The Open Public Services White Paper: the reaction
The government’s Open Public Services White Paper signals an end to the prevailing ‘get what you’re given’ culture, the Prime Minister has claimed.
David Cameron said: “I know what our public services can do and how they are the backbone of this country. But I know too that the way they have been run for decades – old-fashioned, top-down, take-what-you’re-given – is just not working for a lot of people.
“Ours is a vision of open public services – there will be more freedom, more choice and more local control. Wherever possible we are increasing choice by giving people direct control over the services they use.”
The White Paper, a summary of which can be read here, said the proposals would "profoundly change" the future role of local government.
In response Sir Merrick Cockell, Chairman of the Local Government Association, said ministers needed to deliver on their commitment to let go and devolve services down to the local level.
“We urge Government not to hold back,” he said. “No department should consider itself above the need to break up the centralised power they have held over local areas.”
Sir Merrick claimed it was vital that the devolution of power from Whitehall down to town halls and communities was comprehensive “and not tied up in red tape”. “Local government has a key role to play putting people in charge of the services they rely on,” he added.
The LGA chairman urged ministers to adopt the Local Government Group’s own proposals for a radical devolution of power. These would save billions of pounds over five years “through pooling budgets at a local level and stripping the public sector of swathes of bureaucracy and unnecessary regulations,” he said.
Unions criticised the government’s announcement, however, with TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber claiming it was “nothing less than a manifesto to break up our public services, smuggled out while all attention is focussed on the misdeeds of News International”.
Barber argued that with the Southern Cross case underlining “just how dangerous” introducing the profit motive into public service could be, “people should be very afraid at what these proposals could mean”.
He added: “Of course they are skilfully wrapped up in warm words, but when the Prime Minister talks of charities and voluntary groups, he means parcelling up public services for private companies; when he talks of ending top-down control, he really means introducing a postcode lottery with few winning tickets; and when he talks of fairness he means new opportunities for the sharp-elbowed middle classes to push others aside.”
Jonathan Carr-West, director of think tank LGiU, warned that the key to delivering the choice and local control the Prime Minister wanted was to break the budgetary stranglehold of the big Whitehall departments. He said this was a point made clearly in the Department for Communities and Local Government’s structural reform plan but was yet to be delivered on.
“At present CLG is the only government department actively pushing community budgets,” Carr-West said. “This needs to become standard practice across Whitehall and the resulting pooled budgets used to support the open services approach. Without this there is a real danger that a more diverse public service supply side will be fragmentary and ineffective.”
The LGiU director also suggested that there were important issues around accountability. “The Prime Minister talked about new forms of accountability through the exercise of consumer choice, but this must operate alongside, not in competition with, the exercise of local democracy,” Carr-West said.
“Giving power to citizens and communities to shape the public services they use is an important objective. David Cameron said ‘other governments pay lip service to localism we’re really doing it’ but it is only as individual departments formulate their implementation plans that we’ll see whether this is really true”.
Philip Hoult
