The 2020 Public Services Commission recently published our assessment of the government’s record on public service reform. What stood out for us was the failure thus far to engage citizens in establishing a new public service settlement. But this is true not only of the coalition but also of the opposition.
When we last reported on this a year ago the challenges facing public services looked pretty daunting – fiscal squeeze, an ageing society and disappointing social outcomes. But the situation has worsened since then: the economic outlook is now very grave, with the likelihood being that Britain will need to come to terms with the implications of low to no growth over the short to medium term. Yet none of the main parties used party conference season to reflect on what this will mean for our public services and for the social contract they embody.
The old arguments about whether by nature we are cooperative or competitive have collapsed in the face of the growing evidence from neuroscience that we are social animals. Yet we persist in organising our vital public services as if the only things that matter are professional autonomy, economic incentives and consumer accountability. That is the legacy of the New Public Management orthodoxy, which sought to make the public sector operate more like the private sector via the embrace of market-oriented reform and privatisation that evolved in the 1980s. This was bequeathed to New Labour by the Thatcher and Major governments and was even more firmly established through targets and national frameworks in the Blair-Brown years. In education the attention has been on institutional autonomy in the form of academies and now free schools, but equally as important is engaging parents and communities in supporting learning. In health the focus on structural reorganisation has overshadowed the need to engage the public better in managing and improving their own wellbeing.
Lasting social value is created between users and deliverers, so the real challenge for the future should be how we can socialise as well as localise our public services.
Outside Westminster there are some encouraging developments. In Scotland, the Christie Commission report on the future of Scottish public services called for a new framework based on four principles – community empowerment; service integration and collaboration; prevention rather than ‘failure demand’; and greater efficiency. And in Wales there are moves afoot to review the service relationships between central and local government. Both of these approaches build on the Total Place work begun under Labour, with a strong emphasis on service integration and collaboration at local level based on pooled budgets and local public service boards.
But arguably of even greater significance to Labour nationally is the renaissance that is taking place in parts of English local government. Manchester is thinking about how an urban conurbation model of leadership can boost economic development. Cooperative councils like Lambeth and Oldham are seeking to radically reshape services so that they are community owned, while Sunderland is pioneering a community leadership approach which puts local councillors alongside frontline workers to create responsive neighbourhood services.
The challenge for Labour is to develop out of these different strands a new and compelling account of what the relationship between citizens, communities, social institutions and the state ought to be in low-growth, austerity Britain.
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Ben Lucas is principal partner of the 2020 Public Services Hub at the RSA
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