After the election, public managers are drinking from those mugs carrying the motto “keep calm and carry on”. The old aphorism from management guru Tom Peters about “sticking to the knitting” comes to mind. In public services the age of heroism is long past; the next five years are grit and sawdust.
The excited talk about “transformation” we heard after the 2010 election has died away. There isn’t going to be any big-bang adjustment to service boundaries or public expectations. Austerity is a permanent condition. So today’s watchword has to be: keep your head down and get by. All around there’s a sense of shrinking into a more limited, circumspect role. The very idea of “the public” is being replaced by the specifics of this department, that agency, my local authority, our NHS trust.
In Whitehall, more than ever, permanent secretaries are strictly departmental, rarely venturing into civil service-wide affairs. In local government senior figures concern themselves with the fate of Birmingham or Barking, leaving the bigger picture to take care of itself.
The other day we reported on the multi-hued coalition running Norfolk county council. Once the chief executive of such a large and influential authority would have been a national figure, opining on matters going well beyond Norwich; striding the big stage. In Wendy Thomson, Norfolk does indeed have a figure with national heft – ex-Whitehall, ex-Audit Commission. But since her appointment last year she has kept close to home, eschewing the wider scene, focusing on the county council. Given the multiple pressures on Norfolk – financial, demographic and political – it’s a wise course.
The wider scene is itself shrinking. The local chief executives’ body, Solace, is a pale shadow of what it once was. The Local Government Association and regional bodies such as London Councils retreat into silence, as their members cultivate the home turf.
Apart from their weekly meeting – which is usually strictly government business – and occasional away days, permanent secretaries don’t even meet as a collectivity, let alone generate a common view. Over the past week, some have looked askance at Lord Gus O’Donnell’s intervention in the election campaign, feeling it conveyed an anachronistic sense of there being a “civil service view”. As the new government forms, their preoccupation will be the fate of their departments and accommodating new ministers.
Take, say, Robert Devereux, permanent secretary at work and pensions. He is in the unfortunate position of attracting the mistrust of both the Tories (Iain Duncan Smith blamed him for not getting universal credit up and running) and Labour (who hold him responsible for contracting problems and giving DWP staff targets for excluding people from benefits). If he keeps his job, his attention will be entirely inwards. He will have no time for airy debates about the fate of the civil service.
And then there’s the public service at large. The past few years have seen an ideological assault on public spending and public service provision. Part of it has involved attacks on bureaucracy. Public service managers, notably in health and local government, have taken a heavy rhetorical beating from the likes of communities secretary Eric Pickles and health secretary Jeremy Hunt. The conclusion some are drawing is that generic public service has no future.
The London borough of Barnet, the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust and the Environment Agency do as individual entities, but single bodies are also easier to pick off. This individualisation of the public service can only further weaken it. In the months and years ahead, public managers must retain some capacity to relate to one another, to think across boundaries, to imagine themselves having a wider, generic identity whether they work in health, education, the civil service or local government. Here, in the space for ongoing conversation offered by Guardian Public Leaders, we strive with you to keep that vision alive.
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