The challenge facing UK public services is stark. Increasingly complex citizen demand is causing considerable strain and is coming head to head with diminishing financial resources.
As we face major challenges (demographic, cultural and technological) ahead for public services, efficiency savings and traditional Treasury led cost-management strategies will not be enough. Instead, we need a radical re-think of the role and purpose of public services.
The chancellor’s 2009 budget statement made clear the crisis that confronts the UK’s public services. In the short term, a debt burden, a struggling economy and rising unemployment will all inevitably constrain public spending. Even if consensus is emerging as to the need for thoughtful reform rather than salami-slicing, the crisis of political legitimacy emerging from the MPs expenses scandal means that our politicians are too preoccupied to address this need. Even if they did, would people listen?
It is within this shifting context that the commission on 2020 Public Services is conducting its inquiry. Our aim is to develop a new public services settlement that reflects the needs, wants and capabilities of 2020 citizens, and the networks and communities they develop. The first stage of this must be to understand the nature of the issues these citizens might face.
The Scoping the Challenges series is a first step towards hosting a new national conversation. It seeks to survey the landscape of issues and questions we must pose, in order to hold a coherent and comprehensive debate on the future of public services.
The reports illustrate that fiscal constraints will not be the only factors framing public service reform in the future, rather, a host of emerging demand pressures will be brought to bear, such as the impact of an ageing and increasingly diverse society, and the challenge of changing behaviour in areas such as climate change and public health.
So, policymakers must face a potentially perfect storm of increasing cost pressures within a new era of fiscal constraint. Faced with this scenario, a traditional cost-management (or salami-slicing) approach looks increasingly inadequate. Rather we should return to first principles, and look to developing a new settlement that enables citizens to meet these challenges
Whilst we should be realistic about the prospects for such radical, root-and-branch reform of public services, our research indicates that certain developments could facilitate qualitative, citizen-focused change. New technologies are enabling citizens to co-produce services and access services in a joined up and personalised way, and drives towards a new localism will empower citizens to create new welfare networks and to better mobilise collective resources.
The future of public services should be to enable, not constrain these initiatives. It is vital that we start recognising and building around these developments now, or we risk selling ourselves short in the future.