COMMENT
Public service reform: Outcome scenarios
Chris Painter, Emeritus Professor of Public Policy and Management at Birmingham City University, uses alternative scenarios to game longer-term impacts of Coalition government reforms and to develop a richer analysis than the orthodoxies that tend to take hold in offi cial circles.
M
uch metaphorical ink has been spilt – not least by this author – in analysing the Coalition’s public service reforms, notably those for education, health, policing and welfare-to-work. But are these reforms likely to end in smiles or tears? This article examines six future scenarios and their ramifi cations.
Open public services scenario (OPS)
This scenario takes its cue from the Coalition’s white paper of the same name published in July 2011. The intention is to open public services to ‘qualifi ed’ providers from the public, private, and voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors, who will be licensed or registered by regulators as appropriate and rewarded wherever feasible on the basis of ‘payment by results’. Barriers to open commissioning are to be reduced in the interests of a level playing fi eld and to create more accessible public service markets, providing opportunities for all types of provider, including mutually owned spin-outs formed by public sector
Left: “Such frustrations have more to do with over- simplistic conceptions of policy implementation.”
employees taking control of their own services.
The desired objective, as the white paper puts it, is therefore
to: ‘switch the default from one where the state provides the service itself
to one where the state commissions the service from a range of…providers’. An associated challenge is ensuring continuity of service
– especially for the most vulnerable users – in the event
of organisational failure, putting interventionist strategies in place accordingly.
This approach will usher in a new era of increased productivity, resourcefulness and innovation
16 | public sector executive Sep/Oct 12
in the way public services are delivered, from which we will all benefi t both individually and collectively. The value of such an outcome in an era where public fi nances are heavily constrained hardly needs emphasising.
Implementation defi cit scenario (ID)
A pre-requisite for realising those benefi ts, of course, is more intelligent commissioning of services by central and local government, as well as by new clinical commissioning groups in the health service when shortly they take effect. That will depend partly on professional development and training programmes for those commissioners. The fi rst scenario, indeed, requires capacity-building on a number of fronts. There are also issues surrounding the transparency of the contracting process.
Yet, we are hearing echoes of Tony Blair’s ‘scars on my back’ syndrome, the phrase that encapsulated his frustration that more progress in improving public services was not being made early on in his premiership. Former members of David Cameron’s inner circle have already voiced concerns about the sluggish pace of reforms, with a now familiar refrain about rearguard actions from professional bodies and defi ciencies in the civil service machine.
In reality, such frustrations have more to do with over-simplistic conceptions of policy implementation. Rather than mechanistic pulling of levers, reforms are contested, negotiated and mediated by those implementing them. The Coalition created a rod for its own back through lack of prioritisation, simultaneously taking on a number of special interests. This was combined with heroic assumptions, as in reform of police governance and likely turnout for the election of police and crime commissioners in November 2012, which if low will have a direct bearing on the success and legitimacy of this new offi ce in replacing local police authorities.
There is also a paradox in the Coalition focusing so much energy on structural re-organisation that it is in danger of missing opportunities for meaningful substantive reforms. This is no more evident than in the case of health and social services. Finding a workable and funded solution to the growing crisis in adult social care has been marked by erratic
decision making. Necessary reconfi guration of specialist hospital services to put them on a more sustainable basis remains elusive. Just as pressing is the need for greater integration of these services so that more care can be delivered in the community rather than in hospitals. At best, we have seen only piecemeal moves in these directions. In fact, many of the current Government’s structural reforms are likely to impede the achievement of more cost- effective service provision.
Corporatisation scenario (C)
The open public services agenda risks mutating into unadulterated corporatisation, as they are progressively contracted to large (frequently multinational) outsourcing and private security companies, with other potential providers marginalised. The prime contractors selected by the Department for Work and Pensions to fi nd employment for the long-term jobless as part of the work programme proved instructive in this respect. Discontent by voluntary and charitable bodies has, if anything, subsequently increased, sensing that they were used as ‘bid- candy’.
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