Public services are the bread and butter of British politics. The modern progressive cause is to provide security and opportunity in an era of constant change. Public services provide one of the best means of doing so.
The role of the state is not to withdraw, leaving families and communities to the whim of a free-market approach, as neo-conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic believe. Nor is it to assume responsibility for everything from the litter on the streets to the behaviour of children in the classroom.
It is not the state that drops litter or disrupts classes. It is citizens. So where the old bonds of community – the male apprenticeships, the extended families, the churches and trades unions – are weaker, a new approach is needed to strengthen responsibility and aspiration in society.
Today the priority must be to fashion an active citizenship, where the state enables more people to make choices for themselves so they can realise their own aspirations for progress in their families and their communities.Public services belong to the public and it is time to give the public more power. This approach recognises that fighting crime is not just a job for the police. It is a job for the whole community. It recognises that improving health cannot be done by the NHS alone. It must involve people taking some responsibility for their own – and more particularly for their children’s – health and wellbeing.
I believe that over the next five to ten years the policy agenda will shift decisively towards building alliances between citizens and services to bring about advances in public health, crime prevention and community regeneration.
Doing so will require major reform, and a good start has been made. Health and education are benefiting from record levels of investment. More recently, reforms to enhance choice, diversify supply and devolve control are all taking hold as the government moves from a centralised command-and-control model to what has been called new localism.
The issue now is how much further to go.
There will be those who say that any move to devolve, diversify or democratise is merely privatisation by another name. They say we have gone too far and must now stop. I say we have not gone far enough and need to go further. In this next period, accountability needs to move downwards and outwards to consumers and communities. Empowering them is the best way to make change happen.
The new principle at the heart of public service governance should be one of subsidiarity. Power should be passed to the lowest possible level.
Where it is feasible for users to exercise individual choice – as over elderly care or hospital operations – that should be the norm. And where there are fewer opportunities for individuals to exercise consumer choices – policing being a good example – it will mean passing power downwards and outwards to local communities. In other words, our accent should be on strengthening the power of both the individual and the community. Either way, we have to move away from top-down and towards bottom-up control.
Take choice. Today, those who can afford it buy choice over health and education. Those without, do without. This is unfair and must be changed. More choice is about enhancing equity and opportunity, not undermining it. It is also about strengthening public services.
When I grew up in a County Durham council estate it did not much impress me that it was the council, not my family, who chose the colour of my front door. When tenants were offered the chance to opt out of council ownership, perhaps unsurprisingly they did so in their droves. Ironically those who rail against choice as a market-driven reform risk ending up strengthening private markets, not weakening them.
So reforms to extend choice should be driven forward in education and housing as well as hospitals and surgeries, so that parents get new rights to choose their children’s schools and tenants get new rights to buy or part-buy their homes.
Power should be passed down to communities, too. It is now widely recognised, for example, that if regeneration is to be sustainable it needs to extend real power into the hands of local communities themselves, as the New Deal for Communities has begun to do.
In this next period, government at all levels will need to focus more explicitly on helping local communities run things themselves – the council estates, the enhanced neighbourhood watch schemes, the Sure Start programmes – with a bigger role for voluntary, community and residents’, organisations. None of this means there should be no role for national standards, still less for national governments. But the direction of travel should be towards greater autonomy for local services.
Devolution cannot stop at the town hall door. Instead it has to reach down into local communities and empower individual users. So, in this next period more schools will need to open their doors to become community resources. There will be more use of local referenda. Turnouts in housing transfer ballots already exceed 70 percent – well in excess of that at the last general election. Indeed, we could take the whole concept further by legislating to allow locally generated petitions or ballots to require the removal of poorly performing services.
And below the level of the existing local authorities, where local people want them, directly elected neighbourhood councils could be established to help tackle local crime and grime issues of anti-social behaviour and street cleaning. Direct elections to at least some of the places on PCT boards, police boards and perhaps school governing bodies could be considered. Colleges and housing estates could be opened up to direct community control, drawing on the imagination and creativity of citizens themselves, using the mutual model embodied in NHS foundation trusts and the government’s plans for community interest companies.
And local boards running public services could be given the power to control – or perhaps raise – at least some of their own finances and the power to dismiss senior executives who have failed to raise standards and performance.
I hope Labour will fight the next election on a power-to-the-people manifesto. In a modern consumer society with a more informed and inquiring public, voting at elections is not enough. Democracy needs to be broadened and the state’s role needs to be reformed. Our purpose – as Aneurin Bevan once famously said – having won power is to give it away. It is time to unlock active citizenship as the key to better services and a fairer society.