare services, but also seeking to promote independent provision as the driving force for the development of public welfare in the UK. This could be seen most prominently in the role of leading COS figures (Booth and the Bosanquets) in the drafting of the Majority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of 1909, which argued that charitable and voluntary provision should be at the heart of 20th-century welfare reform. This contrasted with the Minority Report, which was largely the work of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and argued that it was the state that should take up the responsibility for delivering welfare.

Although support for state welfare was only a minority voice in the Commission, this was the direction that was largely followed by government in the early 20th century, with the introduction of social insurance protection, state education and public housing, by a mix of both central and local government. These early welfare state reforms led to a second phase of third sector involvement in public services, with organisations playing something of a complementary role to these new state providers. For instance, the Friendly Societies were used to administer statutory health insurance provision, and voluntary hospitals remained as major providers of acute health care. In the early 20th century, the Webbs (W...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables, figures and boxes
• Series editor’s foreword
• Notes on contributors
• one: The third sector delivering public services: setting out the terrain
• Part One: Policy, politics and organisations
• Part Two: Cross-cutting issue for third sector service delivery
• Part Three: Service delivery in key policy fields