Battered and bruised, their commands further shrunken, public managers won’t pretend that 2017 has been a vintage year. All roads lead back to austerity and the gradual chipping away at the size and significance of government.
This Tory project has succeeded. Warm words in Theresa May’s election manifesto were instantly forgotten after the general election. One million jobs have gone from the public sector since 2010 and public employment, at 17% of total UK employment, is at its lowest since the second world war. (The rush to fill the cavities opened by Brexit does nothing to counteract the effects of successive budgets from George Osborne and Philip Hammond.)
However mean, spending cuts aren’t the public sector’s principal problem. Downsizing the state has been accompanied by fragmentation, encouraging service managers to snarl and fight with one another, or transfer their work to outside companies.
Take the Grenfell Tower fire. First responders were magnificent and the follow up, especially with regard to the psychological consequences for residents, showed NHS staff at their best.
But Grenfell also exhibited the disjointed, uncommunicative nature of public services and the effects of outsourcing and arm’s-length management.
We’re as far away as ever from public services that really focus on individuals, let alone households or communities. Work and pensions pass the welfare buck to underfunded councils, who are in turn suspicious if not downright hostile to the NHS. Fire officers’ connections with local authority housing departments are haphazard, with no one looking at emergency services in the round. Council, trust and agency budgets are jealously demarcated and protected.
The Grenfell inquiry won’t even begin to ask about the new public management doctrine, which told public bodies to “steer, not row” and which has pushed much public service delivery to profit-seeking firms or devolved bodies, leaving accountability in tatters and the public befuddled over who does what.
Nobody else will ask questions about the bigger picture on public services, either.
The National Audit Office nibbles at specific instances of contract failure. But professional bodies and sector associations are silent or cowed. Where’s the wide-ranging, syncretic look at what has been pulling public services apart for 30 years and still continues (witness the recent decision by Lancashire county council to award a major public health contract to Virgin)?
Public services have no champion, no vocal, identifiable spokesperson – no one prepared to put their head above the parapet when ideologues and mercenary hacks take pot shots. The cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, is hardly a commanding presence in Whitehall, let alone in the wider public sphere; he spends his time running a fractious, Brexit-fixated cabinet for which the welfare of the nation(s) was long ago neglected in the cause of preserving the Tory party. Of course, “running” is not quite the right word. We’re as unsure now as we were in January about Whitehall management and the Treasury’s role.
So 2017 ends as it began, with urgent, unanswered questions about both services and how government is organised. No point in looking to parliament for scrutiny and oversight when committee chairs are consumed by partisanship. As for much talked-about better “evidence for policy”, look at Brexit and the silent impotence of officials when their ministers lie.
Do civil servants really have no constitutional identity other than fetchers and carriers for squabbling, shortsighted ministers? In which case, how on earth is Sue Gray, the Cabinet Office head of propriety and ethics, able to sit in judgement on the ethics of those selfsame ministers? Many marvelled at the corkscrew nature of public managers when Andrew Travers, the point man for Tory Barnet’s radical deconstruction of services, turned up as chief executive of Labour Lambeth.
Looking at that wider public space, no one could call either the prime minister or the leader of the opposition localists. Neither seems interested in addressing the long run question of giving council funding a secure, buoyant base.The latest finance settlement for local government is a confusing compendium of grants and freedoms, with the centre retaining an iron grip on council tax increases: paying for social care remains a yawning chasm
Yet the year’s bright spots must include the election of city-region executive mayors. Despite limited powers, the two Andys, Burnham and Street, and the other regional mayors, may show that England’s conurbations can heal fragmentation and show leadership.
Change does not necessarily follow the logic of events and formal decisions. Look below the surface. This year, despite penury, public services have become more diverse, more conscious of the need to recognise minority talent. The #MeToo movement matters in councils and government department as well, and the past year, gloomy as it has been, has seen consciousness of gender discrimination grow along with awareness that public services simply cannot afford the sheer neglect of women’s talent under present arrangements. Maybe 2018 will see further, albeit incremental steps towards greater equality.
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