Digital Disruption

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Can digital innovation reboot our public services?
 Contents
Part 1: Time to get real 3

Part 2: How can we Reboot Britain? 6

Part 3: From the margins to the mainstream 21

Part 4: Ten ways to Reboot Britain 26

Endnotes 30

Acknowledgements 31

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 Part 1:
Time to get real
Social media. Web 2.0. iPhone apps. Twitter, Facebook, eBay,
YouTube, Wikipedia. You can’t move these days without
encountering articles, events, conversations – even pamphlets –
about all these trendy new tools and how they’re changing the world
we live in. We tweet and text our way through daily life, and even
the most reluctant among us are forced to sit up and take notice.
These technologies are here now, they aren’t going anywhere in the
foreseeable future, and they have already transformed how we talk
to each other, how we hear and share news, how we work and how
we organise ourselves.
This is about more than ‘tools’ though: the reach and power of
these technologies is turning them into infrastructure, the platforms
that we all take for granted and use in every part of our lives. We
are witnessing the construction of a new social infrastructure, as
fundamental a change as the introduction of the railways or the
highways and potentially even more transformative. Compare the
UK today with a country with no cars, buses, trucks or trains, and
you have some sense of how radically different things are about to
become.1
3
The social web is already disrupting our society
Changes in infrastructure change everything. The impact of the
digital revolution has been felt most in the commercial world, from
the growth of huge new consumer markets for smartphones and
online gaming, to the radical reshaping of the media as the internet
drives down prices and creates radical new competition. Old business
models are made unsustainable, forcing organisations to innovate to
develop new ways of bringing value to customers.
The impact is being felt in every part of our society, from the
expectations of the voting public to our changing attitudes to work
and careers. Many of these tools began in the social world, not
necessarily with philanthropic intent, but certainly from the self-
organised communities of newsgroups, peer learning, activism and
academia. Social media tools may be commercial in their popular
expression, but fundamentally they began as, and remain, tools for
organising society.
For several years now, people have been talking about how the web,
and particularly the connective and organising potential of the web,
can be used to improve society, solve social problems, and redesign
our world for the better. Digital tools are starting to transform how
 we learn, how we care for ourselves and each other, and how we
access public services.
However, such widespread changes in society represent not just
an opportunity for public and third sector organisations, but also a
huge challenge. Public bodies now need to understand and respond
to increased expectations, changing practical constraints, greater
cultural diversity and increasingly active and demanding digital
citizens. This challenge is already here, and it isn’t going away.
The forthcoming austerity for public services will change
perspectives on disruption
So, what’s new? The internet has had a disruptive effect on much
of our society, but the public sector has so far survived relatively
unchanged by new technologies. Councils create websites, but
they don’t correspondingly close call centres or benefits offices.
Government agencies use Facebook and MySpace in their
campaigns, but they still use all the other channels too.2
Up to now, the focus for digital innovation has been on the
added value that social media tools and digital platforms can
deliver: building communities around service provision,
influencing and educating the public, speeding up access
to information and services, helping officials and citizens
share knowledge and campaign for change. All of these
things are happening at the margins, creating excellent
added value for people in need, but rarely replacing
existing service provision. Few people have
argued that the success of NHS Direct should
be measured by how many GP surgeries it could
enable us to close.
Until now. We are all inescapably aware of the
financial challenges that confront the public sector. A
considerable proportion of the vast public sector deficit
– expected to peak at 70 per cent of GDP in 2013-14 – is
thought to be structural and will not be reduced by a return to
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economic growth. The UK Government has pledged to accelerate
deficit reduction over the next parliamentary period, with the main
reduction coming from cutting public spending rather than raising
taxes.
In the Emergency Budget in June 2010, the Government announced
that up to £61 billion in savings would need to be made by 2014-15,
based on further reductions in departmental spending of £17 billion
on top of the previous Government’s deficit reduction plan. The
Budget requires some public service departments to save as much as
25 per cent of discretionary current spending, which will result in the
scaling back of to public services.3
Meeting these savings targets will be profoundly challenging. Cuts
to public services will be acutely felt by those who depend on
them, and result in service closures and staff cuts up and down the
country. Making these savings will mean the first five consecutive
years of real cuts since 1948-49.
In times of fiscal and economic crisis, complex, long-term social
issues are increasingly highlighted too. The UK is already dealing
with poor mental health, rising rates of obesity, an ageing
population, low attainment and engagement in schools, and
entrenched joblessness and long-term unemployment. Just as
the financial impact of the recession hits public services hard, so
the social impacts of job losses, the stress of social change and
transition, greater risk of poverty, more pressure on families and
social care and so on, will push demands up even further for services
which are already struggling to meet existing needs.4
In particular, there are high-cost, high-anxiety areas such as
safeguarding children, anti-social behaviour, family support, youth
crime and community safety which are vital to protect, as well as
increased pressure on our welfare system to prevent vulnerable
people from dropping out of society entirely.5
 The crisis facing public services demands a radical shift

The crisis facing public services is such that it calls for a radical
shift in the way services are provided and organised. It changes the
nature of the conversation, from one where innovation is about
improvement and excellence, to one where innovation is about
transforming the way services operate. Technology has to be a tool
in the box, and its underpinning infrastructure part of the long-term
vision of how services work in the future.

Innovation with technology does not mean more technology, and it

doesn’t mean more services. In this spending context, it means using
existing technologies to deliver current services in different, cheaper
ways. It is about looking at the assets we have, inside and outside
government, and figuring out how they can be used to enable new
models of delivery and alternative channels for access. In a time
of drastic cuts, innovation must offer more than improvement and
efficiency alone; it becomes the driving force for a radically different
and more effective approach to service delivery.6

This is the moment when new approaches on the margins move to

the mainstream. The urgent pressure for reform means innovators
need to respond quickly. The stark choice facing commissioners will
soon be to do things in new ways, or stop doing them at all.

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 Part 2:
How can we Reboot Britain?

Digital technologies are ‘disruptive’ in that they enable new
forms of provision that meet user needs better and at lower cost.
Successful internet tools are scalable, personal, collaborative and
can be extraordinarily cheap to develop. In the commercial world,
the web disrupts traditional services by cutting out the middle-man,
providing greater flexibility and offering people goods and services
which are highly tailored to their needs. In short, they put the
service user in control.
The internet cannot alone heal the sick or collect bins, but it can be
used to assist the design and delivery of our public services. Web
and mobile platforms that offer people the ability to interact with
one another and with information and institutions are particularly
useful for enabling the kind of action that could prove central to
delivering radical efficiency.
At the heart of this initiative is the belief that collaborative
technologies can give our citizens and front-line workers a much
more powerful voice to change things. Effective public services
in the 21st century will be designed and delivered when, how and
where our citizens need them and technology has a key role to play
in enabling this approach.
Reboot Britain has chosen to support projects in three areas which
are of high social anxiety, and where current provision of public
services is often very expensive:
• Families – supporting and enabling families to move out of crisis.
• Young people – helping young people at risk or not in education
or employment.

NESTA has launched Reboot Britain as a programme to test how • Harnessing local communities – engaging communities in social
digital technology can support the design and delivery of the next action and decision-making.
generation of public services. It shuns the traditional model of rolling
out large-scale and expensive IT infrastructure projects. Instead,
Reboot Britain explores how the collaborative and open nature of
disruptive, collaborative technologies can be used to build better
and cheaper public services.7

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 There are four key elements underpinning these projects:

1. Developing a better understanding of service users’ needs,

reducing costs by eliminating those aspects of services that are
not helping.

2. Accessing and unlocking ‘non-state’ resources, by using

available infrastructure, working with volunteers, advocates, and
community groups.

3. Intervening early by using technology to surface patterns of

demand.

4. Scaling services using social media and other digital tools to

deliver more personalised services to large numbers of users.

The following examples are case studies of NESTA-supported

projects. They are being designed and prototyped in live
environments. Once they have been deployed and tested, we will
report on their impact. In the meantime, the projects are uncovering
valuable insights and prompting questions about how disruptive
services can be integrated into mainstream delivery.

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 Project:
Families
Many problems and solutions start and end within families.
Some families are so close to crisis that they are in frequent
contact with local services. These families can be hard
to reach, but take up a considerable amount of
local government time and are of high concern to
frontline workers and service staff.

There are an estimated 110,000 to 150,000

families deemed to be in ‘crisis’ in the UK.
Supporting them through a raft of problem areas
can be resource-intensive, with large amounts of
time (a ratio of up to 80:20 per cent) going on
administration. This can be difficult for families
bounced back and forth around different services,
especially when they are feeling vulnerable.
Professionals are frustrated with this too, and this way
of working often means that little sustainable impact is
made on families’ abilities to come out of crisis and lead
better lives.8

The Reboot Britain programme has supported

approaches that might help to reverse this ratio and put the
relationship between carers and service users at the heart of delivery. They offer new ways
of tapping into other sources of support such as family friends and the resources of families themselves.
Collaborative tools such as social media are being trialed to improve the responsiveness of these services.
They are being developed to bring people together to share experiences and reduce bureaucratic processes.

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 Case study:
The LIFE programme by Participle
In association with Swindon Council
Swindon Council is pioneering an approach to managing and
supporting families in crisis and providing services for them in a
different, more integrated way. Working with Participle – a service
design and innovation agency – the ‘LIFE’ Programme focuses on
unlocking capabilities for families to build and sustain the lives they
want to lead.
The 2009 pilot, with Swindon, saved over £200,000 in 12 weeks
with one family alone, by preventing children going into care,
reducing court orders and ASBOs. A second pilot is well underway,
with another 30 families, and is due to end in September 2010.
The next challenge for LIFE is to scale up across the UK. NESTA has
supported Participle to develop web tools to do this in a way that
also allows for local variations.
Participle is using an ‘open source’ model for scaling up. All its
material and tools will be available on a shared public platform for
feedback and development, so that the programme can be taken up
by other similar projects, local authorities and social enterprises and
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adapted to local conditions. This includes user manuals and training
videos for how to build a new team, tools to allow teams to interact
with families, and monitoring and evaluation frameworks.
Frontline workers and managers in care teams in Swindon Council for
this project, will then be able to engage with the materials and adapt
them as they learn.
The LIFE programme’s success stems from the amount of time
that team workers are able to spend with families. A key goal is to
develop tools that enable more time to be spent with families and
to drastically reduce the effort spent on paperwork. Participle is also
developing Dashboard – an online self-reporting tool that helps to
capture both ‘required’ data and softer information to allow families,
front-line workers and their managers to chart the progress made
by the families that receive support. The aim of this tool is two-fold:
to allow families and front-line workers to work together to collect
data, but also to reduce the time that social workers spend on
inputting these data into systems.
 Case study:
Buddy by Sidekick Studios
Trialled with SLaM
Mental health conditions affect so many of us. At any one time,
just over 20 per cent of working-age women and 17 per cent of
working-age men are affected by low-level mental
health conditions such as depression or anxiety.
These can become serious, and have a serious
impact on propensity to work, family life and social
environments.9
Sidekick Studios is developing Buddy to reduce the
cost of mental health care by creating better-timed
interventions from professional services, and by
encouraging the use of personal social networks.
Designed around an internet-enabled digital radio,
Buddy is a social care service for people
living in the community who have long-
term mental health conditions. The device
allows patients suffering from depression
to ‘broadcast’ their mood to a selected and
secure social network. Users turn a dial on
the Buddy radio to share how they are feeling,
and the service updates their status in real time via email,
SMS, Facebook and Twitter to their support network of
friends, family and mental health carer. This creates a new
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level of responsiveness and
collaboration across professional
and non-professional carers.
The service is currently being
piloted with the South London
and Maudesley NHS Trust, and
is being co-designed with mental health users, their care teams and
their peers.
By harnessing networks of professional carers, friends and families
to work alongside each other, Buddy aims to provide better real-
time support to individuals, using data collected to co-ordinate the
community response, increase staff productivity and encourage the
ultimate goal: self-management.
Buddy’s goal is to change the
way care is delivered, reducing
demand for professional
interventions and enabling
genuine care in the community.
 Case study:
Safeguarding 2.0 by FutureGov
The safeguarding of children at risk of physical or mental abuse is
arguably a public service in crisis. Following a number of high-profile
deaths, unfilled vacancies for care professionals in this sector are
high, morale is low and the requirement to log and communicate
highly astute and sensitive data has led to social workers feeling
over-burdened by systems, reducing their available time with
families.
Safeguarding 2.0 aims to find a better way of
working. The project is a design partnership led by
FutureGov that seeks to understand how children’s
safeguarding services might be made more responsive
to both front-line workers’ and families’ needs by
using features of web social networks. Tools that
allow the quick distribution of information across
networks and highlight the amount of activity
surrounding the child may act as an early warning
system to carers in order to enable earlier and better
intervention.
Phase One of the project, which ended in May 2010,
has researched and scoped potential solutions in
partnership with Westminster Council, Headshift,
ThinkPublic and the Local Government Information
Unit (LGIU). Research was carried out to understand
the needs of frontline workers, children and safeguarded families.
A review was also carried out of the systems and tools in use, with
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some recommendations for using simple web tools to link data to
show a better picture of each family case.
These tools aim to create much greater practical value out of data
that frontline workers already gather and use.
1. Better visualisation of case information to surface problems,
allowing rapid absorption of information, identifying hotspots
more quickly, and freeing up time for social workers to spend
with families.
2. Development of tools that allow comparisons of data, to rapidly
check progress or deterioration.
3. Tools that better connect the network, and connect earlier, to
allow the sharing of key information.
4. Technology that can be extended to other platforms – such as
mobile – to make
best use of front
line workers’ time.
FutureGov is now
looking to partner
with a local authority
to pilot these solutions
in a live environment.
 Project:
Young People
The need to provide guidance and support to the UK’s young people
who need it the most is a key priority for our public services. Setting
young people back on the right track, by raising their aspirations
and keeping them out of trouble, not only helps to
ensure a more cohesive society, but it also can bring
dramatic cost savings to the public purse. It is vital
to offer young people ways for them to get back into
work, education or training and, if they get into trouble
with the law, to keep them out of prison.10
Traditional public services have focused on developing
hard skills and there is a place for this. But Reboot
Britain’s projects for young people have ‘softer’ skills,
relationships and mediation at their heart. They do
this through mentoring, rehabilitation and restorative justice
approaches.
Our supported pilots all use proven models, but the use of
technology enables a more scalable approach, on platforms that
are relevant to young people and which, by their nature, offer the
possibility of rich data to further develop service design.
Solutions need to see our young as capable assets, who can be
mobilised to build a better society. Our future economic and social
prosperity depends on them and so we cannot afford to leave them
behind.
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Young People and Crime – some facts
Seventy-one per cent of children in custody are involved with or
in the care of local authority social services before entering prison.
Eighty-six per cent of boys and 79 per cent of girls entering prison
have already been excluded from school.
The UK’s total prison population is at bursting
point – 85,000 in 2010. The cost per prisoner
is £45,000 per year. The cost per place in a
secure children’s home is £215,000 per year.
Just imposing a prison sentence alone costs
approximately £30,500.
The majority of prisoners will go on to
re-offend within two years of leaving,
costing the economy £9.5 billion
to £13 billion. Up to £10 billion of
this is attributed to short-sentenced
prisoners. It is much the same picture
for children – 74 per cent of children
released from custody in 2008
re-offended within one year.11
 Case study:
Buddi by Sara Murra
In association with Hertfordsire Police
Tagging young offenders is a potentially challenging public service
issue. Despite the evidence to show that it does help to prevent
re-offending, the thought of being tagged often raises civil liberty
concerns, especially with young people.12 However, there are signs
that demand is there. Ninety-eight per cent of the young people on
the trial for Buddi (46 out of 47 participants) volunteered to test it.
Current technology that puts offenders on curfew and confines them
to a single place for long periods of time can isolate users from good
influences as well as bad.
Buddi works with prolific young offenders and pilots the use
of miniaturised GPS tagging alongside a proven community
rehabilitation programme – Causes and Consequences, run by
Hertfordshire Police.
The Causes and Consequences programme, also known as C2, was
developed in 2007 and aims to help prolific offenders (average of
152 crimes a year each) to halt the drug, crime, prison cycle and
return to productive lives, and shifts the emphasis from enforcement
to relationships.
C2 addresses users’ needs by providing drug rehabilitation and
mentoring to young offenders, helping to deal with the root causes
of repeat offending.
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The tagging supports
the core activity on
the programme. CPS
Officers work with their
charges to identify
suitable candidates and
once accepted on to the programme their sentence is deferred up to
six months. They then take part in drug treatment, life skills training
and employment experience.
The miniaturised tags are socially important too; research showed
that large bulky tags were unpopular and socially stigmatising,
reducing compliance. The miniaturised GPS tags offer greater levels
of discretion.
The use of data, including real time data, from the GPS means
that information can be used in various ways, to increase the
effectiveness of rehabilitation and support earlier intervention. For
example, it can be used by the mentors and drugs counsellors on
the programme to provide behavioural data to support rehabilitation
around habits pinch points, success factors and trouble spots.
These data can also be shared and used to feed back into the
refinement of C2 and other rehabilitation programmes to increase
their effectiveness.
 Case study:
Safe Ground by Restorative
Technology Ltd
In association with South Devon, North Devon and Exeter YOTS
Restorative justice has been shown as an effective way of reducing
reoffending. Government research has demonstrated that it provides
85 per cent victim satisfaction, substantially reduces the frequency
of re-offending, and provides value for money by saving the
taxpayer £8 for every £1 spent on restorative justice.13
Currently, access to restorative justice programmes is patchy. Recent
workshops with case workers at Southwark indicate that 70 per cent
of offenders entering the youth justice system don’t take part in
restorative justice work. Of those that do, only 5 per cent are able to
meet face-to-face and 25 per cent undertake some type of indirect
communication such as letters.
Safe Ground is piloting a new way of enabling many more people
to feel the benefits of restorative justice through new channels. At
the centre of the project lies a moderated multi-media website to
support Youth Offending Teams in their restorative justice work.
Videos can be used to exchange communications between victims
and offenders, giving the ability to interpret more genuine emotions,
as well as being an easier medium for some offenders to take part in.
14
It is thought that this can also contribute to people going on to take
part in more face-to-face mediation, which is the most beneficial
form of mediation.
After the reparation process offenders will make good – such as
repairing broken windows or contributing usefully in the community.
Victims often don’t get to see the benefit of this; the Safe Ground
website will enable offenders to demonstrate their reparation by
posting photos and videos online.
The feedback from both victims and offenders in the process will
also be used as a means of encouragement to introduce more
people to the process. For youth offending teams these tools free up
critical time, as the process will be much easier to manage, reducing
administration time, and reducing practitioners’ case loads.
Safe Ground will be tested with South Devon, North Devon and
Exeter Youth Offending Teams, and Restorative Technology is also
looking for partners.
 Case study:
ReSync by BeatBullyings
In partnership with Kent, Greenwich, Cornwall and Lambeth Councils

There are approximately 900,000 young people from 16-24 not
in employment, education or training (NEETS). But efforts to get
young people away from benefits and towards a better future have
not generally been successful on a large scale.14
NESTA is working in partnership with one of the UK’s
fastest-growing charities – BeatBullying – to develop
ReSync, a public service designed around the web. This is
the place where we know young people go to first for their
help and advice.
and it allows a model for scaling up the service as it becomes more
popular.
By doing this, ReSync could become integrated into existing local
services provided by the state.
ReSync is being piloted in Kent, Greenwich, Cornwall and Lambeth
and is currently seeking additional local partners to trial the service.

At the heart of the service is a safe, online social Children not in education, employment or training
networking site that supports excluded and vulnerable (NEETS) - some facts
young people with trained mentors, counsellors and
advisors, who guide and support disengaged young In May 2010 the Office of National Statistics showed a rise in
people and signpost them to specialist help and services NEETs, to just under a million 16-24 year olds out of education,
where needed. employment or training. This represents a rise of 18,000 on the
previous three months.
Key to this is helping young people to develop soft skills,
such as communication skills, and the ability to manage The economic
relationships, to provide the right foundation for learning hard skills and social costs,
– such as a trade. particularly for long-
term NEETs, are high.
Importantly, ReSync enrolls young people to run the service. LSE figures put costs at
Mentors are trained young people from across the UK, which gives £97,000 per NEET over
them the opportunity to develop and use soft skills to support their the course of a lifetime
peers. This is an approach that has already been used successfully – an annual cost of
on BeatBullying’s anti-bullying website, www.cybermentors.org.uk, £3.65 billion.15

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 Harnessing Communities

The ‘co-production’ of public services between traditional providers and

the communities that use them is a practice that is gaining credibility.16
By harnessing the resources, capabilities and insights of our citizens,
services are not only made more relevant to their users, but can also
offer potential cost savings.

Collaboration is at the heart of our projects. The use of technology

enables people to engage better with service providers, be they
local authorities, volunteers, the police or Members of Parliament.

The internet has the power to bring communities of interest together

from around the globe to deliver solutions, while portable devices are
increasingly being used to provide responsive services that have a particular
geographical focus.

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 Case study:
MyMPs
By Public Zone

Over the past few years there has been a growing sense of
disillusionment in the transparency of Parliament and its
elected officials. Revelations and the resulting scandal over
unnecessary expenses claims means that our trust in MPs
has never been lower.

The recently elected Parliament, with an unprecedented

number of new MPs – many of them younger and adept
with technology – offers an opportunity for a step-change
in democratic engagement.

MyMP is a smartphone application that

allows better communication between
MPs and constituents. The free application
connects to a specially built website for each
of the MPs, where they can canvas opinion
on local and national issues, share local news,
publish events, plans and surgery times. Making
MPs easily accessible, and allowing constituents to
provide opinion on local issues, is a way of encouraging a
better democratic interaction with local communities.

MyMp presents an opportunity for people to engage

with politics and local issues on platforms that are
increasingly second nature to them.

www.my-mp.org.uk

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 Case study:
Where Do I Feel Unsafe?
By Blink Media in partnership with Greater Manchester Police
Many inner-city areas across the UK suffer
from interlinked problems, including crime and
low levels of real and perceived safety. Yet
these problems often go unreported because
of barriers, including anonymity, perceived
responsiveness and access to the right point of
contact.
Where Do I Feel Unsafe? is a pilot programme
in Gorton, Greater Manchester – one of the
highest wards for multiple deprivation in the
UK – designed to increase the reporting of
these problems. The ultimate aim is to help
residents feel safer in their communities and
feel that they can take action where they don’t
feel safe.
The project uses text, a technology that is widely
used even in more deprived areas. Residents are
encouraged to report areas where they feel unsafe
in their community to one single reporting point, regardless of the
issue.
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This could range from reports of broken street lighting, vandalism,
and suspected drug dealing. Rather than a directory of different
numbers for different services, this pilot focuses around a single
need of residents – to increase a feeling of safety, and provide a
simple route to addressing concerns.
Police community officers receive
the text messages via a
computer interface, creating a
digital trail of incoming texts
and responses. Officers then
liaise across a range of public
services to get problems fixed,
with reporters given updates
via text message.
We’re particularly interested in
whether this tool can engage
younger community members
in ways that feel second nature
to them.
 Case study:
Transformed by You by Adaptive Labs
In partnership with Kent County Council

Co-creation of public services with users can help to deliver more Ideas can be submitted and
relevant cost-effective services. This pilot looks at how digital tools organised by high priority areas.
can be used to support co-creation approaches between local This process will also be used
authorities and service users. to identify the best routes
to mainstreaming successful
Kent County Council’s innovations team is developing an innovation prototypes.
process – Transformed by You – to engage public service users and
digital innovators in the design and prototyping of public services.
Transformed by You brings together developers and service-users on
an issue – such as NEETs – to develop solutions. Kent is interested Engaging digital innovators
in tools that can help maintain those relationships
after the event to support on-going co-production Transformed by You enables digital innovators, who meet particular
efforts. challenges, to engage with Kent County Council on a rotational
basis. It acts as a means to showcase talent and provides smaller
NESTA has funded Adaptive Labs to work with organisations that would otherwise struggle to fit within a traditional
Kent to develop a web-based platform that can engagement process, to get better access. The process also allows
act as a communications bridge between service Kent to sound out the market.
users and developers. The tool will allow users to
track the progress of ideas and services being
developed. Service users can comment on the
ideas and prototypes, vote, categorise and tag
their comments and then share them across
social networks.

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 Case study:
Person-to-Person
by Slivers of Time
In partnership with Hertfordshire Council and Hounslow Council
This project run by Slivers of Time enables
volunteers to be managed much more
dynamically in a safe on-line setting.
The web-based platform provides an
infrastructure that enables local authorities
and the voluntary sector to better support
service provision, giving them a tool to
increase the number of active volunteers.
Slivers of Time has tested this model in the
private sector, as a way to manage flexible
workforces, where some sectors such as
supermarkets want people who can be
hired for a few weeks, days, or just hours
and often at short notice. The system
allows anyone with spare hours to sell
their time to local employers and enables
employers to make precise bookings of
workers, using an online platform.
The volunteering sector has similar needs.
Slivers of Time is applying this model to
matching social care users and volunteers
by piloting a person-to-person marketplace
in Hertfordshire and Hounslow.
These pilots support the pairing of
volunteers with social care service users.
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Social care users can find volunteers to
support with low-level, but vital, activities
such as shopping and leisure.
The platform will allow users of care to
book their exact needs for support in a
safe environment. It allows volunteers,
once vetted, to run a personal online diary
of their availability, allowing them to
volunteer around other commitments.
It provides an opportunity for localised
matching of service users with
volunteers. Volunteers also build up
a verifiable, printable track record
of work. The platform gives service
users a higher degree of flexibility
with care, with the ability to book care
around their changing needs.
This is a particularly scalable model that
has potential to be applied to other
areas of social service provision.
 Part 3:
From the margins
to the mainstream
The projects profiled in Part 2 are just some examples of digitally
led innovations in public services tackling social issues in ways that
are cheap and effective. There are many others. However, there are
few examples that have really made it into the mainstream. Digital
tools are certainly adding value, but a genuine reinvention and
replacement of core transactional services still feels a world away.
Could we really see a leaner, digitally organised state emerging from
the current situation?
We need to be realistic – there are legitimate barriers to
mainstreaming digital innovation in public services
There are many, many obstacles to mainstreaming digital innovation
in our public services. For a start, many of the services we are talking
about reforming are laid out in legislation and will require a change
in the law, or at least a change in central government policy, before
innovators have the flexibility to change anything.
Existing procurement contracts lock in suppliers for several years,
with detailed specifications of the services and rigorous performance
indicators, and there is little or no incentive or freedom for most
suppliers or commissioners to do things differently. Value for
21
money initiatives have squeezed suppliers to the limit of their profit
margins, whilst denying the public sector the flexibility of manoeuvre
to adapt to changing possibilities.
Current processes for public procurement – although designed to
be fair – in practice favour large commercial organisations with the
resources and skills to handle the complex written specifications
and lengthy bidding phases. The need for a full specification up-
front also makes it virtually impossible to procure innovation, partly
because it favours known, predictable models, and partly because it
requires all ideas to come from inside government.
Much can be made of the need for culture change in the civil
service, but the reality for many public servants is that they have no
legal authority or mandate to implement the kind of changes that
may be necessary to create truly radical cost-savings.
Commissioners in particular may not actually be able to ‘progress’
any agenda, but only have the evidence and position either to
continue to spend along historic lines for the same services (perhaps
with a few cost-savings and shifts in priorities), or to cut spending
within their remits. Their task is often to secure value-for-money and
quality of service within existing parameters rather than assess needs
and opportunities from first principles, making anything that may be
 ‘new’ or ‘high risk’ particularly hard to progress. They may not even
be free to buy innovative services from small companies who are not
on the approved supplier lists.17
As consultant Anne Bowers argues: “perhaps the right people to
push this agenda are the people who use and want the services
that are being delivered – and what we should be asking is how
to capture the energy, the views, the thinking, the desires, the
approaches that people already take themselves to fill public sector
gaps, and find out how to use those to influence and shape the way
that commissioners and the front line behave.”
There is often a limit to knowledge, particularly at senior level,
about what technology can be used for. Many decision-makers still
see technology as an add-on: websites are typically regarded as new
doors onto the ‘real’ services, not places of transaction and value
in themselves. The web is great for non-essential services, but how
is it relevant to the vital work of protecting vulnerable people and
delivering statutory provision?
The risk-averse culture demonstrated in public services does have
its foundations in the very just cause of protecting and providing
for the most vulnerable in society; for example ensuring that the
elderly are able to access the care, finance and support they need
in a way that is meaningful and practical for them. Fear of exposing
vulnerable people to risk, or putting frontline services in jeopardy,
pushes many commissioners towards the safer, more expensive
routes of building customised systems that can be specified to meet
statutory and organisational priorities such as child protection.
However, it might be said that this risk-averse culture has gone
beyond its original purpose and is now preventing those of us who
are more able and do not require special consideration to be served
more effectively and efficiently as a result.
Yet the focus on technology can be a distraction: the value of this
new digital infrastructure is principally that it gives organisations
instant access to huge new audiences, so building another version of
Facebook or Twitter rather misses the point. It might be safe, but it
will also be empty.
22
The potential applications of technology have moved on
Efficiency through technology used to mean ever-more sophisticated
integrated systems for capturing evaluation metrics, crunching
data and indexing information. There have been numerous, well-
publicised examples of mainstream IT projects that have been costly
failures (the NHS IT project ‘Connecting for Health’, for example), so
there is considerable ‘technology fatigue’ in government for large-
scale, centrally implemented tools.18 The FutureGov team, working
to scope the Safeguarding 2.0 project with a local authority, noted
that past experiences of bad technology lend legitimate caution to
practitioners in experimenting and adopting new ones.
IT procurement brings its own challenges too: there are legacy
systems, problems with integration, challenges of security and
protecting vulnerable people in public systems, and restrictions
around how procurement works. Little wonder then that few
commissioners trust the potential of technology to improve services
that are already working well. What people generally want is simple
efficiency. New and different does not necessarily mean better, and
technology – like innovation – is merely a means, not an end in
itself.
Now though, ‘social’ technology means using the connecting power
of the internet to organise people, hold vast public conversations
and spread new ideas. IT used to mean replacing normal procedures
with smart software; now it means using smart software to connect
the crowd. Technological innovation used to be about building
technology; now it should be about using what is here already.
The advantage of this for public servants is an interesting one:
technology now does not require expensive outlays on resources,
but it does require extensive engagement from real people to make
the most of the tools.
How will these changes affect us?
There is incredible knowledge and expertise within government,
particularly on the front line of service delivery, but often the
knowledge isn’t joined up. For example, there is still an extensive
 separation of function, understanding and hierarchy between those
who understand technology and those who drive strategy and policy.
Many frontline workers are using Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other
social tools in their personal lives, but the aptitude and enthusiasm
they have for these tools rarely penetrates the day-to-day work of
heavy case loads, frequent meetings, and programme boards. There
is undoubtedly a training issue around the use of new digital tools,
which must be addressed, but much can be achieved right now
simply by making better use of the skills and creativity that staff
have already.
So there is huge potential for change, and for that change to be
led by frontline staff. Yet there remain so many barriers to taking
innovation mainstream, from skills and mindset, to hierarchies and
resources. Consultant Tim Davies and colleagues have compiled
a list of 50 barriers to participation in web 2.0 by public servants,
from limitations of corporate IT infrastructure, to an ingrained need
to moderate and control every discussion in which the organisation
participates. The current crisis is likely to make many commissioners
and managers even more risk-averse, for fear of disrupting the
working practices of already overburdened staff, or ‘wasting’
even more money on technology when they are supposed to be
tightening their belts. Cuts make innovation necessary, but they
don’t always make it easier.
In the commercial world, however, there are many real examples of
disruptive innovation going mainstream, even in times of recession
and market failure, so what can the public sector usefully learn from
these models?
The pattern is fairly consistent: identify the demand for a product or
service, look again at what is now possible with the new digital tools
available, and design a new, cheaper way to meet consumer needs.
Amazon understood that people wanted books, but not necessarily
bookshops. Rather than designing more efficient bookshops,
they used the web to sell directly to customers in their homes,
bypassing the bookshops entirely (much like the book club model
before them). Now with Kindle they have realised people want
the information in the books, but not necessarily the books. Since
books are heavy and cost a lot to ship, their solution was to create
23
electronic books that ship digitally, bypassing printers and postal
services.
In both cases, advances in technological infrastructure enabled
innovators to design completely new approaches to meet consumer
demand, and create radically cheaper services that weren’t possible
before. Existing services are bypassed, and the innovation goes
‘mainstream’ when the reduced demand for the old model makes it
no longer viable.19
There are examples of this model working for the public good
too. ‘Integrated Pest Management’ (IPM) is an ecological model
for controlling agricultural and other pests with minimal use of
pesticides. Rather than relying on expensive, ecologically damaging
chemicals to attack the living bugs, the IPM approach builds an
ecological map of the lifecycle of a pest – how they feed, breed, eat,
sleep etc. – and then puts pressure on every stage of the lifecycle.
They set acceptable levels for reduction and target each part of the
system to prevent population explosion and reduce the need for
chemical agents, saving money, and the environment. The technique
successfully moved from the margins to the mainstream over a
number of years, winning the World Food Prize in 1997.
Examples like Amazon and IPM highlight the value of ‘whole-
system thinking’: looking beyond the immediate problem into the
wider system around it. “Economic theory traditionally teaches that
the more resources you save, the more you must pay for the next
increment of savings,” according to US sustainability think-tank
the Rocky Mountain Institute. “But when the design looks at the
system as a whole this theory no longer applies… whole-system
engineering can often ‘tunnel through the cost barrier’, making very
large – even order-of-magnitude – savings”. Optimising one part of
a system in isolation means savings will always be limited compared
to redesigning the whole system to deliver more value. The most
radical innovations typically achieve higher impact for lower cost
by analysing the whole system and focusing their resources where
progress is cheapest to buy, often bypassing the more expensive
delivery models entirely.20
 What does this mean for public services?
Systems thinking can be usefully applied to public services. Accident
and Emergency (A&E), for example, is extremely expensive and
often overloaded, but in the systemic model the way to reduce the
costs of A&E is by reducing the number of people coming through
the door in the first place.
“[One] story comes from Chicago, called the Chicago Housing
and Health Partnership,” writes Nan Roman in the
Huffington Post in 2009. “Over four years, the
Partnership followed 405 chronically homeless people.
Half of the 405 received immediate housing and intensive
case management… the other half of the 405 were offered
typical homeless services. Those receiving housing decreased
the incidence of hospital admission and days spent in the hospital
by a third, and decreased their emergency room visits by 25
percent. These studies suggest that addressing the health care
needs of homeless people would not only benefit them, but
us as well. With worries about the cost of health care reform, the
spiraling national debt, and the future of our country, it’s
reassuring to know that sometimes doing the right thing
is actually the right thing to do.”21
The project’s initial study revealed that an annual
average of $12,000 was spent per housed client to
provide a permanent supportive housing unit in a highly coordinated
system of care. Preliminary cost estimates however showed that
annual medical expenses for housed clients were at least $900,000
less than their usual care counterparts, even after subtracting the
costs of the programme.
This example highlights the risk of ignoring cheaper early-stage
interventions as ‘optional’ and putting more pressure on the more
costly ‘essential’ parts of the system that cannot turn people away.
It may look like smart fiscal management to cut non-essential
services, but is it really all that efficient to put the burden on costly
crisis management provision that doesn’t actually remove people
from crisis? As Secretary Shaun Donovan of the US Department of
Housing and Urban Development remarked in 2009: “Simply put, if
24
we want to tackle health care reform – if we want to lower costs – we
must tackle homelessness. It’s that simple.”22
Disruptive innovation in public services?
For public service innovators, the cheapest solution may not always
be found in the place where the problem shows up. There is value in
looking beyond the reach of the current system and to create radical
new ways to take pressure off existing transactional services. In
many cases these services will work alongside the traditional models,
alleviating pressure and reducing costs. In some cases though – like
Amazon’s impact on bookshops, or IPM’s on pesticides – the new
model will disrupt the old, even replace it, and become mainstream
itself.
Real ‘disruption’ – the replacement of the old by the new – is
historically very rare, and this is particularly challenging when
making the case for technology. NHS Direct, for example, is one
technological innovation that has become truly mainstream, but it
is yet to transform the way in which other healthcare services are
delivered. It has augmented the service, but not reinvented it. Yet
in the new world of service cutbacks, a service which is no longer in
demand will quickly find itself decommissioned and the innovation,
like Amazon, could find it has become the established solution.
The current financial context for public services makes it imperative
to find ways to offer better quality provision for less money.
This is not about investing in large-scale, high-risk innovations.
‘Mainstreaming’ is not about mass production here. Instead, public
services should look at how to use existing tools and assets in
new, creative ways. Digital technology offers a wide range of new
configurations which have yet to be fully exploited.
It is about creating the conditions for new models to flourish, and
buying the cheapest solution to the problem from the broadest set
of what is possible. Some of these answers may come from inside
government, but the great advantage of this disruptive model is that
the public sector does not have to do everything itself: it can reap
the rewards of a diverse marketplace of innovations.
 Reboot Britain

Reboot Britain aims to understand how to create the conditions for

these new approaches to develop and spread.The project will also
identify what the barriers and enablers are in engaging in this type
of innovation. As the projects progress, NESTA will work with them
to reveal some of the cultural and institutional issues that prevent
or drive their work and what measures could be introduced to
overcome or encourage them.

Phase Two of Reboot Britain – which will begin in the autumn

– will work with five public service commissioners, including
local authorities, to understand the challenges in mainstreaming
innovative new services. NESTA will share what we and the project
teams learn from the programme, encouraging others to get involved
and experiment themselves.

25
 Part 4:
Ten ways to Reboot Britain
There will never be a more critical time to reboot our public services,
and it is important that we lay the foundations today for these kinds
of innovations to emerge, grow and spread in the coming years.
So, what can we actually do on a practical level, right now, to make
digital innovation a reality?
Already from our work with the Reboot Britain projects (and NESTA’s
wider experience supporting innovation in public services) we can
identify some ways in which services need to adapt now to open up
to the potential of this digital future.
Below we set out ten ways for doing so, or areas for services to
focus on in the immediate term. These are intentionally bold and
provocative, but they do hold practical and actionable suggestions
for how services can start to become more flexible and agile.
These are recommendations for people working in public services –
commissioners, practitioners, frontline staff – as well as policymakers
who support and enable the system to operate effectively.
26
1. Keep a relentless focus on transparency, particularly on
where money goes
The first task is to be clear, open and honest about how money is
being spent right now. There is insufficient clarity about the cost
of the old ways of doing things, which makes innovation seem
disproportionately risky and expensive. Figuring out where progress
can be bought cheaply is vital. Conversely, it is very difficult for
unfunded entrepreneurs and voluntary organisations to prove
impact, and particularly real cost-savings, for new models. The public
sector also needs to support projects that are tackling matters in the
public interest to prove the impact of what they do, which is partly
a matter of giving them opportunities to undertake exploratory
projects with public sector support, and partly about explaining
clearly the standards against which such innovations will be judged
by commissioners.
2. Open-up procurement
Next, public sector procurement needs to change, and fast. Many
people are advocating the adoption of agile methodologies – the
software development methodology which favours working in short
 iterations, testing outputs in a live environment, learning from
users, and reprioritising development. Agile methods and user-
centred design techniques deliver consistently better results, and
yet they are very difficult to contract within current government
IT procurement processes. We don’t need to wait until the system
changes to change our approach though. What is needed is a new
framework for procurement, and to address key training and skills
gaps to support the procurement of innovation, prototypes and
short projects from SMEs and volunteers, particularly using agile
methodologies.
“The IDeA Knowledge Hub (a community and innovation
platform for local government services) will be developed using
agile development techniques, procurement was open to the
SMEs, and it’s an open source/open platform that will enable
social innovators to develop value-added apps,” says IDeA
consultant Steve Dale. “So, it can be done within a public sector
framework – you just have to persist and overcome the blockers.”
3. Use ‘failure’ to learn and improve your services
Alongside this, there is an important need to accept that innovation
requires adaption, experimentation and learning from mistakes.
Internet companies start small, perhaps an engineer, a designer and
a salesman, and maybe as much as 90 per cent of projects never see
turnover. The internet grows its capabilities through numerous small
experiments with a lot of individual vision. We can’t change this
overnight, but if each of us individually alters how we think and talk
about failure, and the risk of failure, we can create more space in our
organisations for creative thinking and risky innovation. In order to
manage risk more effectively, devolve small budgets to individuals or
innovation teams (including representatives from comms, IT, front-
line services, monitoring and evaluation, and at least one director) to
work without further approval to prototype new ideas.
27
4. Prototype and develop, don’t pilot
We need also to ensure that successful small-scale innovations are
properly rolled out nationally to give us real savings. There are huge
barriers to scaling up a small idea effectively, from the concerns
of corporate communications departments and brand controls,
pressures on risk management, major IT infrastructure barriers,
and difficulties of sign-off and accountability. Even if things get
commissioned on a large scale, there is a tendency to pull the
plug at the first sign of failure. Innovation, like entrepreneurship,
demands a more mature attitude to risk and failure, one which
embraces them as part of the process of creating value, rather than a
sign of incompetence or irresponsibility.
Good leadership in this area by elected officials and heads of
organisations will be critical to creating the space for innovation
in those below them. One of the key insights from the LIFE team
at Participle was that leaders needed to allow and give space for
uncertainty and unpredictability of innovation, in order to allow the
time for the new approach to take root and change behaviours.
5. Extend digital infrastructure and inclusion
We must continue to improve and augment our digital infrastructure
– both hardware and software – and continue to pursue digital
inclusion and opportunity. “Many of our staff and citizens don’t
have (direct) access to a connected computer,” says government
IT worker James Cattell. “How do we cater for and train them…?
However we do it, they must come first.” A strong digital
infrastructure for our country must be matched by a similarly up-to-
date and adaptive IT infrastructure for its government, and digital
opportunities for even its poorest and most vulnerable citizens.
There is no need to force people to adopt new technologies if they
don’t want to, but putting these tools in the hands of the people
who matter creates not just opportunities for switching to cheaper
digital delivery channels, but also increases the likelihood that some
of these engaged digital citizens will be able to help solve problems
and design better services for themselves.
 6. Look across sectors and boundaries
Innovation can come from anywhere. In Washington in 2010,
for example, a Kenyan software program was used to organise
snow relief in the city’s ‘Snowmageddon’ project. New models are
emerging in other fields, other countries, and closer to home, in our
local communities and the third sector. Even the commercial world
is developing tools and concepts that could help deliver radical
public service efficiency. Start gathering examples of innovation
projects which might potentially solve problems and help
deliver services, so that you are ready with the
list of options when the call comes. Establish
clear processes for evaluating the potential
applications and efficiency of third party
projects, and how to bring them into
government.
Scan the horizon for tools and models
that could help, and start making the
business case for implementing them in
a public service context. Train and task
people in your organisation with the
job of working with innovators outside
government to assess the potential
impact of their work on your public
service objectives. Seek advice from
innovation specialists like NESTA, the
Young Foundation and independent
specialists in the field to help assess the
value of new models, and start building
a shortlist of the potential projects that
might be worth prototyping, supporting
or even just exploring in more detail. And
this applies to front-line officials, not just
communications and IT teams.
28
7. Listen to service users (and frontline staff)
Understand your service users and build services with them,
centering the process around the end user and your own needs as a
commissioner. If innovations are to become mainstream they must
have customer demand, so ensure that it is there first, because if
you build it, they might not come. This is partly about understanding
service design techniques, and particularly the collaborative tools of
co-design, and applying them to creating more effective models. It
is also about finding those who share your intent and purpose about
improving outcomes in the outside world, developing collaborative
fora with them, and working to establish a shared vision and intent.
Go and meet your local digital community where they meet up
to build relationships and bounce off ideas about how you could
work together. Make sense of stories in your local community: find
out what people are talking about online and interact with them
so people know you’re part of their conversation. This is critical to
mobilising energy to work in the same direction.
Frontline workers are part of the services, and their needs mustbe
considerd. We urgently need to give frontline workers greater
flexibility and freedom to solve problems, rather than restricting
people’s movements and scope to solve problems. Involving frontline
staff in service design processes, and helping them to respond
more directly to service users provides more space and incentive for
innovation. In particular, staff may be used to using digital tools in
their social lives, and enabling their use at work could provide means
to engage with citizens in powerful new ways.
8. Don’t go it alone – ask the community for help
Give the people who want you to succeed the opportunity to help
you. Establish the environment for your local innovators to help you
develop solutions. Create an ‘ideas’ e-mail address for members of
the public, and your own staff, to send in ideas for how to make
public services cheaper and better. Publish the things you need
help with clearly on your website so others can work on solving
the problems too, and explain the areas and indicators that are
most important or at risk, and identify which services most need
 innovation. Open up any licensed development environments you
use to digital people locally so they can prototype and test out
innovations in your system. Include positive questions in research
and analysis as well as negatives: assess the needs, but also ask
people what they can do, how they’d like to be involved, what they
could offer. Map the assets, not just the deprivations. Be open about
the challenges and people will help you.
9. Don’t reinvent the wheel
As government IT worker James Cattell says: “Twitter is a great
source of related random information. Delicious’ browser-integrated
bookmarks follow you wherever you have internet access. Flickr
and YouTube reduce internal storage requirements and improve
disaster recovery time, cost and effort.” As the FutureGov team
advocates, the lightweight, flexible nature of social media and these
kinds of technologies means that they can change and adapt over
time. Services need to take a flexible approach to using existing
assets and infrastructures to open up new opportunities for cheap
experimentation and radical cost savings.
Analyse your services in terms of tools/infrastructure and services:
what are your assets, how are they being used, what else could they
be used for? For example, could the SMS update system developed
by the local PCT be used for another service? Publish your assets so
other bodies can tap into what you have. If you are building tools,
build them for everyone to use. Trying to build centralised services
that fit the needs of dozens of departments only slows things down
even further, but real cost-sharings can be achieved by looking
carefully at what has already been commissioned, and deploying an
adapted version in a fresh context rather than building something
new is far cheaper, quicker and more effective.
10. Build effective partnerships with other organisations
and volunteers
29
Look after the social innovators, organisation and volunteers
working to improve our society. The public sector must cultivate
strong, mutually beneficial relationships with third sector and
particularly small start-up and voluntary organisations, and work
more effectively with unfunded organisations, without expecting too
much or acting insensitively to their concerns. One particular issue
that Sidekick Studios came up against was that often bureaucracy
and internal processes were barriers to the speedy turn-around
of service contracts and payments. For small to medium-sized
enterprises – and other civil society groups – hold-ups can have a
big impact.
And finally...
It’s time to start believing in the possibilities of these new
approaches. “I know of an example where the government has not
commissioned unbelievably innovative stuff,” confesses one public
sector consultant, “because they simply couldn’t believe (in the light
of the millions they had spent and wasted in recent years on similar
work) that the outcome could be achieved for less than £100,000!”
Much of this is about serious change of culture and mindset,
which begins with the leaders but needs to diffuse throughout
organisations at all levels. Pay attention to the bigger picture, and
develop a culture of continual honesty and learning.
It is now genuinely possible to use digital tools and radical models
like co-design and co-delivery to structure services in much cheaper
ways, without compromising on quality of care. So, an innovation is
presented to you, by all means critique it carefully and show proper
diligence – but don’t dismiss it just because it looks too good to be
true.
 Endnotes
1. For more details on available tools and their uses, see Gibson, A., Sample-Ward,
A., Wilcox, D., Courtney, N. and Holtham, C. (2009) ‘Social by Social: a practical
guide to using social technologies to deliver social impact.’ London: NESTA.
2. For local government in particular, see Gibson, A. (2010) ‘Local by Social: how
local authorities can use social media to achieve more for less.’ London: NESTA.
3. HM Treasury (2010) ‘Budget 2010: Securing the Recovery.’ London: HM Treasury.
4. See further details in 2020 Public Services Trust (2009) ‘Drivers for Change:
Citizen Demand in 2020.’ London: 2020 Public Services Trust at the RSA.
17. There has been considerable analysis of the barriers to innovation in the
public sector. See for example Accenture (2009) ‘Barriers to Public Sector
Transformation.’ London: Accenture; also National Audit Office (2006) ‘Achieving
Innovation in Central Government Organisations.’ London: National Audit Office.
18. The NHS IT programme has also been identified as a barrier to technological
innovation more generally in the NHS, due to its dominant focus and investment
in infrastructure rather than more outward-facing, patient-centred projects such
as telemedicine and telecare. See Liddel, A., Adshead, S. and Burgess, E. (2008)
‘Technology in the NHS.’ London: The King’s Fund.

5. The Young Foundation (2009) ‘Sinking and Swimming: Understanding Britain’s
Unmet Needs.’ London: The Young Foundation.
6. For examples of this sort of ‘radically efficient’ innovation in public services, see
Gillinson, S., Horne, M. and Baeck, P. (2010) ‘Radical Efficiency: Different, Better,
Lower Cost Public Services.’ London: NESTA and the Innovation Unit.
7. NESTA’s Reboot Britain programme builds on our work on digital technology
and innovation, explored in relation to public services in Coyle, D. (Ed.) (2009)
‘Reboot Britain: how the promise of a new digital age can tackle the challenges
we face as a country.’ London: NESTA.
19. For further development of this argument, see Christensen, C.M. (1997) ‘The
Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.’
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
20. John Seddon makes the case for systems thinking in the public sector, in Seddon,
J. (2008) ‘Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: The Failure of the Reform
Regime... and a Manifesto for a Better Way.’ London: Triarchy Press.
21. Roman, N. (2009) The Homelessness Problem in Healthcare. In: Huffington Post.
Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nan-roman/the-homelessness-
connecti_b_324047.html

8. Participle LIFE Programme Research. 22. See video of Donovan’s remarks at the National Alliance to End Homelessness
website. Available at: http://abouthomelessness.blogspot.com/2009/09/
9. Department of Health (2009) ‘New Horizons: a shared vision for mental health.’ secretary-donovan-video-annual.html
London: Department of Health.
10. A recent report from new economic foundation (nef) argues the case that better
support for young people would have a significant impact on other service areas;
see Aked, J., Steuer, N., Lawlor, E. and Spratt, S. (2009) ‘Backing the Future: why
investing in children is good for us all.’ London: nef.
11. Prison Reform Trust, Prison Briefing, May 2010.
12. Shapps, G. (2007) ‘The Tagging Game.’ Hatfield: Grant Shapps MP.
13. Ministry of Justice (2008) ‘Does Restorative Justice affect Reconviction?’
Ministry of Justice Research Series. London: Ministry of Justice.
14. The Princes Trust (2007) ‘The Cost of Exclusion.’ London: The Princes Trust.
15. Ibid.
16. Boyle, D. and Harris, M. (2009) ‘The challenge of co-production: how equal
partnerships between professionals and the public are crucial to improving public
services.’ London: NESTA and nef.

30
 Acknowledgements
This paper was written by Sociability’s Andy Gibson, NESTA’s Carla Ross, Laura Buntand Jon Kingsbury. It
would not have been possible without the contributions, co-operation and support of many people inside
and outside public services across the UK. Among others, and in no particular order, we would like to
thank: Dave Briggs, Vinay Gupta, Ruth Kennedy, Tim Davies, James Cattell, Simon Booth, Steve Dale, Hugo
Mannassei, Anna Maybank, Dominic Campbell, Adil Abrar, David Wilcox, Jonathan Hobbs-Smith, Dougald
Hine, Cassie Robinson, Birmingham BEST, the Be Birmingham partnership and especially NESTA’s Jon
Kingsbury and Dr Mike Harris for their research and editorial support.

Thank you.

31
 About NESTA
Our public services face unprecedented challenges, made more urgent by the impact of the current
economic crisis. Traditional approaches to public services reform are unlikely to provide the answers we need.
NESTA is applying its expertise to find innovative ways of delivering our public services. More effective
solutions at lower cost will only come through ingenuity. Our Public Services Lab is identifying, testing and
demonstrating new ways of responding to social challenges and delivering better public services at lower
cost.

Reboot Britain is part of NESTA’s Public Services Lab. It aims to identify ways in which technology can aid
moving towards a model of ‘people-powered public services’. Further information about its experimental
programme, including how to get involved, will be available at www.nesta.org.uk as the projects develop.

www.nesta.org.uk

If you’d like to find out more about Reboot Britain please get in touch with Carla Ross, Reboot
Britain Programme Manager at NESTA, carla.ross@nesta.org.uk

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 NESTA
1 Plough Place
London EC4A 1DE
research@nesta.org.uk
www.nesta.org.uk

Published: July 2010

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