Public service reform: people power or privatisation?

Within hours of some wag tweeting ‘it’s a great day to be burying bad newspapers’, David Cameron was launching the Open Public Services White Paper just as the News International tsunami broke.

A complete coincidence, of course, but who’s to say which of these events will ultimately have the greatest impact on the country and the fortunes of the coalition? Don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if much substance lay behind the PM’s announcement. The general consensus is that this white paper is as green as they come. On its own admission, extensive consultation and engagement will be needed with ‘those who use public services, as well as those who are or could be delivering public services, about the best ways to achieve the government’s ambitions’.

Nor is it easy to take issue with the principles on parade. Choice, decentralisation, diversity, fairness and accountability – all as beloved as our mothers and their apple pies, right? And who can argue against universal truths like ‘the poorer we – or our neighbours – are, the more we rely on the state and its agencies’? What’s difficult to appreciate is quite how the programme sketched out in the white paper will ensure, in the coalition’s words, that ‘our reforms will mean that the poorest will be at the front of the queue’.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the bulk of independent analysis produced thus far plus many of the government’s own figures show that public sector spending cuts and job losses are hitting the country’s poorest people, the services they consume and the places they live harder than anyone or anywhere else. Instead, let’s recall the recession of the early 1980s and the wave of privatisations which ‘rolled back the frontiers of the state’ and boosted a faltering business-led recovery by transferring jobs out of the public and into the private sector. What are the likely outcomes when all public service provision is up for grabs? More private contracting out of government services, certainly, but how does that help the poor reach the front of the queue?

Well, apparently the poorest among us are going to be queuing up for service vouchers, having forearmed themselves with perfect information about who can best provide what they want or need – in care, education, skills, children’s services, family services, health and social housing – from amongst every registered provider available. They will be itching to form social enterprises to take over local libraries, reduce teenage pregnancies and cut obesity rates in competition with private providers who reckon they can do the same on a payment-by-results basis. They will be gagging to get online to scrutinise local authority spending patterns and making representations to the ombudsmen or appointing themselves ‘consumer champions’ if they don’t like what they see. And they will be clubbing together to bid for the ownership of community centres and neighbourhood facilities.

Call me cynical, but my money’s on it all having a bigger impact on private sector job ‘creation’ than on poverty alleviation.