The following conclusion from today's British Social Attitudes survey seems, on the face of it, counter-intuitive: "The public service ethos appears to have increased rather than withered during the New Labour years."
In other words, over the past 10 years, the core motivation of public employees - the will to "do good" in a socially useful way - not merely remains undented by Blair and Brown's turbulent programmes of reform (think markets, contracting out, targets, constant structural re-organisation) but has strengthened and thrived.
This conclusion will surprise a few people, not least at a time when police, doctors, nurses and prison officers are up in arms over pay and conditions. It has been an article of faith on the left from the 1980s onwards that the introduction of competition and performance-related pay into the NHS, local government and other agencies will corrode the ethos of service, will turn a once publicly-spirited workforce into selfish, self-interested jobsworths.
We should not be surprised that, on the whole, it hasn't. After all, bitterness over pay is seasonal in the public sector. General grumpiness is endemic and perennial: I've never known a time when staff morale in the NHS, for example, is anything other than "rock bottom", or public sector unions are not worried about the "pace of reform".
Of course public servants get hacked off with the capriciousness of politicians and the grander follies of public management; but there's no reason why that feeling of dissatisfaction can't co-exist with more fundamental beliefs about why they do what they do. According to the BSA study, two of the most important attributes of a job, for public servants, are that it is "useful to society", and that it "allows someone to help other people". As to whether those expectations are met appears to depend on age. The over 35-year-old age group in the public service workforce is less confident than it was 10 years ago that their own job is socially useful. The 18-35 group, however, is brimming with self-belief in the goodness of their work, much more so than it was a decade ago (it could be, of course, that disillusion has yet to set in). "Around two-thirds of young public sector employees now 'strongly agree that their job is useful to society' and gives them the opportunity to help other people," says the study.
Who is this new generation of highly-motivated, public-spirited idealists? I have an idea in my mind who they might be: socially aware, environmentally active, gap year charity volunteers; offended by societal injustice but uninterested in formal party politics; young people who the social entrepreneur Tim Smit might argue are un-encumbered by the "baggage of the 60s - the radical chic of being pro-business or anti-business". They are, perhaps, people who see in modernised, decentralised public services an opportunity to create what Smit calls the "new configuration" of business and social values. Perhaps.
What's not clear from the study is how far the Blair-Brown reforms have positively encouraged a stronger public service ethos or whether the BSA study has identified a hardening of resistance to them (your answer to this might depend on your age). Nor is it clear what your motivations are if you are an employee of a private company which provides public services. I'd also want to know more about how far service users value a strong public service ethos. The idealistic young public manager may have unshakeable self-belief in the social usefulness of her work, but what if her clients beg to differ?
