A loud crunching sound is about to start reverberating from Britain’s public services. After a period of plenty, public spending will grow no quicker than the rest of the economy over the next few years. Complaints from producers and users, barely contained even in the fat years, will become very noisy.
Additional resources have disguised some of the underlying problems with public services, many of which are stuck in an organisational timewarp. We are building more prisons. But they look alarmingly like Strangeways in Manchester, opened a century ago. Run-down schools are being replaced, but too often the replacements merely look like improved versions of their Victorian predecessors.
Instead of imposing yet more targets and performance management, we need a different picture of how public services could be organised. The key to this will be to see service users not as consumers but as participants. Postwar public services were built around a paternalistic ethic of professional control and expertise. The current reforms challenge professional power with an ethic of consumerism and choice, but are overlaid with a heavy dose of top-down managerialism. Instead, reform should start to be guided by an ethic of participation and self-management.
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