Frontline staff were not long ago seen as self-serving. Now, all parties seem keen to devolve responsibility to them
One thing we were bound to hear from all three leaders in the Great Debates was that they are anxious to give away power. They have all argued for some time that more control should be passed to ‘frontline staff’ in public services, allowing them to be innovative and responsive and free of the shackles of Whitehall.
This is something of a turnaround. Back in 1979, when the Tories were last hopeful of gaining power, there were lots of conservative-minded think-tanks beavering away at big ideas. One of these was ‘producer-capture’, a term borrowed from economists. They said that public services were often shaped by their staff to suit their own interests rather than those of the public. Producer capture suggested that ‘bureaucrats’ were obsessed with empire building. Public servants – the ‘producers’ – were demonised.
But the Tories weren’t the only ones developing this critique – those on the Left were also concerned with the power of ‘producers’, although they tended to talk about managers (corporatism) and professionals. The latter were criticised for developing policies in psychiatry, medicine, teaching, town planning, criminal justice and other fields that were authoritarian and ignored the feelings of patients, pupils and the public.
All this fed into the reform movements from the late 1970s onwards that sought to re-empower politicians and the public themselves directly. The exact remedies diverged in detail between the Left and the Right, but everyone agreed that producer capture was a Bad Thing.
So how did we get to the point where all the main parties now seem to think this would be the very best thing for public services? That teachers, doctors and nurses are now all angels who will do only the Right Thing?
One explanation is that all these ideas tend to go in waves or pendulum swings in which the opposite of the prevailing orthodoxy gains in attractiveness as the faults and problems of the status quo become ever more apparent. And, of course, people forget what was wrong with the previous regime. Slowly the idea takes hold that empowering frontline staff is the ‘one best way’ to radically improve public services.
It’s not just the role of public servants – whether they are angels or demons – but other things like whether big or small organisation is beautiful, centralisation or decentralisation is best, diversity is ‘postcode lotteries’ or local empowerment, and so on.
The truth is, of course, rather more complex. Public servants can behave in self-interested and altruistic ways, both of which are perfectly legitimate.
Building an entire policy on one-sided assumptions about how public servants will behave is fraught with danger. While some of the centralism of public services might be unnecessary and bureaucratic, it’s easy to forget that a lot of it grew up for very good reasons – to stamp out corruption and to ensure equity and equality in provision and proper accountability.
Whoever wins the election, if power is genuinely devolved to ‘frontline staff’ you can almost guarantee that within a fairly short order there will be more complaints about postcode lotteries, discrepancies in services, waste through lack of co-ordination and lack of responsiveness to users.
Indeed, some voices are already saying this. Businessman Sir Gerry Robinson says that, in his experience of the NHS – for the BBC’s Can Gerry Robinson fix the NHS? – what was needed was more centralisation and standardisation, not less, and especially not foundation hospitals.
Most of the things that needed doing to improve efficiency and effectiveness of services were, he said, fairly simple and straightforward – what was lacking was the central authority to impose them and make them work. His voice might be counter-cyclical at the moment, but watch this space.
Colin Talbot, professor of public policy and management at Manchester Business School. He blogs at http://whitehallwatch.wordpress.com/
