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Historic England's emerging public value framework
- 1. Historic England’s emerging Public Value Framework Dr Andy Brown, Analytics Director January 2019
- 2. What is a Public Value Framework? ‘To hold public bodies to account for the way they have spent taxpayers’ money in a much better way than ever before.’ www.gov.uk/government/publications/delivering-better-outcomes-for-citizens-practical-steps- for-unlocking-public-value
- 3. It’s not rocket science! It is, however, challenging ...
- 5. From 50 questions down to 20
- 6. Designing new initiatives Choosing between options Reviewing current activities Public value rating Pursuinggoals Managinginputs Engagingusers Developing capacity Green Amber/ Green Amber/ RedRed Benchmark guidance to follow
- 7. ‘PVF lite’
- 8. Assured Alignment? • Clarity of goals • Appropriate KPIs • Links to other work • Quality of track record • Measures drive good behaviours ‘How well does the project* address the published goals of Historic England?‘ Is the project ambitious enough? How is the degree of alignment to be measured? Will the measures reveal any issues early enough to take corrective action? Is the project dependent on other projects for its success? Do the people in each part of the delivery chain have a good track record? Will the measures drive good behaviour rather than create perverse incentives?
- 9. Appropriate Resourcing? • Measurement of unit costs • Detailed resource plan • Timely information to managers • Optimised funding mix • Awareness of knock-on costs ‘How do we know that the resources being devoted are the right ones?’ Will managers have timely information with which to manage, including on unit costs to allow comparisons? Is there a convincing plan for meeting costs, including meeting unexpected ones? Have options for funding been considered—not just taxpayer funding? Are we just shifting costs onto other public sector bodies?
- 10. Public Support? • Stakeholder needs • Public perceptions • User experience • Public participation • Stakeholder influencing ‘Does the project* show understanding of its stakeholders—both their expectations and how they can be influenced?’ What drives public support on the relevant issue, and is there evidence of it for the project? Do the proposers appreciate the importance of improving user experiences as the gateway to better outcomes? How does the extent of public participation compare with similar projects? How sure are we that stakeholders’ perceptions will be well managed?
- 11. Capacity Development? • Well-designed evaluation • Use of new technologies • Clear accountability • Cross-boundary collaboration • Reslience ‘Will the learning from being involved lead to a stronger knowledge- and skills-base in the sector?’ Will measures and evaluation results allow identification of what works, for whom and in what circumstances? Have new time-saving technologies been given a chance? Is everyone in key roles clear about their accountability up the line? Are the advantages of cross-boundary collaboration exploited? Will learning from being involved make it easier to respond to future changes?
- 12. 3 responses to PVF assessment Go for it Tweak it Bin it
- 14. • a more compelling case for funding from Government for heritage • confidence that each of us is using taxpayers’ money well • fulfilling our role as heritage sector leaders
Editor's Notes
- Hello! I’m Dr Andy Brown, Historic England’s Analytics Director, and this set of slides aims to introduce our emerging Public Value Framework, which will serve as an organisational compass for us as we navigate our way to creating as much public value as we can through our work in England’s wonderful historic environment.
- Our public value framework springs from the work done by Sir Michael Barber (pictured), former Head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, which was published in November 2017. Sir Michael’s report aimed to crack the difficult nut of how to make sure that every pound of taxpayers’ money gets spent well. Previous attempts have met with only partial success, and Barber’s public value framework is a new attempt that concentrates more on outcomes rather than inputs and outputs. Outcomes are about making real people’s lives better – ‘real-world improvements’ as Barber calls them.
- What’s public value about? Imagine you are a Board member of a museum. The Board runs a tight ship, and accessioning and procurement are all done absolutely by the book. The accounts balance, and the Board is very satisfied with itself. The only problem is that visitors are left completely cold by the exhibits and are neither inspired nor enriched by their experience of the museum. Your Board is not creating public value by just running the museum efficiently. So, too, for us in the historic environment sector. We must go beyond working efficiently and make sure that we are making people’s lives better through our taxpayer-funded work. We must engage with our stakeholders and grow the next generation of the heritage workforce. This will be more challenging for some of us than for others.
- Sir Michael Barber’s report is well summarised in this diagram from his report. For any publicly-funded organisation to maximise the public value it creates, it must deliver results under each of the four pillars at the same time. It is not enough to be working on things the organisation believes to be important, nor even to do those things with careful attention to spending properly. The stakeholders in whose name the work is being done need to be engaged and all our work should aim to leave a legacy of a stronger, more resilient sector at the end of a project or programme.
- The Barber Report includes (at Appendix A) 50 challenges to any public body, the responses to which allow an assessment of how well the public body is set up to create as much public value as possible. Those 50 challenges constitute the generic Public Value Framework that could apply to any public body. Fifty challenges, however, are too many for practical application to programmes and projects. We have identified the 20 challenges that work best in the historic environment sector. The pillars are the same ones as Barber uses, although expressed slightly differently. In the slides that follow we will expand on the shorthand used in the diagram. The overall idea, though, is that any historic environment project or programme can be assessed using these 20 challenges to see how well it will maximise the public value it creates.
- Here’s how it works. This chart represents the assessment of one of our projects – it might be a completely new initiative, it might be one of a number of options, it might be part of a review of one’s own forward job plan. By referring to a simple benchmark guide (in preparation), the project has been assessed on a four-part scale under each of the four pillars. In this case, the project is felt to be great for developing capacity but poor in terms of its alignment with our published goals (in the Corporate Plan). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go ahead, but we should satisfy ourselves that the design of the project does all it can to squeeze out public value (and sometimes there is nothing more that can be done under one or more pillars). We should take an active decision to go ahead in spite of the limited public value rather than spend the resources differently.
- For those of you who are thinking even 20 challenges is too bureaucratic for some projects, you’re right! So for simple projects and programmes (‘simple’ has yet to be defined for our purposes), we will use the ‘PVF lite’ set of four challenges – one for each pillar. If a simple project has good answers for the highlighted challenges, it is likely to create sufficient public value to justify taxpayers’ investment. Even simple projects, however, should meet all four challenges well; if we excuse ourselves from any one pillar, there is a substantial risk that the public investment will not yield the value it should.
- Let’s unpack the pillars one-by-one. The first is about making sure the project or programme starts on track with a published goal and then stays on track rather than being allowed to veer off course and deliver results that are not a priority. The most important challenge is about the clarity of the project’s goals, but it is also important to look out for dependencies on other projects, for any weak links in the delivery chain that need extra support to ensure success and for measures that look good at first but that actually tend to hi-jack the real goals in order to tick performance boxes.
- The second pillar is about resources. What assurance can we give the investment decision-maker in the organisation that the resource allocation is neither too little nor too much? The critical indicator is an expression of the unit costs of key parts of the project, such as the cost per new Listing recommendation, because that will highlight good or bad practice when compared with similar projects and programmes in the past. Cost plans need to be convincing, in particular with regard to how unexpected costs will be met (risk-linked contingency allowance). Options other than relying solely on taxpayer funding should always be considered, such as sponsorship or cost recovery from eventual users. And it is important to think whether a project will shift costs from an organisation that can deliver a task efficiently (perhaps due to economies of scale) to another organisation that can only do the work at greater cost or lesser public benefit.
- The third pillar is about engaging our stakeholders – often the general public but also many different sub-sets of the public, such as interest groups or businesses. Every project or programme should be able to show that it is aware of stakeholders’ needs, even if we have then to explain that those needs will not be met completely. Where stakeholders are narrower that the general public, we need to be mindful of what that general public feels about the issue that the project or programme addresses. Public participation is a great way of increasing public value, and should be maximised in the particular circumstances. And like justice, which must not only be done but must be seen to be done, it is no good us doing great projects and not telling the taxpayers in whose name the work has been done; we need our stakeholders to tell their friends and their politicians about the good work we do.
- Finally, the fourth pillar is about legacy. The crucial component for ensuring legacy is a well-designed evaluation built into the project from the outset, not bolted on as an afterthought; without this we will never learn what works for whom and in what circumstances, and the crucial legacy of wisdom gained through experience will have been foregone. A different sense of legacy is the learning we might achieve through experimentation using new technologies. Part of our responsibility as sector leaders is to take some risks so that better ways of doing things are explored for the benefit of sector partners, and we must be prepared to fail and learn from our failures rather than to stay on the safe path and miss opportunities.
- So what do we do with an assessment against the four pillars of our public value framework? There are three possible outcomes: The project already does as much as it can in the circumstances to create public value under the 4 pillars, in which case the investment decision-maker may be willing to proceed without amendments; The project performs well under some pillars but not so well under others, in which case the investment decision-maker is likely to want the design amended before signing it off; The project performs so poorly against the pillars that it is unlikely ever to compete successfully for funding and the best thing to do is to start again with a completely different approach.
- So here’s our project that we assessed before, but now it has been tweaked so that it more explicitly addresses the organisational goals as well as doing OK for pillars 2 and 3 and still developing capacity to a high degree. There is no fixed threshold at which a project is ‘good enough’ for funding; rather, the public value framework will help investment decision-makers to decide between projects in a consistent and transparent way. If they decide to fund a project that delivers little public value, they can be held to account for that decision more easily with this procedure in place than without it.
- In conclusion, our Public Value Framework is an aid to good, robust and fair decision-making; it is not a substitute for judgement. It sits alongside our Corporate Plan and serves as an organisational compass, helping us to steer our way towards our goal of having real-world impact by making the best possible use of taxpayers’ funding. If we use it well, we will be able to make a more compelling case to the Government for increased funding because we will be able to show how effectively we convert public money into good outcomes for people. Furthermore, it provides each of us with a personal compass for how we use our time and effort to best effect in the creation of public value in return for taxpayers’ investment. Lastly, it behoves us, as heritage sector leaders, to set an example to sector partners so that others will similarly create as much public value as possible in our collective mission to manage change in the historic environment for present and future generations.