Labour’s failure to shape a public service reform agenda was recently lamented on ProgressOnline. Since then, Ed Miliband has unveiled arguably the most radical public-service reform agenda since the second world war. Two days later Jon Cruddas gave a speech in which he talked about devolving power to people, while publishing the second major output from his policy review – One Nation Society – containing the ideas that will make this aspiration a reality. At the core of all of this is what the Labour leader called a ‘people power revolution’.  Not Old Labour’s top-down paternalism, nor New Labour’s target-driven managerialism, but a shift of control from the providers to the users of public services so their insights, preferences and aspirations can drive them where they want them to go.

Ed drew on the experience of Labour’s high-powered Local Government Innovation Task Force, the Cooperative Councils Innovation Network, community organising, and grassroots pioneers such as Hilary Cottam’s Participle organisation, to pull together a vision of public services that places power in the hands of the people who use them.  This, he argues, will deliver more responsive, more effective public services that are more preventative and more outcomes-focused. He demanded more control for parents over schools and more control for patients over health services, relatively modest demands that nevertheless open the door to major change. People power in the public as well as in the private sector, he insisted, will be the defining mission of his premiership if Labour is returned to government next year.

We are seeing Labour shape a new agenda that meets the challenge of the times both financially and by addressing the power imbalance in our society. The party is preparing to confront vested interests in the public sector having already confronted them in banking, the economy and the media. The two Eds have made clear that there is going to be less money around, but they have chosen to think bigger than offering ‘kinder’ cuts than the Tories. Instead, they’ve gone for the radical option of transforming the way public services work so they can do better for less. As Jon Cruddas put it, we will protect outcomes not institutions. For a party that can be very conservative about our most cherished institutions this is radical stuff. The NHS is perhaps the most cherished of all, but you can already see Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall promoting people power through personalised budgets and the integration of health and social care around people and the communities they are part of.  Similarly Yvette Cooper is exploring how communities can have a bigger say over local policing priorities.

It’s striking how big a role Labour local government is playing in the creation of the new people power agenda. But it makes perfect sense. Labour councils have been dealing with the reality of shrunken budgets and rising demand for services for nearly four years now. They’ve resisted salami-slicing services in favour of transformation, and the scale of innovation has been immense. We’re seeing community energy projects, mutualised housing, community-led youth services, schools collaborating to support each other, local projects that get people back to work far more effectively than the government’s failed work programme. Their success has convinced Ed Miliband that he can unleash even more innovation if he commits to pushing power down to cities, communities and individuals. The tools he’s making available are power pushed down as far as possible, information opened up to public scrutiny, decisions taken together not imposed from above. Instead of trying to answer every question the country faces, One Nation Labour is offering the country the means to find its own answers. At a time when the Britain is questioning whether it can still trust politics, Ed Miliband has looked the country in the eye and challenged it to trust itself instead.