The Office for Public Service Innovation – OPSI
Transforming Lives through Data, Collaboration and Early Action
The Office for Public Service Innovation is about doing things differently: using data, new technology and new ideas to tackle entrenched poverty, underachievement, poor health and lack of opportunity in our most deprived communities.
It’s about not repeating failed, short-term policies of the past but instead harnessing new tools and new learnings, while working with communities to drive long-lasting change and opportunity.
It’s about early intervention and prevention: developing innovative ‘stitch in time’ approaches that will deliver better value for money by tackling issues before they escalate into costly, resource-intensive problems.
And it’s about developing partnerships to deliver changes that will improve life chances and foster community cohesion within safer neighbourhoods.
The Office for Public Service Innovation will convene, support and enable partners – including Liverpool City Region’s six local authorities, the NHS, housing associations, emergency services, universities, businesses, grassroots organisations and communities – to design and deliver innovative solutions desperately needed to break long-standing, deep-rooted deprivation.
It will encourage data sharing and, by using AI and new technology, it will provide compelling insights to guide new, early solutions to age-old and emerging problems as well as developing new efficient approaches.
It will harness existing expertise, while working with communities to increase trust and develop new tailored ‘test and learn’ approaches and helping them to attract more funding. And it will track their effectiveness and share lessons learned.
Public service innovation is already transforming lives in the Liverpool City Region. The award-winning Cradle to Career programme is raising educational attainment and reducing the burden on social services in some of our most deprived communities, while the Civic Data Cooperative is improving health and wellbeing, and the North Liverpool pilot is using school absence data to identify complex household needs.
More than 60% of the city region’s 1.6m residents live in England’s most deprived areas – with life chances of successive generations defined by their postcode. But it shouldn’t be this way.
OPSI will nurture and accelerate ideas that can break the cycle and offer a better way forward: providing individuals, families and communities with innovative routes out of deprivation and into economic activity, while reducing the burden on hard-pressed, cash-strapped services.
Find out more about the Government’s ideas for Public Sector Reform from a speech delivered by Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden.
‘OPSI is about trying to do things differently so people get the right public services at the right time, early enough rather than leaving it until people get to crisis point.
‘By doing that we can improve the outcomes for residents and we can help them to take advantage of the economic growth and job opportunities we’re seeing across the whole city region.’
Combined Authority Executive Director of Public Sector Innovation Kirsty McLean and Public Sector Innovation Programme Lead Rob Tabb explain how OPSI is changing the way public services are delivered – using AI, data and working with communities – to tackle long-standing challenges that are holding people back. Watch the video to find out more.
Public services are facing unprecedented challenges, with demand growing and resources becoming increasingly stretched.
In the Liverpool City Region, we’re not just acknowledging this crisis; we’re partnering with the government’s Test, Learn and Grow programme to actively build a bold, collaborative solution.
Here, Combined Authority Executive Director of Public Sector Innovation Kirsty McLean outlines how the Office for Public Service Innovation (OPSI) is transforming how we support our communities and tackle the root causes of disadvantage.
