This article first appeared as part of a series written for the Skoll Foundation by Dan Ebanks, Co-Founder of Firesouls.

In my last post I reflected on how stock market investors are looking more and more at social impact metrics because “new economy” companies are increasingly creating public goods. It’s no longer enough to rely on earnings per share, price-earnings ratios and cash flow.

Traditionally, government has provided public goods. Instead of acting as a direct service provider, could there be a role for government in the creation of new kinds of open platforms that facilitate the exchange of these goods? For example, platforms which broker connections between people — someone seeking care for an elderly relative, or trying to form a group to solve local problems. One could argue that government, local government in particular, is well positioned to take on this type of role.

Could this be an alternative to trying to squeeze ever more efficiency out of government? At what point do we start to ask, “is this the right system?”

The current situation

In the UK there has been much debate about the future role of the local council. Broadly speaking, there is a political and economic consensus that the council should enable the delivery of services, rather than providing them itself.

Compulsory competitive tendering in the early 1990s and the Labour governments of the late 90s and 2000s saw an increase in private provision of local public services. The global financial crash of 2008 accelerated this shift towards the commissioning model.

One outcome of the 2015 UK general election this past May will be a renewed drive to achieve even more savings in the public sector. Efficiencies have been the source of much of the savings achieved over the last five years — staff doing more, communities playing a role, services redesigned — but there is a limit to how much efficiency you can wring out of a system. At some point it might be better to ask, “how can we do things differently?”

Moving beyond the commissioning model

If councils are to move beyond commissioning, adopting an “aggregator” model may be the best strategy. Councils are at the center of local networks, have a high-level view of the needs of local residents and understand the current level of service provision. And there has been a big push in local government around the “personalization” agenda — public service users exercising complete control over their choice of provider.

Facilitated by technology, these drivers offer to reconfigure councils as aggregators — organizations that do not produce or deliver services, but collect information on them from a number of sources, and draw users to platforms that facilitate an easy matching of needs and prices.

Social Value as a game changer?

We need a coherent framework to effect this shift from deliverer and commissioner to aggregator. Government has to be at the heart of this new dynamic, with initiatives such as the Personalisation and Prevention Agendas, the recognition of the value of open data in service design and delivery, as well as the growing need for community-based public services, gravitating around this core idea of a new model for local government.

The Social Value Act could be an important part of this new framework. In the final part of this series, I will look at the transformative potential of this unusual and sometimes maligned piece of legislation.