Andy Burnham’s first speech as chief secretary to the Treasury grabbed the headlines with his promise to slash the number of government targets.
This was almost universally welcomed. But the really interesting parts of the speech were the ones that told us how the new administration is going to approach public services.
The trades unionists in the audience were certainly pleased with what he had to say — not surprising, given the praise he heaped on public service workers and the emphasis he put on collaboration and motivation.
It gave the signal loud and clear that the new prime minister has no intention of developing any ‘scars on his back’.
Instead, Gordon Brown’s government appears to be strongly of the view that it cannot deliver improvements to public services without the support of their workers.
But the unions are not about to have things all their own way. Burnham also made it clear that public services will have to be more outward-looking and more responsive to the needs of the people they serve.
In practice, this will mean that the new Public Service Agreements are going to promote engagement with users and specify more measurements of user satisfaction.
This might horrify some professionals who will view it as a ‘whingers’ charter’. This is exactly what it should be. The core concept behind the public service ethos is supposed to be just that — one of service. If public services are to meet the needs of the people they serve, then it can only help to ask whether people are satisfied with what they are getting.
Of course, the best providers are doing that already. But the view that the general public is an inconvenience getting in the way of the smooth running of a service still hangs around in unreconstructed corners of the sector.
If the general public complains about that, then that is all to the good. It would be even better if lack of satisfaction on the part of service users had some consequences for the services that fail them.
Critics of this approach will point out that some people are more easily pleased than others.
This is certainly true. For example, the older generation tend to be uncomplaining in the face of poor service, unlike their grandchildren. But measures of user satisfaction should take account of this by looking at the gap between people’s expectation of the service and their experience of it.
Critics will also argue that satisfaction is a very slippery concept, and that a positive experience is not the same as a positive outcome. This amounts to saying that there is an arbitrary standard for a good outcome, which the provider is better placed to judge than the person receiving the service. It is both patronising and paternalistic.
For example, in health, it suggests there is a difference between someone being better and feeling better. And that the things that people care about, such as being treated with respect and maintaining their dignity don’t matter. This is just plain wrong.
In fact, there is quite of a lot of measuring user satisfaction going on across the public services already. There are four major sets of surveys: the National Learner Satisfaction Survey covering further education, adult learning and work-based training; the Health Commission’s patient survey; the Best Value User Survey in local government; and the Police Performance Assessment Framework.
Unfortunately, three out of the four have major flaws. The NLSS does not produce data at provider level, rendering it useless for examining the performance of an individual college. The health survey relies solely on postal forms, meaning its sample is not representative, and the Best Value survey covers all the general public rather than just service users.
In contrast, the police survey does well. It is phone-based; it uses people who have been victims of crime as its base; and it delivers meaningful information at police force level. It also manages to take at least some account of the role of existing expectations in determining people’s satisfaction.
None of this is good enough if the government is going to use these measures to evaluate how a service is performing. In the past, ministers have flirted with the idea of establishing a national survey along the lines of the Canadian system. They do not need to go this far, but they do need to set out some core standards if the considerable sum of money currently being spent is going to be well used.
Of course, measures of user satisfaction are not a replacement for measures of outputs or outcomes. But they are an important and necessary addition if we are going to end up with truly personalised and user-centred services.
