Improving Performance Throughout a Housing Supply Chain: Portsmouth City Council’s Systems Thinking Transformation

Abstract

This is the story of Portsmouth City Council’s housing management service, which has transformed the way it works by designing services against local demand. The results achieved are outstanding, making the targets the service was set by central government look unambitious in comparison. These results were achieved through the adoption of a different way of managing and delivering services based on systems principles, in spite of the approach’s inherent antithesis to the ‘command and control’ ideology of many of the previous government’s public sector reforms. As a consequence, there is a large disparity between the results achieved by the service and the way it has been treated by the inspection bodies and the government’s Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG). Inspectors have not been able to see the usual hallmarks of their ‘best practice’ guidance at work in Portsmouth and thus have scored the services poorly against their inspection criteria.