European experiences with quality management policies and service charters

Salvador Parrado (Governance International and UNED-Spanish Distance Learning University)

Draft Report Version - 11- February- 2011

Framework project:

Prestação de Serviços de Assistência Técnica e Logística para o Projeto «Apoio aos Diálogos Setoriais entre a União Europeia e o Brasil» within the programme: Projeto DCI/ALA/2008/018-698 for Brazil, EUROPEAID/ Lote: 7 Governance and Home Affairs, Requisição : 2010/ 256-152/1.

2

Table of contents

Executive summary ................................................................................................................................3

1) Introduction .........................................................................................................................................8

2) The evolution and context of Charters in each country.......................................................................9

3) Diffusion of service charters ..............................................................................................................15

4) Enforcement of service charters .......................................................................................................17

5) Implementation of service charters ...................................................................................................19

6) Publication of results and use of performance indicators..................................................................21

7) Participation of citizens in drafting the service charters and the use of surveys ...............................22

8) Incentives to organizations that comply with the policies of citizen’s satisfaction .............................26

9) Evaluation of service charters ...........................................................................................................29

10) Policy lessons .................................................................................................................................33

11) Annex ..............................................................................................................................................39

12) References......................................................................................................................................41

3

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1 This report has been written to address the requests of the Terms of Reference (ToRs) for action 1 (Ação 1: Políticas de Atendimento ao Cidadão - Carta de Serviços (MP/SEGES). Under this action, it was requested to present European experiences on citizen satisfaction with the quality of public services (políticas de atendimento ao cidadão) and the methodology used for setting service charters.

2 Both concerns have been addressed in the report by taking service charters as the core element. Service charters are short documents in which public sector organizations commit themselves to the accomplishment of certain service standards, that are meaningful to the users. The documents also display the rights and duties of service users for that particular service in an accessible language.

3 The service charter is just one tool to increase the satisfaction of users and to enhance the quality of the services delivered by any organization. Quality is understood as “the extent to which service delivery and/or service outcomes meet with the informed expectations and defined needs of the customer” . As quality goes beyond service charters, charters are analysed in the context of wider policies on quality and performance management.

4 The ToRs also requested the comparison of the abovementioned policies in three European countries. Ireland, Spain and United Kingdom have been selected for this report because all of them have experienced with service charters between 10 and 20 years, independent evaluations have assessed the system and service charters are included in wider policies of citizen satisfaction with the services.

5 Furthermore, each country offers distinctive valuable insights for the Brazilian context. Ireland identified different strategies for a public document as a proof of commitments with users (service charter) and an internal document (also made public) for meeting customer needs (Customer Action Plans). It has also been able to align customer orientation with strategic statements and overall goals of the organization. United Kingdom followed a singular road by certifying excellence of services that had a sound customer policy and by discussing how to include (minimal universal) entitlements in public services. Spain launched the service charter as a part of a wider strategy on quality management and created an inter-territorial commission (among different levels of government) in order to foster policies of customer satisfaction all over the country. Moreover, some Spanish charters have also included compensation mechanisms in case of failing to meet the standards.

6 The report, written between the 11th of January and 11th of February of 2011, has benefitted from official documents, academic writings, interviews with officials and several other projects of the author in the European arena on quality management and on service charters.

7 Charters have been embedded in Ireland and in the United Kingdom in wider performance frameworks. This has facilitated the connection between customer oriented goals and the goals of the organization and the introduction of performance measurement. Spain, however, has fostered the use of charters without supporting it with a performance management system. This has reduced the success of this scheme.

8 After this introduction, questions from the ToRs have been addressed.

9 Question from the ToRs: Como as organizações públicas, em suas diversas esferas (federal, estadual e municipal), são mobilizadas e sensibilizadas? [How are public sector organizations from

4

different levels of government – federal, state, municipal- mobilized and sensitized?].

10 The diffusion of service charters in the three countries depends on institutional features. Ireland and the United Kingdom are unitary countries with relatively highly centralised local-central relationships. In these countries, policies have been implemented through high involvement of central government. The British Cabinet Office and the Irish Department of the Prime Minister have been active in promoting the scheme and in compelling public sector organisations to adopt customer focus orientation. This has been further facilitated by networks of quality management officials. At local level, there has been a more bottom-up approach in the United Kingdom than in Ireland. In this country, the diffusion of the charters to the local level was initiated after some experimentation took place at central level.

11 Spain, however, is a federal polity in which local authorities have a considerable degree of freedom. At central level, the support for service charters was offered by the ministry of public administration (now the state agency for the evaluation of public policies and services), with weaker powers than their counterparts in the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Therefore, much of the diffusion process has come from persuasion and the use of the network of service inspectors. Innovative agencies have played a key role in helping the ministry of public administration to further foster the implementation of quality initiatives in other organizations. In regional administration, with total autonomy on modernization strategies, the diffusion of service charters and quality management initiatives in general has been uneven. Some regions have even surpassed the centre; others lack any kind of quality strategy. Finally, the diffusion of charters at local level, still low, is mostly due to local entrepreneurship.

12 Questions from the ToRs: Qual o nível de obrigatoriedade da adoção de instrumento (por exemplo, Cartas de Serviços) para órgãos e entidades públicos? Existem atos normativos que podem constar como referências? Como se dá a disseminação de instrumentos às organizações interessadas? [What is the compulsoriness level to adopt a particular instrument (for instance, Service Charters) for public sector organizations? Are there legislative acts that could be taken as reference? How is the dissemination of instruments among interested organizations?]

13 Compulsoriness has to be understood at least in two ways. On the one hand, it refers to the extent to which the standards or commitments of governments produce entitlements or automatic compensation mechanisms in users. None of the countries under consideration has as of yet a policy in which public sector organisations are obliged to redress users in case of failure to meet standards. In Spain, compensation mechanisms are possible as long as the patrimony of the State remains untouched. There are some examples of public service charters with compensation mechanism.

14 On the other hand, compulsoriness also refers to the extent to which public agencies have to implement a quality strategy or launch a specific service charter. The response to this question varies among countries. In Ireland, there has been certain level of compulsoriness in some of the measures together with a kind of voluntarily commitment on the side of the Departments. In any case, the compulsoriness of government papers in Ireland and in the United Kingdom has also helped. Although there is no legal enforcement of government policies, it is customary that ministries and agencies will comply with regulation. In Spain, the adoption of quality management strategies and service charters has been voluntary, and persuasion has been the most used technique to foster these approaches.

15 Questions from the ToRs: Como se dá o gerenciamento da implementação e dos resultados das

5

políticas públicas? Qual o órgão responsável? [How are the implementation and the results of public policies related to quality managed? Which is the responsible body?]

16 In a report on the Irish case by some preconditions were highlighted for the implementation of service charters. These pre-conditions are valid for any of the national experiences under analysis in order to implement the service charters.

- Leadership to mainstream quality into the core business.

- Consultation with users and user representatives.

- Need to develop a culture driven by results, which embed customer focus.

- Clarity about customer and service mapping.

- Establish public official networks to transfer knowledge across departments.

17 As regards to the responsible body(ies) Ireland offers a well deployed network of different officials to develop quality customer service initiatives. The system is fostered by the office of the Prime Minister, steered by the secretaries general and worked at the operational level by the QCS Working Group (made up of a wide range of different stakeholders) as well as the QCS network officers placed in all ministries.

18 In the United Kingdom, the modernization agenda, including customer focus initiatives, is steered by the Cabinet Office, which sits at the core of the decision-making process. The Cabinet Office is further helped by network of quality managers as well as voluntary assessors for the Charter Mark scheme.

19 However, in Spain, the support comes from AEVAL, a state agency that is not at the core of the governmental decision-making processes, unlike in Ireland or in the United Kingdom. The AEVAL relies on the network of service inspectors, but the support of the under-secretaries (equivalent to secretaries-general in Ireland) is rather weak.

20 Questions from the ToRs: Como se dá a publicidade dos resultados? Quais os indicadores utilizados? [How are results published? Which performance indicators are mainly used?]

21 Targets and results are published in Ireland in Annual Reports. This publication strategy entails the risk of hiding the results that matter to citizens in other broader organizational performance indicators. Discussions on the matter have suggested integrating customer related results from all departments into one single report. In Spain, results are published at the will of ministries. In general, the public is uninformed from the performance of public sector organizations in this matter.

22 In all countries, most performance indicators in use are the ones related to delivery time of the service.

23 Questions from the ToRs: Como se dá a participação da sociedade? [How does society take part in these initiatives?]

24 In most of the cases, the participation technique in use is consultation. Co-decision mechanisms are rarely reported to be used. Consultation has taken various forms like surveys, citizen’s panels or focus groups. Early assessments of the charters were concerned that consultation was rather low.

6

Later on, consultation seems to have increased in all three countries. However, another concern with consultation is that it focuses very often in service satisfaction questions. It seems that service satisfaction as only predictor is poor in identifying the complexity of many public services like health or social services. Other aspects as customer experience, complaints and quality of life outcomes were considered as complement.

25 Question from the ToRs: Existem pesquisas regulares para aferir e dar publicidade aos resultados da qualidade dos serviços prestados? [Are there regular surveys to assess and publish the results on the quality of the delivered services].

26 National surveys of user satisfaction with public services are becoming common place in the three countries. There are bi-annual or annual waves of surveys. It is unclear though how the surveys help further in the development of charter or other quality strategies at the level of single agencies.

27 Question from the ToRs: e) Quais os meios de incentivo às organizações públicas que cumprem as políticas de atendimento ao cidadão? [Which incentives are better fit for encouraging public sector organizations to implement policies focused on customer satisfaction?]

28 Schemes to incentivize the use of quality strategies range from certification exercises of the service charter drafting process through stamps or marks of excellence to awarding the best services. While all these instruments seem to be valid, Charter Marks (or similar schemes) seem to be better placed to become an incentive for introducing charters. The Charter Mark is a standard of service provision, so that any organisation meeting the criteria could gain the Charter Mark. This helps organizations to focus on the customer, because the external assessment exercise focuses on the ten criteria that are relevant to the user.

29 After an evaluation of the charters, there are some common problems in the three countries: low use of user surveys in the early stages of the charters programmes, unequal distribution of charters across departments (although the Irish case seem to show more uniformity in this regard), uneven adoption of standards or measurable standards too focused on delivery time. Besides, in Spain service charters have not been mainstreamed in the core business of the organisation. In spite of the relatively high proliferation of charters and of some self-assessment exercises, customer focus is at the periphery of the concerns of government. By and large, quality is rather the concern of quality managers.

30 In Ireland and in the United Kingdom, service charters have been better mainstreamed into the core business of the organisation in spite of criticism of several evaluations. Quality and customer focus are not at the periphery of the concerns of government.

31 The last section of the report offers some policy lessons from one or more countries under consideration. These lessons reflect some of the points raised earlier on in this summary and are not conceived to be directly used by the Brazilian government. They are just a departure point of discussion.

32 Each precondition of service charters mentioned above in relation to leadership from organizations, use of user consultation beyond satisfaction survey boundaries, trying to implement a performance management system previously to quality initiatives and foster the charters through networks of public officials are valid points for launching any customer satisfaction strategy or any charter programme.

7

Efforts should be placed to foster the above mentioned pre-conditions, some of which are further detailed below.

33 It is highly recommended that service charters or any quality management initiative addressed at increasing user satisfaction with the service is embedded in managerial systems in which results oriented objective are proposed, performance indicators are used to monitor the achievement of results, and results oriented objectives are embedded in the budgetary process. The Irish experience, with all the potential pitfalls identified by observers and evaluators, is a good example in this regard.

34 It is recommended, if still not done in a country that deploys quality strategies, that the government engages in identifying what dimensions are the drivers of service satisfaction in that particular country. Drivers vary from country to country. For instance, in Ireland, the following drivers were identified: timeliness, knowledge and competence of staff, fairness, courtesy and comfort, and outcome. Perhaps, in some cases there is the need to differentiate among urban vs rural environment, geographic regions and type of services. The identification of the drivers of customer satisfaction may help to mainstream the main standards of service users into quality initiatives.

35 It is recommended that the Guidelines address the following aspects:

- Define the diversity of the service in terms of users and services provided.

- The guidelines could address both service charters, as visible short documents mainly for external use, and Customer Action Plans (or other labels), for internal use with focus in the integration of Business Plans and customer focus.

- Commitments should be clearer and should go beyond the “delivery time” dimension.

- Service charters should remain to be short, easy to read and accessible for the public.

- Specific commitments of the service should be evaluated and shared with the public. This includes not only the results of performance indicators but also the information contained in the complaint mechanisms. Whenever possible, this evaluation should be subject to some degree of independent and professional validation.

- The use of Annual Reports to include reporting on the service charters could be an option. Perhaps, results focused on the user from different organizations should be published in a joint report, so that the actual delivery of services is conveniently enhanced. Web sites could also be used more imaginatively to show the results of service standards as in Madrid city council (see website)

- While user surveys is a valid instrument to gauge users’ expectations and needs, other instruments are likely to offer a complementary vie like user experience, measurement of outcomes, analysis of complaints, customer panels, focus groups with representatives of advocacy organisations and the like.

36 The Charter Mark principle aligned with the principles of customer satisfaction and improvement of outcomes is a valid instrument to strive for better service quality. The instrument should operate firstly through self-assessment and later on be externally validated by an accredited organization, so that the

8

results are credible for third parties. Finally, the tool should profit as much as possible from benchmarking and sharing of best practices.

37 Nationwide (or state-wide) minimum standards could be established for certain services in which there is already a long tradition in measurement. The setting of a minimum acceptable level of service quality provision should not stifle innovation and improvement of those organisations that could go beyond the bare minimum.

1) INTRODUCTION 38 This report has been written to address the requests of the Terms of Reference (ToRs) for action 1 (Ação 1: Políticas de Atendimento ao Cidadão - Carta de Serviços (MP/SEGES). Under this action, it was requested to present European experiences related to the policies on customer satisfaction with the quality of public services (políticas de atendimento ao cidadão) and the methodology used for setting service charters.

39 Both concerns have been addressed in the report by taking service charters as the core element. Service charters are documents in which public sector organizations commit themselves to the accomplishment of certain service standards. Normally, they are short documents in which customers know what they can expect in their dealings with the services. The documents also unveil the rights and duties of service users for that particular service in an accessible language. A distinctive feature of service charters is the commitment of public sector organisations to the achievements of certain standards that are meaningful for users.

40 The service charter is just one tool to increase the satisfaction of users and to enhance the quality of the services delivered by any organization. Quality is understood as “the extent to which service delivery and/or service outcomes meet with the informed expectations and defined needs of the customer” . As quality goes beyond service charters, these initiatives are analysed in the context of wider policies on quality and performance management.

41 A set of detailed questions were included in the ToRs in connection to service charters and quality management policies. These questions have been included in the relevant sections of this report. For the sake of simplicity, the Portuguese wording has been included in the initial paragraph of the section. In order to set the context of the questions being asked in the ToRs, this report has added some sections related to the evolution of service charters in the wider context of quality management in the three selected countries

42 The ToRs also requested the comparison of the abovementioned policies in three European countries. The ToRs gave a list of countries as suggested examples for comparison. While all suggested examples were relevant for this report, the final selection of Ireland, Spain and United Kingdom is due to their comprehensive policies on quality management, their experience with service charters and the use of independent reviews to assess the positive and negative aspects of both policies.

43 Service charters are common in many European countries. Since the launch of citizen charters in the United Kingdom in 1991, several European countries have introduced service charters in one or several levels of government. In 2011, 22 countries out of 27 have launched service charters in any or all territorial levels of government. In 11 countries, charters have been practiced at any given point in time to a full extent. This implies that a large proportion of public sector organisations have published

9

any sort of service charter in these 11 countries. From them, 5 countries had in their charters the following elements: Clear and concrete quality standards based on citizen involvement; proper communication mechanisms to communicate standards; and easy access to complaints procedure; and there is a continued improvement based on the evaluation of results. Those five countries are Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.

44 Ireland, Spain and United Kingdom have been selected for this report because all of them have experienced with service charters between 10 and 20 years, independent evaluations have assessed the system and service charters are included in wider policies of citizen satisfaction with the services. Furthermore, each country offers distinctive valuable insights for the Brazilian context. Ireland identified different strategies for a public document as a proof of commitments with users (service charter) and an internal document (also made public) for meeting customer needs (Customer Action Plans). United Kingdom followed a singular road by certifying excellence of those services that had a sound customer policy (by expanding the principles included in the charter) through schemes like Charter Mark and the Customer Service Excellence and by discussing how to include (minimal universal) entitlements in public services. Spain, launched the service charter as a part of a wider strategy on quality management and created an inter-territorial commission (among different levels of government) in order to foster policies of customer satisfaction all over the country. Moreover, some Spanish charters have also included compensation mechanisms in case of failing to meet the standards.

45 The report has benefitted from official documents, academic writings, interviews with officials and several other projects of the author in the European arena on quality management and on service charters. The text was written between the 11th of January and 11th of February of 2011.

46 The text is further divided in ten sections from now on. The third section deals with the evolution of charters and their fit in wider policies of customer satisfaction (políticas de atendimento ao cidadão as a concept from the ToRs). This section highlights some of the pre-conditions for service charters and quality policies according to the experience of the three analysed countries. Although section three is not specifically asked in the ToRs, it provides some answers to the main concerns of the Brazilian government at the same that they set the scene for other topics. Section four is about how to foster and further support the implementation of charters and quality initiatives from the centre (ministry of economics, of planning or the office of the prime minister). Section five deals with the degree of compulsoriness to implement service charters and to include minimum standards in those charters. Section six presents how the three countries have organised the implementation of the charters and, especially, who is responsible for this. Section seven deals with the issue of how performance results related to customer focus are published and what performance indicator are mainly used. Section eight is devoted to dispel the role of users in the drafting or quality management strategies in general and service charters and their commitments in particular. Section nines focuses on the incentives that have been used in these countries to make public sector organisations to implement customer focused policies. Section ten offers a general evaluation of the service charters in the three countries. This evaluation is done by third external parties; in most occasions at the request of government. A final section offers policy lessons from these three cases. These recommendations are not directly addressed to the Brazilian government, but they help to understand the main hits in the evolution of quality initiatives.

2) THE EVOLUTION AND CONTEXT OF CHARTERS IN EACH COUNTRY

10

47 This section offers a brief account of how service charters have been implemented in each of these countries since they were officially acknowledged for the first time in 2002 (Ireland), 1999 (Spain) and in 1991 (United Kingdom). The evolution of service charters is examined against the backdrop of wider quality management policies.

48 The structure of the charters is very similar in the three countries under study. Normally, a charter comprises three parts: general and legal information regarding the agency and the provided service, quality commitments, and other information which includes procedures about complaint mechanisms or redress, in case that users are entitled to compensation mechanisms.

49 However, the same contents are embedded in different reform trajectories. Therefore, the integration of the customer focus of the charter and the core business of the organization seems to be very different in the three countries.

a) Ireland: from strategic goals to customer focus

50 The modernization programme which encompasses service charters was the Strategic Management Initiative (SMI) launched in 1994 with three avowed aims: (a) the provision of an excellent service to the citizens, (b) the efficient and effective use of resources (c) the contribution to national development. The quality customer service initiative was just one of the pillars of the SMI. The Delivering Better Government Report (1996) set already as a goal the need to deliver excellent services to the citizens. This report was the seed of the Quality Customer Service (QCS) Initiative of 1997, which will be developed below.

51 Another important element that paved the way for introducing the charters was the Public Service Management Act (1997), a logical continuation of the SMI. This Act requested to publish three-year Strategy Statements from all civil service departments and offices. These statements included objectives, performance indicators and specific commitments to enhance the quality of service. The Strategy Statements are accompanied by Annual Progress Reports, Business Plans, which link the Strategy Statements to monitoring and Customer Action Plans. Therefore, the introduction of quality management was preceded by the launch of a performance management strategy.

52 Strategy Statements pave the way towards the use of service charters. Since 1997, secretaries general and heads of office are requested to send Statements of Strategy to Ministers within six months of the Minister coming into office, and every 3 years period (see the revised guidelines for submitting Strategy  Statements). Lately, all departments were subject to a common timescale (not to a different scale for each ministry in relation to the appointment of a new incumbent). For instance, the most recent Strategy Statements covers the 2011-2013 period. The Guidelines state that the Strategy Statements should “be mindful of existing commitments in other areas of corporate planning and reporting including, for example, ICT Strategy Statements, and Customer Charters and Action Plans”. Therefore, customer charters are embedded in a wider framework which makes the core concern of the business of the particular organization for which the charter has been drafted.

53 Another building block is the Business Plan, which translate the high level goals and objectives of the Strategy Statement into objectives cascaded down in the hierarchy of the Department. The Business Plan allows different organizations to prioritise and allocate the tasks for achieving those objectives. There are several Business Plans in each ministry. Each one of them is prepared by a section within the Department.

11

54 In 1997, a Quality Customer Service Initiative was developed as part of the SMI. This initiative attempted to improve the customer service standards of services delivered by government departments. Each department had to produce a three-year Customer Action Plan in which they have to state how they would improve the delivery of the service. By 2001, the government introduced some changes in the Customer Action Plan and demanded a more homogeneity of these plans from civil service departments.

55 Shortly after in 2002, all Departments were required to publish a Charter Statement of Service Standards. The Customer Charter Initiative was embedded in the trajectory initiated with the QSC Initiative. Between 2003 and 2006, 30 central government departments and offices prepared customer charters, following the government guidelines and the four-step cycle of consultation with customers and stakeholders, commitment to service standards, evaluation of performance against these standards and reporting on results. Charters were compulsory for the civil service and they also had to report their performance against the service standards in their Annual Reports.

56 The non-prescriptive guidelines for the service charters prepared by the Department of the Prime Minister in 2003 were supported by the CMOD (Centre for Management and Organisation Development) with the organisation of tailored training programmes. Following the publication of the Fitzpatrick report on the evaluation of the Service Charters, the guidelines for the customer charters were revised in 2008. The new guidelines addressed not only the customer charters but also the Customer Action Plans. The resulting document Revised Guidelines for the Preparation of Customer Charters and Customer Action Plans (2008) is now the one used by public sector organizations.

57 Customer Charters and Customer Action Plans represent a two-sided coin and have different roles within the Quality Customer Service Initiative. The Charter is a public (external) document that focuses on the transactions and the commitments of the organization with users. However, the Customer Action Plans are rather internal documents with more detail on how the commitments expressed in the Charter are going to be met and evaluated by the proponent organization. In spite of the internal character of the plans, they are also made public.

58 Typically, a Customer Action Plan should outline consultation mechanisms, responsibilities within the organization to meet commitments, and performance indicators to be used for evaluating the plan. Since 2003, Customer Action Plans have been more closely linked to service charters by describing how the Customer Charter commitments will be delivered and evaluated. Although in practice the distinction is not as neat as expected, there are clear differences among these two documents . In the following example, the Customer Action Plan (2004-2007) of the Department of Social and Family Affairs of the Irish Government, both types of documents are included. Customer Action Plans are normally available in hard copy or in the websites of the agency. Although they are tailored to local conditions, these documents are launched for 3 year period at the same time. Subsequent waves of Customer Actions Plans have been published in 1997-2000; 2001-2004, 2004-2007, 2007-2010.

59 The customer satisfaction policies of the Irish government have had considerable support from the centre in comparative perspective. There has not been a highly directive top-down approach in which “one size fits all” . The Department of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister in Irish) has been considerably involved in the initiative and has guided, encouraged and supported the reforms. There has been certain level of compulsoriness in some of the measures together with a kind of voluntarily commitment on the side of the Departments. Individual public services have developed the

12

approaches that have been better adapted to the local conditions.

60 According to , Customer Charter Initiative was triggered by several factors. Firstly, the QCS Initiative stressed broad principles, which were worked in Customer Action Plans. These plans were soon requested to give certain emphasis to more concrete targets and performance indicators. Secondly, the department of the Prime Minister was willing to introduce performance measurement, although not in a top-down fashion by selecting the performance indicators that an individual organisation had to choose. Individual services could choose their own metrics. Finally, service charters were adopted because it was thought that external commitments would have an impact on the internal management of the organisation at the same time that it would foster a positive view of the service by the users. For instance, the introduction of the charters emphasized some dimensions that were not present in the QCS scheme like customer consultation, quantitative targets and their measurement, and complaints procedures.

61 The list of Acts and Government Papers connected to quality is considerable and not only restricted to the QCS Initiative and the documents already mentioned. This list includes the Obudsman Act (1980), The Comptroller and Auditor General (Amendment) Act (1993), The Freedom of Information Act (1997), the launch of the Performance Management and Development System (PMDS), and the Government Statement on “Transforming Public Services”. Each one of these Acts affects the Quality Strategy in general, and, in some cases, the service charter approach.

62 For instance, the Ombudsman’s Guide to Standards of Best Practice for Public Servants (first published in 1997 and revised in 2003) helps to define good administrative behaviour, i.e. how public servants will interact with the public in carrying out their duties: how to deal properly, fairly, openly and impartially with the public. These concepts were further elaborated in 2004 by the Standards in Public Office Commission of the Civil Service Code of Standards and Behaviour and, subsequently, the Code of Conduct for Local Authority Employees.

63 Another example is the Performance Management and Development System (PMDS). This system is a process for establishing a shared understanding about what is to be achieved and how as well as an approach to manage and develop people towards those achievements. The system tries to establish the link between the performance of individuals and the performance of the agency (Departments) established in the Strategy Statement and Business Plan.

64 Another step in the search for quality within the QCS Initiative is the implementation of the recommendations from the government document Transforming Public Services (TPS). The ‘Transforming Public Services’ Programme was a response of the Irish government to the OECD’s Review of the Irish Public Service. A Programme Office was established to encourage the implementation of the 'Transforming Public Services' programme (see in particular statements 4 to 6 related to quality services from the Government document).

b) Spain: customer focus without organisational strategic goals

65 The beginning of the service charters in Spain took a different route than in Ireland. Charters were promoted as a part of a wider quality management initiative, but without the support of a wider performance management framework. The service charter was the initiative of public officials within the ministry of Public Administration committed with the principles of quality management. They fostered the idea of the charter with the aim of counterbalancing a poor image of public services, that

13

citizens deemed as inefficient. Then, the service charters initiative tried to improve the image of public administration rather than improving its efficiency and effectiveness, as also proved by the lack of involvement of the ministry of Economics and the Treasury.

66 Nonetheless, there are differences among public agencies at central level. Some agencies, like the tax administration, or the social security institute, had previously introduced a performance management system. This has facilitated considerably the integration of the charters in the core business of the agencies.

67 Service charters were launched as executive orders in 1999 and amended in 2005 (see the legislative documents in the links). The 2005 executive order had the purpose to establish a quality management framework under which central ministries and agencies could operate. Each quality instrument that had been dealt with in both executive orders was also refined. For instance, the charters experienced the following innovations. Firstly, compensation measures were included in case that standards were not achieved for individual citizens. In these cases, the compensation could explicitly not have consequences for the public patrimony. Secondly, a certification of the service charter drafting procedure was going to be established. The certification had the purpose to ensure some homogeneity in the way in which commitments and standards were conceived (see more on this below). Finally, the executive order opened the option for drafting inter-organizational or even intergovernmental service charters. This option has not materialized as of yet.

68 Service charters are part of other quality management initiatives such as certification schemes (ISOs), self-evaluation approaches for the public and the private sector (EFQM – Excellence Model of the European Foundation of Quality Management, equivalent to the American Excellence model of Malcolm Baldrige), self-evaluation approaches promoted by the European Union for the public sector CAF (Common Assessment Framework) or a Spanish home-made self-evaluation scheme (EVAM - Modelo de Evaluación, Aprendizaje y Mejora).

69 A similar trajectory has been under operation in different local authorities. The extension of quality management in local government is rather low as the following numbers show for big municipalities: the constitution of ‘quality improvement teams’ (37%), service charters (36%), self-evaluation (35%), service guides (34%) and quality systems such as EFQM (34%) . These figures might have changed in recent years with the considerable support given by the association of local authorities (FEMP – Federación Española de Municipios y Provincias) to the adoption of quality management strategies.

c) United Kingdom: charters within a performance management framework

70 The Citizen’s Charter programme was originally launched in 1991. In the middle of a wave of privatisation and the search for choice, the charter initiative aimed at improving the services for which users could not have a choice. Therefore, the Conservative government tried to put the public sector under some sort of pressure, to improve its services through the charters, with the idea of giving voice to users. The emphasis of the Citizen’s Charter in the UK was on citizens as ‘customers’ of public services. Their main focus was the levels of service provision to be expected by users. The whole scheme was re-launched under a different label with the Labour government elected in 1997. In 1998, the Charter Unit of the Cabinet Office launched the ‘Service First - The New Citizen’s Charter’ initiative as a part of the Better Government initiative.

71 The Citizen’s Charter scheme was a toolkit to allow standards to be raised in the way most

14

appropriate to each service. It was not envisaged to have a universal standard for all services, but rather a common purpose for all of them. This scheme is made of several elements: the Charter Mark, an award to recognise excellence in the public sector, the individual service charters for each organization, and the Customer Excellence scheme that replaced the Charter Mark.

72 The individual service charters were conceived as a contract between service providers (commitments) and users (entitlements). Those commitments mean that the provider has to improve service standards and their responsiveness to users. By 1997, 42 national charters covering the main public services and over 10,000 local charters were launched . The charters were labelled normally after the particular group of users that they were meant to serve, not so much the particular organization: the ‘Taxpayers’ Charter’, the ‘Council Tenants’ Charter’, the ‘Patients’ Charter’ and the ‘Travellers’ Charter’.

73 The Charter contained a mix of four objectives (raise quality, increase choice, secure better value, extend accountability), seven principles (standards, openness, information, choice, non-discrimination, accessibility and redress) and nine mechanisms. However, the connection among these elements was not specified and it was difficult to see any rigour in the document . The seven principles of the Citizen’s Charter scheme were expanded to nine in the new scheme (Service First: The New Charter Programme) (see Annex).

74 The national charter scheme (in its Service First form) has largely disappeared from the UK national policies. However, there are numerous offspring as many local authorities have embraced service charters as means to improve service delivery, because of the potential they offer . Moreover, many departments are mentioning the service standards as part of their service strategy.

75 It is difficult to give a clear account of the context in which service charters have been produced . Charterism was built upon the Next steps Initiative. The Next Steps Initiative set the basis for splitting up the design of the service from service delivery through the creations of agencies in the 1990s at central government. Since then, ministries have been roughly in charge of policy making and agencies of service delivery. This system further supported the use of performance management systems, evaluation and assessment of the achievement of targets through performance indicators, the focus on outputs and outcomes, and the use of consultation for policy-making. Since the reforms of Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, there has been a strong emphasis on performance management, management by results, performance indicators and targets.

76 Apart from this general evolution towards performance management, there are some particular elements that have been a consequence of the implementation of charters. For instance, mentions that the emphasis on improving internal complaint management in the public services as well as the setting-up of a Complaints Task-Force inside the Cabinet Office have been relevant in order to tackle problems of ‘process’ as well as of ‘results’ directly connected to the charters. The work undertaken by the Task-Force as well as the different Guides to deal with complaints (see a version of the Guide) have converted the complaint management system as a learning tool which has helped many organizations to draft improvement plans and better meet the commitments offered in the charters.

77 The launch of this initiative to deal with complaints was probably an effect of the use of charters and the principles attached to them. Service First ideals seem to have raised the public’s expectations about the standard which public agencies should meet. As users felt that there was a gap between their expectations-hopes and actual performance, the number of complaints rose at the time

15

(Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration, Annual report 1992).

d) Conclusions

78 In all these three countries, quality standard are not legal rights (as it has been the case with service charters in Belgium and in France) but targets to be achieved in order to increase customer satisfaction. The charters of these countries have the following dimensions: a statement of the standards of service which can be expected; a statement of who is responsible for the provision of the service at the level promised; and a guide to the customer about complaint mechanisms.

79 The approach in Ireland and Spain has been bottom-up, while the approach in the United Kingdom has been rather top-down. However, the level of support in the Irish case has been higher than in Spain, not only due to the use of different guidelines for drafting the charters but especially due to the related measures that have helped public services to focus on the customer. In the rhetoric level, the British service charters gave the illusion that customers had a choice in service delivery, however, the charters were mostly implemented in services for which choice was not possible. The charters were rather a countermeasure to improve the services that had not been privatised, i.e not submitted to choice. Choice has not been really present in the Irish or the Spanish cases.

80 Finally, charters have been embedded in Ireland and in the United Kingdom in wider performance frameworks. This has facilitated the connection between customer oriented goals and the goals of the organization. Moreover, the existence of wider performance frames has helped the task of measuring performance. As it will be shown below, the connection between customer focus and higher level of organizational goals has not always materialized (see next section). Spain, however, has fostered the use of charters without supporting it with a performance management system. This has reduced the success of the charters.

3) DIFFUSION OF SERVICE CHARTERS 81 This section deals with the following question of the ToRs: Como as organizações públicas, em suas diversas esferas (federal, estadual e municipal), são mobilizadas e sensibilizadas? [How are public sector organizations from differentl levels of government – federal, state, municipal- mobilized and sensitized]. The section shows that quality management professionals that occupy key position in different networks of the public services have been key in mobilising and sensitizing organizations in the embracement of service charters. Furthermore, the compulsoriness of government papers in Ireland and in the United Kingdom have also helped (see next section).

a) Ireland: diffusion from the civil service to the wider public service

82 Ireland is a unitary and very centralized country. The modernization strategies normally come from the department of the prime minister. The department normally issue reports or white papers that form the basis for policy delivery of other ministries and offices (their civil service) and other sectors (the public service that includes for instance also local authorities).

83 All the initiatives related to quality and service charters were primarily launched for the civil service. Afterwards they were also aimed at other sectors, including local authorities. The government statements and reports present certain degree of compulsoriness, and this has formed the basis for further mobilising the energies of different departments towards customer satisfaction strategies.

84 Apart from the continuous support of the department of the prime minister, the coordination among

16

the secretaries general, ministries and offices have been sensitized thanks to the networking activities of the QCS officers and the training programmes associated to the initiative.

b) Spain: proliferation of charters at all levels and potential collaboration on intergovernmental charters

85 At central level, two different strategies have become apparent as regards to the evolution of quality policies. In the early nineties a bottom-up approach among some particular organizations took place. In the 1980s, an overall programme of public sector reform failed without hardly reforming a poor performing public sector. Some agencies that had intensive contacts with the user (tax agency, social security institute, property registry) started an ambitious reform programme in which performance management was a core part. After having implemented a performance management system, these organisations started to introduce quality management approaches and service charters. Their leadership effect was very important to support a top-down process to introduce quality management at central level.

86 The top-down process was initiated by the ministry of public administration by legislative acts and by advising and training those organisations that introduced quality management initiatives. Although having a quality system or a service charter was not compulsory, an informal network of quality managers managed to implement quality schemes in many central government organisations.

87 The diffusion of these reforms to the regional and the local level has been achieved through the different professional networks at first. Quality management was firstly fostered by a group of civil servants (service inspectors). Service inspectors are in charge of organizational matters of national and regional ministries. There are equivalents of service inspectors both at central and regional level. Their role in relation to the operation of the service and their support of quality initiatives have helped to build up an informal community countrywide on quality management.

88 A more formal mechanism of intergovernmental cooperation started to work in 2008. The then minister of public administration went to the territorial chamber in order to initiate an intergovernmental process of commitment with service delivery. As each level of government (central, regions and local) are responsible for the policies concerning public service delivery, a joint commitment to increase the satisfaction of users with service delivery would be based on a voluntary approach. Since then an intergovernmental network of quality public services (Red Interadministrativa de Calidad en los Servicios Públicos) was approved in 2009 by a Intergovernmental Conference. This network is integrated by organizations in charge of quality management and public policy evaluation in all levels of government. Around 20 organizations take part in the network. The network structures its work through Working Groups. For instance, one of them works on observatories of quality management in the whole state.

89 The Spanish government has not carried out special initiatives for spreading charters among citizens. In fact, only 22 per cent of charters have been advertised in newspapers. Most of the charters are, however, displayed in the premises of the organizations. The percentage of dissemination is a bit higher at local level, as 56 per cent of interviewed local authorities have advertised the charters in the newspapers and 53 per cent mailed their contents to the households .

c) United Kingdom: charters remains after official distance from charterism

90 The Cabinet Office has played traditionally an important role in spreading public sector reforms.

17

The publication of the White Paper on service charters was a key driver in fostering the launch of service charters at central level. The Audit Commission played a similar role for local authorities.

91 The work of the cabinet office has been based traditionally on task forces and on networks of professionals. The Citizen’s Charter complaints task force, that produced A  Good Practice Guide in 1995 with recommendations on how to handle complaints from service users. . For instance, by 1994, the Charter Unit established 24 Charter quality networks around the UK. Those networks consisted of small groups of managers from public services and privatized utilities who met locally to exchange ideas on issues relating to customer service and quality.

92 Many commentators maintain that service charters appeared in local government even before the scheme was launched at central level. Already in the early 1980s, charters arrived together with the wave of managerialism that permeated local government. Charters and standards have remained in spite of the fact that charterism is no longer a priority of central government.

d) Conclusions

93 The diffusion of service charters in the three countries depends on institutional features. Ireland and the United Kingdom are unitary countries with relatively highly centralised local-central relationships. In these countries, policies have been implemented through high involvement of central government. The British Cabinet Office and the Irish Department of the Prime Minister have been active in promoting the scheme and in compelling public sector organisations to adopt customer focus orientation. This has been further facilitated by networks of quality management officials.

94 However, the diffusion of service charters in Ireland and in the United Kingdom has experienced different routes. In the United Kingdom, it is claimed that some charters of local authorities appeared even before the Charter programme. Although the Audit Commission has been key in the performance management revolution at local level, the uptake of the service standards and the service charter approach seems to be a rather grass-root movement at local level. In Ireland, however, the diffusion of service charters at local level forms part of a government strategy to expand the impact of customer focus beyond the boundaries of central ministries.

95 Spain, however, is a federal polity, in which local authorities have a considerable degree of freedom. At central level, the support for service charters was offered by the ministry of public administration (now the state agency for the evaluation of public policies and services), with weaker powers than their counterparts in the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Therefore, much of the diffusion process has come from persuasion and the use of the network of service inspectors. Innovative agencies have played a key role in helping the ministry of public administration to further foster the implementation of quality initiatives in other organizations. They were the leading example to imitate. In regional administration, the diffusion of service charters and quality management initiatives in general has been uneven. Some regions have even surpassed the centre; others lack any kind of quality strategy. Finally, the diffusion of charters at local level, still low, is mostly due to local entrepreneurship.

4) ENFORCEMENT OF SERVICE CHARTERS 96 This section tries to answer the following question of the ToRs: Qual o nível de obrigatoriedade da adoção de instrumento (por exemplo, Cartas de Serviços) para órgãos e entidades públicos? Existem atos normativos que podem constar como referências? Como se dá a disseminação de instrumentos

18

às organizações interessadas? [What is the compulsoriness level to adopt a particular instrument (for instance, Service Charters) for public sector organizations? Are there legislative acts that could be taken as reference? How is the dissemination of instruments among interested organizations?]

97 Compulsoriness has to be understood at least in two ways. On the one hand, it refers to the extent to which the standards or commitments of governments produce entitlements or automatic compensation mechanisms in users. The answer to this is very similar in the three countries under consideration (see next point). On the other hand, compulsoriness also refers to the extent to which public agencies have to implement a quality strategy or launch a specific service charter. The response to this question varies among countries.

98 Service charters do not give specific legal rights to citizens, although some of the rights included in the charter are already included in the legislation. However, the commitments, as standards of service, included in service charters cannot be legally claimed by users. Therefore, in those cases that a public sector organization does not meet a particular standard (for instance, a police unit will be in the place of an urgent phone call in less than 7 minutes), citizens are not compensated. Compensation mechanisms are binding, though, if specifically mentioned in the charter. For instance, the service charter of the water utility company Canal de Isabel II in the Region of Madrid has redress mechanisms. The charter makes commitments as to the maximum time needed by the public utility company to provide for new installations and services. For each day of delay the customer receives a fixed financial compensation which varies from 3.01 Euro/day for not reading the meter on time to 20 Euro/day for failing to install a water system in new housing on time.

99 Regarding the legislation, only Spain publishes the regulation of the charters as executive orders in the official diary like, for instance, in 1995 and 2005 for central government; for autonomous regions (like Andalusia in 2003) or for city councils (example of Madrid in 2009). In the United Kingdom and in Ireland the tradition rather focuses on issuing government papers, which may have the same degree of compulsoriness (or even more depending on how they are written) than Spanish legislative acts. Some differences are apparent among countries.

100 In Ireland, there is certain degree of compulsoriness in the development of the different elements of the QSC initiative. Departments have to develop service statements, Business Plans, Customer Action Plans and service charters. Departments have certain flexibility in the way they draft those documents; however, the degree of uniformization has increased throughout the years. The use of Guidelines, the support with training as well as certain monitoring from the deparment of the prime minister has helped to homogenize the different tools. In sum, there is obligation to adopt these instruments at the same time that some flexibility is built in them. Unlike the Spanish example, charters do not have to be passed as legislative executive order, but had to be displayed in all public offices.

101 Service charters in Spain tried to improve the image of the organization and its service performance. In principle, Spanish service charters are voluntary in the three tiers of government. Their launch has been initiated by the politicians, field managers or quality managers. In each case, the imprint or philosophy might have changed. For instance, the regional government of Madrid launched service charters in all the ministries at the advice of the quality management department. It was soon seen by the regional president as a good means to enhance his figure for electoral purposes. His photo as guarantor of service commitments appeared in each single service charter

19

from any regional ministry. The charters included few standards and were more a propaganda action than a real focus on customer satisfaction. In some local authorities, however, service charters appeared as a genuine effort to improve customer satisfaction with the services. This has not been the case elsewhere. Most public authorities use service charters to focus on the customer.

102 The compulsoriness varies among levels of government. At central level, if an organization releases a charter, their features become compulsory for the public body and they are ruled by a legal norm. This strategy does not apply to all local authorities, only to some.

103 In the United Kingdom, John Major presented his Charter initiative in 1991 to Parliament as a White Paper. A White Paper in the British context is an informal name for a parliamentary paper enunciating government policy. The binding nature of the document depends on the particular will of the government. In this case, the White Paper was to be applied to departments, agencies, nationalised industries, local authorities, the NHS, the courts, and the police and emergency services.

104 However, the Charter Mark programme, an award that certifies the excellence of public sector organizations in service delivery was voluntary, at first on competitive basis and later on as individual recognition of excellence.

5) IMPLEMENTATION OF SERVICE CHARTERS 105 This section tries to answer the following questions of the ToRs: Como se dá o gerenciamento da implementação e dos resultados das políticas públicas? Qual o órgão responsável? [How is the implementation and the results of public policies related to quality managed? What is the responsible body?]

106 In a report on the Irish case by some preconditions were highlighted for the implementation of service charters. These pre-conditions are valid for any of the national experiences under analysis in order to implement the service charters.

- Leadership to mainstream quality into the core business of the organisation.

- Consultation with users through partnerships (with user representatives), surveys and other means.

- The need to develop a culture driven by results, which embed customer focus.

- Clarity about customer and service mapping by understanding what services are relevant for the main business of the organization and identifying their differences.

- Launch of a networking group of public officials that are key in transferring knowledge across departments.

- Back offices that are able to sustain increasing demand of information and ability to meet customer needs in a speedy way (i.e. sound ICT-based services).

a) Ireland: network of different groups and task forces supported by secretaries general

107 At first, the QCS Initiative was not a co-ordinated approach.  This led  to significant variation in the levels of service provided across the different departments at central level. This lack of coordination prompted the creation of cross-departmental groups chaired by the secretaries-general.

108 In the modernisation strategy, the Department of the Prime Minister grants a considerable

20

relevance to the secretary generals, which had organised themselves into the Implementation Group of Secretaries General. This group has the responsibility of leading the modernisation programme. The QCS Working Group reports to the secretaries general. The Working Group includes members from government departments and offices, as well as representatives of trade unions, business, consumer and equality interests. A Research Group helps the Working Group in considering new initiatives and particular topics of interest. These groups have the tasks of supporting the share of best practice, monitoring and assessing the progress of reforms and fostering mechanisms to improve service delivery.

109 Additionally, in 2000, a QCS Officers Network was set up. The network includes representatives from ministries and offices. The Network is chaired by the chief executive of the Public Appointments Service. Their regular meetings (every two months) help to oversee the implementation of the QCS Initiative in the civil service. One of the most important roles of the network has been the implementation of the Customer Charter Initiative since 2002.

110 Another example of how the system operates is the task force on Customer Service established in 2007. This task force oversees the implementation of those customer service commitments made in the Programme for Government 2007-2012. Furthermore, this task force assesses and makes recommendations on how the various elements of the QCS initiative are applied in public service .

111 In addition to these units, sectoral centres have been established within the wider Public Service. There was a sector centre for each of the following sectors: Local Government, Health, Education and Justice. These sectoral centres have the aim to support the quality agenda in each of these sectors. The sectoral centres are highly involved with the Central Programme Office in piloting innovative initiatives.

b) Spain: network of service inspectors without enthusiastic support of under-secretaries

112 The unit in charge of service charters is at present a state agency (AEVAL) in charge of the evaluation of public policies and quality of services. This agency replaced the secretary of state for public administration in the responsibility on the charter and other quality management initiatives. At present, the AEVAL reports to the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Public Administration.

113 The undersecretary of each ministry (similar senior administrative roles than the secretary general in Ireland) through the ministerial service inspector (in charge of organizational, managerial and auditing aspects of each ministry) monitors and assesses the level of achievement of the commitments of the charters. They normally do this through performance indicators, users’ complaints and the evaluation of user satisfaction with the services. In other to do the monitoring, the service inspector follows the Questionnaire for the monitoring of the achievement of commitments included in the Guide for developing the service charters (Cuestionario de Seguimiento del Cumplimiento de los Compromisos) (see Guía para el desarrollo de Cartas de Servicio 2010). In any case, under-secretaries do not meet to discuss quality initiatives and this task related to the service charters is rather a periphery work for them in most of the cases.

114 Each ministerial report is sent to the AEVAL. The central unit in charge of monitoring the whole process will encourage the certification process if appropriate. The service charters are not subject to

21

external audit or evaluation: external validation takes place when self-assessment exercises (EFQM) are conducted or when assessors of ISOs visit the organization . However, the recently approved certification process is a kind of external validation that rather focuses on the process to draft the charter.

115 Since 2009, the agency issues a certificate stating that the charter meets the requirements of the certification protocol (see the executive order). In principle, the certification process addresses its methodology and development work, compliance with quality commitments, the indicators offered in the charter, and the criteria laid down for regular review.

c) United Kingdom: central support from cabinet office with the help of networks of quality managers

116 In the United Kingdom, the organization in charge of modernization strategies at central level is the Cabinet Office throughout any of its units. For instance, the Citizen’s Charter was re-launched on the 30 June 1998 by the Charter Unit of the Cabinet Office. A new unit was created in the Office for Public Service, the central agency responsible for public service policy, to implement the Citizen’s Charter programme and the Charter Mark scheme. The unit had to spread best practices, monitor and report progress and administer the Charter Mark award scheme. Further, the Audit Commission helped to spread the charters through the development of performance indicators in local authorities and the National Health Service. Quality standards from main charters were subject to some control by the National Audit Office and the Audit Commission.

117 In order to better implement the principles of Service First, Quality Networks were created. Quality Networks are formed by groups of managers from different public service providers. They meet to exchange ideas on quality service issues and to share best practices. Furthermore, the assessment process of the Charter Mark is undertaken by external voluntary assessors in charge to evaluate the increasing number of applications that ask for recognition each year.

d) Conclusions

118 Ireland offers a well deployed network of different officials to develop quality customer service initiatives. The system is fostered by the office of the Prime Minister, steered by the secretaries general and worked at the operational level by the QCS Working Group (made up of a wide range of different stakeholders) as well as the QCS network officers placed in all ministries.

119 In the United Kingdom, the modernization agenda, including customer focus initiatives, is steered by the Cabinet Office, which sits at the core of the decision-making process. The Cabinet Office is further helped by network of quality managers as well as assessors for the Charter Mark scheme, who work on voluntary basis.

120 However, in Spain, the support comes from AEVAL, a state agency that is not at the core of the governmental decision-making processes, unlike in Ireland or in the United Kingdom. The AEVAL relies on the network of service inspectors, but the support of the under-secretaries (equivalent to secretaries-general in Ireland) is rather weak.

6) PUBLICATION OF RESULTS AND USE OF PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

22

121 Another issue of the ToRs refers to the following question: Como se dá a publicidade dos resultados? Quais os indicadores utilizados? [How are results published? What performance indicators are mainly used?]

122 In Ireland, the achievement of targets is published in ministerial Annual Reports. According to the evaluation report of the service charters , the robustness of reporting is mixed. While reporting in Annual Reports is a normal practice, the publication of targets and performance indicators associated with service charters is highly heterogeneous. Furthermore, the achievement of these targets is some times lost in these Annual Reports. It is also unclear to what extent service users read the reports. Moreover, in some cases there is a description of the evaluation that is being carried out rather than reporting on its quantitative results. The reporting style is rather qualitative in many cases.

123 Like in the other three countries selected for this report, quantitative targets have been established. However, these targets are mostly limited to response time. By and large, most targets are actively monitored and measured.

124 In Spain, the publication of the results of the charter is not compulsory. The public does not have the right of accessing the level of accomplishment of different commitments in the charters. The internal reporting of ministries with AEVAL is not echoed in the public arena. It is up to each ministerial undersecretary to publish the actual achievement of performance indicators. In sum, the monitoring and evaluation of service charter results is primarily internal. The degree of compliance with commitments is reported to top levels of departments, and the public remains unaware of these results.

125 The city council of Madrid has established an innovative system to monitor and publish the achievement of the standards in all the charters from the city council. In the council website, citizens are welcomed to consult on how the council is performing (this external website). The system allows for comparing results across charters and years. This is perhaps one of the most transparent systems in Spain in this regard.

126 In the United Kingdom, most results on service charters are included in the websites of departments and agencies, although they are not always visible. Like in the other two countries, there is no one single publication that brings together all the results related to customer orientation.

127 To sum up, targets and results are reported in Ireland in Annual Reports. This publication strategy entails the risk of hiding the results that matter to citizens in other performance indicators on how the organization is managed. Discussions on the matter have suggested integrating customer related results from all departments into one single report. In Spain, results are not published or only at the will of ministries. In general, the public is uninformed from the performance of public sector organizations in this matter.

7) PARTICIPATION OF CITIZENS IN DRAFTING THE SERVICE CHARTERS AND THE USE OF SURVEYS

a) Participation of citizens in quality initiatives

128 This section deals with the question on how society takes part in the process of drafting service

23

charters in particular trying to answer this wording in the ToRs: Como se dá a participação da sociedade? [How does society take part in these initiatives?]

i) Ireland: from low use of consultation at the beginning to higher participation of society

129 An early assessment of the system showed that customer surveys and consultation to draft the charters were hardly used. Later on, consultation alongside with other techniques has been intensively used by most departments that have launched service charters.

ii) Spain: use of surveys and other techniques for consultation purposes

130 In theory, the opinion of users is consulted through different means by the individual authorities: front-line staff, website surveys, user satisfaction surveys and user panels. Units delivering service charters are encouraged to do user consultation, however, this practice is not homogeneously widespread. By and large, only those units that already have other quality tools in place and use surveys on ongoing basis are likely to use surveys for adapting the charters to service needs.

131 In 67 per cent of the organizations that have service charters, opinion surveys are used for setting the commitments of the charter (77 per cent at local level) while in 50 per cent of the cases (23 per cent at local level), the opinion of the users are collected in the front-office. In one half of the cases, surveys are carried out specifically for the development of service charters; in the other half of the cases, surveys are linked to other quality initiatives such as the self-assessment of the EFQM model .

iii) United Kingdom: the first national experience with People’s Panel

132 Consultation has been part of the wide policy towards the improvement of the public sector in the British government. For instance, the 1998 White Paper Modern Local Government: In Touch with the People (Cm 4014) requested all local authorities to consult widely in policy formulation, when producing community plans and when trying to improve the quality of local public services. .

133 There are other approaches that could complement the use of satisfaction surveys, as the British example has shown. In some cases, the user experience could be further used for improving the services. This has been attempted with national surveys of patients’ experiences of health care. In other cases, the quality could be measured by the outcomes of the provided service in the users. For instance, measuring the quality of life of particular patients (diabetes) or recipients of social help (programmes to address famine, for instance) would be examples of including outcomes measures into quality programmes.

134 A particular consultation technique that was used to implement the charter agenda was the People’s Panel. The use of this panel for the Service First initiative had the purpose to see public services from the point of view of the citizen. The Panel was established in 1997 with 5,000 people (with a profile representative of the total population in terms of age, gender, region, socio-economic group, and a range of other demographic indicators) in order to research the public's views on improving services. Two supplements of 500 members each were added during the Panel’s life in order to over-represent some groups or make up for the losses from the Panel.

135 Citizen’s Panels were already commonplace in some 100 local councils (House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration, 2000, Qu.104). In this case, the People’s Panel was the first nation-wide initiative of this kind, but short-lived with its abolition in 2001. The aim of the Panel

24

was to have a first-hand source of information on the views of citizens on a wide range of issues related to public services. The Panel allowed for understanding changes across time with the same group of people. The idea of the panel was abandoned because the same aim could have been done more effectively by ministries or agencies according to the government. In fact, not all government departments used the services of the Panel, and the omnibus surveys did not satisfy the local needs of particular organizations .

25

Box 1 Strengths and weaknesses of the People's Panel

Main strengths of the People’s Panel:

symbolism of the Government's recognition of the importance of consultation about public services;

user-friendliness of having a Panel available, run by a highly reputable independent expert survey organisation (MORI) - meant that novice users needed only to think about their research problem, not any technical survey design issues;

financial-friendliness - it being both easier and cheaper to buy into the Panel than to go through the tendering process involved in commissioning an independent survey;

equality of information - giving at least a broad feel of public opinion, if not necessarily a precise reflection;

production of quick results - enabling the highlighting (eg for Ministers) of areas that needed policy action or more detailed research;

accessibility of results - and of an increasing body of data, including benchmark data, on attitudes to the public services, via the Panel's own website;

linking of reported results with policy statements - showing that the Panel could be effective in contributing to policy development.

Main weaknesses of the People’s Panel:

symbolism - interpretable by critics as its being PR-driven, rather than research-driven, and more to do with measuring satisfaction than with serious consultation;

sample design and size - which, though large by conventional survey standards, could result in some seriously small numbers of users of particular non-universal services, thereby limiting the significance of any analysis;

unfitness for purpose - its sample size and relatively high attrition rate made it ill-suited for its supposedly principal purpose: tracking attitude change of the same individuals over time - leaving it with no unique advantage over other vehicles for research: omnibus surveys, specially recruited focus groups, etc.

breadth of questions - aimed at measuring overall attitudes, satisfaction, etc., which limited the ability to draw policy-relevant conclusions;

lack of comparability with other similar surveys, which could have been increased by using more standard or 'harmonised' questions.

Source:

26

136 Apart that consultation is widely practiced; the British government has also invested resources in identifying general drivers of user satisfaction (that are likely to differ among countries). According to a study commissioned by the Cabinet Office (see document) the drivers of customer satisfaction that explain 67 per cent of the cases in the United Kingdom are the following ones:

- Delivery of promised outcomes and handling problems effectively;

- Timeliness of service provision;

- Accurate and comprehensive information, and progress reports provided;

- Professionalism and competence of staff and treating customers fairly;

- Staff attitudes – friendly, polite and sympathetic to customers’ needs.

137 The assessment report of the Charter Mark conducted by Herdan, however, showed several problems with the measurement of user satisfaction. During the different hearings for the report written by PASC (2008), the committee came to the conclusion that the measurement of customer satisfaction was problematic due to several reasons. The hearings even questioned whether user satisfaction is the most appropriate indicator to measure quality public services.

138 Several criticisms were voiced against the exclusive use of user satisfaction surveys as exclusive means to understand user needs and expectations. Firstly, such subjective measures could be misleading, because in some cases they could reflect at the same time low expectations and high quality provision. This means that there would not be a clear interpretation of the survey results. This is particularly the case for low income groups, inhabitants of disadvantaged areas or senior people. In these cases, there is a tendency to report on high satisfaction levels even though objectively the delivered service is worse than the one experienced by other demographic groups.

139 Secondly, in some complex services (tax administration, social services, cultural or educational services), the use of satisfaction indexes are not enough for judging the key element of the services. As those services have a considerable back office work, users do not have the necessary information to make a sound judgement that could be of help for the service providers. Therefore, the satisfaction with the service is often limited to the type of experience of the user rather than the solution given by the authority or the actual service delivered by the public sector organization.

140 Thirdly, user satisfaction might not be consistent with broader policy objectives. For instance, students of secondary level may be satisfied with low demanding syllabuses, but if so, they may score low in the international PISA assessments. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardised assessment that was jointly developed by participating countries and administered to 15-year-old teenagers in schools

iv) Conclusion

141 In most of the cases, the participation technique in use is consultation instruments. Co-decision mechanisms are rarely reported to be used. Consultation has taken various forms like surveys, citizen’s panels or focus groups. Early assessments of the charters were concerned that consultation was rather low. Later on, consultation seems to have increased in all three countries. However, another concern with consultation is that the focused very often in service satisfaction questions. It seems that service satisfaction as only predictor is poor in identifying the complexity of many public

27

services like health or social services.

b) Surveys on service satisfaction

142 This subsection deals with the following question from the ToRs: Existem pesquisas regulares para aferir e dar publicidade aos resultados da qualidade dos serviços prestados? [Are there regular surveys to assess and publish the results on the quality of the delivered services] General surveys of satisfaction of the users with public services are becoming common place in the three countries.

143 In Ireland, to provide a benchmark for customer satisfaction with the services provided by the Civil Service, the Department of the Taoiseach commissions periodic surveys of general public and business customers. The results of the most recent surveys to customers and businesses were published in 2009. In Spain, annual waves of surveys on quality satisfaction only started in 2006 (see results for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009).

144 Humphreys (2007) highlighted that the positive opinion on the quality of the services (in terms of user satisfaction and perceived efficiency of the service) grew in Ireland only slightly between 1997 and 2002. During this period, there was a considerable investment in the QCS Initiative. In spite of this, the increase of satisfaction level seemed to be low. There are three possible answers to this: a) the counterfactual analysis of what would have happened in absence of the initiative cannot be made. This would have probably thrown a rather negative trend. B) The drop of user contact with public service organisations due to the economic growth (less demand for social services or employment services) might have influenced this. C) Further, the level of expectations might have grown in an ever more confident population. The problem with measuring public service satisfaction is that neither expectations nor levels of service delivery are static and quality is about “the extent to which service delivery and/or service outcomes meet with the informed expectations and defined needs of the customer”.

145 The United Kingdom has launched not only user satisfaction surveys but also People’s Panel to identify trends in user satisfaction. Consultation is considerably practiced in British public services. The Cabinet Office has drafted Guidelines not only on How to Improve the Public Experience in the Public Services but also on How to Measure Customer Satisfaction. National surveys have been launched in several waves.

8) INCENTIVES TO ORGANIZATIONS THAT COMPLY WITH THE POLICIES OF CITIZEN’S SATISFACTION

146 This section deals with the following question of the ToRs: e) Quais os meios de incentivo às organizações públicas que cumprem as políticas de atendimento ao cidadão? [Which incentives are better fit for encouraging public sector organizations to implement policies focused on customer satisfaction?]

i) Ireland: use of performance pay and awards to incentivise quality

147 In Ireland, two different schemes to motivate the use of service charter with explicit commitments have been in place. On the one hand, the achievement of service standards set in consultation with the recipients of the service has been linked to public service pay. In order to ensure that such performance indicators are sufficiently challenging, Quality Assurance Groups for each sector were established to challenge them . This link though does not seem to be an easy one to establish, and

28

the results of the scheme have not been reported.

148 On the other hand, public service awards have been set as recognition schemes. The Taoiseach’s Public Service Excellence Awards launched in 2004 was, for instance, one initiative of the Quality Customer Service Working Group in order to acknowledge and recognise the improvements related to the QCS Initiative. The Awards rewards examples of innovation and excellence in the development and delivery of services by Public Service organisations every two years. There is also an equivalent scheme for local authorities.

ii) Spain: awards and certification protocols to recognise quality and service charters

149 Two incentives have been used to recognise good work on quality initiatives in general and on service charters in particular. The reward of excellence through the different regional and national awards is one way to give incentives to public sector organizations in this regard. Such awards aim at providing recognition and motivation. There are three types of awards: Excellence (linked to high score in self-evaluation schemes), Innovation (linked to knowledge management and the use of information and communication technologies in service delivery) and best practices (rewarding good practices with direct impact in the users of the service or good practices with internal and not external impact). Although the service charters programme does not have a special recognition scheme, some good practices with impact in the user are likely to receive a good practice award.

150 Since 2009, the agency issues a certificate stating that the charter meets the requirements of the certification protocol. This is another instrument to incentivise public organizations to launch service charters. In principle, the certification process addresses its methodology and development work, compliance with quality commitments, the indicators offered in the charter, and the criteria laid down for regular review. The certification lasts three years. After this period, it is expected an update of the charter and its commitments. Once updated, the organization can undergo a certification process again. Certified charters are included in a list of certified service charters with public access to them. This would be a guarantee of the quality of the process. However, by the time of writing it was impossible to access this list.

151 The following requirements are needed to start the certification process:

- Service charters should be approved through a ministerial legislative measure (Executive order of under secretary with approval from AEVAL and, in some cases, the approval of the ministry of economics and the treasury).

- The executive order should appear in the official gazette. This will prove that the charter is available for the public.

- The charter should have a life period of at least three years.

- The achievement of results should be verified by the inspection of services of the department.

iii) United Kingdom: the Charter Mark as a main incentive to focus on the customer

152 Apart from the different award schemes, the Charter Mark, a sort of quality stamp in its latest evolution, has been a clearly devised incentive to promote service excellence. The Charter Mark, launched in 1992, was part of the Citizen’s Charter programme. The Charter Mark Awards Scheme has evolved from the Charter Programme set up in 1992. It was conceived as an award to be granted

29

to organizations that achieved excellent customer service in the public sector. The award could only be granted if organisations showed that they were complying with the Citizen’s Charter principles for delivering their services. Moreover, they had to display evidence of “customer satisfaction” with the service provided. By 1992 there were 35 Charter Mark award holders, 949 in 2002 and 1600 in 2008 (PASC- Public Administration Select Committee 2008).

153 The nature of the Charter Mark changed since its inception and that may explain the high number of organizations that have received the award. At first, it was a competitive award and it changed in 1995 to a standard of service provision, so that any organisation meeting the criteria could gain a Charter. The Herdan’s report coincided with the opportunity of the change considering that the Charter Mark was “a benchmark that all should aspire to, rather than a badge to collect”. The Herdan’s report recommended to refocus the Charter Mark into a new scheme (Customer Service Excellence) presently in place to ensure user satisfaction with public services (see the principles in Annex).

154The Service First Unit within the Cabinet Office is responsible for the Charter Mark Awards Scheme. The application, not subject to charge fees, can be voluntarily filed by any public sector body in charge of direct service delivery and responsible for managing its own staff and budget. NGOs that receive at least 50 percent of their income from the public sector and deliver public services are also eligible for the Charter Mark if they apply for it. Since 1999, large organizations are encouraged to apply for the individual parts that are autonomous. In the application, the organization submits the following documents: an application form, a one-page summary of the main points of the application, a one-page background note about the organisation, ten pages covering the ten criteria and evidence supporting the application.

155 Awards are granted for three years, after which organisations must reapply. The organizations that received the Charter Mark may use the logo on stationery, and on their equipments during the period for which the award is valid (no more than three years). The achievement of the Charter Mark implies that public sector organizations have to demonstrate excellence against 10 criteria (see Annex). The update of the criteria has normally involved more partnership working and inclusion of front line staff through consultation processes.

156 Two independent assessors score the written application and a visit to the organization prior to the final assessment is undertaken. At the time, the Service First Unit provided independent assessment and detailed feedback on how organisations can improve. Assessors are not paid and they come from several backgrounds: academics, consultants and retired public servants.

157 The achievement of a particular organization that has received the ‘quality stamp or mark’ is assessed once a year to make sure that the organization still meets the standards. The external assessor uses a four-band scale (see box) that is based on documentary evidence, observations and discussions with the managers of the organisation.

30

Box 2 Assessing organisations under the Charter Mark Scheme

Assessors score organisations against each element of each criterion using a four-band scale:

best practice – all aspects of the element are met, and the applicant can demonstrate that they have gone beyond the requirements

full compliance – all aspects of the element are met

partial compliance – some but not all aspects of the element are met and remedial action to meet the remainder could be put in place within three months

major non-compliance – none of the aspects of the element are met, or the assessor concludes that remedial action would take longer than three months

158 According to Humphreys (2003), the yearly 1,200 applications require between 40 and 60 independent assessors and an annual budget of around of $ 2.5 million (£2 million). From the point of view of the applicants, an organization may need between 25 to 30 staff days to prepare the application. Since 1999, feedback reports from the assessors were introduced in order to make suggestion to unsuccessful applicants. Around 80 per cent of the unsuccessful applicants implemented the feedback provided by the assessment team. A special seminar for re-applicants focuses on improvements needed to increase their chance of gaining an award. The introduction of a mentoring system enables unsuccessful applicants to obtain advice on their application and on ways in which they can improve their service from a Charter Mark-holding organisation.

159 In the (Herdan 2006) evaluation it seemed that Charter Mark holders are generally very positive about the scheme as they feel that the tool helps them to achieve higher level standards and also helps them motivating staff. It is unclear how effective the Charter Mark is in really driving up the standards. On the other side, the level of awareness of the Charter Mark by the general public is rather low. Some members of the public are sceptical about the value of quality schemes and awards when displayed by public offices. In any case, if users have to confront any kind of choice, the holding of some form of quality scheme or award might influence this choice.

87. The analysis of (Humphreys, Butler, and O'Donnell 2001) of the Charter Marks is useful for the purposes of this report because this Irish expert also recommended adopting a similar scheme for the Irish public service, although this scheme has not materialized until now.

b) Conclusions

160 Schemes to incentivize the use of quality strategies range from certification exercises of the service charter drafting process through stamps or marks of excellence to awarding the best services. While all these instruments seem to be valid, Charter Marks (or similar schemes) seem to be better placed to become an incentive for introducing charters. The Charter Mark is a standard of service provision, so that any organisation meeting the criteria could gain the Charter Mark. This helps organizations to focus on the customer, because the external assessment exercise focuses on the ten criteria that are relevant to the user.

9) EVALUATION OF SERVICE CHARTERS 161 This section offers an assessment of the service charters scheme in each country by independent

31

sources. In the United Kingdom, the system has been evaluated by parliamentary commission hearing evidence from different experts; in Ireland the report was commissioned to a consultancy firm; and, in Spain the evaluation was performed by academics and it was not commissioned by government.

a) Ireland: significant improvement in customer focus in spite of weaknesses

162 Researchers from the Institute of Public Administration and consultancy firms have evaluated several dimensions of the QCS initiative covering service charters, Customer Action Plans, the adequacy of Charter Marks, and the use of consultation as well as other policies of the context. The results of the evaluation are reported here.

163 In an early evaluation of the system in 1998 before having launched the service charter but after setting the quality strategy, there was some progress in issues related to the draft of Strategy Statements, Business Plans, appointment of customer service officers, training programmes for staff and the handling of complaint mechanisms. A negative aspect highlighted during that period was the low use of customer surveys and consultation. In the second evaluation (one year later), managers complained that the available resources (through a Change Management Fund) were not enough form making substantive progress in the QCS Initiative.

164 In 2003, evaluated the first wave of (1997-2000) Customer Service Action Plans. The plans showed great degree of variation in the specification of standards and how these standards should be met. The second wave of Customer Action Plans reached all departments and some services were more user focus oriented (instead of drafting objectives only meaningful to public managers) as a driver to the transformation of the operation of the services. Progress has also differed among ministries with external customer contact like departments in charge of social affairs (normally good progress) than departments with internal customers (branches of the ministry of finance, for instance).

165 Apart from the engagement of QCS officers, the commitment of senior managers in charge of line units has been uneven. They have seen very often quality as an add-on and not the main business of the unit. The most important hindrance of the process is that customer service values are not mainstreamed in the business processes of many departments .

166 In 2006, all thirty targeted organisations had published their customer charters, basically following the Guidelines for Charter preparation (see the newest version of the guidelines).

167 According to , there are several areas of improvement as regards to the contents of the charters. These weaknesses can also apply to the Spanish service charters:

- Charters are standardised documents that do not always reflect local conditions.

- Charters do not segment customers of the organizations and treat them equally through the same standards, even though there are significant differences among them. The diversity of different services within a ministerial department and the diversity of service users, each one with their own need has not been recognised.

- All charters tend to contain quantified service targets; however, those targets mainly focus on response times to communications. There are normally no targets, for instance, to commit to a certain level of customer satisfaction (i.e. customer satisfaction index).

32

- Accessibility and visibility of Charters by the public is also low. They not always easily visible either in the premises or in the web site of the organization. It was felt a lack of proactivity in making customers aware of the existence of the charter.

168 According to an evaluation of the OECD , significant improvement in customer focus and service delivery have been noticed ten years after the launch of the QCS initiative, although this improvement has not been uniform across all services.

169 Another element of relevance to help service units to draft their service charters is to identify what are the key drivers of service satisfaction. In 1998, a survey identified five drivers, that have remained consistent throughout subsequent surveys: timeliness; knowledge and competence of staff; fairness; courtesy and comfort; and outcome . These drivers may different among different countries.

b) Spain

170 Although the contribution of service charters to service improvement has not been measured, there have been internal and external visible impacts of the charter scheme (see ). Internally, it seems that the introduction of charters have helped to change working procedures, have improved the knowledge of the organization by internal staff, have contributed to better control of quality standards, have increased the internal perception of service quality and have fostered the cohesion of staff from different departments.

171 Externally, “the results of satisfaction surveys carried out before and after the implementation of service charters show that they have improved citizen perception of service accessibility, the transparency of the entity, the cooperation between units related to the service as well as enhancing the entity’s image, the service offer and quality” .

172 In the Spanish context, the introduction of service charters has been relevant as a driver to change a highly bureaucratic style. The idea of having “citizen first” has changed the way in which some organizations have conducted their business. However, as a downside, service charters have not encouraged radical transformation of public sector services because they have not been previously preceded by other pre-conditions, for instance, the presence of a performance management system.

173 A mere content analysis of service charters in central departments shows considerable differences between those agencies which have undertaken a profound managerial reform (by and large with committed senior leadership and the introduction of performance management systems for the core business of the organization) like the tax agency and the social security institute, for instance, and those organisations whose primary contact with less bureaucratic practices (i.e. they are characterised by incremental budgetary processes, focus on inputs and legal procedures and lack of results oriented objectives) has been the service charter. When the charters have not followed the adoption of performance management system, their impact has been limited, in the periphery of the service, without real impact in the core business.

174 Like in other systems, service charters have fostered the adoption of complaint mechanisms. The use of complaints as a relatively cheap “consulting service” to identify areas of improvement in service delivery has not been always well understood by public managers. Interviews with public officials show that the less service users complain the better for the service. This may hide the fact that users do not complain because they find it useless. Their trust in public sector organisations is so low that they do

33

not feel encouraged to complain. In any case, it seems that the number of complaints might have risen and this has triggered the launch of guidelines to set up complaint management systems (see document) Like in other countries, service charters do not include staff penalties related to complaints or redress tools to users.

175 The consequences of the results in service delivery once a charter is implemented are far to be clear for the general public. It is uncertain what public sector organisations do if they continuously fail to meet standards or standards are not very ambitious. There is no information about the complaint management systems. Users do not know what issues trigger most complaints, what public authorities do about those complaints and how those complaints are fed into the improvements of service delivery. In general, the publication of any type of results stemming from the charter is rather low. There is a contrast between public commitments and opaque (rather internal) accountability systems.

176 Service charters have been adopted in isolation or as one dimension of wider quality management strategies. Many organisations that have undertaken self-assessment exercises (through EFQM or other excellence models), have adopted service charters in order to improve one of the dimensions of quality service (customer dimension). However, this does not mean that there has been an attempt to link service charters to wider performance management systems as previously mentioned.

c) United Kingdom

177 An evaluation in 1997 found that the Citizen’s Charter had led (not always alone) to improvements in the delivery, culture and responsiveness of many services. The charters have helped users to be more critical to public services and service providers have understood the need to include the views of users in assisting their management of the service. The Parliamentary Ombudsman somehow regretted in 2008 that many organisations had abandoned the charter scheme. It seemed to him that those services were gathering higher number of complaints .

178 The review of the programme offered the following weaknesses of the service charters :

- Many service standards in the charters were too vague;

- Relevant issues to users were not included in the charters;

- Users were hardly consulted or involved in setting the standards;

- Front line staff was not involved in drafting the charters.

179 The first service charters varied considerably in their length, content, and especially, the promises to service users. For instance, in the first 1991 Patient’s Charter, patients had the some measurable entitlements, other rather general aspirations (see box). This variability has been found in the early stages of service charters in the three countries.

Box 3 Entitlements of the Patient Charter (version from 1991)

- “Formalisation of best practice relating to, for example, standards of catering and accommodation; - Statutory entitlements, such as access to medical records and informed consent; - Targets, such as waiting times for treatment; and - Broader policy objectives, such as the promotion of community support.”

34

180 Therefore, users were often confused about the meaning and scope of their entitlements as in some cases there were general commitment to a good practice, while in other cases a specific target would demonstrate if the proposed standard would be reached. Finally, there was uncertainty whether some commitments would entail compensation mechanisms (moral or financial) or not .

181 Apparently, the Citizen’s Charter lost public respect. Citizens thought it was a confusing scheme. However, according to PASC report Choice, Voice and Public Services the basic idea, that public services should operate at a minimum standard of performance, whatever the provider, has remained as relevant. The Charter programme has the merit of having articulated the need to focus on the user and the need to be responsive to their needs. It also made popular the measurement and publication of performance as well as to bring clarity to the information about services .

182 The Charter Mark programme has also had some positive remarks. A consultancy company, analyzing data from 17,877 civil and family court customers across 218 courts between 2001 and 2004, found that the service at public counters received significantly higher satisfaction ratings, more satisfaction with telephone service and better complaints handling than those without the Charter Mark award (Thompson, 2005 quoted in

183 In general, the Charter Mark programme has been positively evaluated with the caveat that not many organisations have striven to apply for it and the visibility of the Charter Mark and their consequences was low among the general public (see Herdan review). The most important element of the Charter Mark is that it simply did not reward good service (recognition scheme) but it rather helped to raise performance and had performance improvement as a tool for continuous monitoring and improvement of the organisation. The Charter Mark certainly helped to support organisations in focusing on public service users’ satisfaction .

d) Conclusion

184 There are some common problems in the three countries: low use of user surveys in the early stages of the charters programmes, unequal distribution of charters across departments (although the Irish case seem to show more uniformity in this regard), uneven adoption of standards or measurable standards too focused on delivery time. Besides, the Spanish system is in disadvantage as there has not been a commissioned evaluation of the charter process in order to improve the scheme like in Ireland or Great Britain and the publication of results coming from the charters does not seem to happen. Finally, in Spain service charters have not been mainstreamed in the core business of the organisation.

185 In Ireland and in the United Kingdom, service charters have been better mainstreamed into the core business of the organisation in spite of criticism of several evaluations. Quality and customer focus are not at the periphery of the concerns of government. In Spain, however, in spite of the relatively high proliferation of charters and of some self-assessment exercises, customer focus is at the periphery of the concerns of government. By and large, quality is rather the concern of quality managers.

10) POLICY LESSONS 186 The following policy lessons have been drawn from the three case studies. Of course, these

35

lessons can only be applied under certain conditions. Some of them could be of use for the Brazilian government. However, the purpose of this section is not so much about the specific recommendations for the Brazilian government as about what mistakes have been made and what has worked. Further work with the Brazilian case (understanding the logic of their reform processes) will help to fine tune and tailor these learnings to that particular context. Some lessons address direct concerns from the ToRs; others try to include wider experiences with customer satisfaction in these three countries.

187 There are at least three major dilemmas in the Citizen’s Charter process. The first refers to the tension between tailoring the charter to local needs of a particular agency or local authority and the need to have certain central control in order to achieve some uniformity. The second reflects the tension between a top-down approach in which senior managers launch the initiative and try to control it and a bottom-up empowerment of consumers and staff from lower hierarchical levels. The top-down approach is likely to have league tables and rankings of organizations and a more grass-root approach is in favour of identifying solutions for particular customers. The third tension is established between a continuous rise in the level of expectations, which entails stronger commitments in a context where funding is key for improvement policies. The following lessons try to identify a middle point as a result from the experiences from different countries.

a) Pre-conditions for implementing service charters

188 The pre-conditions for the customer charters to have a minimal success were highlighted by the in their assessment report of the Irish service charters:

- Leadership to mainstream quality into the core business of the organisation.

- Strong partnership, for instance, with user representatives in order to elicit their diversity dimensions and their most relevant needs. This goes beyond than just surveying into users perceptions.

- The need to develop corporate culture within the organisation, which works towards the achievement of results and those results are included in Business Plans / Strategy Statements.

- Clarity about customer and service mapping by understanding what services are relevant for the main business of the organization and identifying their differences.

- Launch of a networking group of public officials that are key in transferring knowledge across departments.

- Back offices that are able to sustain increasing demand of information and ability to meet customer needs in a speedy way (i.e. sound ICT-based services).

189 These pre-conditions seem to be also in demand in other national systems and have been identified elsewhere (Loeffler, Parrado, Meskal, 2007). Some of these pre-conditions will be developed further below.

Recommendation: Each precondition can apply for any of the system under exam. Therefore, they are a valid point for launching any customer satisfaction strategy or any charter programme. Efforts should be placed to foster the above mentioned pre-conditions.

b) Mainstreaming quality in the main business of the organization

190 In general, there have been difficulties to mainstream quality in the major business of the

36

organisation. As a result, not many departments have engaged seriously in significant business restructuring to place the values, needs and expectations of the customer in the centre stage. In recent times, Ireland and United Kingdom have been more successful in contemplating this quality management initiative in combination with broader management policies. Spain has failed so far to achieve this integration.

191 In the Irish civil service, it has been often requested that departments and offices ensure that customer service issues are included into all elements of the strategic planning and reporting process (Strategy Statements, Business Plans and Customer Action Plans). They already have a wide range of instrument that allows services to have a complete look at service charters (not just on the issue of customer focus). The concern is double. On the one hand, service charters and Customer Action Plans should be aware of the Strategy Statements and Business Plans. On the other hand, Strategy Statements should also show how the expectations and needs from the users are considered. Further, the Strategy Statement should link with Customer Charter commitments and the Customer Action Plan by including customer concerns in the development of associated objectives. This view has been widespread by the Department of the Prime Minister of Ireland, but it could easily apply elsewhere .

192 Recommendation: It is highly recommended that service charters or any quality management initiative addressed at increasing user satisfaction with the service is embedded in managerial systems in which results oriented objective are proposed, performance indicators are used to monitor the achievement of results, and results oriented objectives are embedded in the budgetary process. The Irish experience, with all the potential pitfalls identified by observers and evaluators, is a good example in this regard. See also the approach in the following publication of Loeffler, Parrado and Meskal 2007 developed for the Czech government and other Easter European countries and commissioned by SIGMA-OECD.

c) The search for tailored drivers of customer satisfaction

193 The number of dimensions that drives customer satisfaction is rather low and depends on local conditions. It is likely that the drivers of customer satisfaction with public services will differ in countries as different as Brasil, Honduras, Germany or New Zealand. For instance, in the United Kingdoms, the drivers of customer satisfaction that explain 67 per cent of the cases are the following ones (see complete report):

- Delivery of promised outcomes and handling problems effectively;

- Timeliness of service provision;

- Accurate and comprehensive information, and progress reports provided;

- Professionalism and competence of staff and treating customers fairly;

- Staff attitudes – friendly, polite and sympathetic to customers’ needs.

194 The 1998 Irish survey formulated these drivers of service satisfaction somehow differently: timeliness; knowledge and competence of staff; fairness; courtesy and comfort; and outcome . The similarity is unsurprising. A further analysis of these drivers is to understand the percentage that each driver accounts for user satisfaction.

195 Recommendation: It is recommended, if still not done in a country that deploys quality strategies,

37

that the government engages in identifying what dimensions are the drivers of service satisfaction in that particular country. Perhaps, in some cases there is the need to differentiate among urban vs rural environment, geographic regions and type of services. The identification of the drivers of customer satisfaction may help to mainstream the main standards of service users into quality initiatives.

d) On Charters Guidelines

196 The role of the Guidelines has been very positive in Spain and in Ireland. In Spain, there are different guidelines for drafting service charters. For instance, there are Guidelines from central government, from regional authorities (autonomous community of Andalusia) or from city councils (for instance, the guidelines from the association of municipalities and provinces or the guidelines from the city council of Madrid.

197 It is recommended that the Guidelines address the following aspects:

- Define the diversity of the service in terms of users and services provided. This should help in the adaptation of more tailored commitments.

- The guidelines could address both service charters, as visible short documents mainly for external use, and Customer Action Plans (or other labels), for internal use with focus in the integration of Business Plans and customer focus. The Customer Action Plans could also be a backup for the service charter documents themselves. Both guidelines could be consolidated though in the same document, as they do in Ireland, although it should be clearly acknowledged the different role they play.

- Commitments should be clearer and should go beyond the “delivery time” dimension. Other dimensions of the service should help to draft commitments.

- Unlike practices in some Spanish public sector organisations, service charters should be short, easy to read and accessible for the public. As mentioned below, each service charter has their own niche and requested adaptations.

- Specific commitments of the service should be evaluated and shared with the public. This includes not only the results of performance indicators but also the information contained in the complaint mechanisms. Stakeholders could be aware of the existence of this evaluation and they should be able to seek information on the results. This evaluation should be rigorous in the methodologies used by doing proper sampling and choosing appropriate questions. Whenever possible, this evaluation should be subject to some degree of independent and professional validation.

- The use of Annual Reports to include reporting on the service charters could be an option. However, care must be displayed with this option as data relevant to the customers could be embedded in lengthy reports of little use for them. The reported results should encompass not only the mere performance indicators but also actions undertaken to achieve the results or to solve problems that were raised during the budgetary year (or the 2 to 3 year period of validity of the charter). Perhaps, results focused on the user from different organizations should be published in a joint report, so that the actual delivery of services is conveniently enhanced. Web sites could also be used more imaginatively to show the results of service standards as in Madrid city council (see website)

e) External customer satisfaction in a wider context

38

198 The most common way to measure customer satisfaction worldwide is through surveys. However, there is an increasing dissatisfaction with the exclusive reliance on these surveys to improve the quality of services.

199 There are other approaches that could complement the use of satisfaction surveys, as the British example has shown. In some cases, the user experience could be further used for improving the services. This has been attempted with national surveys of patients’ experiences of health care. In other cases, the quality could be measured by the outcomes of the provided service in the users. For instance, measuring the quality of life of particular patients (diabetes) or recipients of social help (programmes to address famine, for instance) would be examples of including outcomes measures into quality programmes. Further, there is much to be done by the systematic analysis of users’ complaints. Public sector organisations could profit from this relative cheap method of acquiring information from users (no need to deliver surveys). In some organizations in Germany and in the United Kingdom there is even a proactive approach to complaint management by encouraging complaints from users in internal/external websites or in radio programmes. Under the motto: “Tell Rob your problems” (for internal staff); or “Tell the mayor your concerns” (as citizen).

200 Recommendation: While user surveys is a valid instrument to gauge users’ expectations and needs, other instruments are likely to offer a complementary vie like user experience, measurement of outcomes, analysis of complaints, customer panels, focus groups with representatives of advocacy organisations and the like.

f) The idea of a Charter Mark as an incentive to implement quality strategies

201 The Herdan review identified many positive aspects in the Charter Mark, as an instrument for improving user responsiveness and raising the quality of public services. The Charter Mark initiative is a mixed tool that serves the purposes of quality improvement, of awarding (recognizing) excellence and establishing a customer service standard. A similar recommendation was given for the Irish public sector . Such a Quality Mark could assist the internal and external promotion of quality service at the same time that it constitutes a driver for continuous improvement. If needed, the Quality Mark could be a step towards the achievement of other excellence models (Malcolm Baldrige, Premio Iberoamericano a la Calidad and the like).

202 Recommendation: The Charter Mark principle aligned with the principles of customer satisfaction and improvement of outcomes is a valid instrument to strive for better service quality. The instrument should operate firstly through self-assessment and later on be externally validated by an accredited organization, so that the results are credible for third parties. Finally, the tool should profit as much as possible from benchmarking and sharing of best practices .

g) Public service guarantees as principles and the case for universal standards

203 Standards are established by the concerned organisation and each organization normally has their particular standards. This strategy does not ensure that standards are challenging across the board.

204 In the United Kingdom, before the victory of recent conservative-liberal government, the discussion focused on whether it would make sense to establish some minimum standards. In the British National Health Service, for instance, the setting of minimum nationwide standards has driven improvements in performance (for instance, establishing maximum limits for waiting times to receive

39

surgery). The setting of minimum standards prevents the inequity of treatment due to the “postcode lottery”: your treatment depends on where you live (your postcode is). At the same time, establishing minimum standards brings the race to the bottom, as this may encourage service providers to satisfy the bare minimum and forget about improvements. Therefore, minimum standards could be helpful in order to avoid the postcode lottery effect. These standards would set a floor or a baseline not to be trespassed. Beyond that, organizations should be encouraged to strive for excellence and, locally, the organizations would set their own local meaningful standards. In this regard, there is a balance to strike between the minimal comparability level across jurisdictions and the degree of local flexibility and innovation. Another issue is that the minimum standard is the ‘right’ one: not too easy, not too ambitious.

205 Recommendation: Nationwide (or state-wide) minimum standards could be established for certain services in which there is already a long tradition in measurement. The setting of a minimum acceptable level of service quality provision should not stifle innovation and improvement of those organisations that could go beyond the bare minimum. Other schemes like the Charter Mark can certainly raise the motivation of those that go beyond the minimum standard. Further, as mentioned above, it would be needed to move beyond purely response times to other targets appropriate to the substance of the quality.

h) Responsibilities of service users

206 Service charters do not always specify the responsibilities of service users, which may entail problems of quality for other users if responsibilities are not fulfilled. For instance, in health-care in some countries some 10 per cent of people do not show up for their out-patient appointments and the slots that could be taken by other people are lost. Therefore, a balance of better management of appointments as well as a more responsibility from the side of the patients should take place. This does not mean that the service user should lose their rights to public services if failing to uphold their responsibilities.

207 Recommendation: If minimum standards are to be credible (see previous recommendation), they should take place in a context in which rights and entitlements are placed together with responsibilities. As the level of entitlements depends on the resources available, it is necessary that charters mention the responsibilities of the user and to what extent the inadequate use of these responsibilities are taken into account in the delivery of the service to them.

i) The internal customer

208 According to different analysis and evaluations of the system, there have been some implementation problems for not including properly internal customers as relevant drivers of improving service delivery. All cases showed that the delivery of quality services suffered partially from the extent to which staff had the necessary support (i.e. training, resources, support from more experienced staff with the charters and so on).

209 Recommendation: Regarding the internal customer, there should be support for establishing a network of quality officers, for sharing practices among departments and for informing and training staff on the latest developments of quality strategies. Furthermore, the promoters of charter initiatives should have a very clear budgetary picture so that improvements can be tailored to available resources.

40

41