Voters as consumers

Ryanair: Business model coming to your town hall soon? (Click for pic credit)

Nick Clegg has gone on the attack. His target is the London Borough of Barnet’s easyCouncil model of service provision.

There are a number of ways of portraying Barnet’s idea, but I’ve not seen many that appear to be very kind. As a Barnet resident who has to use Ryanair in his line of work, I should probably leave it to others to comment on the politics behind this - I suppose the most neutral one would be to call it a freemium service.

I’ve posted on ‘cognitive polyphasia’ before (broadly, it’s the phenomenon where voters want Scandinavian welfare systems on US tax-rates), and this idea seems to be another attempt by politicians to get the public to believe that they can have the best of all worlds.

Barnet’s approach – like Ryanair’s – appears to be based upon the idea that a service can be packaged as being more attractive than it actually is – hardly a revolutionary concept in politics.

I doubt if Barnet will be as brazen as Michael O’Leary’s outfit are either. Ryanair tell us that you can fly to Perpignan for only £5. But then, once you start buying the ticket, you find that the figure multiplies if you want optional extras.

Optional extras include the right to stay out of prison for tax-dodging, or the right to pay for your ticket with anything other than a fairly exotic credit card as well as other more commonly requested premium services such as the option to have luggage with you.

You have to keep your wits about you to ensure that you don’t bump the price up by accidentally ordering any unwanted additional services from their badly-designed website. Other elements of their service are also deemed to be non-essential. The options to change reservations for example – are prohibitively priced, leaving you with little option but to re-book.

And the coup de grâce comes from Ryanair if you do have cause to complain about the service: By accepting our inflexible terms, you helped us to provide you with the thing that you said that you wanted the most: A very low headline price.

It appears that Barnet want to appeal to the kind of cognitive biases that many commercial companies appeal to. They want to be able to appeal to the consumer reflex that will pick the lowest price. It’s a variation on the ’stealth-tax’. Again, politicians have long beleived that totemic pledges demonstrably delivered can trump good governance with the electorate.

As Jean Baptiste Colbert put it, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing.”

Now it all appears to be about a stealthy withdrawal from the elements of public service that we may have always taken for granted – offering the absolute basics but charging for ‘optional’ extras.

It will be interesting to see which services this approach will apply to. There are services that councils have to provide, despite themselves: Services that they would be electorally able to withdraw from – services that central government requires them to deliver, but ones that mainly benefit groups that are not electorally decisive.

It may be the case that this approach allows some councils to ‘tick the box’ in cases like this.

Politically, it may be expected that some Conservatives will want to re-cast public service in order to make private alternatives attractive. My worry is twofold:

• that this will accelerate the degree to which local authorities only serve electorally active sections of society – particularly the active middle class that don’t rely too heavily of social services
• that voters may come to regard local government in the same way that regular users regard Ryanair?