Public services reforms to end "take what you're given" model, says PM

The Open Public Services White Paper will “signal the decisive end of the old-fashioned, top down, take-what-you’re-given model of public services”, the Prime Minister has said.

Writing in the Telegraph, David Cameron predicted that the reforms would bring complete change. “The grip of state control will be released and power will be placed in people's hands,” he wrote. “Professionals will see their discretion restored. There will be more freedom, more choice and more local control. Ours is a vision of open public services – and we will make it happen by advancing some key principles.”

The Prime Minister said the most important of these principles would be diversity. This will include the creation of a new presumption – “backed up by new rights for public service users and a new system of independent adjudication” – that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service.

Cameron excluded certain areas from the reforms, including national security and the judiciary. “But everywhere else should be open to diversity; open to everyone who gets and values the importance of our public service ethos,” he suggested.

“This is a transformation: instead of having to justify why it makes sense to introduce competition in some public services – as we are now doing with schools and in the NHS – the state will have to justify why it should ever operate a monopoly.”

The Prime Minister claimed that over the past decade, stories about bureaucracy over-ruling common sense, targets and regulations over-ruling professional discretion, and the producers of public services over-ruling the people who used and paid for them “became the norm, not the exception”. The evidence suggested that this approach had not brought about dramatic improvements, he argued.

Cameron also said that the government would seek to increase choice “wherever possible” – “whether it’s patients having the freedom to choose which hospital they get treated in or parents having a genuine choice over their child's school.”

As part of this, there will be a presumption that services should be delivered at the lowest possible level.

“Working from this presumption, we will devolve power even further,” he wrote. “For example, we will give more people the right to take control of the budget for the service they receive. In this new world of decentralised, open public services it will be up to government to show why a public service cannot be delivered at a lower level than it is currently; to show why things should be centralised, not the other way round.”

The Prime Minister insisted that the state would still have a crucial role to play – “ensuring fair funding, ensuring fair competition, and ensuring that everyone – regardless of wealth – gets fair access”. He added that the reforms were not about destabilising the public services people rely on, but about ensuring they were as good as they could be. “Our public services desperately need an injection of openness, creativity and innovation,” he claimed.

Cameron said the principles in the White Paper would make it impossible for government to return to “the bad old days of the standard state monopoly”.

The Prime Minister also argued that the coalition government’s plans to devolve power from Whitehall, and to modernise public services, were more significant aspects of its Big Society agenda than the work it was doing to boost social action.