Public service savings – no pain, no gain
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics, Public policy, The RSA
Fresh on the heels of Tessa Jowell’s welcome call for politicians to be more open and honest about hard choices (see yesterday’s post), we have the Government and Opposition implying that it is only if we elect the other lot next year that we will face public spending cuts. Perhaps Tessa should send a copy of her speech to Andrew Lansley and Liam Byrne.
We need significant public sector reform so that services are more effective and responsive, and particularly (as 2020 Public Services Trust Director, Ben Lucas, said at a Number Ten seminar this morning) to embed the idea that most public service outcomes result not from ‘delivery’ but from the combined efforts of the state, communities and individuals. But this kind of change will be gradual, and although it will ultimately create better services, it will not reap savings in the short term.
In as much as politicians, officials and advisors are facing up to the coming spending crunch it is possible to distinguish an important difference in emphasis between Labour and Conservative.
There are some specific cuts to which the Conservatives are pledged, for example scrapping Regional Development Agencies. But, as Philip Hammond, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, emphasised here at the RSA last month, the Conservatvies put great store by better management. They genuinely believe it is possible to find major savings (of the order of ten percent) through improvements to the way Government works. In essence, this involves an updating of the Thatcher strategy of Next Steps agencies and contracting out to create a leaner, meaner government machine.
The Conservatives are unapologetically technocratic saying that the ways to make a step change in productivity are clear but that Labour has failed to pursue them due to vested producer interests and the inability of ministers to control the growth of targets and initiatives. There may be much to this, but the kind of savings the Conservatives are aiming for still won’t be achieved without resistance from both workers and the public.
Labour also thinks it may be possible to save a lot of money without damaging public service entitlements (indeed the Government’s soon to be unveiled public service reform plan is likely to propose putting key entitlements on a statutory footing). But Brown’s advisors are also stressing the potential of decentralisation.
Following on from a report compiled by Sir Michael Bichard, a former Permanent Secretary and now Director of the Institute for Government, a series of pilot studies has been established looking comprehensively at the public money spent in specific local authority areas. I understand that early indications suggest a huge amount of waste, over-complication, duplication, and, more profoundly, a failure to get funding directly to the problems it is supposed to be addressing. The main cause of this lies in the overload of targets, funding streams, guidance and accountability mechanisms spewing forth from Whitehall. Labour’s plan is therefore to embed key public service improvements from the last ten years (and there have been many) while devolving to local government as much as possible beyond these core entitlements.
Labour’s plan is bold and makes sense as policy and politics. But – and this is a huge but – it will only be credible if Number Ten is willing to tackle the dysfunctionality of the political management of central Government. Problems like these need to be dealt with: there are far too many ministers, all of whom think it is their job to generate initiatives; ideas are allowed to be developed and launched without any reference to those at the front line; change management and the time it takes is not treated seriously; there is complete lack of realism about how far the centre’s intended messages actually reach; civil servants fail to see or warn (or be allowed to warn) their masters that every new target or piece of guidance had an adverse impact on all these existing targets and instructions (not to mention local morale).
However well intentioned Brown’s advisors are, they will not achieve real change unless they do something about this. The process of Whitehall capability reviews started when I was in Number Ten but, despite my best efforts, the political management of departments was largely excluded (even though everyone knew this was the biggest single problem).
Labour’s reform plan won’t be taken seriously, nor will it deserve to be, unless it involves a profound shift in the way policy is made at the centre. And if you want me to make this more concrete I will: I would find it impossible to believe in any plan to decentralise power from the centre that did not commit to a substantial reduction in the number of Government ministers
Social mobility, the brain and good news for the RSA
Filed under: Public policy, Social brain, The RSA
As I write I’m listening to the Today programme item about the social mobility white paper. The RSA will soon be hearing from someone whose work may be one of the most important contributions to this debate.
After yesterday’s discussion on this site it is interesting that the Government is leading with the idea of paying the best teachers to teach in the most deprived schools. This is a straightforward piece of public service redistribution, and no bad thing for that. As always, the success of such an initiative will depend on the way it is implemented; just because someone succeeds as a teacher in a middle class school in Richmond upon Thames doesn’t mean they would do as well in a school like Lilian Bayliss, which includes my younger son amongst its pupils. Indeed, arguably, in a school like Bayliss, which is overwhelmingly made up of working class children from minority ethnic families, it is important to inspire the pupils with successful teachers with a similar background to the pupils.
Liam Byrne has just disagreed with David Willetts that the Government is putting too much emphasis on early years in seeking to tackle entrenched inequality. Whether the Government’s interventions work is one question but the evidence that infant experience does have a major impact of future prospects does seem to be getting stronger. Yesterday we heard the fantastic news that our nominee for the Benjamin Franklin Medal (awarded to an international figure who has contributed to enlightenment thought) has accepted; she is Professor Elizabeth Gould from Princeton University.
Professor Gould is responsible for one of the recent decade’s most important breakthroughs in neuroscience. Taking on one of the most established and dogmatically adhered to nostrums of her discipline, Gould painstakingly demonstrated the existence of neurogenesis – the generation of new neurons – in mammals. And, even more significantly for social policy, she found in her work with monkeys that the scope for neurogenesis - in other words the ability of the brain to generate and repair brain cells – was significantly affected by the circumstances in which the monkey was reared. Mothers who had experienced high stress and suffered from being low in the dominance hierarchy produced offspring with a lower capacity for neurogenesis.
The good news, and why David Willetts may be right to question too great an emphasis on the early years, is that these effects can be corrected in later life. If monkeys brought up in deprived circumstances were then transferred to stimulating environments, their capacity for neurogenesis recovered, over time, to the average.
It is fantastic that Professor Gould will soon be sharing her latest research findings and their social implications with an RSA audience; we’ll be sure to invite Liam Byrne and David Willets.
Is social mobility a good thing?
Social mobility will be in the news again this week, with the Lib Dems’ commission reporting today and Liam Byrne unveiling the Government white paper tomorrow . But is social mobility necessarily a good thing? This is what I wrote a few weeks ago in the context of the general rise of social pessimism.
‘Is it in the nature of some of the things that seem to be getting better – for example, growing affluence or tolerance – that they contribute to making (some of us) feeling worse? Should we give greater weight in social policy to the subjective than the objective? Interestingly this has been the general shift in how the Government measures public service performance, moving from outcome based indicators to user satisfaction.
‘One example is social mobility. Everyone says they are in favour of having more of it. This is fine when we are talking about absolute social mobility – increasing the numbers getting into the middle class, as happened in the fifties and sixties. But the only way to increase relative social mobility (or to increase absolute social mobility when the middle class has stopped expanding) is to make it easier for people to come down as well as go up.
‘But it is far from clear that a society in which it is easier for middle class people to be downwardly socially mobile would be a more content society. Behavioural economics teaches us that the pleasure of upward social mobility (getting something we didn’t have before) is less than the pain of downward social mobility (losing something we have now). So the net social contentment impact of increasing relative social mobility (disregarding other knock-on effects) is negative. In other words the one thing all leading politician say they want more of is something that will make us less happy as a society!’
Given this it is perhaps not surprising that Liam Byrne called the idea that social mobility must be about people going down as up ‘a classic liberal error’. Gordon Brown intends to emphasise the scope for the managerial and professional classes to grow thus boosting absolutely social mobility. But even if we focus on absolute mobility there is still a distributional aspect.
If our objective is to increase the number of people in higher occupational groups, presumably we want to do this by elevating those (and the offspring of those) currently in the lowest levels; this is certainly the implication of the Government’s messaging. If this is the case the objective is to redistribute opportunity among the middle and lower strata so that the poor have as good a chance as rising up as those just below the higher levels.
But if this is the case – and there are perfectly good grounds of equity and releasing talent for thinking so - then the effect on aggregate social contentment will again be negative. Those just outside the top strata are much more focussed on, and expectant of, shifting up a notch, and will thus be more disappointed when they don’t, than would be those at the bottom who will tend to compare themselves with the people just above them.
I support attempts to improve social mobility, and was pleased to see the most recent data confirming that things have improved over the last few years. But the latest international data indicates that the single best policy is simply to reduce inequality. By lowering the distance people have to travel to move up or down, and making downward mobility less disastrous for personal finances and status, relatively equal societies lower the economic and social barriers to mobility.
But while ‘increasing social mobility’ is a buzz phrase ‘redistributing wealth’ is not. So we can expect all our politicians to conspire it the story that mobility can rise in an unequal society without anyone having to suffer.
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