By David Williams
9 November 2010
Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has revealed that the government plans to introduce different models of mutualisation for different areas of the public sector.
Speaking at the Royal Society of Arts/2020 Public Services Summit in central London this afternoon, Maude said the government would not try to implement a cover-all measure that would enable all public sector staff to take over services in the same way.
His comments come ahead of a more detailed announcement on mutualisation expected in the coming weeks. Results from the Cabinet Office’s ‘pathfinder’ mutualisation trials, which begun in August, are also expected to report back soon.
Maude said: ‘Rather than trying to create an absolutely universal right to bid across the public sector, trying to cater for every eventuality and ending up with something so complicated none of it works, we’re likely to end up creating different rights in different parts of the public sector.’
He said he wanted to make the right to bid in the NHS less bureaucratic, but with ‘some redress’ to stop health commissioners blocking their staff from taking over the services they work on.
‘In central government, we can do it by diktat,’ he added, while in local government Communities Secretary Eric Pickles and decentralisation minister Greg Clark were looking to build a right for staff to bid to run services into the forthcoming Localism Bill.
Maude added: ‘There are a lot of people [in the public services] who are steeped in the public service ethos, whose vocation it is to provide public services, who are nonetheless entrepreneurial.’
He argued that staff-run social enterprises benefited workers, the economy as a whole and service users.
In a wide-ranging speech on public service reform, Maude also said he could save £3bn this year through tightening commercial practices such as procurement and supplier contracts.
He restated his commitment to open public sector work up to a wider range of outside bidders, rather than a small number of large companies, and also called for a ‘channel shift’ which would make more services and government transactions available online.
