Freedoms and Flexibilities

WAPES – Innovation Conference19-20 November 2014Martin Fitches – Department for Work and Pensions, UK

July 2014 v1

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Introduction

• In the UK, we have a strong culture of ‘inverting the triangle’ and building a ‘bottom-up culture’ of innovation.

• Freedoms & Flexibilities is an approach that encourages innovation, and supports the most effective way for us to design and deliver our services to the public.

• This forms part of a drive to switch from a process driven/‘box ticking’ culture in delivering work services to one where we do the right thing to help claimants move off benefit and into work.

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Overview

• Claimants and labour market needs vary dramatically throughout the country. Freedoms & Flexibilities offers us scope to tailor our services to individual claimants and local labour markets. It is about doing the right things to get more claimants into work more quickly and meet the needs of local employers.

• However, Freedoms and Flexibilities is not a ‘free for all’. Our context is that we are delivering the biggest welfare reform in a generation, with Universal Credit requiring brand new operating models, based upon differentiated and personalised services for claimants built upon digital by default.

• Our back-to-work services are, therefore, part of an end-to-end customer service with many inter-dependencies. So, pushing further at the boundaries of local freedoms and flexibilities to get more claimants into work more quickly must be done collaboratively, working with key stakeholders.

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The details

• A Yes/No Framework to help offices determine what is totally within their gift to develop and implement locally; and what is off-limits, e.g. where we have a legal or political obligation to deliver; major DWP contracts; DWP and/or Civil Service terms and conditions.

• A process through which Districts can develop proposals around things they do not control or cannot simply implement, but are not off-limits, i.e. ‘Maybe’ proposals.

• Access to analytical tools and support to ensure proposals and decisions are well informed.

• A Catalogue of ‘Maybe’ initiatives that are in progress, or that have been considered previously, as well as “Yes” items that have been shared. The catalogue enables emerging/good practice to be shared and helps avoid unnecessary duplication.

• Local innovation require a proportionate approach to evaluation and deciding how to evaluate is not a case of ‘one size fits all’.

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Some examples

• High-level targets based not on activity or interventions, but on outcomes, empowering advisers to take the steps they deem appropriate to get somebody into work.

• The Flexible Support Fund – a pot of money that advisers have in order to ‘remove barriers’ to work for claimants, such as buying clothes or tools to set up a business; and that local managers can use to support NGOs to provide bespoke services to our most vulnerable customers.

• Working with local partners – advisers and local managers are encouraged to join up services at a local level in order to design holistic services for our claimants.

• Digital Jobcentres – our recently installed customer facing computers can be used however offices choose – to run CV sessions, group job-searching, or one-to-one digital upskilling.

• Bright Ideas – a desktop icon that enables advisers to submit ideas for innovation quickly and easily, to vote for other ideas, and a team that develops popular and feasible proposals.

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Conclusions

• Freedoms & Flexibilities promote, and enable, the benefits that can be achieved through straightforward continuous improvement, whilst supporting more complex proposals by integrating them into mainstream structures.

• Having such flexibility promotes people engagement, encourages our people to think innovatively about our services and grants them the autonomy to implement newly emerging practices and exploit new technology far more quickly than traditional Departmental processes allowed.

• Ultimately this will provide both claimant and employer with a more modern, tailored and reactive service which they will recognise as being flexible to, and driven by, their needs

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Thank youAny questions?