We need to listen to how public services impact on people, however uncomfortable that may be

In an era of tight budgets and increasing demands, what does it take to ensure public services meet public needs?

This collection of interviews is intended to help address this question by listening to those who are already answering it in practice.

We need reform of public services not just because money is tight, but because we need to find new ways to give people better support. Often that means giving people more control and a bigger say over the public services they rely on.

Oldham council leader Jim McMahon offers a powerful insight into how to do better for less. Faced with a collapse of trust in politics, he suggests that confident political leadership begins with a simple idea: ‘Just listen’.

That is advice we are happy to take.

This publication includes people who have shown how listening carefully to the people they are trying to help gave them a deeper understanding of their changing needs. They found insights that helped both staff and service users improve the quality of public services because people on the frontline have the best understanding of what needs to change.

As Hilary Cottam argues, ‘Everything needs to start from the point of view of people, not institutions’.

These interviews make the case for public services that constantly ask how they really impact on people’s lives and how those supposed to benefit from them feel about what is on offer. It is not always comfortable to get this kind of feedback, but it is vital to hear it if we want to make sure public services are as effective as possible and have the popular support they need to survive into the future.

The changes our interviewees are making are driven by a common belief that when users and providers of public services make choices about responsibility and power together they can radically improve services and outcomes.

Whether it is social workers giving children access to better opportunities in life, helping vulnerable older or disabled people choose the kind of life they want to live, or supporting people with mental health problems to choose their own path to recovery, the voices in the pages that follow demonstrate the power of the state not just to redistribute resources but to act as a counterbalance to inequalities of wealth, health and power.

The challenge for us all is to make sure that more of our public services reach that high standard, and, just as important, to be frank about when they do not. At a time of shrinking resources, the one freely available resource we can harness to help public services become more effective is people’s own experiences of their lives and the services they rely on. As Gill Ruecroft says, for people with mental ill health, services can too often fail to ‘make any sense to the way they live their lives’.

This can be a hard path to take. Those of us on the left are proud of the ethos and social purpose of public services.

But we weaken the case for public services if we neglect the criticisms, disappointments and ideas for improvement that service users can offer. Giving people a stronger voice and more control will lead to greater innovation and even variation as different communities in different parts of the country try out new ideas. We welcome that as an opportunity to learn together. We welcome, too, giving people more control over the decisions that affect their lives because we understand that helping people become more self-reliant means they have more control over their own destiny and the chance to be more aspirational about what they want to achieve.

We strengthen our case most when we build services that hear their users’ criticisms and then use them to make improvements step by step, day in, day out. The best organisations listen and learn. That principle must be at the heart of every public service.

Giving people more control means parliament and politicians having less control. For old-style politics, rooted in the desire to take decisions about people, that is a huge challenge. But we must seize the new politics of empowerment because, as these interviews show, it has the power to transform the lives of people and their communities, and even to restore trust in a broken politics.

In his Hugo Young lecture last year Ed Miliband urged Labour to make the case for people-powered public services. He spoke of friends who, in trying to get desperately needed help for their son, felt ‘they were standing alone in the world’. There are new ways to bring people together so no one feels isolated, and everyone feels they have the power they need to make the change they want to see. That is what the new politics is all about.

The lesson of this publication is we can improve people’s lives by listening to them, involving them in decisions about their own lives, and bringing them together with others who share their life. At its heart it is about giving people more power, and that has been a central principle of Labour politics for as long as our party has existed. The Tories want to roll back the state, but our goal must be to change the role of the state so that it is more directly under the control of the people who rely on it.

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Liz Kendall MP is shadow minister for care. Steve Reed MP is shadow minister for home affairs

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Download the full pamphlet, Let it go: Power to the People in Public Services, here