The more cynical view is that the Government's agenda is to cut costs.
In the corporate world outsourcing has often been used in that way, after all. It is easier to replace the relationship between employer and unions with that between a dominant buyer and contractor suppliers.
Some non-governmental organisations told the commission the Government was trying to deliver social services "on the cheap" by squeezing providers tightly on funding.
Whatever the Government's motives, the draft report the commission released this week on its inquiry into "enhancing productivity and value in public services" makes interesting reading.
In particular, its brief is to look at how to improve the commissioning and purchase of social services from providers outside the state sector. The numbers are a bit spongy, but we are talking about billions of dollars a year and thousands of providers.
The system is top-down, with vertical silos dealing with housing, or health, or income support or whatever in isolation, and which have little capacity or incentive to diagnose the root causes of a person's problems, share information and co-ordinate a timely response.
A more integrated approach is easier said than done, however, as English acknowledged on Radio New Zealand's Morning Report on Wednesday.
Talking about the children's teams set up to deal with the most vulnerable children, he said "trying to get the teachers, the doctors, the social workers and the police to agree on what information they are allowed to share and agree on who is going to be accountable for the welfare of a vulnerable child has turned out to be a very difficult process ...
"Bureaucratic competition, ethical constraints, traditional bureaucratic cultures mean it is very difficult to genuinely get a child-centred approach ... Some of the tools the Productivity Commission is talking about would help us with that."
The commission counsels against trying to direct the integration of services from the centre and says the Government should instead focus on ensuring that institutions and commissioning arrangements provide opportunities for bottom-up integration of services.
A more effective use of resources is likely to be achieved, the commission argues, if decisions about what services to deliver, by whom, when, where and how are moved closer to - if possible all the way to - the people in need.
What may work well for one person may be inappropriate or ineffective for another, it says. Different people have different needs.
"This means that the system must supply many different combinations of services. Yet the social services system tends to bundle clients into homogeneous groups - older New Zealanders, people with disabilities, people facing domestic violence, people with drug problems, and so on. As such, services are not tailored to the individual needs of clients.
"One symptom of this is the under-utilisation of entitlements."
Whether services are provided directly by a government agency or contracted out, the people in need are often cast as passive recipients rather than active participants in decisions which affect their lives, the commission says.
Giving them choices and control over when, where and how they access social services should lead to a better fit between their needs and the services they receive. And when a choice of providers is available, it should make the providers more responsive to their clients' needs.
The commission sees little evidence that this "client-directed" approach reduces the quality of services people receive, or is any more - or less - open to fraud or abuse than agency-directed models.
The commission emphasises the need for a system that innovates and learns. It needs to be flexible enough to try new ways of doing things, accept that some will fail and quickly deal with that, while identifying those which work well.
Many social services at present involve risk-averse government agencies contracting for services from not-for-profit bodies unable or unwilling to take on the financial risk of innovation.
Less prescriptive contracts which pay by results could help overcome that problem. Better use of the great enabling technology of our day and age would also assist both devolution and integration of social services, the commission believes.
Commission chairman Murray Sherwin said that when the Government was a monopoly buyer it needed to take responsibility for what emerged on the supplier side.
"It hasn't always been very smart about how it goes about that."
The draft report is open for submissions until June 24 with the final report to go to the Government in August.
