Gordon Brown’s speech this week on smarter government was the product of two political imperatives, which, in combination, create an attractive win-win that all parties are keen to seize.
The first is the need to reign in public spending without signifying untold damage to public service provision. On this count, the white paper goes a long way to passing the test by wielding the scalpel on Whitehall itself. Nearly three-quarters of the £12bn savings announced in Smarter government come from the Operational Efficiency Programme announced last April, large sums of which will be found through the uninspiring but entirely necessary merging of back-office functions and collaborative procurement. Changes to senior civil service pay make better headlines but save only small amounts as does the commitment to reduce arms-length bodies – though proposals here are more a campfire than a bonfire.
But an area with more radical scope both to cut public spending and signal genuine change in the machinery of government is in relocating government away from London and the Southeast, where currently almost a third of all civil servants are based. The annual £5bn savings are to be found in relation to property costs, but the prospect of policy-making being better informed by day-to-day life in Liverpool and Leicester rather than London may hold out significant prospects for fresh perspectives on devolution. We must now wait until Budget 2010 for any further proposals on this topic.
The second imperative is for public agencies to respond to citizens whose consumer savvy demands a new approach to service provision. Much space is devoted to a further opening up of government data and iPhone geeks will have a field day designing – and flogging – a raft of new apps designed to compare and contrast the relative merits of hospitals, care homes, schools and neighbourhood policing teams. With investment to ensure a further deepening of digital inclusion and further attrition of the national performance framework, few can doubt that the tide is turning from central inspection to bottom-up scrutiny. But this is still too little too late.
Rather than a further tinkering with performance and ring-fenced funding, government needs to grasp the nettle and radically alter the balance of funding between central and local government. If public agencies are to be judged by comparative data (implicit admission of the postcode lottery) then they must have far greater freedom to produce - and pay for - the services by which they are to be judged.
But more importantly still, if savings are to be made through the closer collaboration between civil society and public service providers then this deserves a white paper of its own. From incentivising recycling to personalised budgets, the greatest scope for wholesale transformation of public spending lies in the recasting of the relationship between the citizen and the state – not as client or consumer, but as contributor to and convenor of healthy, happy communities. With less than a page on this vital topic, there is still plenty of scope for smarter government to become smarter state.
Ed Cox is director of the Institute for Public Policy and Research North
