Last night Prospect's arts and books editor Tom Chatfield and I were lucky enough to be part of the 200 or so people packed into Bafta's auditorium for the widely trailed "secret" Cameron TED talk. Three reflections.
1. People are missing the radicalism in his open contracts announcement. Cameron last night committed to publish the details of all government contracts. Not just IT contracts, which no one noticed they pledged to do in their IT paper before Christmas. ALL contracts. Every contract any contractor signs with a government department. Cleaners. Train operators. McKinsey being paid to write most of the Dhazi review. McKinsey running large chunks of Northern Rock. All of it. Here is the pledge:
A conservative government will publish all government contracts worth over £25,000 for goods and services in full, including all performance indicators, break clauses and penalty measures. This will enable the public to root out wasteful spending and poorly negotiated contracts, and open up the procurement system to more small businesses.
It's a bit confusing, because this looks like their existing announcement (to publish all government spending lines over £25,000). But it isn't. It's new. I can only imagine what the CBI think about this. (UPDATE: see end of post for more on CBI reaction.) It is, if delivered in this spirit, a genuinely radical transparency measure. Imagine the fuss this is going to cause when everyone who didn't get the contract pores over each detail, and asks difficult questions? Imagine how much easier it is going to be for outside bodies to track public money—think PFI projects—to see if they are on track, and also to use FOI to track progress? Interesting stuff. 2. Cameron's "Transparency, Accountability, Choice" framework should be taken seriously too. Last night Cameron—again—used this troika to structure his talk. It reminds me of Bill Clinton, who used to always talk about "Responsibility, Opportunity, Community" as his mantra, as perhaps most famously put in his 1996 campaign. I remember being told a story once about the White House staff doing an end-of-year skit at a Christmas party, one part of which was to slightly tease Clinton for always saying this. Clinton, so I was told, took this badly —he saw it not as a slogan, but as a governing philosophy, as framework to apply to any policy problem. (It even turned up in the names of his laws.) The same is true for Cameron. Last night's talk was fairly familiar territory for anyone who follows such things. It took the basic framework from his important 2007 Google "zeitgeist" speech (the first time he signed up the post-bureaucratic age narrative, thought up by Oliver Letwin, developed by Steve Hilton and popularised in print by Michael Gove earlier that year) of a pre- and post- bureaucratic age. But more important is the fact that this mantra—transparency, accountability, choice—always turns up in all of his speeches. It is, in effect, his governing philosophy. People should be seriously thinking about how the Tories are going to apply it more broadly in policy when, and if, they are elected. 3. The role of the state implicit in his remarks is startling optimistic. Too optimistic. In Cameron's "big society" speech a few months back, he laid out a startlingly optimistic vision for the future role of the state. I say startling because it is one which asks for a degree of subtlety and precision from state action that most progressives, let alone most conservatives, find implausible. Here it is:The same vision of the state underpinned his remarks last night. This, remember, is the same hopeless, useless, Brownite state which—says Cameron—has failed utterly to deliver growth, end poverty, fix Broken Britain, improve education, make us healthier, and so on. Yet, in Cameron's hands, it will suddenly become a keyhole state, able to dip gently into the very fabric of local communities as a heart surgeon would reach into an open chest—the same brittle fabric of social organisation which conservatives normally fight so hard to keep away from the state. A gentle tweak here and there, which will let loose a social flowering. Now, some of this I buy—for instance his agenda to push open public data, and transparency, will enable communities to act in various ways, as he claimed last night in his speech, citing the examples of public spending and local crime information. But behind this lies a deeper vision of not simply an information-producing state, but an interventionist state tasked with "remaking" things. How this is going to work I honestly have no idea, especially given all the bits of central government which might do this: the COI, the office of the third sector, the bits concerned with social action aren't much good at the sort of thing he has in mind. So while this vision is attractive, at the moment it feels unrealistic too. Much more work needs to be done to make real the bold claims that underpinned last night's remarks, namely that you can improve public services through clever use of new techniques (like open data, or the insights of behavioural economics) with no need for extra investment. If it looks overly optimistic, I reckon that is because it is. (One more minor plug. If you are interested in this agenda, look out for the next edition of Wired. I have a 6,000 word essay in it about Cameron, and his approach to technology.) UPDATE: CBI I should have read the FT more closely: it seems the CBI are supportive, see the quote below. I have to say I find this rather implausible—my hunch is the CBI feel they have to back whatever it is the Tories are doing now, but I can't imagine for a minute their members (who include every large public sector contract winner) will like this one bit. I may be wrong, but this feels like a gritted teeth "well, we have to do this" endorsement:This, then, is our new role for the state. Galvanising, catalysing, prompting, encouraging and agitating for community engagement and social renewal. It must help families, individuals, charities and communities come together to solve problems. We must use the state to remake society. We must use the state to help stimulate social action.
John Cridland has said that the CBI supports transparency in principle —transparency on contract pricing and performance is both sensible and acceptable as long as intellectual property is protected. Transparency would help achieve the improved value for money and better outcomes that are necessary if the government is to achieve more with less. Working through the practicalities to avoid unintended consequences is essential; avoiding the creation of new layers of bureaucracy is essential nor do we want to see a civil service paralysed by indecision for fear of criticism when contracts are scrutinised. Both these concerns will be addressed by the proposal for outcomes based commissioning. He also said that in order to ensure that government always chooses the best service provider, all providers must compete on equal terms and transparency on costs, performance and outcomes must be the same whether the service is provided by the "in house"/public sector provider or a private and third sector provider.
