Open up and reform
Sean Worth, who advised David Cameron on public sector reform, talks to Peter Cheney about how open data and freedom of choice can improve the public’s experience of services.
Publishing easy-to-read information on spending and performance will increase the public’s desire for better services, according to the Prime Minister’s former adviser on reform. Sean Worth spent two years in Downing Street before joining the Policy Exchange think tank in 2012.
His keynote paper ‘Better Public Services: A roadmap for revolution’ was published last April and sets out five steps for further improvement:
1. unlock as much information and transparency as possible;
2. create powerful consumers of services (with legal rights to exercise choice);
3. build safeguards against failure and abuse;
4. boost the buying skills of government; and
5. create a thriving field of competition.
This approach sounds “radical and ideological but that’s because of the argument it creates with the vested interests and the status quo.” Extensive public opinion research for Policy Exchange shows that citizens do not want to see “mass privatisations” but they do want “a lot more competition, a lot more choice.”
He adds: “If there are poor services being provided, they want to see those people fired and replaced with new ones.” In his view, the citizen does not care who is providing the service but is more interested in ‘who can do the best job?’
New governments “don’t do enough right at the beginning to expose the performance of services to people.” Data can be published on websites with the public encouraged to switch services where quality is poor.
This, it is put to him, is the rationale behind abolishing the Audit Commission – its auditing of public bodies has been outsourced to the private sector. Worth says that the commission’s reports were important “but the big problem with these bureaucratic agencies is that no-one reads them, nothing happens.”
He continues: “If the public don’t know what’s going on, nothing will happen. If you force councils to publish all this spending over £500 online, you can see exactly where the problems are. That drove such huge change that now local government is way ahead of central government on improving services – despite the fact that they’re actually facing the toughest cuts.”
Showing people the “variance in performance” as a positive from his time in government: “The downside is we haven’t done that early enough and we haven’t gone nearly far enough largely because the people who hold the data don’t want to release it – because of what it exposes obviously.”
His advice is that reformers should “just expose what is going on and people will demand change of the kind that actually the politicians want to see.” More competition, more openness and more accountability would then result.
Worth wants the Government to bring in more legal obligations to release data, both for public sector organisations and private sector providers.
“People think that all this is an attack on the public sector because it’s inefficient,” he comments. “It’s not. Actually, a lot of it exposes the fact that chunks of the public sector are brilliant but other areas are very poor.” Private sector outsourced services are statistically “cheaper and better quality” but more information is needed on the profit margins that providers are taking out and also their actual performance.
Policy Exchange sees freedom for bureaucratic control as a driver for change. In English local government, in particular, the Coalition Government has brought in a “complete liberalisation” through the Localism Act.
The message is: “Here’s your budget. You do what you like. As long as you meet a couple of standards, you can meet your poverty reduction targets however you want and there’ll be no oversight and targets.”
This approach has worked well for the councils that have “embraced” it but others are performing poorly. Worth is keen to see the concept of “earned autonomy” take root throughout the system: “We know freedom produces great results but you can’t just give freedoms to people that are incredibly bad at what they do.” Some government oversight is therefore still needed i.e. to give more and more power as the performance of a public body improves.
Cameron
From his time in the Conservative Party and Downing Street, he finds that David Cameron has a “very pragmatic” attitude and focuses on what people want.
Polling indicates that people “largely accept” the case for cuts in the public sector: “They get the fact that what went on in the past is not sustainable but they don’t want things to go too far, they don’t want things to go too fast and they want areas like the NHS and schools protected. What would really concern him is making sure that he can, as far as possible, keep to that kind of ‘map’.”
Health and schools spending in England has been ring-fenced, and he says the Prime Minister is also focused on improving protected services.
“You might think I would say this, wouldn’t I?” Worth adds. “But he has, and Osborne in particular has, done a pretty good job in being pragmatic on that front. If you look at the original plans that they set out in 2010, they were much tougher in terms of cuts than what has actually happened.”
Economic growth was lower than expected and, under the initial plans, this would have meant deeper cuts in public sector spending. Ministers rejected this option as they thought that the public would not accept it.
Welfare reform, it is put to him, is often seen as very ideological and brings back memories of the Thatcher years. Worth disagrees.
“If you take pragmatism to mean giving people what they want, 80-odd per cent of people supported a cap on benefits. The vast majority of people think that welfare had literally just got out of control.”
He comments: “There is nothing compassionate about having someone on sickness benefit who could actually work and get out and get a job, when we desperately need more people in our economy right now.”
Welfare reform, in his view, accounts for the fastest fall in unemployment since records began. It is now tougher to “stay on the dole and do nothing” but the public don’t want welfare reform to go “too far” and affect disabled people and single mothers.
Most people, of course, only see 10 Downing Street from the outside. Inside, it’s a “strange building” with “pokey little offices” but “you don’t really notice that you’re working so hard because you’re doing stuff you believe in.” Worth has counted it a “huge privilege” to work in politics, whether in opposition or government.