Public services must always be at the heart of Labour’s policy and its vision for Britain. They embody so many of our values – putting solidarity, equal treatment and general decency above almost everything else. And they are the practical way of achieving so much of what we want, ranging from traditional values of social justice and economic opportunity to more New Labour elements like efficiency and entrepreneurialism.
However, provision of a universal and uniform service, which was once the great advantage of our public services, has become entrenched into the left mindset as what those services must be about and how they must always be delivered. The structure of public services has produced a two-tier system with those on lower incomes or in deprived neighbourhoods almost always getting the worst deal. Provision has become too inflexible for modern citizen-consumers, who want a more personalised approach, not the one-size-fits-all tradition of many post-1945 public services. The real goals of public services have been lost.
Our aim must be to make public services more personalised and more responsive. We must decentralise decision making to local managers and – most importantly – to local authorities, as the democratically elected representatives of the community. Such an approach allows more diversity, so that each area’s problems can be tackled in the way that suits the community. It leads to innovation – which can then spread – and allows local actors to look out to their community rather than up to a central body (Whitehall) that is setting its targets and rewards.
The role of central government must change: there must be much less reliance on the tools of command and control. Instead, central government’s job should be to create a system of financial flows, incentives and accountability that allow local managers and players to get on with their task. A relevant parallel is with the way the central state interacts with the private sector.
However, this is not to say that the centre cannot play a role in helping improve the outcomes we get in public services. It has a role in trying to understand why some schools, hospitals and police forces seem to do less well than others even where the conditions they face are similar.
Perhaps most importantly, we must be better in how we go about pursuing change. It was a bad mistake to suggest that Public Private Partnerships and the Public Finance Initiative were at the heart of the public service reform debate, misleading many into believing that the reform agenda was in some way really a code word for the privatisation of our public services. In some areas, PPPs will work and in others they will not. As Gordon Brown has recently argued, there may be areas where for good reasons we want to completely exclude them from being used. We should be pragmatic here.
We must do everything we can to bring along the party and the workforce. Profound misunderstandings or suspicions arise as parts of the party fear that decentralising – which most would support – is just a precursor to some sort of privatisation or unequal system. That is why we need to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. We need to rationalise it in terms of what all public sector workers and Labour members care about – improving the service to the user.
Plenty of evidence from change in the public sector shows reform works best where the workforce is on board. And many of the best examples of public service modernisation have roots in the insights, suggestions and ideas that come from the workforce itself. This is the way to gain support for modernisation, rather than letting change be seen as a macho taking-on of vested interests.
These are all tough challenges. But this is surely what most of us got involved in politics to do in the first place. We cannot duck them.