In defence of “one size fits all” public services
by Jamie Bartlett
Jamie Bartlett goes from 'one size fits all' to 'one size fits none'...
We’re all guilty of it. As a Demos researcher, I certainly am. As are many of my colleagues. And all the other think-tanks. And Gordon Brown, David Cameron, & Nick Clegg. Basically pretty much anyone involved in public policy work over the last 3 years, in fact. We have all argued for the end of “one size fits all” services.
The argument, roughly speaking, is this. The post-war welfare state was designed the principle on mass production. In health, education, policing, or whatever, the state, benefitting from huge economies of scale and determined to ensure we all got the same deal, produced standardized services for everyone. Today, that’s not good enough. People want and need personalized services that are tailored to their own needs and circumstances, not some top-down services delivered to them like a pizza.
You’ll be hard pushed to find a single soul these days who doesn’t agree with this account. And it’s all captured in the tidy soundbite – we need the end of one size fits all.
But read the sentence again. One size fits all. Think about it for a second.
Wouldn’t one size fits all be wonderful?! If we could produce one service that genuinely “fit all”, just imagine the possibilities. The state could mass produce goods that were appropriate for all of us, and on the cheap too. All our problems would be solved. The problem isn’t one size fits all. It is one size fits none, or one size fits some, which is what we have now.
Laziness in language like this is serious. Such metaphors produce unthinking dogma. Orwell put it perfectly in his 1946 essay “politics and the English language”, where he lamented the way in which “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” was blunting political discourse.
As a result, he went on, we have “a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy… who has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.”
I hereby apologise for being a dummy.
Mike
"All our problems would be solved. The problem isn’t one size fits all. It is one size fits none, or one size fits some, which is what we have now."
Are you sure the term one size fits all can be applied to any public services? The NHS treats cancer patients differently to diabetes patients by giving them different drugs and treatments, hence it is highly personalized and not one size fits all.
Juan-Pablo Velez
What characteristics of a public service make it 'fit' one type of power spreading over another?
And why isn't there more experimentation? Doesn't stir the blood during election time? Call me a naive empiricist (or a philosophical pragmatist), but it seems like the best way to determine the effectiveness of a policy approach is by implementing it. The unique problems that accompany a particular policy are seldom visible in advance.
Sure, different ideological persuasions will still read the outcomes of said parallel experiments in ways that square with their assumptions about the state, the market, the individual, etc. , but rigorous enough research might inspire more consensus among wonks, pundits, and politicians.
Mike
Public services should be fashioned to provide everything every individual citizen needs. The challenge is how best to achieve that. Quasi-markets, radical democratization, co-production, entitlements and systems of redress, local government or national government? It will probably require a mixture of all of these in different areas of public services over time.
Problems arise when people are intent purely on any one of these means of power spreading at the expense of others, be it quasi markets or national government.
There is no one best way to spread power. Different services require different kinds of power spreading to meet the needs of citizens.
Also, the way to spread power in public services depends on the nature of the economic system in which these public services exist, be it neo-liberal capitalism or international socialism.