Reforming the Public Sector
It is eleven years since Tony Blair launched the debate on Clause Four at Party Conference. That debate had crucial importance because it challenged us to say what we really stood for.
reviously we had claimed an ideology based on the assumption that state ownership together with a planned economy would deliver us to the Promised Land.
Twenty years ago we could only dream about discussing a third term in government but if we had, the question would have been “When are we going to introduce socialism?”
So we lost our way and the Tories had four terms to undermine and destroy so many of our values.
We don’t need another long debate about our ideology. We do need to use the signposts that distinguish Labour values from Tory ones.
What are those signposts?
Full employment has to be one. Who can imagine a Labour Government that could assume as the Tories did under Margaret Thatcher that three million unemployed was not a hallmark of failure? Until the 2001 election all previous Labour governments had gone into the following election with rising unemployment. But not this one.
Another signpost is the eradication of poverty both here and overseas.
Our promise to take all children out of poverty in twenty years is a truly bold one. It is a profoundly important aim but also a profoundly difficult one. We have made real progress and policies like Sure Start show the way forward.
With poverty overseas the challenge is even greater and we know it requires international policies on aid, trade, and good government.
However the signpost I want to talk about today is our aim to achieve high quality public services.
When we came to office in 1997 we didn’t underestimated the amount of money the public services needed. But we did underestimate both the management problem and our understanding of what the public wanted from public services.
The management problem was not just about individuals and management style. It was about systems. A health service that had few computers and what computers they did have, didn’t talk to each other.
So we poured money into the public services but are now faced with the sceptics who say “Well, where’s the difference?” There are in fact plenty of differences. Who remembers the last winter bed crisis for example? They are a thing of the past. A bad memory of the Tory years. But in politics you can’t live on the credit of your achievements alone.
We in Government and Parliament knew that we were pouring money into the public services and we knew we were getting credit for it from our supporters. But we also knew that we weren’t getting sufficient change of the type the public wanted. This led us to sound like excessively harsh critics of people working in public services. I think we got the balance between criticism and encouragement wrong at times but I would ask teachers, hospital workers and others to remember that we were doing it because we need change to keep the public loyal to public services.
We were fearful that the defining argument of the next election would be whether or not the public would accept that public investment had to continue or was the Tory alternative of opt outs a better route? And take note of this the Liberals, ever the opportunists, are now moving in that direction too.
So how do we reshape our public services so that people not only go on using them but more importantly are really willing to pay for them? We want the public to be enthusiastic supporters of public services not passive recipients.
If we don’t achieve this then eventually the Tory’s will return because people will pay to opt out or vote for a party that seems to offer routes out of public service provision.
So our agenda has to follow the publics desire to tailor services to their specific needs. This is a more positive way of describing choice. It is also recognition of the way an advanced and wealthy industrial society operates.
The old idea of community that defined 19th century socialism was of a community bound together to protect itself against a harsh external world. Trade unions did just that and it is why community became so important to Labour.
Community is still important but it has changed. The individual now has much greater general protection for their rights and for their needs so they can seek the enjoyment of more individualism without putting at risk the advantages of community support.
The sense of community that dominated the 19th and the first half of the 20th century required the workers to unite on a common platform which often required the suppression of individual variation of needs. This was the cause of continuous tension within working class communities and within the old definition of socialism.
The working class united was a good phrase for the song books but it wasn’t real and the wealthier we got the more apparent the splits.
We tend to put health and education at the centre of our debate about public services for understandable reasons but in doing so we have underestimated the importance of local authorities.
We really haven’t done as well as we should have done here. Why? Because we baulked at the change that was necessary. We needed to break out of the circle where we said we wanted to give more power and autonomy to LA’s but we wanted evidence of reform first.
Frankly we won’t get the best out of local authorities unless we give them more freedom and that means we have to let go. This is very important politically too. When the Tories began to lose the support of their own local councillors they began to lose some of their best activists.
We are in danger of doing the same. Local councillors are often the cement that holds the local party together.
Let me try and describe how my reformed public services might work by giving a few examples.
Let’s take education. There is a problem around people’s choice of schools. It is very severe in London and some other large urban areas but also in some rural areas where although the school caters for the majority of people it might not be seen as good enough for some parents who might then choose to buy their way out.
I rather doubt that we will ever get to a situation where a parent has absolute choice of school but is that really the choice they want? Supposing the education authority said to the parent, “These are the options on schools with places available but why don’t we do an assessment of your child’s strengths and weaknesses and in discussion with you decide what extra the child needs?”
This is exactly what the better off do now. They either choose the school they want by paying or they pay for extra classes. And over a quarter of all state school pupils now have additional classes paid for by parents.
If an education authority was able to provide a more refined service which offered any parent who requested it a full assessment of the Childs strengths and weaknesses and offered extra classes if appropriate then I believe the parent would feel more positive about the system.
Let me give a housing example. At the moment you go to your council or housing association and ask for a transfer. Depending on the degree of housing stress you are told how long you will have to wait and the options available –usually not too many. But supposing as well as these options there was more detailed housing advice available.
Obviously shared equity is one and a good housing officer will mention that. But if space for an expanding family is the problem why not talk about extending their current property – a loft conversion for example?
Why not extend our existing policy of letting people move to other geographical areas but increasing the assistance to move, offering more financial help and more advice especially about jobs and schools. At the moment the help is minimal.
And if noisy neighbours are the problem why can’t we offer a good soundproofing service? I know that won’t work for the extreme cases but many of the complaints we get are really about the shoddy building of many flats and house built in the 1960’s.
Some extra services would have to be paid for by the tenant but people are used to paying more for an additional service when they go to the private sector and we are now talking about a more flexible rent policy that allows people to choose a different quality of housing.
The key problem for so many of our public services is that they are geared to offering options rather then to solving people’s individual problems. Our agenda of choice is getting a somewhat cynical response because people assume they are just going to be told you can choose A, B or C.
In fact the public sector, particularly local authorities need to be able to say “How can we help solve your problem?”
We are moving in this direction and I know that there are many good examples around but we have to do more if we are to retain support for public services.
This is not some academic problem. Let me give a specific one. Two parents felt their child was underperforming at school. The school was not a bad school but it was struggling with a high level of special needs children. Discussion with the school led to reassuring statements but no actual change. The parents paid for an educational advisers report. It showed the child had a high IQ but would benefit from extra help in some of the areas where he was underperforming.
They gave the report to the school. “He is bright was the response”. And the report disappeared never to be seen again. More importantly there was no change in the teaching for the boy. So the parents did what parents often do and paid for private classes.
This is what led us to criticise the teaching profession at times but the problem is not just one of attitudes of teachers and staff. It is a failure to provide a structure within which it is possible for either parent or teacher to ask for expert reports and then adjust the programme in a way designed to meet the needs.
We do it when a child has been Statemented but the idea that it might be a good service to offer to parents generally seems something of a dream at present yet it is precisely what most parents pay for when they feel their child is not getting his or her needs met.
There have been two broad models of local authorities in post war years. The Conservative one offered minimal public provision and use of the private sector wherever possible. And the Labour one offering a monopolistic approach to public services.
I dismiss the Conservative one because it does not fairly serve the whole community and fairness and community are two important signposts for a Labour government.
But the Labour one needs more revision if we are to deliver high quality public services. The key is for councillors to have the power and the resources to set out the policy aims and to ensure that the structures of the council are geared to high quality delivery.
Signposts give the public and our supporters an idea of where we are trying to get to. We can then ask our councils and our government to help get us there.
