If this is the future, can I go back to the 1970s?
12:15pm Friday, 26th January 2007
I was at the Guardian public services summit yesterday listening to people like Phillip Bobbitt, Gus O'Donnell and a surprisingly good Michael Gove speaking about the future of government. Lots of talk of market states, enabling states, commissioning and 'transformation' - a word so abused in government that it's rapidly becoming meaningless.
Ever since I left the event last night I've been under a cloud of doom. For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I know their future isn't one I want to live in. Here's an attempt at working out why:
Language: I'm not a luddite when it comes to using markets in the public sector - I used to lobby for more of them at the CBI. But I find the language of the market intensely alienating. Some parts of government may resemble a business, but that does not make government a corporation.
Public services have an explicitly moral set of goals and attitudes - we should be celebrating those and talking about them more, not losing them in a mush of business jargon. I'd have liked to hear people yesterday talking less about transformation and more about how we help people lead better lives.
Commissioning, which lots of people yesterday seemed keen on, is a curiously values-free way of reformulating the state. More than that, it raises a whole load of important questions - how does a commissioning state deal with complex social problems, how does it get innovation and learning out of lots of autonomous business units, how does it create the conditions for collaboration?
Markets and the enabling state: I don't quite buy Bobbitt's argument about the market state. He argues that the state is retreating and now aims to maximise our choices rather than provide us with security. But in large parts of the world the state simply isn't retreating. It's growing both in size and social ambition. I think Gosta Esping-Anderson's social investment state provides a much more compelling and morally-fluent explanation of how the state is changing. Giving people more choices is good, but only if we invest in their capability to use those choices.
Gus O'Donnell argued that an enabling state is emerging - this strategy unit document highlights some of the international models for getting there, including my old favourite, New Zealand. The trouble with New Zealand is that the enabling/commissioning model (the two seem very closely linked) had very severe drawbacks which the country's government has been trying to fix for most of the last seven or eight years.
What people didn't say: government isn't just about service delivery, so a special prize to the IDeA's Lucy de Groot for being the only person I heard talk about democracy and citizenship for any length of time. You could be forgiven yesterday for thinking that the only reason we were changing the state is to give people more choice. I'm sure more choice and personalisation is good - but people don't want endless Dell-style customisation of their public services. The bigger, harder question is about how we deal with collective action problems and create a healthier, more participative kind of democracy.
What do we really think about the future: me and Duncan had a crack at setting out where we think public services should go last year. For us, it's about finding deepening democracy, encouraging collaboration and creating a new relationship with professionals. I suppose we take competition and great customer service a little for granted. They're important and we need to get them right. But I'm not sure we can build a future out of them alone.
Do let's be reasonable: before I get too grumpy, it's probably worth injecting a note of reason. Of course commissioning is part of the future of government - although I think we need radically different kinds of contracting if we want to create innovative, integrating and learning public services. And of course there's a big role for all sorts of providers. It's all about how we engage them, on whose terms and to what end.
Rant ends here.
Ever since I left the event last night I've been under a cloud of doom. For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I know their future isn't one I want to live in. Here's an attempt at working out why:
Language: I'm not a luddite when it comes to using markets in the public sector - I used to lobby for more of them at the CBI. But I find the language of the market intensely alienating. Some parts of government may resemble a business, but that does not make government a corporation.
Public services have an explicitly moral set of goals and attitudes - we should be celebrating those and talking about them more, not losing them in a mush of business jargon. I'd have liked to hear people yesterday talking less about transformation and more about how we help people lead better lives.
Commissioning, which lots of people yesterday seemed keen on, is a curiously values-free way of reformulating the state. More than that, it raises a whole load of important questions - how does a commissioning state deal with complex social problems, how does it get innovation and learning out of lots of autonomous business units, how does it create the conditions for collaboration?
Markets and the enabling state: I don't quite buy Bobbitt's argument about the market state. He argues that the state is retreating and now aims to maximise our choices rather than provide us with security. But in large parts of the world the state simply isn't retreating. It's growing both in size and social ambition. I think Gosta Esping-Anderson's social investment state provides a much more compelling and morally-fluent explanation of how the state is changing. Giving people more choices is good, but only if we invest in their capability to use those choices.
Gus O'Donnell argued that an enabling state is emerging - this strategy unit document highlights some of the international models for getting there, including my old favourite, New Zealand. The trouble with New Zealand is that the enabling/commissioning model (the two seem very closely linked) had very severe drawbacks which the country's government has been trying to fix for most of the last seven or eight years.
What people didn't say: government isn't just about service delivery, so a special prize to the IDeA's Lucy de Groot for being the only person I heard talk about democracy and citizenship for any length of time. You could be forgiven yesterday for thinking that the only reason we were changing the state is to give people more choice. I'm sure more choice and personalisation is good - but people don't want endless Dell-style customisation of their public services. The bigger, harder question is about how we deal with collective action problems and create a healthier, more participative kind of democracy.
What do we really think about the future: me and Duncan had a crack at setting out where we think public services should go last year. For us, it's about finding deepening democracy, encouraging collaboration and creating a new relationship with professionals. I suppose we take competition and great customer service a little for granted. They're important and we need to get them right. But I'm not sure we can build a future out of them alone.
Do let's be reasonable: before I get too grumpy, it's probably worth injecting a note of reason. Of course commissioning is part of the future of government - although I think we need radically different kinds of contracting if we want to create innovative, integrating and learning public services. And of course there's a big role for all sorts of providers. It's all about how we engage them, on whose terms and to what end.
Rant ends here.
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The thing I find most depressing about the debates around reform at the moment is the emptiness and narrowness of the language used, which in turn seems to limit our capacity to develop an agenda based around people and relationships rather than delivery and targets. It's like we all know that the old models of public service provision - discrete interventions to avoid crisis - will no longer cut it and yet we can't resist returning to that kind of language and mental model of services all the same.
The other troubling theme of the summit for me was the quest for rational solutions. Democracy isn't really working any more, or so the 'democratic deficit' story goes, so what we need is better governance, better information, neater structures. I just don't think this acknowledges the true nature of what we are dealing with here: services aren't commodities, they don't roll off production lines. Nor do people behave rationally (or am I just speaking for myself here?). To design services as if we will all do what we should do, or even what we say we'll do, seems to me to be the wrong place to start. And to give up on democracy and look for solutions elsewhere is a depressing thing to contemplate.
However, amidst these worries I did hear some things that got me thinking. For example the fact that as a growing number of companies are larger than countries, the notion of socially responsible business has to become a mainstream concern. Also the acknowledgement by a couple of the speakers (thank you, Gus O'Donnell) that the heavy use of economic models and analysis by govt needs to be supplemented with the discipline of social science (and predictably I would argue design approaches too). And finally Estelle Morris' eloquently made point that devolution must be based on powerful moral and political arguments, not a managerial business case for improved services alone.
It's all a bit much for a cold friday afternoon, but we need some serious bravery from our politicians and policy makers on these issues if we are to create a serious agenda for public services in the future – one based less on the ‘rational man’ model that has dominated discussions in recent years, and more based on the values and aspirations of citizens. Human nature is rarely logical, and on that basis seeking to create political institutions that are based on rational, detached analysis of the issues are unlikely to engage people or inspire them to participate. As Robin Cook once said, ‘a good society isn’t defined by its pass rate on performance indicators, but by the values that shape it’.
Simon I’m just off having chaired an open forum yesterday in Scotland around ‘Health, Wellbeing and Regeneration’ where issues of commissioning and evaluations were touched on.
It did occur to me that perhaps the problem or challenge with commissioning is not so much commissioning itself, as the questions of ‘who does the commissioning’ and ‘why are they doing it’ and ‘to what end’ and ‘from who/where do they derive their mandate or legitimacy?’. I’m thinking here about the situation with the dreaded evaluations that everyone working on delivery in the public and grant supported sectors must periodically endure.
My journey on evaluations started with me managing in a community-based services delivery organisation with a debilitating sense of being distracted and frustrated by the imposition of evaluations for external funders. These evaluations seemingly served no purpose for our organisation. I then moved on into activities that saw me advising organisations (not-for-profits) on how to be ready for evaluations and how to succeed in them. At that stage I was converted to the whole thing about learning from evaluation – and indeed, not just waiting for an externally-imposed evaluation, but, rather, do your own internal and regular evaluating and learning.
But an interesting comparison between internal, and externally-driven evaluations recurrently arose. Most organisations not only learned from the internal evaluations, but the lessons were actually useful and could be acted on in feasible and appropriate ways. Crucially, the organisation’s own aspirations and values were an informing influence on the evaluation.
However, with the external-driven evaluations, it was more often than not the case that the external agent (usually a government funding agency) had in advance ‘fixed’ the impact of the evaluation outcomes. This was done by, firstly and mainly, pre-setting the policy context and parameters in which the evaluations were undertaken, and by pre-determining the scope, nature and purpose of the evaluations. This could all be done by the central agency acting in entirely self-regarding and self-serving modes. For example, ‘dangerous’ questions like the efficacy of the central agency surrendering powers and resources to the organisations being evaluated were just omitted from evaluations.
This whole mode of operation is of course inimical to truly effective evaluations that must be, by their nature, dynamic, interactive and sometimes ‘messy’ processes – hardly the stuff of pre-set tick-box lists and statistical returns to criteria-wedded external evaluators.
Moreover, here in Scotland we’ve now had cases of the Executive simply and arbitrarily ending (or significantly increasing) funding, regardless of what the evaluation evidence was – or, in at least one case, just not waiting for the evidence.
I appreciate that the forgoing may seem to drift away from the topic, but I think that very similar considerations of who, why, how and to what end, all apply to commissioning. If the ‘end user’, whether as service user, elector, client, patient, delivery organisation or whatever, are not involved from the outset at the planning-of-commissioning, and involved meaningfully, then the whole exercise remains just another rotation of existing permutations of power and structures in public services.
Indeed, I think that you’re maybe referring to similar/the same issues when you write about language, democracy and the future.
But I get a vaguely similar impression from Demos sometimes as well. I probably ought to read the relevant pamphlets first, but how far are you committed to democracy for moral reasons, and how far for evidence-based/utilitarian reasons? Or is this some hybrid form of 'rule-utilitarianism', in which abiding by certain political principles inadvertently leads to the best outcome (e.g. fairly regulated markets experience higher levels of growth)? Gurus - and I guess this accounts for Bobbit - tend to make money out of not having the mental capacity to distinguish between facts and values (e.g. telling business leaders that their companies will thrive through crypto-normative categories like leadership and trust), but I'd have thought this is not Demos's game. Do you not have to make a case for why a public services summit needs to address questions of democracy? It's not immediately apparent, and risks getting lost in the murky space between evidence and values.
Will - maybe you've just defined my sense of gloom for me. You're right that a lot of the people at the summit made little distinction between the way they think the world is going to be, and the way they think it ought to be. It's a slightly jarring experience to listen to that kind of argument - as one member of Bobbitt's audience asked: 'why do I get the feeling I'm being softened up for something?'
It’s also a position that precludes a moral vision of the state - because Bobbitt's argument appears to be based on a set of impersonal driving forces that we (apparently) cannot alter. David Walker's question about whether there is a Fukuyama-like logic driving change is a good one. The answer is that broad economic and social trends probably do point in a particular direction - but that we (and our governments) can change and sometimes should seek to change that direction. The state does not just respond, it also shapes. But that's very hard to encompass in Bobbitt-world.
Here's an attempt at a Demos take on democracy (although my colleagues may disagree). I think we start from a moral position - democracy interpreted very broadly is a normative good. But we're also writing at a moment in history at which we believe that democracy is not only moral, but key to social and economic progress. That said, the two are very closely intertwined for us – to the extent that I can’t help wondering whether the distinction between moral and utilitarian goals is hard to make in this case.
Public services should be an expression of that democratic goal, both because that's just the right thing for them to do, and because they are likely to be more successful and legitimate if they can engage effectively with the people they serve.
The case we apply to public services does not work as well elsewhere - for instance we're pretty weedy on democracy in the market and workplaces, and we tend to gloss over the impact of wealth and power-inequalities on people’s ability to participate. What I hope will propel us into thinking more about those subjects over the next year is a moral instinct for putting people in control of their lives and communities – the utilitarian stuff will follow.
'The great shift of contemporary politics is the realisation that there is no one source of certainty - and that progress in a post-political age depends not primarily on the design or management of institutions, but on the ways in which they draw on and interact with the people they serve. In other words, politics cannot go forward without another wave of democracy.
Democratic progress is conventionally characterised in one of two ways - making those who govern more subject to those who elect them through various channels of accountability, and consulting people more often on a wider range of decisions, for example through focus groups or the internet.
But both of these options ignore the real foundation of the ancient democratic ideal: that the goal of democracy is not accountable or responsive government by representative leaders, but self government.'
...in other words, there there is considerable overlap (Simon's point), but there is also a distinct vision of the good society: putting people in control of their own lives.
But if anything, the moral case is harder to make. Firstly, belief in democracy as a moral good in itself is, at least on a rhetorical level, something which would allign Demos with the neo-cons of Washington DC. Obviously, there's a world of difference in the delivery mechanisms (and if Dick Cheney had been fonder of podcasts and seminars than of stealth bombers, Iraq would be a happier place right now), but there is an ideological issue at stake here. Secondly, you risk something of a performative contradiction: what happens if you consult users of the NHS, and discover that the majority of people simply want quicker, cleaner hospitals, and actually don't want to be involved in the decision-making process? What's the democratic option then? (I'm sure I'm not the first person to pose this one, but it introduces an interesting set of dilemmas.)
Part of the problem lies in the fact that the individualism of liberalist and market-oriented socio-politcal strucutres has historically been at odds with the collectivist nature of democratic dynamics. At best they exist in a kind of creative tension. What we have seen as states move up a neoliberal spectrum is a tipping of the balance in favour of liberalist conceptions of the 'good society'. This evident in the mantras of globalisation and the fact that the rights to property and profit are society's fundamental social rights, whilst the right to tolerance, a quality of life, the right to the city are at best derivative rights. This amounts to a subversion of the substanitve content of democracy. Rhetoric about enabling or commisioning states is window dressing of the same phenomenon.
If we are to address the 'democratic deficit', if democracy is to be extended to the places, Simon quite rightly notes, it has never reached - namely the workplace - and if democratic structures are ever to legitimately challenge the endemic social inequities, then democracy as outcome-oriented value that carries with it a host of normative imperatives must be defended.
Nasser - communism, of course, claimed that it was extending democracy into the economic sphere. In some places, notably the former Yugoslavia, that was not an entirely empty claim. You could also point to the Mondragon co-operatives and a host of similar experiments. I'm not sure how much these tell you about how to run a modern democratic workplace, but they're interesting precedents.
Will and Pete - I'd like to think I'm more Tom Paine than Dick Cheney.
Democratic political institutions could have provided a source of legitimacy that would have supported renewal and reinvigoration of socialist societies; this, howver, does imply a conflation of the normative and functional attributes of democracy - but you need to start with an acceptance of the former.