I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services.
The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet Office, and Christian Bason from the Danish reform institute Mind Lab, set out a vision that I might crudely summarise as:
- We need to understand that public service goes wider than the things funded or provided by the state – in other words, the hospice movement is part of the health service, even if it isn’t part of the National Health Service
- We need to combine greater user empowerment, productivity drives and a better understanding of user pathways to identify waste in the system
- Future services will be provided in a radically decentralised way – well below town hall level
- Citizen/citizen and citizen/state relationships are the most important element of this new mode of public service
There’s a lot to like in this vision of decentralised, democratic public service, particularly if it brings about the alchemical “better services at lower cost” that we’re all hunting around for.
I don’t think it’s a simple or risk-free transformation, though. The questions that occurred to me were:
- Public service delivery is something that goes wider than taxpayer funding, but it is also something that is fundamentally political. How can decentralised local organisations be made accountable and representative to their users and those who pay any taxes that fund them?
- Are we acknowledging the problems of Whitehall managerialism only to create them over again at local level?
- How do we create the active and informed citizens needed to co-create and co-produce these services? It feels like the change needed – though a good change – is either a years-long cultural transformation programme, or devolution to a group of super-engaged people running local services.
I don’t have any easy answers. I want to see more democratic and less managerial service delivery – which is what both Ben and Christian were describing. I want fair and comprehensive public services. I buy the vision and the potential. My only nagging worry is that in a world where we’re living with the consequences of the efficient markets fallacy, we should be wary of stumbling into an efficient citizen fallacy.
