By David Williams
14 September 2010
The government has been managing expectations of next month’s Comprehensive Spending Review since June’s emergency Budget, and voters now know to expect incredibly harsh settlements for the services and benefits they rely on. But although Prime Minister David Cameron has coined a phrase – the ‘Big Society’ – to describe his plans for service reform, it is not yet clear whether the post-CSR period will herald a new philosophy for the public sector.
The2020 Public Services Trust set up a commission 18 months ago to investigate this very issue, and publishes its final report today. Its impressive all-party line up of commissioners – politicians, academics and leaders from the public, private and voluntary sector – say a definitive, overarching vision must be spelt out soon.
Sir Andrew Foster, PST commission chair and former chief executive of the Audit Commission, tells Public Finance that the combination of spending cuts and other factors – including an ageing population – will make it necessary to rethink the entire structure of the welfare state from scratch, just as Lord Beveridge’s report did in the 1940s.
Foster is concerned about whether such broad-perspective thinking is at work on the basis of the reforms introduced by the coalition so far. ‘There are some big questions about how it hangs together,’ he says.
‘If you look at the schools stuff, GPs commissioning health services… how do these things inter-relate? What are the long-term implications? What is going to be the way that commissioning of public services takes place at a local level, if you’re not going to have so much control from the centre? That isn’t clear to me yet.’
Many of the 2020 PST proposals bear a strong resemblance to Big Society ideas. For instance, the report recommends allowing citizens to take over public services and run them as mutuals, and scrapping central inspectorates in favour of greater transparency over spending.
But the report, titled From social security to social productivity: a vision for 2020 Public Service, also goes on to link the entire spectrum of public services to these principles.
Foster advocates Total Place style local budgets, in which extra autonomy is given in return for a reduction in funding, with services designed around the real needs of citizens, rather than the funding streams of Whitehall.
The report also contains its fair share of warnings about the government’s approach to reform.
‘We welcome [the] impulse to shift power towards citizens, but are concerned that attempts to do so by bypassing local democratic structures may prove counterproductive,’ it says.
It also warns that loosening council control over schools, which regularly work with health, mental health and social services, might serve to weaken integration and, in the case of the academies programme, strengthen the centre.
This concern is echoed by Rob Whiteman, head of the Improvement and DevelopmentAgency for local government. He agrees that reforms so far risk fragmenting services at a local level, rather than joining them up.
‘We could end up with silo-based localism, where money is devolved down to individual agencies, and not joined up. We think the two are mutually exclusive.
‘It’s not that local government wants to control every school or every GP. But if those monies were being commissioned alongside other monies, we could make sure that markets are made in a way that services are joined together, rather than atomising them.
‘We really hope the government acts on that in the Spending Review.’
Foster and his associates also argue for more powerful mayors or commissioners to make councils more visible and accountable, and for citizens to be given more control of the services they use, with greater use of personal budgets and with locally-designed school curriculums.
This stands in marked contrast with Education Secretary Michael Gove’s recent suggestion of a UK baccalaureate to guarantee a broad education, to satisfy the demands of universities and business. Other critics of the government’s education reforms agree they are inconsistent, and not easily compatible with a localist agenda.
Martin Johnson, deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, says it is unclear what education ministers are trying to achieve. And, he argues, more independent state schools that are not answerable to a local council make it less likely that local services work together for the benefit of the whole community.
‘Some academies are brilliant at working in their neighbourhoods and with neighbouring schools. A lot aren’t.
‘I think that if academies become the norm, there will be too many schools looking out for themselves and their own advantage, seeing life as a competition between them and other schools. That way does not produce the kind of system improvement we’re all looking for.’
