15 February 2008
France is struggling, like us, to cut back its public sector and devote more resources to the front line. But she would be wise to learn from the British experience before adopting our policies wholesale
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to present a paper at a round table discussion at the French ministry of finance in Paris. No, not on the fall-out from l'affaire Soc-Gen, but on the more prosaic subject of public service reform.
Arriving at the Bercy area of Paris illustrates all that is good and bad about French public administration. Until fairly recently this was a run-down former industrial area of Paris, equivalent to London's Docklands. The decision to move the ministry of finance there — against howls of protest from its staff — was a typical French grand projet.
The massive scale of the building — which felt to me like the whole of Whitehall rolled together into one huge edifice — is truly staggering. And moving the ministry to Bercy has clearly worked: the area has revived.
But why does the French state need a finance ministry the size of some small countries? This is the sort of question French president Nicholas Sarkozy and his team have been asking. And they have — perhaps surprisingly, given the state of Anglo-French relations in recent years — been looking across the Channel for answers.
The round table, chaired by the public services minister André Santini, had been organised by Demos, the UK think-tank, which is working with the French government on their public services reform agenda, itself something of a first.
The Sarkozy government is fascinated by UK reforms — both under Thatcher and Blair (and sometimes, perhaps understandably, it confuses the two).
Indeed, the French public services reform programme has some aspects of both. Sarkozy's over-arching aim is clearly 'rolling back the frontiers of the state' à la Thatcher, but mainly by reducing the size of public spending in relation to national wealth, and within that the proportion of spending on administration.
Thus, Sarkozy proposes to cut public service numbers by 100,000 over five years through a one-in-two freeze on posts created through retirements.
He intends to halve the number of ministries through mergers and reorganisations. These include, controversially, plans to merge the various branches of the armed forces into a single ministry (something we already have) and to merge the state intelligence agencies.
Less controversially, the government plans to amalgamate the unemployment and social security agencies along very similar lines to the creation of Jobcentre Plus from the merger of the benefits and employment agencies in the UK.
This has echoes of both Thatcher's and Gordon Brown's efficiency drives, as well as New Labour's 'joined-up government'.
More New Labourish still are plans for decentralisation and choice, and in some cases the proposals are even more radical than in Britain.
Thus identity cards and the issuing of driving licences are to be devolved to town halls, something I doubt Whitehall would countenance here. More services are to be provided online or though call centres, an echo of New Labour's 'transformational government' agenda.
And finally, in line with Gordon Brown's (supposedly) three-year spending reviews, France is to move to a three-year cycle.
The recent strikes and demonstrations by public service workers have been motivated mainly by two things — job cuts, but first and foremost the proposals to reform their pensions.
On the numbers, Sarkozy has already retreated somewhat — now one in two of the jobs not replaced in administration is to be reallocated to the services front line (sound familiar?).
Indeed, it would be ironic if the French government were to adopt the 'head-count' targets idea from the UK — the British government effectively dropped it again in last autumn's Comprehensive Spending Review.
The massive public sector strikes in France evoke memories for many of Labour's 'winter of discontent' or the protests against Thatcher, but the reality is far more complex.
Trade union membership in France is tiny — only 8% of the workforce, compared with 30% in the UK and even 12% in the US. And France loses fewer days to strikes relatively than Spain, Italy or even, again, the US. Compared with trade union strength in the UK in the early years of the Thatcher government, France's unions appear very weak indeed.
But they have broken the backs of reforming French governments before, mainly because of their stranglehold on essential services such as transport.
The French can learn from the UK experience of public sector reform — we've been at it longer — but they need to be aware of the problems and the costs of change as well as the advantages. We have a tendency to export only highly sanitised success stories. Faites attention!
Colin Talbot is professor of public policy and management at the Herbert Simon Institute, Manchester Business School
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