Rehumanising Public Services

Have just finished reading Simon Jenkins' Thatcher and Sons a witty and engagingly abrasive account of the public service revolution of the past 30 years or so.

Recasting the drive to increased centralisation and in many cases nationalisation of previously autonomous local institutions of health and education in the familiar Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the progenitor of the Millenium Dome (it goes to prove that nobody is immune from public sector quicksand, the 'Euan effect anybody?') makes in his final section a strong and persuasive case for a further transformation focused on stronger local accountability of public services .

Given all that was heard but not seen of ‘New Localism’ and the adopted vocabulary of communitarianism pre ’97, it could be questioned as to whether after ten years of further entrenched central government control and consequent emasculation of local authority discretion and autonomy it is worth the candle of calling for a more humane devolution of powers.

The big unknown is the extent to which Burke’s small platoons of Englishmen and women are capable, after 70 years of welfare statism, of taking responsibility to stand up for their local communities and fostering the qualities of leadership, trust and accountability that government at central, regional and even district level is simply incapable of engendering.

In the big picture, Jenkins is best in rationalising the enigmatic spirits that drove Margaret Thatcher's, her own formidable courage in breaking the mould of economic defeat by overthrowing Heath, weathering the storms of opposition and aided by Geoffery Howe at Treasury the dire and painfully necessary monetarist budgets of '81 is balanced by a striking absence of gratitude to her family let alone party or any other rung of society climbed in the progress of her life and career.

Major, Blair and Brown have further ntrenched the Thatcher revolution in public services, extending privatisation and triangulating between the citizen an increased involvement of the private sector in the delivery, running and infrastructure of public services.

Striking also is the fact that none of the leaders of the country over this period have had sufficient understanding of how to operate the levers of power or feel comfortable in utilising the collective wisdom of successive Permanent Secretaries and Cabinet Secretaries.

Unlike the French 'enarques' and maybe just as well, there has never been any danger of the United Kingdom being competently run to mediocrity by an all powerful technocratic caste of political administrators.

Sir Humprey has in the main been sidelined. Until Blair and Brown found a servant they both felt happy working with in the adept form of avowed Manchester United and lifelong Labour voter Gus O’Donnell, the role of Cabinet Secretary was a bypassable redundancy. Sir Richard Wilson, the seemingly placidly equine successor to Butler was incensed enough to bark, ‘You've merely led, never managed' at Blair when the sofa government of unminuted meetings led to another Whitehall paralysis.

Instead the centripetal power of Central Government has propelled the public services into a vertex of perpetual growth, continual change, creating an enormous and dissatisfied workforce regimented by a culture of Gogolian audit and inspection.

In consequence ministerial responsibility encompasses to the minutest degree success and failure of what in the rest of the world would be local matters for local people to decide.

This omnipotence when twinned with a deliberately stunted level of local accountability has engendered a scenario in which the villain of the piece, a paranoid, inhumane and overbearing HM Treasury, unceasingly delivers the worst outcomes for all concerned.

Convinced that local government, NHS trusts and the wider public sector are incapable of delivering efficiency and savings, a ‘know it all’ Treasury has itself proved to be a most hapless negotiator: susceptible alike to being hog-tied by blue collar unions into national pay settlements, so distorting regional pay-scales to the disadvantage of local economies to signing off GP significant salary increases without producing any discernible benefit in patient services.

In Jenkins’ words ‘The consequence has been the remorseless march of big, intrusive and incompetent government’. How best to bind the Leviathan of central state control that through ID cards and other measures purportedly in the name of foiling Al Quaeda terrorism, seeks to devour the freedoms it was established to protect?

The dynamic localist revolution if it does succeed will have to break through at grass roots level the consciences of individual mired in the current political status quo, in which the British tolerate ‘warm compenstated servitude, slavery mitigated by the welfare state’ and have a choice of elected dictators to centrally manage the levers of government every 5 years or so.

Citing de Tocqueville, Jenkins invites parallels between the atomisation of British society today and post revolutionary France where: “Every man is a stranger to the destiny of others. His children and personal friends form for him the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is beside them but he does not see them…while above them rises an immense and tutelary power, that of the state.”

The public service revolution is like its Marxist predecessors virtually unceasing. Cameroon and Brown would both be equally capable of further delivery focused reform, calibrating finer a range of performance indicators, targeted ring fenced grants and passported funds, and all at the politically acceptable cost of 40 pence in the pound of centrally raised tax and the subsidised cowardice that is council tax.

Whatever the outcomes of the Lyons consultation, it is unlikely either politically for the fear of another Poll Tax fiasco, or fiscally on account of HM Treasury’s paranoid control freakery that funds for the delivery of local services will be locally raised and targeted.

A restoration of the link between accountability for the funding and delivery local services is the main plank of a putative localist revolution.

If the people of Britain are as keen as their peers in Western Europe to assume control for determining how public services, including health, education and elements of social services are funded and delivered at an accountably local level, will require a sizable leap of civic faith into civic action.

This does require the vision thing, the rediscovery, in daily public life by people of different backgrounds, holding individual aspirations and interests the ability to learn to work in unity to ensure that public services common to all are simply the best they can possibly be.

Not a return to socialism, not a continuation of failed absolute statism but a recognition that people can be trusted to take responsibility for the best interests of themselves and their immediate environment. In essence a repersonalisation of public services and reconnection with the concern, compassion, wisdom and courage that make life in human society fully worth living.

Aside from finding willing and capable community leaders, the present division in local authorities between unitary county councils and district will also require redress. Town councils may be given greater powers and unitary city and metropolitan authorities might be redrawn but with structures largely intact.

It is more than likely that the nanny state will shriek down the inability of power to be devolved, of the perils of waste and mismanagement inherent in devolution. Given the £6bn Working Family Tax Credits fiasco, £26bn Connecting for Health and more answers lie closer to central government’s door than they’d care to notice. But more to the point, the remote outsourcing to regional agencies to deliver Whitehall’s will has simply not led to happy outcomes in delivery, efficiency or accountability.

The future delivery of successful public services will entail going back some way into the past of civic and local pride to deliver public services that are both personal and accountable.

The risk averse, arse-covering of Whitehall audit committee culture must end and responsibility be devolved down to communities and groups capable of accountably ordering, managing and delivering services. The personalisation of public services will be based on humane qualities of elected accountability, personability, responsibility and trust.

And the reason for this is that small platoons of organised people, entrusted with responsibility will invariably stand up to do their best for their communities. They do so admiralbly well enough on the continent, and in those parts of the world wherein English government was transplanted, namely the United States and white Commonwealth, so why not return to its roots here?

Jenkins opines: “Democracy can only be based on tiers of autonomy, on people trusting people who trust other people, on a hierarchy of trusts. Only thus will we allow others to exercise judgments and accept risk on our behalf. Otherwise public service degenerates into a miasma of league tables and statistics.”

And as Onora O’Neill writes in the 2004 Reith Lecture: “When individuals and the professionals are denied responsibility for risk a part of their humanity is diminished. The individual is socialised. You may increase openness and transparency in government, but this does not increase trust. Indeed if anything trust had receded as transparency advanced.

“Perhaps we should not be surprised,’ said O’Neill, ‘that the technologies that spread information so easily are just as good at spreading misinformation and disinformation;. Trust in self government depends on trust in confidences, even secrets, bred of personal acquaintance and professional respect. People long to trust others but if they have bred in them a ‘culture of suspicion’ they will not do so.”

To rewrite WH Auden, ‘We must trust one another or die’