Polemic is good fun. More urgent – and more demanding – is clear thinking about risk, its mitigation through regulation, and how much local variance in risk the public and their representatives want.
Let’s give frontline staff more freedom, says conventional wisdom. (The notion of ‘frontline’ is problematic: are head teachers ‘frontline’?) But with freedom comes risk in many forms – of non-performance, of cognitive monopolisation (remember teachers once tried to bar access to the ‘secret garden of the curriculum’?). The Demos authors acknowledge the problem but don’t think it through.
The case, in principle, for external regulation of local public services is that local mechanisms are not reliable enough. For example, local electors rarely have the fate of looked-after children in their line of sight or the vulnerable elderly. So there’s a case for an expert inspectorate to oversee how these groups are treated.
What you might call enforced audit (what the Audit Commission does) derives from ministers’ and MPs’ insistence that public money is well spent. Of course, if the public trusted local authorities completely – in a localist nirvana – there would be no need for public audit. Electors could come together once in a while, as if in ancient Athens, to ask the providers of municipal services to give account.
Here I do wish would-be reformers would risk reading some of the history. Public audit was not invented in 1997, nor in 1983 with the advent of the Audit Commission. Its origins are in the late seventeenth century as magistrates acquired a role in supervising the spending of local public bodies and that role became professionalised. Audit brought assurance, and paradoxically local electors and taxpayers found their assurance maximised when they could pray in aid external (non-local) expertise in reading and scrutinising accounts.
The Demos authors seem to be in two minds. Risk is lessened because ‘people are not just motivated by the drive for profit and personal success but also out of genuinely virtuous motives and the desire for excellent.’ But on the other hand public servants ‘are lazy, selfish and incompetent’.
The main event is performance management. Can it safely be left to staff to manage themselves? The advocates of ‘trust the frontline’ need to ask about elected members in local authorities. Should they also back off and let teachers teach and social workers safeguard? We can have an argument about scale and geography of audit and regulation, but first we have to drill down to the principle: is external management of risk necessary?
Audit and regulation augment knowledge. They make more information available – to the public. One of the objectives of Comprehensive Area Assessment is to unpack and analyse a body of data about the local public service economy for the public themselves to use and peruse. Information, that is, which is not provided by any single public body. And a judgement – yes, an external, disinterested conclusion – about performance.
We invite rigorous debate about the scale, cost and effectiveness of the regulation that we do. Our colleagues in other inspectorates take the same approach. But we insist on the closest examination of such ambitions as (from the Demos report) ‘empowering professionals’. The report says autonomy and accountability ‘go hand in hand’. In fact, they often trade off: accountability follows from external inspection, which in principle diminishes autonomy.
