Kerry Lorimer examines an American performance measurement model the SNP intends to adopt...
Bill Leighty is an evangelist. In the last week, he’s preached to close on a thousand of the most influential people in Scotland: national and local leaders, civil servants, chief executives, finance people. No one knows yet how many converts he’s won, but anecdotal evidence suggests the gospel is catching on fast.
“I’m a believer in what I do,” he says. “I’ve been working hard on it for six years, so I’d better believe in it. You can’t fake sincerity.”
Leighty’s message has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with Scotland’s success as a nation. As chief of staff in the state of Virginia, he developed a groundbreaking programme that allowed ordinary people to see at a glance how their state was performing.
Everything Virginia aspires to be –
healthy, wealthy, the best managed state in the US – is captured on the Virginia Performs scorecard. No gloss, no spin, no excuses, just a robust assessment of performance, there on the internet for anyone to see.
The so-called Virginia model could have stayed right where it was, had it not found its way onto page16 of the SNP’s manifesto in last year’s Scottish elections. “We will bring forward proposals for new management and monitoring arrangements for government and agencies, based on the successful model in Virginia, USA, so we can bring greater rigour and success to the delivery of public policy in our nation,” it said.
The first Leighty heard of the manifesto was an email from a colleague at Harvard, telling him of his new-found international reputation. “Which was startling to me,” he says. “To see something I had been working on for almost six years [being] used as a model for someone else is very, very rewarding and quite an honour.”
The SNP took up office at Holyrood, and single outcome agreements became one of the biggest buzzwords in Scottish governance. Everyone was talking about the new relationship between national and local government which would be characterised by its focus on outcomes rather than processes. Meanwhile, Leighty, retired from a long and distinguished civil service career, was looking for something to do with his time.
“My wife and I decided that perhaps a two-week holiday in Scotland was a great thing so I contacted some folks…and
said I’m going to be coming over on
holiday and if you really want to know more about the Virginia model, I’d be happy to drop in and chat with you all,” he says.
His offer was taken up by Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth John Swinney and Permanent Secretary Sir John Elvidge, and so word began to spread – not just across Scotland, but through civil service networks to Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.
So what is the Virginia model, and why has it captured the attention of policy makers in Scotland? Click on the website for Virginia Performs (http://vaperforms.virginia.gov/) and you will see an approach to performance management that bears little resemblance to anything found this side of the Atlantic.
First of all, the website is firmly directed at the people who use and pay for public services in Virginia: it promises to show how the state is doing on the quality of life issues that impact on local people. Secondly, it builds on an immense depth of data to produce a verdict that is both simple and meaningful. Thirdly, it has the credibility of a system that is completely neutral and free from mealy-mouthed verbiage.
Take the scorecard. The first topic is the economy, and there is one stated goal – “be a national leader in the preservation and enhancement of our economy”. Under that are listed seven indicators (personal income, poverty, unemployment and so on) each ranked by performance (improving, worsening, maintaining) and degree of state influence (significant or limited).
The site also uses sophisticated mapping software to allow residents to mix and match a colossal range of data specific to their area. For example, you can zoom in to a particular region and bring up a detailed coloured map showing the high school drop-out rate overlaid on the rate of teenage pregnancy.
“{quotes align=right}We report to citizens directly on whether we’re doing a good job or a bad job{quotes},” says Leighty. “It allows us to look at what people might consider a league table – though we don’t want to call it that – of how we’re doing as a state.”
At the heart of Virginia Performs is the focus that it brings to the key aspirations the state has set for itself. “Every one of our government agencies has been required to sit down and think very carefully about what it does, how it achieves specific outcomes and which outcomes it has the most influence on,” he says.
Each agency is ranked not only on outcomes, but on its organisational performance. Leighty believes that assessment is equally critical to the integrity of public services. “You can have fantastic outcomes in education, but if your educational agency is constantly in the press with negative things about their travel expenses, the way they’re procuring things, or the way they’re hiring, the public will never believe the agency is delivering good outcomes, and you will never have that credibility,” he says.
One of the strengths of the system is that it highlights the different needs and priorities that exist across the state. “In some areas we have health issues that are far more severe than other parts of the state, in some areas our traffic congestion is far worse,” he says. “Not all areas of Virginia require the same policies and procedures and programmes, and we
need to understand they are going to be different.”
Leighty strongly believes that where Virginia has gone, Scotland can follow. He says Scotland has been presented with “a unique set of circumstances” in which a transformation can take place on a scale that will outlive any government.
Chief among these is the sense of expectation engendered by an administration so palpably different from anything Scotland has known. In the last few days he has spent in Scotland, Leighty has
made a point of asking people he meets – security guards, tour operators, bus
drivers – what they think of this new
government.
“I have not yet had a negative response and that’s pretty unusual,” he says. “That doesn’t mean they said they voted for this government. But they certainly have a sense of expectation and hope that this government is going to be different.
“Hopes and aspirations are wonderful, but hopes and aspirations lead to very real expectations that things are going to happen, and those expectations will manifest themselves in these single outcome agreements.”
So how can Scotland learn from the Virginian experience to ensure that those expectations are met? Number one, says Leighty, is to aim high. “There is no time better than the first year to set a goal you’re not going to achieve,” he says.
And yet, he found an “amazing number” of agencies in Virginia set goals that were less ambitious than what they were already achieving. “Why? Because it’s new, no one knows whether it was the right measure to begin with, no one knows how they’ll be held accountable, or whether funding will follow performance, it’s very new and strange and scary,” he says.
He likens it to students enrolling on a new course: the first thing they want to know is what they are going to be tested on. “In this case, the local authorities get to design the syllabus themselves, so why not design it in a way that is the most aspirational [in] what you want to achieve for your people?”
Leighty also stresses the importance of gaining buy-in for the indicators you choose. The measures selected to reflect, say, homelessness, must, above all, have credibility with the people who work in that field.
“Involve them in discussion over what is the right measure, because the number two group who is going to be questioning [you] will be the press,” he says. “If you put out a number you’re going to use as a measure, and the advocacy groups [approached by the press] say, ‘we think that’s a stupid way of measuring it’, you’re going to get a lot of bad stories.”
Finally, don’t underestimate the difficulty of gaining support within elements of the civil service, he warns. Winning the co-operation of jaded government officials in Virginia was one of the toughest challenges the scheme faced. Expect opposition in particular from what he refers to as “the B team” (those officials who say to ministers – here Leighty adopts a hicksville Dukes of Hazzard accent – “you know, I be here when you got here, and I’ll be here when you’re gone, so I ain’t so sure I’m gonna be doing this.”) “Until you convince the B team that this is real and worth doing, that’s the hardest part,” he says.
So far, luckily, Scottish audiences have been won over by his obvious energy, enthusiasm and commitment to transforming public services. “I’ve sensed a bit of apprehension at the beginning of the discussion of the journey, but in all cases, at the conclusion of the discussion of what we did, folks roll up their sleeves and say, let’s see what we can do,” he says.
That is the spirit the Scottish Government is counting on to turn three lines in a manifesto into nothing less than a revolution in the delivery of public service delivery.
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