Transformation
Change is inevitable with ‘transformation’ the latest public service reform buzzword. What is less certain is how much the public can expect governments to do and how they should do it. David Walker reports
Here’s a Minister for public service transformation: “If anything, history says we have gone too slowly. We need to keep up the pressure for change, and leave open the right to come back and ask questions again.” Unexceptionable sentiments, you might say. But this isn’t Tom Watson, the IT enthusiast who holds the reform portfolio in the Cabinet Office, nor is it even his shadow, Francis Maude, the former chair of the Conservative Party. The quote comes from an interview I did with Stephen Dorrell in summer 1994 when he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury in the John Major government charged with public service reform.
I concluded the piece identifying him as a man on his way up – which was true in the short run as he became Secretary for Health, but in the longer run, it was a bit premature, as he left the Tory front bench in 1998. The point of this bit of history is that transformation, perhaps under another name, has been tried before. Public service reform long antedates the Labour government elected in 1997. It has gone in fits and starts, it has had recapitulations, repeats and long pauses. That back story leads to two related questions that need to be asked about the capital transformation project inaugurated by Sir David Varney’s report to the Treasury in 2006 (the report can be found at www.hm-treasury.gov.uk). The first question is whether his scheme is just another initiative, a cousin (or stepchild) of the Citizen’s Charter, market testing, outsourcing, commissioning and all the other reforms of recent years, or something special? Cynical civil servants would be inclined to think that the clouds will always pass and the Cabinet Office will get yet another minister (how many ministers with ‘public service reform’ in their title have there been since 1992?).
The other question harks back to Dorrell and queries where transformation fits in the political cycle. It wasn’t quite Year Zero when Tony Blair succeeded Major in 1997, but ministers rarely (or rarely openly) built on schemes of reform started by their predecessors, even though, in health, education and public services at large, they soon arrived at a remarkably similar analysis to their Tory counterparts and, branding aside, their prescriptions borrowed heavily on what had gone before.
If David Cameron were to succeed Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, how many wheels would he seek to reinvent? Taken at face value, the speeches and commitments made by Maude suggest much of the same emphasis on the plural supply of public services, with a much expanded role for private companies and the third sector, and on improved customer experience and other elements in the Varney roster. But wouldn’t Maude (or whoever became reform minister in a Cameron government) be tempted to ditch the past? Wouldn’t the Tories want their own logo and bring in their own business guru to report? The answer depends on whether ‘transformation’, however it may be branded, is being embedded in the practice, assumptions and attitudes of both public servants and the public. Often the transformation dialogue is heavily one-sided, implying it’s a job for officials. Actually, it has as much to do with the expectations of those they serve, and their willingness to put a premium on one goal (coherence in service delivery) over another (dislike of data sharing between government agencies, for example). Polls indicate that the public is not always realistic in aligning what taxes will pay for with what service level can be purchased. Customer orientation – the willingness of public bodies to think about whom they serve and how – is now grounded. Election outcomes may not matter in terms of the basic quality of service offered. In Scotland, for example, local authorities have, if anything, become more customer focused since the political upsets of 2007, which saw the Scottish National Party take over in Edinburgh and Labour lose many council seats. Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office Public Services Minister, suggests there is now a sort of subterranean inevitability about aspects of the improvement agenda. He tells officials, “You know that the way that government configures public services is going to change beyond comprehension in years to come and you want to be part of it.”
Alexis Cleveland, Transformation Director in the Cabinet Office, believes there is a ratchet effect that, paradoxically, makes history less relevant. “It’s amazing how quickly we, as customers, take for granted some of the advantages – to be able to choose which hospital to go to, and how quickly you can get appointments now.
“People rapidly forget what it was like a few years ago. This is the challenge for us – the ever-rising expectations that people have.”
Whatever the weather
Understood as a programme focused on interactive government services – advice, cash payments and the like – transformation will persist, whatever the political weather. Powerful drivers of change will not let up. People will continue to benchmark how the government treats them against their experience with banks or insurance companies.
Technology will inevitably alter certain classes of transaction, pushing more public services online. Pressure to improve public sector websites is not going to diminish.
The depth of the information pond in which the public and public services swim will get deeper; we will all need better sonar navigation, filters and submersibles. But beware rogue metaphors.
Transformation, perhaps because of the scope and open-endedness of that word, has been hailed as the apocalypse, promising a once-and-for-all-solution to all the problems inherent in the relationship of citizens and the state. It’s what Paul Connolly of Serco Consulting, a former civil servant, calls the ‘alchemical’ version. Varney’s vision of a state unified at the point of contact with the citizen could be realised but a host of questions would remain. Transformation would not mean the end of politics. Of course, political and public preoccupations do shift over time and with them expectations of what government can and cannot, should and should not do.
A Conservative government at Westminster would, like the SNP government in Edinburgh, be less interested in ‘transforming’ some aspects of interaction between the public and their government. Some advocates allow themselves to become hyper-rational about how government works. Cleveland says, “We want the money to follow the customer, rather than follow the organisational structure,” but she will know as an experienced and accomplished civil servant that organisation itself often follows political priority and sometimes even personality.
For example, the Department of Health and Social Security was created in 1968 to accommodate Richard Crossman, and the Department of the Environment in 1979 to give a job to the “big beast” Michael Heseltine. Great expectations
Expectations of government are multiform and not always consistent. For example, giving citizens a more holistic sense of government through one-stop shops or single enquiry points implies much more data sharing between agencies and departments. A new administration might want to push the privacy agenda and impose stricter controls on how personal data is handled by the state, making sharing between, say, tax and benefits or local authorities and the transport department more difficult.
One of the great IT success stories of recent years has been the way the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority has automated payment of road fund tax, linking insurance and MOT databases. However, there is a persistent problem with public suspicion, which Watson acknowledges. “We need to build public trust and confidence in how we handle data and when we share it. We need to be more transparent about what we are doing, and make a stronger case for how data-sharing benefits people.
“I have this hunch that for every civil-libertarian who is furrowing a brow about government departments sharing data, there are 20 customers tearing their hair out that we make them join up the gaps themselves.” Citizens may be customers but they are also miscreants (in the eyes of other citizens), who may need to be cajoled or threatened. The Department of Work and Pension’s customer insight team found that all the people it deals with, regardless of age, want to be treated with respect.
It often matters more than accuracy or speed or cost. But new social policies might ‘disrespect’ certain styles of living or household relationships because ministers and other members of the public blame these people for breaching social norms or disrupting society.
Improving interactions
Serco’s Connolly offers another example in the push for more localism: greater recognition of the powers and responsibilities of elected councils. Might that encourage individual councils to pursue their own service delivery strategies, even when there are cost savings and qualitative service improvements to be reaped from sharing the service with neighbouring authorities? There need not be a conflict, he says, if councils use common processing then top and tail the service according to local geography and demand. We need, he argues, a better taxonomy of what government does – rewarding, regulating, policing, transporting, penalising, educating, treating and so on – so we can form a clearer picture of where the critical interactions with the public are and work out how they can be improved.
Connolly runs against conventional wisdom in making the case that government is most skilled at the sharp end, in direct engagement with the public. Take teachers or GPs.
Where government is less adept is in servicing them, handling the back office, ensuring that knowledge is managed in a joined up way. Here is where government might secure help and where specifying contractual service provision may be a lot more straightforward than on the front line. That, he notes, is an intensely practical task, to do with the nitty gritty of ensuring a designated service is delivered on cost and at the desired level of quality. That perhaps is where ‘transformation’ talk belongs – in tighter specification of what government is expected to do and open and honest debate about the how and the how much.
David Walker is Managing Director of Communications and Public Reporting at the Audit Commission. Until recently he was Editor of Public for the Guardian
Further reading
To download Sir David Varney’s report visit: www.hm-treasury.gov.uk and search for ‘Service Transformation by David Varney’
