The six largest audit quangos cost the UK taxpayer £1bn a year to run and the biggest beast in this motley crew is the Audit Commission. That billion pounds looks like a pretty attractive saving in an era of austerity, but it’s only half the reason Demos is arguing for the abolition of these bodies.
The Audit Commission lies at the heart of what progressive Conservatives believe has gone wrong with British public services. It encourages the idea that services are accountable to a remote, centralised body rather than to the people that they exist to serve. The obsession with process-led auditing has created perverse incentives, such as NHS accident and emergency departments making patients wait outside to avoid counting them in their statistics. It has also contributed to a recent finding that the three most popular words used to describe public servants were ‘bureaucratic, infuriating and faceless’. Clearly the target-obsessed, process-led model is not working for public service users.
But, nonetheless, accountability is vital. It would be madness to suggest that we can simply hand over public cash and then take no interest in the results. Demos’s Leading from the front proposes an alternative set of measures that improve accountability and cut costs.
First, a principle of subsidiarity when it comes to accountability; if local democracy or market-like mechanisms can be used to judge and improve public services then they should be implemented. Ideas such as Michael Gove’s on school choice and Douglas Carswell’s on police commissioners are prime examples of how this idea can be translated into policy.
Second, where such measures are impractical, government must back away from process-led audits. We are calling for the audit quangos to be replaced with a single body whose purpose would be to measure services on as few outcomes as possible and to deliver that information into the hands of the public. Prison governors, for example, would be measured against a single outcome (how many of their inmates reoffended after four years) rather than being repeatedly checked against volumes of protocol and procedure.
By implementing these reforms we could cut costs, empower frontline staff and improve the public’s experience of services. This isn’t about reducing accountability, it’s about making it smarter.
Max Wind-Cowie is a researcher on the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos. Leading from the front is published by Demos today
http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Leading_from_the_front-web.pdf?1253582974
