A little while ago a backbench Tory MP was rapidly shushed when he blurted out the purpose of government public service reforms. It was to create ‘chaos’. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad – said Euripides – and David Cameron seems intent on doing just that to public sector staff.
Look at the language he uses in his Daily Telegraph prospectus, and note he chooses a partisan, reactionary newspaper in which to advance his ideas. Public services ‘damage’. Bureaucracy ‘overrules’. They ‘grip’. They are ‘monopolistic’. Civil servants are guilty and should, I paraphrase slightly, pack up and go home: ‘our mission is to dismantle Big Government’. As for councils, they patently are not the ‘lowest possible level’ the Tories envisage.
Some will complain that Cameron flies in the face of evidence. He repeats the canard that English cancer survival rates are slipping, despite the articles that confute this in the professional medical journals. Not a mention of the extensive trawl of the literature done for John Hutton by the pro-market economist DeAnne Julius only three years ago – which failed to find any decent evidence that contracting out works as a general proposition.
But such criticism is to miss the point of the exercise. Though he denies he wants to ‘destabilise’ the public services, that is indeed his intention. Number Ten has recently been alleged to be in disarray but Cameron’s Daily Telegraph intervention meshes with the Big Society speeches of late; political planners are at work here. First the good ‘soft’ cop; next the former Thatcherite special adviser showing his true colours.
For this is a rehash of what the previous Tory government talked about – subjecting public services to a universal challenge from private providers. Yet Cameron and his advisers seem to have learnt nothing from the practical experience of the later Thatcher and the Major years. The general formula doesn’t work. Do we include the police or planning in the ‘right to challenge’; why shouldn’t competition make sense in the judiciary, which Cameron says he wants to exclude? What happens to public service pensions? (Margaret Eaton has already said her own party’s plans will destroy the financial viability of local government schemes.)
Finance professionals really need to pay attention. The sheer superficiality and dogmatism of Cameron’s approach are less breathtaking than his apparent lack of concern about money. The Tories’ ostensible objective is to shrink the state and reduce the cost of government. But we know that the looser the contracting arrangements, the more local diversity, the greater chance of money going astray, both in speculation and in under-performance.
So Cameron’s complete silence on audit and accountability is noteworthy. Who might follow up one of this new generation of looser, laxer contracts to ensure value for money? Emasculated councils (which merit barely a mention, except negative in his article) don’t look ready candidates.
But I forgot: the armchair auditors stand ready. A precondition for that, Cameron admits, is more ‘openness’. Has he consulted the business interests that, presumably, are now to pick up the reins and offer competition in schools, clinics, social care, and so on. How transparent can they be, while remaining competitive?
It’s wrong to expect ministers, even prime ministers, to engage with detail. Their forte is rhetoric and fuzzy ideas. So much Cameron offers. But public services – and public servants – deserve at least a sliver of responsibility on the part of those who talk about them, let alone want to reform or replace them. Unless anarchists are at work. This article suggests at least for the moment the destroyers have the upper hand.
David Walker is the former managing director for communications at the Audit Commission.
