A lily-livered white paper?

12 Jul 11
Simon Parker

Critics claim the open public services white paper is a let-down. But this is very complicated territory 

A few months ago, the government’s public service reform white paper sounded like a blueprint for radical change. David Cameron wrote about taking a battering ram to traditional service delivery, breaking open state monopolies and setting targets for diversifying service provision. In comparison to this fiery language the actual product, released yesterday to no fanfare whatsoever, seemed a damp squib.

Many commentators want to blame the Liberal Democrats for this, painting them as lily-livered social democrats with no real appetite for revolutionary change. I suspect the answer is a lot simpler: ministers simply realised that this is very complicated territory.

Fact number one: there is no public service monopoly in many parts of the public sector. Councils already outsource more than half their services in lots of areas. Fact number two: battering rams and targets tend to prove legally difficult and practically counter-productive.

As we learned from the 1990s experiment with CCT, forcing councils to outsource leads to resistance, intransigence and gaming. Even if ministers did set a target for outsourcing, it is far from obvious that EU procurement laws would allow an explosion of community ownership and social enterprises. It would probably just mean more Capita and Serco – not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly not the point.

Some echo of the idea of outsourcing targets lives on in the white paper in a decidedly ambiguous passage on open commissioning. On first reading, it sounds worryingly like ministers are tempted to force councils back into some form of hard market testing. That would be counterproductive – local government is already diversifying its services in response to the cuts and Whitehall should let localities get on with the job.

So what can we say about the white paper? The lack of new ideas is probably a blessing. Ministers have had more than a year of trying to enact their version of ‘creative destruction’ on local government and its partners. It is probably better to let this bed down than to introduce another wave of disruptive thinking. The paper does provide an unusually clear sense of the government’s direction of travel towards a more open and diverse public service settlement, but it seems content to let the current wave of change work through.

There is a strong recognition of an important role for local government in there and a pledge to look at decentralising more services from Whitehall to town hall. That ties in with NLGN’s lobbying for a council ‘right to bid’, with local government able to demand commissioning budgets from departments. Whitehall is the only bit of the public sector not yet feeling the bracing wind of localism.

The drive is clear – a more open and diverse public sector, with power devolved down to the lowest appropriate level. There are all sorts of problems with the implementation and there will be plenty to object to over the coming years. But it’s still the best chance localists have had in a generation to create a better kind of local democracy and more responsive public services.

Simon Parker is director of the New Local Government Network

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