Time to challenge the lazy orthodoxy of intervention

Trying harder won't be enough to fix public services

By Peter Latchford

Now that the political frenzy of recent months has finally eased, we’re left with the ‘what next?’ question.  At one level, the answer is obvious: dramatically reduced public spending resulting in increased pressure on essential services. But at what cost?

If we do no more than cut budgets, the public sector will fail to deliver and can too easily produce an escalation in poverty, ill-health and social tension, particularly in our overcrowded and high maintenance urban areas.  When inequality grows, particularly when the poorest get poorer, everybody suffers, even the rich.  The new government must use this crisis as an opportunity to challenge the lazy orthodoxy which dominates public sector interventions generally. 

A lack of fairness leads to social unrest, the rise of extremism, and measurable negative health, social and economic effects.  A clearer understanding of how to design true fairness, not fairness as designated by gross categorisations, into public services is required. To do this we need a clear framework for fairness to be discussed, agreed and implemented with political backing.

We also need to cast out the false gods of planning which have dominated public sector activity for a decade or more.  Public sector plans are built by centralised big-brained people based on copious amounts of “objective” data, following exhaustive consultation with people who think similarly.  By the time the plan is packaged and launched, it is often irrelevant, and may anyway have little connection with what actually happens on the ground.

We need to be clearer about what we are planning for.  Has our work on regeneration been, for instance, more interested in buildings than in well-being?  Standard urban regeneration follows the plan-obsessed orthodoxy, compounding the sin.  It sees the world as comprising capital assets and wraps up its plans in language which refers to “communities”, but cares little whether the rise in asset values results from the importing of the middle class.  It therefore often leads to the poorest being displaced and to an overall reduction in social capital.  However, high levels of social capital - the strength of interconnections between people, across groups, and with the agencies of the state - correlate directly with lower crime rates, better health outcomes, better educational outcomes, and better economic outcomes. 

If what we are interested in is a reduced burden on the public purse, greater well-being amongst local people, and – yes – the recapitalisation of poor people which comes from their ownership of houses, then we should invest in social capital.  We should be exploring new models for investing public and private sector cash in building social glue.  It may be less obvious than a new hospital, but if brands can be valued on a corporate balance sheet, why can’t social capital?

Once a change of perspective has been identified and the rigid orthodoxies reconsidered, the next piece of the jigsaw is the contribution of the public sector workforce - the lifeblood of every service. For too long public sector personnel have been held back, charged solely with preserving the status quo rather than working with users to design and deliver exceptional services. What's needed is a rebirth in judgement; empowerment of front line staff to reintroduce human emotion and common sense back into the decision making process. This approach will require new ways of thinking, innovative ideas about possible improvements to the delivery of services and an increased management appetite for risk.

Stimulating and enabling these traits will enable the public sector to become more effective, and in so doing contribute to a fairer society. It is perhaps too much to talk of a 'New Deal' for the public sector worker but the critical contribution they make must be better directed at delivering the outcomes desired by us all.

How do we convert nice policy ideas into genuinely useful interventions?  Successive governments have grappled with the challenge of breaking down departmental and delivery agency silos.  Too often, the approach has simply spawned new organisations, or new plans. The latest attempt, in the final months of the last government, was entitled Total Place.  Inspired by the looming budget crisis, this initiative attempted to identify (1) how much public money was being spent in an area, (2) where the inefficiencies were, and (3) what could be done about it.  On the first of these issues, there was some success.  How much is being spent? – a very large amount!  In some regions, the public sector constitutes the majority of the economy: not a sustainable position, given that public money comes from tax which comes from private sector activity.  On the second question, there was also progress.  Are there inefficiencies? – yes, enormous inefficiencies; the greatest of which is that we spend copious sums on dealing with the symptoms of low well-being (obesity, heart disease, crime, lack of business competitiveness etc) rather than substantially smaller sums, earlier in the cycle, dealing with the causes.  But on the third question – what shall we do about it? The conclusion was ‘we will try harder’.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that trying harder will fix it.  The problem is power.  This is obvious at the elected member level, but it is equally true for the officer structures.  The public sector machinery is shaped around power; and the prime form of non-political power is authority over budgets and people with budgets do not willingly give them up.  They do not willingly allow redesigns of their service which will reduce their budget, or the agreement of partnerships which will constrain their decision making. 

Our solutions must help those with (budget) power to see how much more effective they can be if they (carefully) give some of that power away.  If big plans don’t result in change, we should try another change approach; an approach that focuses on changing where the decisions are made.  Our solutions must find ways of putting power in the hands of those who may know best – the service users  and the front-line professionals.  This is what is known as the “personalisation” agenda, though it is still in its early phases of implementation.  Our solutions must do this in ways which also develop robust governance and controls, because our idealism needs to be tempered by the knowledge that some people cannot cope with being given this trust.  But the majority will be entirely capable and honest – and will, if given the opportunity in this way, drag effective change through the system.

The public sector budget crisis gives us a very rare opportunity to unfreeze the system, and to change.  It gives us a brief opportunity to find ways of operating with more humility, of striving for better results, and of rediscovering the fundamentally organic, human dimension of what we do.

28 July 2010

Peter Latchford. Chief Executive, Black Radley

The author is the Visiting Professor of Enterprise at the University of Birmingham, as well as CEO of Black Radley, specialist advisors to the public sector.