The Tories are radically altering the public service landscape. Labour will need to rethink its approach to how it delivers better public services in this new world.

Since entering office less than two years ago, the Conservatives have initiated significant reforms of each of the main public services. From GP commissioning to free schools and police commissioners, the current government is pursuing public service reforms of a scope and at a speed that is unmatched in recent political history.

Yet if their ambition is unquestionable, their consistency is not. The striking thing about the coalition’s reforms is that they do not appear to be underpinned by a single, unified view of what makes public services better. Love or loath New Labour’s reforms, they all reflected a consistent account of how to improve service delivery that placed citizens rather than providers at the heart of services and prescribed a shared set of tools, including contestability between providers, top down targets, citizen choice and voice to deliver outcomes. There was even a PowerPoint slide summarising the approach –nicknamed the ‘Washing Machine’ because of its Dilbert-esque overuse of circular arrows – that did the rounds in Whitehall.

By contrast, the coalition’s reforms are highly disjointed and appear to lack a consistent logic. In health, the government seems intent on passing power and budgets to the professionals. In policing and to a lesser extent in education, the reverse is the case, with power passed either directly to service users under initiatives like free schools or indirectly to their elected representatives, as in the case of police commissioners. Under some reforms, local government and local institutions will be given more influence. Local authorities will be involved in the oversight of the new GP commissioning consortia and existing local crime partnerships will be given more latitude. Under others, in particular in education, they will be cut out of the loop.

Some have taken this as evidence that the Conservatives do not have a ‘theory of governance’ – a view on how government makes things happen – or that they do not have a clear vision of what they are trying to achieve. However, the truth may be rather different. The Tories do have a clear objective. Their aim is to get out of the delivery business. They want to stop managing public services altogether.

Evidence for this lies in the few points of commonality that exist between their reforms. The Tory reforms are sprawling, confused and often imply contradictory theories of reform but they all share two salient characteristics. All of them seek to hand responsibility for delivery of services, spending decisions and even in many cases their oversight to outside or arms length organisations. In health, for instance, Andrew Lansley battled hard to remove the health secretary’s responsibility for ensuring NHS provision. And all of them seek to make it harder to assess whether services are actually performing and improving, by replacing tangible ‘management’ targets (for example the waiting list target) with very broad ‘outcome’ targets upon which the impact of public services is difficult to measure (such as ‘raising life expectancy’) and by ceasing the publication of management and activity data (such as number of arrests).

Senior civil servants and non-profit providers who work regularly with ministers echo this view. They tell stories of ministers halting civil service work on policy delivery on the grounds that it is not government’s job and of members of the cabinet telling their officials that they ‘do not believe in having a top down strategy’ to deliver policy and that they are ‘happy to leave it to others’.

Under the Conservatives’ approach, government’s job is to articulate very broad objectives and aspirations, establish an arm’s length framework and make others responsible for figuring out how best to achieve the government’s goals. Government does not try to drive change in provision and performance directly. It merely sets the rules and then change ‘happens’. The approach is hardly new and mirrors attempts by earlier Tory governments to split policy formulation from policy implementation. Part of its grounding is ideological. When more honest Tories say they want government to get out of the way and that the private and non-profit sector can do a better job, they really mean it. However, much of it is political.

The Tories want to restructure the relationship between government and frontline delivery to inoculate themselves against the political effects of austerity. One of the greatest dangers for the Conservatives is that the public, regardless of their support for fiscal retrenchment in the abstract, will turn against the coalition once they experience actual cuts to services they depend on, especially if growth remains sluggish. This could be a particular problem given the UK’s highly centralised political culture. More than in most other developed democracies, the reflex among British voters is to hold national government responsible for the quality of local services, even when it has limited actual power over them, as in the case of the home secretary and the police.

The government’s reforms aim to address this problem by making it harder to discern how services are performing and critically by moving accountability for deciding and delivering cuts onto other bodies. So while the rhetoric is all about devolution, empowerment and a ‘Big Society’, the reality is all about shifting the blame. The emerging landscape of devolved decision-making will not only allow the Tories to wash their hands of responsibility for specific cuts but will also let them have their cake and eat it, imposing austerity while simultaneously exhorting frontline managers not to cut services and condemning them when they inevitably do. This dishonest sleight of hand is already evident in debates about law and order. Despite the fact that staffing costs make up almost 80 per cent of the police budget, the government has simultaneously imposed a 20 per cent real terms cut over four years at the same time as criticising police chiefs for making staff reductions. Expect much more of this in the future.

This approach poses two dilemmas for Labour. First, the party need to work out how to respond politically. In the short term, this should be straightforward: the party can gain traction by opposing coalition reforms themselves, as, for instance, Andy Burnham has been doing so effectively on health. However, as the reforms themselves bed in and gain popular acceptance, they may render the job of opposition harder. For instance, highly visible police commissioners will take attention and pressure off the Home Office.

Second, Labour will need to rethink its own approach to driving improvement in public services to take account of the emerging landscape of devolved accountability. A Labour government may be able to modify or overhaul the worst elements of the Tories’ structural reforms. But it will surely not be able to unravel them all. So Labour will need to articulate how it will bring about change in this new, fragmented world where government has given up many of the levers it has traditionally used to make public services better. The party will need to develop a new account of the role the state, providers and citizens play in driving public service improvement and a new offer to resonate with voters in a world where they may look less to Whitehall. We will need to develop this thinking both to equip us to win the arguments at the next general election and to give Labour a roadmap to effectively compete for roles like those of police commissioners and make best use of them if we win them. All of this will require intellectual heavy lifting. The work should begin now.

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David Pinto-Duschinsky is a former special adviser at the Home Office and the Treasury

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Photo: Roxeteer