A radical agenda for improving public services
Sean Worth’s report on UK public sector reform sets out clear principles for opening up services to competition (and potential improvement) but is light on detail about implementation.
eolas assesses its main messages.
A major UK public policy think tank, Policy Exchange, has recently published a hard-hitting report on how public services in Britain can be improved significantly. The report is entitled ‘Better Public Services – a roadmap for revolution’ and is authored by Sean Worth who, prior to joining the Policy Exchange stable, had been a public sector reform adviser to the Prime Minister and, before that, Head of Policy with the Conservative Party.
At the beginning of his report, even prior to eight months of research and consultation, the researcher nails his colours to the mast, declaring that access to public services is controlled by “state bureaucrats”, performance is “at best opaque” the people must be enabled to be “powerful consumers” and government must embrace competition as a “proven force for social good”.
Although this report from the outset has the appearance of a somewhat ideologically right-wing ‘public-sector bad, private-sector good’ essay, the author makes it clear that the report is based on new polling, commissioned for this study, which reveals overwhelming support for competition and choice – particularly from poorer households, who generally suffer most from poor services and who are least equipped to go elsewhere.
The report also argues that given the restrictions on the public finances and the inevitable increasing demands of a growing and aging population, services can only deteriorate unless there is radical reform.
The report maps out a five-step plan to achieve better services for the consumers of those services:
1. unlock as much information and transparency as possible – publish information on comparative performance and costs so that people can make their own assessment of value (it will also show the difference between public sector provision and what the private or social economy sector can achieve);
2. create powerful consumers of services – introduce legal rights for people to exercise choice; remove ‘preferred provider’ lists and fixed catchment areas;
3. build safeguards against failure and abuse – introduce regulation, service quality standards and sanctions against providers for non-performance;
4. stop government providing services and instead boost its buying skills – shift delivery from government to other sectors and in particular remove generalists from the procurement management role and replace with external experts, put the right performance incentives in place for change leaders;
5. create a thriving field of competition – there must be widespread competition not just the replacement of a public sector monopoly by a private sector monopoly (barriers to market entry should be removed and vested interests should not be allowed control).
The Policy Exchange report outlines elements of the research conducted around public opinion on public sector reform and reveals that while there is a high degree of satisfaction in relation to some services which are currently provided by the public sector, there is an appetite for alternatives. There is, however, much more public confidence around certain services being run by the social economy or voluntary sector rather than by for-dividend private sector operators.
Overall, ‘Better Public Services – a roadmap for revolution’ is a challenging piece of work. While it is difficult to argue against a greater focus on choice and competition, or the proposal to bring more genuine expertise into the management of procurement, the report is relatively light on how its proposals could be implemented. For there is no doubt that the ‘revolution’ would require a major programme of primary legislation and new ICT platforms. Also for ordinary consumers of services, quite often what they want is one high quality, simple to understand, service rather than a bewildering choice.
Perhaps these practical concerns will be addressed in future reports from Policy Exchange.
About Policy Exchange
Policy Exchange was founded in 2002 by Michael Gove, Nick Boles and Frances Maude – all current Conservative ministers in the UK Government. Its Better Public Services project will include public opinion research into what people want from public services (and their attitudes to reform), and recommendations how government can use new information strategies to better understand service value and quality, better regulation and scaling up independent provisions and adopting best practice. Policy Exchange’s other current projects are focusing on industrial policy, regulatory policy and constitutional affairs.