Sponsored feature Capita Size isnt everything everything Flexibility and resilience are the future, says Andy Foster O ne of the recurring debates that has rumbled through the regulatory professions for as long as I can remember is the question of size more specically, what is the minimum size that a regulatory service needs to be to function? The fact that the query has never been answered is a source of much frustration for government ofcials and politicians, but such inconclusiveness is not without good reason. Rather than transactional services such as contact centres, revenues and benets, where the resources required to process the demand of its users can be predicted with reasonable certainty regulatory services use a combination of preventative and reactive interventions to drive outcomes. So the response to the question of size should be met with another question: how ambitious do we want to be? The problem is that, whatever the size of the service, austerity cuts have often left very little resource for the basics, let alone contingencies, such as unexpected incidents, emergencies or complex investigations. This can often leave councils and their customers exposed. Some colleagues realise that individual councils dont have to deliver everything themselves and, as a result, commissioning becomes a more comfortable term. This is bringing with it a new range of efciencies that will form part of the answer. Partnerships in regulatory services such as our own with North Tyneside Council and the London Borough of Barnet do not operate in isolation from each other. Quite the opposite: they are forming a network that can mobilise resource where it needs to be at any particular time. This allows future partners to commission individual activities or just call upon the network at times of unexpected demand, rather than absorb the cost of employing highly skilled ofcers on a permanent or temporary basis. Turning the resource ow on and off like this keeps the service as efcient as possible. As the sector matures, commissioning is likely to become more sophisticated and outcome-based rather than activity-based. Outcomes include increased survival rates of small and medium-size enterprises in the borough, reduced availability of illicit tobacco and a reduced number of older people going into residential care, to name just a few. Such cross-sector, outcome-based approaches will transfer risk to the provider and force cross-agency collaboration in a way that has not been seen before. This, in turn, will stimulate investment and innovation for the benet of not just local government, but for the citizens and businesses we all serve. So, services of the future will perhaps operate with smaller core teams of varying size teams made up of expert regulatory commissioners, as well as practitioners, who know which interventions will produce the desired outcomes and make better use of our collective national workforce. Smaller they may be, but regulatory services that are able to ex in this way will lose nothing in terms of resilience and capability. Credits Published Andy Foster is a director at Capita. Tuesday 27 January, 2015 (Andrew.foster2@capita.co.uk) Images: Rawpixel / Shutterstock To share this page, click on in the toolbar