The NHS is not often considered a source of enlightened management thinking, but the tremendous financial pressures it is currently under have led to some innovative thinking about the problems of introducing real customer-focus in a public service.
One of the emerging trends is a clearer separation of the "commissioning" of services from "provision" of services. In other words the organisation which allocates where public funds are spent and how they are prioritised should not be the same as the organisation which carries out the services - the idea being to make the public services more responsive to the needs of the local community. If we apply this thinking to local government, it suggests that a Town or Parish Council could commission services (such as refuse collection, street cleaning, and so on) from the Local Authority, which would act as the local "provider" of such services.
This is an idea with lots of potential, which I'll return to later.
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