The government wants to ‘open up public services’, making better use of the private sector’s capital and skills, the voluntary sector’s passion and connections, and mutualised public sector workers’ ethos and experience. This could well improve both efficiency and effectiveness in public services – but as John Cridland points out (see left), progress has been largely confined to a few ambitious departments: the DWP, DfE and MoJ (though the MoD is also moving fast from a poor starting position).
Last month’s update on opening up public services (see news, p3) reveals this patchy performance; and, like every government required to give a poor report on progress against its stated aims, the coalition has felt the need to announce a new initiative to speed things up. Yet the ‘right to choose’ (see below) is likely to sink as quickly from view as Francis Maude’s previous attempts to encourage people to embrace change: the ‘right to provide’ and the ‘right to challenge’. We’ve been here before under Labour, which had different aims but similar tools. Its ‘floor targets’, for example, gave everyone a theoretical right to a basic level of public services. While such ideas force service providers to point in yet another new direction, they fail to challenge the underlying mechanisms that define organisations’ behaviours. Like floor targets, the right to choose will founder on the dynamics that focus public servants on their own narrow objectives.
The government has made a good start on reducing targets and freeing organisations to act independently, enabling them to broaden their horizons a little. What is needed now is not another target (this one apparently designed to prioritise choice at all costs) but the incentives – beyond painful cuts – to encourage people to opt for change. Public workers contemplating mutualisation need confidence that their expertise and social mission will outweigh the private sector’s lower prices. Innovative companies need confidence that payment-by-results will reward intelligent risk-taking and long-term investment rather than cherry-picking and supply chain squeezes. Charities need confidence that the wider social benefits they create will be measured and recognised, even when their paymasters’ own aims are relatively narrow. All these are in the government’s gift, but they require ministers and officials to lift their eyes from the next cuts report and consider the longer term value and savings they could create.
The cuts are a driver of change, but they can also be an obstacle. If the government focuses on big, sustainable medium-term savings – recognising that poorly thought-out cuts risk pushing up demand for services – it could open up public services in ways that greatly improve them. But if it uses the agenda to outsource to the lowest bidder, it will badly damage public services – and miss the opportunity to bring the best of what the public, private and voluntary sectors have to bear on tackling Britain’s problems.