With the Summer break behind us, we have an opportunity to reflect on the momentous first four months of Coalition Government. We are experiencing a seismic shift in thinking towards public services. Deficit reduction remains the overriding principle of the coalition agreement, but grafted onto this is the Big Society agenda. What was a rather nebulous concept during the general election campaign has now been fleshed out with more detail and it promises some exciting opportunities for public service reform. Essentially it is about getting people at local level to take more responsibility to help themselves as an alternative to action by state institutions and state-owned public services.
There are 5 key strands to the policy:
- Give communities more powers – this is taking shape in the new Local Government White Paper
- Encourage people to take an active role in their communities – for example through the National Citizenship service
- Transfer power from central to local government
- Support co-ops, mutuals, charities and social enterprises to deliver more public services, introducing a universal ‘right to request’ to set up a social enterprise for frontline public sector workers.
- Publish Government data transparently but remove meaningless KPIs.
We are already seeing the practical effect of this radical shift of power in education, where the centrally planned and executed Building Schools for the Future programme has been controversially shelved in favour of parent-sponsored ‘free schools’ and freedom for more schools to convert to academy status; and in health the new White Paper has promised a revolution in commissioning local services as GPs take the helm, and Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities are abolished. Many service departments and frontline public sector workers are now seriously looking at the option of setting up their own public services mutuals to take over the running of their services under contract with local authority and NHS commissioners. We have published a special report on how to do this (see p18). In this issue we report on some of the developments we have seen so far as the reform agenda gathers pace, including our work with free schools and new academy schools in Acton and Yorkshire, our support for NHS teams that are spinning out of their host PCT to sail their own ship, and our work with local authorities looking at new service delivery models in tight financial times.
As Sherlock Holmes once said, “There’s an East wind coming Watson, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, and a good many of us will wither before its icy blast. But . . . a cleaner, better, stronger land will in the sunshine when the storm has passed.”
