18 May 2007
Chancellor Gordon Brown must extend payment by results systems across the public services if he is to effectively re-engage staff in the reform agenda, a senior minister has claimed.
Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton, whose radical welfare reforms have often been opposed by his frontline staff, said the government 'must create a shared sense of ownership' of public services among staff and the public, and improve local and national accountability for those services.
Speaking to the CBI business lobby on May 16, Hutton admitted to past mistakes with Labour's reforms and acknowledged that staff felt 'insufficient ownership' of the services they delivered.
He said that ministers now realised that 'there are limits to the use of central intervention, planning targets, audit and inspection', which have all been blamed for alienating staff and the public. 'So one of the most difficult tasks in the next phase of reform is how to share power, responsibility and accountability… to create momentum,' Hutton said. The DWP's city strategy, he added, sought to capture these principles – offering local consortiums of providers greater freedom in return for payments linked to getting people into jobs.
He defended government plans to intensify the privatisation of services and issued a warning to those who associate Gordon Brown with a potential slowdown in reforms and a return to the policies of the old Left.
'They will be disappointed. The core of our reform programme – significant investment, choice, personalisation, empowerment for users, devolution to the frontline, an open-minded approach to who provides – is being built into the DNA of our public service infrastructure. Gordon Brown has been at the heart of this process. And I have no doubt about his commitment to advancing a new phase of reforms based on these principles.'
The political battle over public policy reforms intensified further when, speaking at the same conference, Conservative shadow education secretary David Willetts announced a radical revision of the party's education policy.
Willetts said he and party leader David Cameron no longer backed the extended use of grammar schools. He said there was 'overwhelming evidence' that grammar schools served to deepen divisions between the rich and poor and that it was a 'fantasy' to believe selection by ability could be fair in the modern era.
He suggested a massive expansion of privately funded city academies – targeting a higher figure than the 400 limit outlined by Tony Blair last year.
Conservatives would scrap the requirement that academy sponsors must provide a minimum £2m, and allow high-performing companies to manage national networks of schools.
PFmay2007
