COMMENT
Entitlement abandoned
Although the coalition government is barely three months old, there are already very definitive signs emerging of the approach that they will take towards the management of public services. The abandonment of the principle of ‘entitlement’ is amongst the most prominent examples, says Luke Hildyard
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Luke Hildyard is a researcher for the New Local Government Network
ntitlements or guarantees were one of the flagship policies of the last
administration. The ‘jobs guarantee’ for the economically inactive; a maximum waiting time of two weeks for cancer treatment on the NHS; and one-to-one tuition for any pupil falling behind in Maths or English were all given prime billing during Labour’s general election campaign.
Under the new government, however, the list of universal citizen entitlements consigned to the history books grows longer by the week.
Many of the maximum waiting times contained within the NHS constitution have already been scrapped.
The Personal Care at Home Bill, which, as the name suggests, outlined provisions for free home care for older people, has been halted during its passage through Parliament.
Theresa May recently told the Association of Chief Police Officers that the policing pledge requiring officers to spend 80% of their time on the beat was to be dropped.
As May suggested, cost was a factor in this decision and it may well be the case in others relating to universal service guarantees.
There is some merit in the argument that savings can be made without harming the worse off in society if certain initiatives are subject to means testing.
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But this is clearly not the only consideration at work here.
The changes to the NHS waiting times were ordered by a department that is protected from the cuts, and when the Conservatives attacked the Personal Care at Home Bill before the election, it was on the grounds that the government was mandating councils to cover the costs of the service rather than the cost itself.
This is of interest because it reveals a great deal about the de- centralising agenda that is set to be put forward over the course of the current Parliament.
Broadly speaking, their direction of travel, including the abandonment of narrow, uniform entitlements, is to be welcomed.
NLGN’s recent paper Making Sense of Entitlement charted the increasing use of public service guarantees under the last government and identified a number of their inherent flaws, as well as measures that the coalition should undertake in order to maintain the benefits that they brought.
Entitlements were at the heart of both the Smarter Government and Building Britain’s Future programmes of summer 2009, which outlined Labour’s plan for long-term economic recovery and a more dynamic, efficient model of government.
The rationale behind the introduction of measures such as the NHS constitution and one-to-one tuition in schools was
that they provided a framework of minimum standards in public services that could replace the much-criticised targets-regime that had existed previously.
“The next stage of reform will be characterised by moving from a system based primarily on targets and central direction to one where individuals have enforceable entitlements over the service they receive,” was the claim made in the Building Britain’s Future document, emphasising the key difference between targets and entitlements.
While targets compel service providers to report back on (normally quantitative) performance measures to a civil servant behind a desk in Whitehall, entitlements mean they must now deliver tangible outcomes to actual service users.
This not only tied in with wider narratives on personalisation and user-engagement in public services, it also reduced the bureaucratic processes incumbent on frontline staff that prevented them from doing their jobs.
In practice, however, a number of the problems associated with targets remained. In the case of the NHS constitution – highlighted as a key example of the move to the entitlements- based approach by the Smarter Government paper – maximum waiting times that had existed as targets were simply re-branded as user entitlements.
The difficulties in terms of distorting the focus of staff from
Jul/Aug 10
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