Countries are making public administrative services more human centred, but more work remains to be done. Fuller implementation of the Recommendation on Human Centred Public Administrative Services will support better programme outcomes and higher levels of satisfaction with PAS. This first-ever stocktaking of relevant practices across OECD countries finds many areas of good practice already becoming well established: most countries have a vision and strategy for improving PAS; the vast majority have begun undertaking some form of user surveys; users’ rights are well protected; and the concept of life events is well established.
However, there are also significant areas to improve. Some are important gaps that can and should be actioned immediately to ensure key tenets of a “human-centred” approach are in place: governments should ensure the public are consistently consulted on PAS reform strategy, and they should make sure that information from user surveys is systematically used to inform improvements in public services. Other areas of reform will require sustained focus to help create the conditions for successful implementation of the Recommendation.
Most importantly, governments have significant distance to cover in integrating public administrative services and making them more pro-active. The concepts of life events and the digital tools to enable service integration are already well established across countries, but given their prevalence, it might be considered disappointing that governments have begun integrating services for only around 25% of the life events covered in the Serving Citizens survey. Moving from information grouping to genuinely integrated services requires using more decisively the existing digital foundations that allow public institutions to recognise users, reuse information securely and maintain continuity across agencies and channels. Successful PAS integration will require deeper investments, development and reinforcement of critical digital infrastructure, including digital identities, secure data sharing and interoperable systems – thereby enabling information sharing across government siloes and reducing users’ time and effort burdens. Related to this, it is also important that governments consider how they are supporting the civil service in delivering the Recommendation: better workforce planning and training tools will improve skills, and linking performance targets to performance incentives will help to improve delivery.
Looking to the future from a cross-national perspective, countries would benefit from a wider range of internationally comparable performance information for PAS. While satisfaction is one of the few outcome metrics which can be reported across most countries, it is not sufficient on its own to understand service performance. It will be important in implementing the Recommendation that work is undertaken internationally to strengthen methodologies to better understand the efficiency and effectiveness of PAS delivery across countries. This would allow analysis to move from comparing institutional functions to more direct and practical insight into the quality and effectiveness of delivery in different countries. It is unlikely that the conceptual issues which hinder measurement of spending on PAS can be resolved quickly. Instead, OECD members should focus on tracking the performance and delivery of PAS in comparable ways across countries and building a more systematic basis for shared learning on how to deliver PAS that meet the needs of the public.
