Public services – the stakes are high
The effectiveness of public services is vital to our social fabric and important to our economic competitiveness. Public service policy will feature heavily in the forthcoming General Election campaign, with debate overshadowed by the fiscal deficit.
Looking at this context, surveying innovative practice in public services and reading through the ideas being offered by the parties and their think tank advisors, a number of key trends can be seen emerging. They are:
Resource pooling: After years of discussing better joining up of information, budgets and back office services we will reach a tipping point. The Total Place pilots are already pointing the way. This will be made more possible by technological advances – better data capture and greater interoperability of systems and made more necessary by the squeeze on spending.
The search for legitimacy: Public agencies will continue to search for ways of engaging the public in decision making and service design. This will be made more possible by new techniques for engagement ranging from citizens juries and on-line deliberation to neighbourhood decentralisation. It will be made more necessary by continued public disenchantment from traditional forms of representative democracy (including our ailing poltical parties) and the need to legitimise difficult spending decisions.
Behaviour shaping: Policy makers and service mangers will continue to explore how public investment can be better used to shape the values and behaviours of citizens. This will involve services turning outwards and acting as a catalyst for change in the community. This will be made more necessary as, without encouraging greater self reliance and civic activism, services will not be able to meet growing needs. It will be made more possible as we learn about what shapes behaviour and social norms.
Social infrastructure: The goal of behaviour shaping is already leading innovative public services to try to find out more about what makes communities more or less resilient and resourceful. This will be made more necessary as we see the consequences of weaker social bonds, for example more isolated older people. It will be made more possible as projects like the RSA’s Connected Communities develop ways for agencies to map social networks and develop community tools to strengthen those networks.
From spending on to spending by: Personal budgets for social care are often cited as one of the best existing examples of innovation. Recently, reports from both right and left of centre think tanks have stressed the scope for turning public services into co-operatives or mutuals. These policies have in common the idea that instead of agencies spending money on services for disadvantaged people, clients are able to be the managers of their own services. The potential benefits are more responsive services, empowerment of service users and even scope for welfare budgets to provide the seed capital for emerging social enterprises. This is made necessary by the desire and the need for disadvantaged people to have more control. It is made possible by better, more accessible, data providing information about the cost of existing interventions and helping individuals and organisations to argue that they could use funding more effectively.
Taken overall, these trends see the core role of the state move from service provider to decision maker and strategic enabler. It will not be a smooth process of change ; there will be many pitfalls and dilemmas on the way. A key factor will be the degree of decentralisation. If local leaders are able to experiment then the welfare system as a whole can learn fast about what works (and what doesn’t).
If we get this right we will see wave upon wave of public sector innovation resulting in a smaller but more effective and strategic state alongside a deeper public commitment to collective decision making and social responsibility. If we get it wrong – if, for example, budget reductions are too extreme and too indiscriminate or if Whitehall reacts to tough choices and public concern by centralising control – then we are in for a decade of retrenchment, resentment and a hollowing out of the public sphere.
The stakes are high. The major parties are on their way to this vision but none yet has shown quite the clarity or courage needed. It will certainly be interesting, and even possibly electorally salient, to see who commands this debate in the next few months.
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Comments
5 Comments on Public services – the stakes are high
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henry on
Fri, 18th Dec 2009 6:39 pm
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Indy on
Fri, 18th Dec 2009 9:17 pm
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Richard Crawley on
Wed, 23rd Dec 2009 2:58 pm
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John Craig-Sharples on
Thu, 24th Dec 2009 11:51 am
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matthewtaylor on
Thu, 24th Dec 2009 5:22 pm
Your blog sets out a fork in the road – shape these trends towards progressive aims, or go for path of least resistance. I think the decisions you suggest (and how the public, professionals and political community react to them) are partly informed by our capacity to do four things:
Think beyond narrow binaries – local vs central, big vs little state, individual vs society. None are particularly helpful
Be open about the trade offs – some difficult decisions must be made. For example, more pooling might require more data-sharing; behaviour-shaping might require compulsion or paternalism; long-term sustainable outcomes might skew short term results
Question assumptions about fairness– according to MORI, the public tend to think of fairness in public services as universalism: ‘the same for everyone’. Some of the trends you articulate would seriously challenge this.
Recognise the importance of collective capacity and social cohesion. All of your trends involve forms of collective behaviour. But personalisation and choice can also challenge this. I think you are right to set out these trends as a corrective.
some of these issues are being worked through by the 2020 Public Services Trust at http://www.2020pst.org (but you know that already!)
henry touches on some of the key points to my mind:
1) Decentralising service provision increases the variation in the service people receive – which is something our political landscape does not appear in favour of – all my life newspapers have been filled with articles about “Postcode lotteries” in health and education, not to mention the evergreen strand about refuse collection on either side of a council boundary… This attitude can change, but it’s important to realise how deeply entrenched it is and what a powerful driver of recentralisation it will be, the first time things get hairy at a mutual and it’s reported in the press.
2) The basic underpinning of all this “greater self-reliance and civic activism” is a belief that we can get back to getting decent quantities of “free work” out of people to maintain their own communities (as was apparently the case in the past.) However, there’s some serious unanswered questions here:
a) The estimates I’ve seen of “civic activism and self-reliance” (CASR) in the past seem rather variable, there are stunning examples which we’d like to emulate and then, in other places, the picture is less attractive – do we really understand the landscape of factors underlying “civic activism”? (I’d argue that we have most of the pieces to understand it, but there’s a lot of ideology which leads to a lot of handwaving in a lot of the proposals I’ve seen.)
b) One factor we do know underpinned a lot of CASR was an entirely different relationship between the population and work. Rates of formal employment (having to clock in for the boss) were overall much lower (mainly due to fewer women in the workplace) and crucially employers had a generally different relationship with geographical communities – which led them to enable communities to use spare resources (both human and otherwise.)
Now one can argue that with the increasing work capacity of people at retirement age, plus the expected increase in unemployment from the financial crisis we’ll have a pool of volunteers to make these mutuals run… but I think the case needs making in serious terms – because without the pool of volunteers you’ll achieve little more than breaking up the big monolithic organisations into smaller ones. That might be a win in itself – but it won’t do much about engagement…
I think I’m like most people in the working population, I do some things for my community, but I’m fairly sure I do less than my father did at my age – but equally I’m fairly sure that my employer wouldn’t give me the flexibility/support that his did for community engagement.
I was trying to think this over the other day. I confess I ended up in a completely different place.
It feels to me that the big issue for local authorities is what “good” is going to look like. The audit commission / CAA feels like it is on the wane, to be replaced with some locally-derived accountability model. This local measure may even allow for the differences in service noted above.
However, the trouble is too much thinking about “good” soon leads to thinking about “purpose”. That’s when I’m glad it’s almost christmas and I can forget these dizzying thoughts.
(Long-time lurker, driven to comment in case you think local govt is non-sexy )
Matthew,
Thank you for a very helpful post which pulls together a lot of current thinking. Not sure if you’ve seen an essay by Hugh Mackay on real communities
http://tiny.cc/LhwdS – he also talks about social infrastructure, saying that while grand visions of society have their place, it’s in the neighbourhood that we join the dots.
Given it’s Christmas I also wanted to say a big thank you for all your posts this year. Apologies for not posting more comments but I have found your posts both stimulating and of practical help in my work. You’re example encouraged me to start my own blog, too, – which may or may not be a good thing!
John
Thanks for the link John. I am delighted I have inspired you to start posting. I’ll check out your blog
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