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Chief executives and senior managers facing the imminent abolition of their public sector bodies under the government's proposals for a bonfire of the quangos have been given guidance by an organisation that has already been through the process.
The Hearing Aid Council (HAC) was abolished as result of the former government's 2005 Hampton Review, which recommended merging 31 non departmental public bodies. But it has left a valuable legacy.
A report on the former body's website merits close attention on the part of ministers and policy-makers as well as those in quangos themselves. It outlines the lessons learned from the abolition of the HAC and why they are relevant to other public bodies facing merger or abolition.
As Sandra Verkuyten, the former chief executive of the HAC, explains in SocietyGuardian, she and her team wrote the report in a bid to prevent other public managers having to re-learn these lessons the hard way.
Trauma
Particularly important, she believes, is the need to understand that managers leading organisations through this kind of trauma will need new approaches to cope with situations that they are unlikely to have encountered before. "I'd shut organisations before and you can anticipate a great deal, but there are always things you hadn't anticipated," she comments.
Verkuyten conveyed this message to a recent meeting at the Treasury of the Association of Chief Executives, the organisation for senior managers running Arm's Length Bodies, including executive agencies and non departmental public bodies.
Remarkably, she is not bitter about the fact that many of the senior managers who failed to support her and her own organisation through the abolition process were in the audience, now facing the same prospect themselves.
She points out that at the time when the HAC was put up for abolition, it was the first NDPB to go through the process and so much of the time her own organisation had to work out how it should be got rid of. "The civil servants didn't know how to do it, the National Audit Office didn't know how to do it," she says.
The HAC's core business was public protection and although it was a relatively small organisation, with a budget of £1.3m and a full-time staff of just eight, there are useful lessons for other bodies, according to Verkuyten. On the whole, the HAC report is encouraging - it concludes that, done in the right way, reform of public bodies can "simultaneously improve efficiency and quality of service". But the report also warns that the amount of work involved should not be underestimated.
The report, Getting more for less from public bodies: 10 lessons from the abolition of the Hearing Aid Council, outlines many of the issues that senior managers will need to consider. In particular, the need for a "new culture" is emphasised, something Verkuyten underlines. "As sure as eggs is eggs, some people will wobble and behaviour will change," she says. "You have to look at your culture almost as though it's an amoeba. It is constantly changing and being shaped by what happens during the process of transition."
The Institute for Government is also planning a follow-up to its earlier report on how to increase the effectiveness of quangos.
Getting More for Less from Public Bodies: 10 lessons from the abolition of the Hearing Aid Council is available at thehearingaidcouncil.org.uk
From Bubb's Blog
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