Better Public Services Advisory Group Report - November 2011

Chapter 4: Better services and more
value-for-money
4.1 Better state services will, in themselves, lead to better results for citizens and businesses.
Better means being open and responsive to citizens and businesses; being clearly
focused on user needs; doing the things that government needs to do and doing them
well in effective, efficient ways. More value-for-money means less cost, time and effort
are taken to generate the same – or a better – result.
Information
4.2 Citizens and businesses expect to have a say on state services: on what services they
need, when and how they might be improved. The processes for seeking public input to
the provision of public services are well established in some cases – for example, via
government discussion documents on policy options for a particular issue. The Advisory
Group is of the view, however, that New Zealand state sector organisations need to get
much better at engaging with the public in designing and reshaping the services they
provide. This should be a routine expectation of both agencies and third-parties that
provide public services. It means listening and being held to account for making
appropriate changes, including in the use of new technology service channels. This
approach is at the heart of state sector reform in the UK, Canada and Australia.
4.3 Done well, taking users’ voices into account when re-designing and improving services
creates opportunity for a co-production approach, where both users and providers work
together on improving delivery. Technology, particularly the internet, is opening up
exciting new possibilties for citizen involvement to happen earlier, more cheaply and in
more meaningful ways. The Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs recently announced
the government’s committment to actively releasing high-value public data. This is a
good start that can be built from.
4.4 The Advisory Group considers that the two main brakes on progressing engagement with
state services clients are agency capability and a reluctance to open up areas of
information and decision-making that have traditionally been out of bounds. The best
way to pick up the pace is by real-time demonstration. Work on the Canterbury
earthquake re-build provides the opportunity. A start has been made providing online
information to Canterbury residents and businesses on the re-build. To date, this has
been about information provision; in future it could support more substantial partnerships
between citizens and agencies 31 .
31 Further work on increasing choices for New Zealanders between providers is not fully explored here and could be
considered as a next phase of work.
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