Public services

slivers of timeEven the best service delivery today has to be driven by the scheduling requirements of the deliverer. So, for example, a homecarer will work a 7 hour day with her clients slotted in where most efficient. But it might be that the real pattern of need today is: 5 clients to be checked first thing in the morning, 4 need a lunchtime visit and 2 require an end-of-day call.

To routinely deliver this sort of ever changing pattern, a council needs an extensive pool of inducted, vetted, local homecarers who are selling their hours. (Those carers may be selling hours to a range of other employers as well.) Once that pool is in place, it's a short step to accountable local control of service delivery.

The role of Slivers-of-Time markets in service delivery is likely to develop in 3 phases:

  1. Cut costs by aligning demand and resource
  2. Enable local control of purchasing decisions
  3. A multi-inducted pool of sellers

Phase 1) Cut costs by aligning demand and resource

Local authority departments such as Public Realm, Wardens, Events, Leisure & Arts, Communications and Office Support often need top-up workers for short bursts. This new facility can give them a pool of flexible and reliable individuals who are priced in competition with each other, based on personal willingness to fulfil any given assignment. They are ready to be purchased for the exact hours on the exact days they're needed. See how to buy in a Slivers-of-Time market. These sellers can be inducted as required by particular departments in advance. See our section on inducting Slivers-of-Time sellers.

For an insight into how this can work it is worth reading up on our Market Research case study.

Examples of this new way of staffing for LA's could include:

  • cut costs Individuals trained to clean up graffiti or other eyesores reported by residents, they are simply booked for an hour to clean up the mess after a report to the council helpline.
  • 25 stewards hired for an afternoon to enable a local park festival.
  • Contact centre staff booked exactly in line with hour-by-hour call volume.

Phase 2) Enable local control of purchasing decisions

A council can authorise any member of the community as a buyer with strict controls. Provision of street wardens provides an example of what this could achieve:

  • Assume a Neighbourhood Watch committee feel their streets are insecure. They could be allocated an annual budget of, perhaps £7,500 to purchase the hours of local people who had been inducted as street wardens. That sum will buy around 20 hours a week at East London prices.
  • Week-to-week, the committee can then nominate someone to decide where and when wardens are purchased and deployed. Kids making trouble outside the shops after school? The community books two wardens for 90 minutes to report to that point and talk to the children. Complaints of noise from a dwelling? Get a warden round there in half an hour to have a chat, then stay around for the next hour in case of re-occurrence. And so on.
  • No money need be handled by the committee. The Council simply authorises them as a buyer with annual, and maybe weekly, maximum spends. Every purchase is recorded in full detail and can be instantly displayed to interested residents on a council website. Wardens will be local people, because they're almost always cheapest in Slivers-of-Time markets. The overheads are negligible.

slivers of time A similar dynamic could apply to tutoring or healthcare. Instead of your family doctor slotting you into a clinic for back pain, she may offer to give you a code that allows you to buy £200 worth of treatment with any NHS registered physiotherapist. Those physio's then sell their time in competition with each other.

Phase 3) A multi-inducted pool of sellers

An LA truly committed to responsiveness might go one step further than just buying specific staff for short periods.

  • Officers might select perhaps 200 Slivers-of-Time sellers living around their area. They would be collectively inducted in a range of localised service delivery skills such as: noise abatement, graffiti removal, street/park warden, ad hoc street cleaning and parking enforcement.
  • These individuals are then a resource to be deployed immediately, in their locality, by the Town Hall. A resident complains about fly-tipping one evening? One of these multi-skilled workers is round within the hour, trained in assessing the requirements for a clear up, able to phone a specification through to the Public Realm department then post a form through nearby letter boxes making it clear a clean up was in hand. Traffic is reported in chaos on Sunday afternoon because of a one-off event? Perhaps the call centre books 4 of these workers living in that area to issue tickets to illegally parked cars at once.

This model raises questions about the role of specialist outsourcers. But it dramatically reduces overhead. In each example above the cost would simply be the cheapest individual's hourly rate in that area at that time (plus agency mark-up to cover costs of vetting and occasional management).

What's the need?