The left stands for a modern and expansive vision of citizenship – a vision of human co-operation to meet the challenges of interdependence. At the heart of this vision are public services. The reasoning is simple. Services provided by the community for the community, when they are of high quality, can deliver opportunity and security, both at the core of full citizenship.
We are committed to economic citizenship by building a more inclusive market economy. We know that social citizenship in a multicultural, multi-faith society depends on a clear social contract of rights and duties. Public services that treat people on the basis of need – in other words, motivated by a commitment to equal worth – are critical to both.
And as I was reminded when teaching a class of ten year-olds as part of the Global Campaign for Education’s commitment
to highlight the importance of education in international development, public services are critical to our international responsibilities, too.
So public services matter. What should be the principles of their governance and their reform? People write PhD theses
to answer this question, but here are seven points that, for me, are key.
First, universality of provision is a strength, not a weakness – as long as diverse provision matches diverse need. Unless respect is shown to all, it will be valued by none. Unless everyone shares the burden, it becomes too large. The right like to argue that universal means monolithic. In fact, universality should
lay the basis for high standards delivered
in diverse ways.
Second, devolved decisions about the deployment of staff are the greatest asset and the biggest decision about public services. Across both public and private sectors there are vital moves towards team-working and flexible delivery. This
is critical in the complex world of public services. In education, the recent historic agreement between government and unions to make teachers leaders of a team of adults in the classroom, cutting teacher workload and giving more personalised help to children, is a huge step forward.
Third, intelligent accountability is in the interests of all, but especially the most disadvantaged. Public services do not have an easy profit and loss account – but they do have a balance sheet of inputs and outcomes. It is vital that we measure the right things in the right way; but without measurement, appropriate to each service, we have no idea whether our investment is paying off, and no basis for intervening to try to make things better.
Fourth, public services are about responsibilities as well as rights. People need to be engaged in the delivery of
the service; it cannot all be left to the professionals. High-quality public services depend on the people who use them as well as those who produce them: children have to work hard to make good the efforts of teachers; patients need to look after themselves if the magic of medicine is to be effective; residents need to work with the police if the criminal justice system is to function properly.
This commitment to active citizenship in public services is about looking after oneself – by exercising choice, for example. It is also about looking after others – through school governing bodies, for example, which work best when
they are representative of the whole community.
Fifth, excellence is a battering ram against inequality. We should always be seeking to turn the good public service into an excellent one, as well as a poor
one into a good one. Excellence is good for the direct users of the service; it is good as a resource for local people; and it is good as a national example of what is possible. That means setting the incentives in the system so that local leaders, key to the whole system, can be genuine entrepreneurs in delivering excellent services.
Sixth, it is vital to build innovation into the system to meet national standards. This is a challenge for politicians and professionals – but there can be no monopoly of wisdom in the current way of doing things. Innovation helps meet the mismatch between need and provision – and helps cater for the hardest to assist. That is why in education we talk about ‘informed professionalism’ as the basis of reform. Government sets the framework – including demanding targets that establish our moral purpose of bringing excellence to all. Local professionals get access to information on best practice. Then they innovate to meet local need.
Seventh, money does not guarantee quality, but it makes a critical difference – in terms of staff and capital investment. The capacity of the system depends on the number of staff, as well as how they work. The quality of the infrastructure, including the use of ICT, is critical to he effectiveness of the service.
There is an ethic of public service. It helps define our values as a society: co-operation as well as competition, selflessness as well as self-interest. It explains why ordinary people do extraordinary deeds, day in and day out, in education, social services, and healthcare. But each public service has its own challenges and its own responsibilities. It is messy, but that’s life.
Our challenge now is to take confidence from the evidence that reform works. Schools provide a good example. England has historically had a schooling system where the best provision was world class, but the average was not good enough. Since 1997 there has been significant progress across the board,
with most progress for those with the greatest distance to travel.
In primary education, not only do three-quarters of eleven year-olds now leave school reading, writing and counting well, one-third have the reading age of a fourteen year-old. International studies now report that, compared to 1996, when ten year-olds performed at the European average, today they are third-best in the industrialised world, with a richer, more varied and more creative primary experience than the average.
In the secondary sector there is steady improvement, as well as faster progress in some of our most disadvantaged city areas. We now plan to capitalise on this progress with a major capital initiative, extending over time to cover every secondary pupil in England, as well as reform to the curriculum for fourteen
to nineteen year-olds.
The left must always be in the vanguard of reform because, if we are not, then those who really do not support public services will capture the aspiration for improvement, and that is dangerous for producers and consumers alike. Labour broke into government by offering change. Now we must continue to do so – not in the name of permanent revolution, but in the service of coherent, consistent reform that brings improvement.
Fifty years ago, the British philosopher TH Marshall defined three dimensions of citizenship: civil, political and social. Together, they define the basics of a strong community of enabling government, dynamic economy and strong civic society.
In a time of interdependence, when all our lives, from the economy to the environment, traffic to terrorism, depend on the actions of others as well as ourselves, our challenge as social democrats is to get the synergy right between values and efficiency. Our values are about opportunity and responsibility
– the heart of social justice. Our reform strategy is about empowerment and accountability. Our focus, day in and day out, is on the needs and interests of those who use public services. This is a powerful combination. We will know in the years ahead whether it is radical enough.