Purpose
The organisational and service delivery landscape of the emergency services in the UK has been rapidly changing and is facing further change in the foreseeable future. The purpose of this paper is to examine recent and ongoing organisational changes in the policy development, service delivery and regulatory landscape of the emergency services, in order to capture the overall picture and potential opportunities for improvement or further investigation.
Design/methodology/approach
This general review utilises the characteristics of the three domains of a national framework, namely, policy development, service delivery and public assurance, and uses these characteristics as lenses to examine the three main blue light emergency services of police, fire and ambulances.
Findings
What emerges in the organisational landscape and conceptual maps for the police and even more so for the Fire and Rescue Service, is the immaturity of many of the organisations in the policy and the public assurance domains while the service delivery organisations have remained relatively stable. In the relatively neglected ambulance services, we find the NHS’s recent Ambulance Response Programme has considerable potential to improve parts of all three domains.
Research limitations/implications
The review is limited to the UK and primarily focussed on England.
Practical implications
The review identifies opportunities for improvement, potential improvement and further research.
Originality/value
Although the National Audit Office has attempted in the past to provide organisational landscape reviews of individual emergency services, this contemporary comparative review of all three services using a common model is unique. It provides considerable new insights for policy makers, service delivers and regulators.
Empirical studies that use the multiple streams approach often examine cases of reactive policymaking in response to "focusing events", rather than proactive policymakers who seek to broker or construct problems that their preferred solution might address. Drawing on publicly-available debates about reforms to fire and rescue services in seven areas of England, we show how individuals within small policy subsystems may construct problems to try and convince others to support their preferred policy solution. By straddling all three streams and acting as endogenous policy entrepreneurs, policymakers and problem brokers simultaneously, we highlight how these actors can exert substantial influence over policymaking processesalthough consensus within the political stream about the existence of a genuine problem is still a key factor in facilitating change. These insights allow us to introduce a more obvious power dimension and greater predictive capacity into the multiple streams approach.
Analysis of 60,000 contracts awarded by English councils between 2015-19 reveals that austerity constraints are a key predictor of councils outsourcing services to forprofit suppliers, regardless of their political control. Conservative Party-controlled councils are also more likely to contract with for-profit suppliers, although we found no link between Labour-controlled councils and not-for-profit suppliers, nor evidence that political or budgetary factors influence whether councils contract with providers based in their own region. We argue that centrally imposed funding cuts, and a belief that for-profit suppliers represent a cheaper option, could be overriding Labour Party councils' ideological preference for not-for-profit providers.
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