Radically re-thinking advice

This report describes the work carried out by Nottingham City Council, the Advice Nottingham group of advice agencies and Advice UK to apply a systems thinking approach to advice provision in the city.
 
The pilot builds on Advice UK's earlier Radical project which found that:

• A large amount of demand for advice services is brought about by the failure of public bodies, such as the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) or HM Revenue and Customs, to get things right
• Requirements imposed on agencies from outside, for example by funders, hinder their ability to respond to client need

The Nottingham pilot has examined the extent to which these factors are true of advice provision in the city and the overall aim of the project is to identify and remove waste from the system so as to improve the client experience.
 
Value demand or failure demand?
The first element of the work in Nottingham was an analysis of demand. This involved talking to clients to find out why they were seeking advice. Once this information had been gathered, it was categorised according to whether it was "value demand - work advice agencies exist for and want to be doing - or failure demand - demand that is generated by the failure to do something or do something right for the clients."
 
484 demands were recorded. 281 were categorised as value demand eg "I've been made redundant, I need help to claim my benefits." 203 were categorised as failure demand eg "I claimed a tax credit three months ago and I still haven't heard anything." This means that over 40% of the capacity of the advice agencies was spent dealing with work that is generated by the failure of external organisations.
 
Value or waste?
The second element of the work was to categorise everything advice agencies do in terms of whether it directly helps them achieve their purpose (to provide advice and support to help clients resolve their problems). Any process that contributed to the aim was categorised as value; any that did not was categorised as waste.
 
A high proportion of the work done by the agencies was categorised as waste, from the client's point of view, as it did not help to achieve the purpose. The report points out that this means there is a nigh number of opportunities for clients to disengage before their issues are resolved.
 
What next?
The report concludes that much of the waste was brought about by the actions of external organisations eg the Legal Services Commission's (LSC) reporting requirements.
 
The next stage of the work is to investigate ways to remove that waste from the system so that more resources are available for helping clients. The report acknowledges the likely difficulty of this given that it will mean influencing external organisations to change their requirements, however, the pilot has already managed to engage the interest of relevant bodies such as the DWP and LSC.
 
You can read the report here: Radically Re-thinking Advice Service in Nottingham