Third Sector Service Delivery: Marrying Scale and Responsiveness

The seminar will address developments in policy and practice resulting from the Localism Bill, Commissioning Green Paper and the Public Services Reform White Paper. It will contribute to our understanding of recent attempts to improve economic performance and efficiency of public service delivery through partnerships, improved supply chain management, spin-outs and co-production. The seminar will critically examine the effect of these developments on third sector organisations and the services they deliver. Examples of research and policy questions to be addressed include:

• How can scale and efficiency best be married with local accountability and responsiveness?
• Partnerships and consortia - what works for Third Sector Organisations (TSOs)?
• The Prime Contractor model - what lessons are emerging for supply chain management involving different types of TSOs - what are the impacts on mission, capacity and influence?
• How can TSOs best configure themselves to promote community engagement and co-production with service users?
• Employment services - what does success look like in commissioning of employment services?
• Housing and health TSOs - what lessons can be learned from different models of spinning out service delivery to the third sector? 

The event will be chaired by Professor David Mullins, Professor of Housing Policy at the Third Sector Research Centre. Contributing academic perspectives to the seminar will be Professor Tony Bovaird, Professor of Public Management and Policy, University of Birmingham and Professor Dan Finn, Professor of Social Inclusion, University of Portsmouth.

A panel session will follow the academic presentations and perspectives will be contributed by Ralph Mitchell, Director of Strategy, ACEVO; Heather Petch, previous Director of HACT; Paul Davies, Executive Director of Social Care and Inclusion, Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council and Richard Johnson, previous Managing Director of Serco Welfare to Work.

The panel session will be followed by Q&A and an open discussion session.

This seminar is free to attend but places are limited and registration is required. If you wish to attend, I would be grateful if you could e-mail your acceptance to the ESRC Knowledge Exchange Team (knowledgeexchange@esrc.ac.uk)