Russell Osborne
This is an abridged and edited transcript of the podcast interview with Russell Osborne, Managing Director of Citizen Solutions at Northgate Public Services, that took place on 29th October 2008. It has been kindly prepared and provided by Fellows' Associates on behalf of Northgate (Please rad disclaimer below).
Mike
Q. Could you give me a brief history of Northgate?
Russell
A. Northgate Information Solutions has been around since 1969. We have over 7,000 people working in our team. We are a very large organisation providing citizen-centred solutions to the UK public sector. One of the things about us that is not well known is that the service we provide in energy efficiency has been around for eight or nine years. It started out with SAPCalc, provided for new builds, and out of that we created our RdSAP solution and our accreditation scheme last year.
Mike
Q. Does Northgate accept individual Domestic Energy Asssesors (DEAs) or are you only affiliated with corporates?
Russell
A. We do accept independents. This area has been excellent for us in the last few months, where we have experienced massive growth. In the last six weeks alone we had a 30 per cent increase in our independent domestic assessors.
Mike
Q. I think there are a lot of people under the illusion that Northgate only accepts corporates, because you do have a few corporate clients, don't you?
Russell
A. When we started out, we concentrated on the corporate client base that was going to have employed staff. As things have changed and evolved we have accepted independents. We have always had independents on our schemes but it was originally a very small number. Now we have about 85 people in our programme who are independent DEAs.
Mike
Q. Philip Salaman of Quidos on the last podcast said that one of the lessons he has learned is that he doesn't like the idea of doing business with a corporate because of the experience he had. Do you see any risks that may be attached to working with corporates?
Russell
A. Northgate as a whole has thousands of corporate customers. I think that the corporate market has provided benefits to DEAs in the past and has been able to provide work and jobs for DEAs. We have not had any problems at all from our side.
Mike
Q. Do you think that the explosive growth of independent DEAs accrediting with you has anything to do with software problems around the RdSAP upgrade?
Russell
A. I cannot comment on other people, but what I can say is that one of the really important things to us is quality. It is the quality of the service and the quality of the software. We come from a software background so we have loads of experience in providing key applications for emergency services and local authorities. One other thing that is really important to us is high availability. Over the last 12 months, we have had in excess of 99 per cent availability across our whole system. I think DEAs recognise that our system is not only available with software of high quality, but that it is also easy to use. We are also quite flexible in the way we work with our DEAs. It is a good service that they get. A year has gone by now and people know a bit of history on how these schemes are working.
Mike
Q. What would you attribute the explosive growth to?
Russell
A. I think it comes down to factors such as high availability and the flexibility with which we work with DEAs and engage with them. DEAs also like the level of support that they get from Northgate. You always have access to someone at Northgate to provide you with advice and guidance.
Mike
Q. Did you have problems with the RdSAP upgrade yourself?
Russell
A. No, not at all. This comes as a result of investing very heavily in our quality controls. We apply the same rules and the same approach to providing upgrades to RdSAP as we would to any other part of our business. Could you imagine Northgate providing 125 upgrades to planning systems or 50 police upgrades and those not working successfully? It would be quite disastrous. The rigour of our quality control and testing is applied across all our applications, including RdSAP. So we do not have that level of problem because we can anticipate what might happen and test for it.
Mike
Q. There has been a lot of criticism in the media about the way the government handled software within various sectors. I was speaking to one of the accreditation schemes before about the RdSAP role and the tight time limit that was originally set to launch the software upgrade. The date was set back by a couple of weeks and since then we have had numerous reports of problems with the software. Has this been frustrating for you?
Russell
A. Yes, these things are frustrating. A lot of the things that we do within our business are legislatively-led. What we've found is that engaging early with changes of specification gives us early visibility of what can happen. Also, we do have the advantage of having 7,000 people available. Obviously, not all of them are working on energy efficiency, but we are able to flex and bring additional resources in to accelerate delivery and to use proven and timely testing. This means we were able to deal with some of those short timescales.
Mike
Q. I was watching the select committee on Parliament TV the other week. In front of them they had the QCA [Qualifications and Curriculum Authority], a couple of other NGOs and also the company that was responsible for marking the A level exam results that went horribly wrong. Do you remember that?
Russell
A. Yes, I do.
Mike
Q. We always get the media version of events at the time, but these select committees are interesting because you get to hear all sides of the story. It became clear that the company that had the contract eventually paid the government to get out of it because of the way it was being implemented. Of course we have the government responsible for awarding the contract in the first place, within which are the details of how the software should work in practice when it's handed over. Then you are dealing with all the parts of government on a day to day basis, like educational institutions in that instance. Is this something that echoes in this industry now?
Russell
A. It is hard to make this comparison. There have got to be clear timetables. There has got to be clarity around the requirements. We encourage the government not to rush into things and not to give us short timescales. It really is all about partnership between government and suppliers. We would offer our opinion and advice on the ease of deploying and implementing policies. Creating that trusted partnership where you can provide the necessary feedback is really important.
Mike
Q. In January 2008, the EU held a meeting of stakeholders from various countries that are dealing with the European-wide implementation of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). Mr Eduardo Maldonando said that we need software tools that make the work of inspectors easier and suggested that these tools need not be government-driven, but could be left to the market. Have you done anything in this area? Are you very much constrained by the BRE licensing process?
Russell
A. We are constrained. This is an area where, particularly around RdSAP, the software must be accredited by BRE and therefore the things we can provide to DEAs become a little bit limited. What we can do to provide support and make the system more efficient is provide mobile services that integrate directly into the lodgement.
Mike
Q. Since you are welcoming independent DEAs, what are your membership and lodgement fees in case people are interested in looking at you?
Russell
A. There is a range of prices depending on the volumes that people are going to process. I would recommend that anyone who is interested should go and look on the Northgate website. There they can get a view in terms of numbers and volumes, because we want to link prices to volumes. The website is www.northgate-dea.com. We are finding that a number of our independent DEAs are choosing to buy blocks of 500 lodgements, which actually works out better than individual pricing.
Mike
Q. So you work on a block basis?
Russell
A. That is one option we offer. DEAs can do individual assessments or buy blocks. People who are quite confident about the work they are going to get have been buying them in blocks of 500.
Mike
Q. For the hard-pressed DEA who wants to look at your scheme, how much would the lodgement fee be?
Russell
A. It is going to be around £7 or £7.50 for a single one, and that would then come down to more like £5 for blocks of 500-plus.
Mike
Q. Is that including VAT?
Russell
A. That would be excluding VAT. Our costs are based on quality, and we are not compromising on that. We talked earlier about software availability and the experiences that people have had with other accreditation schemes. The reason why we are not having these problems is because we invest very heavily. There is a cost to that quality and we don't want to compromise on that.
Mike
Q. Is there an annual membership fee to join Northgate?
Russell
A. There is an annual membership fee.
Mike
Q. A lot of DEAs out there are concerned about the quality of DEAs in general. We have had various reports emerging in the press. Many people have come to my blog complaining about the quality or the lack of knowledge of some DEAs. As far as auditing is concerned, what is Northgate's policy? As an industry are the accreditation schemes doing enough?
Russell
A. We agree on the point about quality. We do a lot of review and assessment. How we audit our DEAs depends on the quality of their work. The first thing for us is having high quality. Where people do high quality work, we apply a light touch and we find ourselves auditing those DEAs once a year.
Where the work is not of the quality we expect, there are processes in place within our scheme for supporting, coaching and advising the DEAs on how to improve that quality. We would increase the level of audit for them until such time as the quality rises.
Personally, I am pleased that the quality of the people on the Northgate scheme is very high. We regularly do surveys with the people receiving the EPCs. We get a lot of feedback. Around 40 per cent of the people we have contacted respond to us. We use that feedback as a part of our process.
We also look at where people have had their training and we work really closely with the training organisations. When we find that the quality for some people is not of the standards we want, we will go and talk to the training organisations in order to understand what kind of training provision they are making and where they could improve certain areas.
Mike
Q. Are you aware of the heated feeling in the community about training organisations? This is where a lot of the criticism stems from in the beginning.
Russell
A. We don't provide training ourselves. We only work with high quality training organisations. We do track where people have been trained so that we can look at that and see whether there is a difference in quality.
Mike
Q. How can you measure the quality of a training company when there has been barely any time to assess it? It seems that people with a history in the construction industry who have migrated to this one are propping up the knowledge base.
Russell
A. This is where there should be more transparency to make information about the training organisations and their quality available to all DEAs. We should not be keeping people in the dark. This is where the Faber Maunsell review will really help. We have been very supportive of that. A year has gone by now and we can start to see some trends in terms of quality. It is now time to start providing all the information to everybody so that they can make an appropriate choice.
Mike
Q. We have training companies advertising nationally and regionally painting a picture of becoming a DEA in just two weeks, and that demand is crazy and that you will earn mega-bucks. People are going into this with absolutely no property history in their career. I cannot understand, with that background, how you can say you work with quality training companies.
Russell
A. There are quality organisations out there. From our side, once somebody comes along with a valid certificate we have to accept them on our scheme. All we can then do is track them through the quality of the EPCs they provide.
Mike
Q. Is the industry doing enough? It seems like Northgate would rather educate than penalise. Is that the way to go, with so many DEAs entering the market? Shouldn't we be getting tough now and boosting the morale of those people that are good and we need to keep in the industry, and not letting them saturate out?
Russell
A. I completely agree. It is all about quality and we are absolutely tough on quality. If people cannot provide that high quality, then they cannot stay on our scheme. There are processes to do that whether they are independent or employed DEAs.
Mike
Q. Have you kicked anybody off your scheme?
Russell
A. No, we haven't, but we do have high auditability of the quality. All our DEAs are high quality people. I think partly because we started with the corporates that were already employing people, there was already a level of auditability of those people before they joined our scheme.
Mike
Q. It depends on the company, because there could be ones out there that would put pressure on DEAs to turn round work at the price of quality. But leaving that aside, I suppose there is another layer between you and the DEAs since they get judged by the company they work for.
Russell
A. From our experience, the successful DEAs that we work with are really good communicators, able to provide good feedback to the person that has commissioned the EPC. Their ability to form relationships with the estate agent or social landlord is also part of the quality that a DEA provides. Those soft skills are also quite important. It is not just about technical skills.
Mike
Q. You mentioned Faber Maunsell. How did Northgate do in that?
Russell
A. We did very well. There has been no recommendation of a change to our scheme at all. We are not expecting to be reviewed or audited for another year.
Mike
Q. Do you know if the findings will be released to the community?
Russell
A. I don't know that. We would really welcome that they were. We support the full publication. I was talking about transparency earlier. It is important that as much information as possible is made available to people. We hope that it's going to be fully published and that DEAs are not kept in the dark.
Mike
Q. I think everybody would echo that. Maybe you should pass it on to the CLG because it looks like it probably will not be published.
Russell
A. We will. We will write to them and make that recommendation from our perspective.
Mike
Q. Do you think there are too many accreditation schemes?
Russell
A. That is a really hard question for me to answer. Again, it will come down to quality. There has to be competition and we absolutely welcome competition. It keeps all the accreditations schemes focused on continuing their own improvement and their own ability to support DEAs. I think there has got to be choice, but then again you can have too much choice and this can cause confusion. That comes back to the point about transparency and making information available. I think if information is available and people can make their own choices the number of accreditation schemes will settle to those people who are investing.
Mike
Q. To go back to something Philip Salaman said, what if one of those choices was to migrate to an accreditation scheme that is known for its lack of auditing?
Russell
A. This is something I would not be able to comprehend, to be honest.
Mike
Q. This was his fear. We covered the same question and one of his complaints was that he felt that they could be possibly doing too much and scaring DEAs off.
Russell
A. I guess this clearly comes to the idea of having an independent watchdog that would pick these things up and make that information available. We focus on a light touch auditing where appropriate. There is no point in having too bureaucratic, too heavy handed an audit process but you have to make sure that the quality is there. You have to make sure you have that for the scheme to be successful, for the credibility of the scheme and for the credibility of the DEAs.
Mike
Q. You did mention an industry-wide watchdog, which is a nice link to where I was going with this. If the industry needs a single watchdog to look over this and ensure the quality is not being driven down, why have more than one accreditation scheme?
Russell
A. I think it is about choice. You have to provide choice to people. You referred earlier to opportunities to provide additional support and services to make things easier for DEAs. Those things come from having more than one scheme and being able to invest in things that, from our perspective, encourage people to come on the Northgate scheme. Having choice and competition in a transparent way does provide an incentive for everybody.
Mike
Q. Where do you see the industry heading in terms of legislation and opportunities going forward?
Russell
A. I think whatever the short-term view of the market, this is a growing industry and an important one. Today, it is all about recording information. What is required next is being able to take action. I think the next set of legislation should be able to effect that. Possibly DEAs should be given more powers to provide practical advice on energy matters and not just record data.
Mike
Q. So do you think EPCs should be enforced in other ways, rather than just through the selling of homes?
Russell
A. I absolutely think they should. I think there has got to be more involvement with local authorities and there has got to be partnership to provide support. It should not just be about selling a house or changing a tenancy. This is something that is important to all of us. Linking with local authorities and actually providing useful, practical and pragmatic information is going to be critical going forward.
Mike
Q. Is there anything else you want to say about Northgate? Any new projects in the pipeline that we should know about?
Russell
A. I think in this context we want to encourage the independent DEAs to come and talk to Northgate. Come and join our scheme and see the level of quality. We are in this market because this is something that is important to us. So all I would say to the independent assessors listening out there is come and talk to Northgate, and come and join our scheme.
This edited and abridged transcript was kindly provided by Fellows' Associates on behalf of Northgate.
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Transcripts provided by third parties may not necessarily reflect the actual content from which they originated. Readers are therefore advised to refer to the original recording. This website accepts no responsibility for any inaccuracies or misrepresentations made herein, although it is quite happy to share in any glory.
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