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In his keynote speech on public services last week, PM David Cameron said their ‘complete modernisation' and more efficiency had to be one of the achievements of the coalition government. But what did he mean? Michael Burton scrutinises the small print. Much of former PM Tony Blair's autobiography My Journey is spent lamenting his failure to truly reform public services, despite regarding it as one of his prime priorities on becoming prime minister in 1997. The current PM, David Cameron, himself, says he ‘was struck by how many times [Mr Blair in his book] admits that opportunities were lost and Labour should have pushed further and faster on reform'. Mr Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, never regarded it with quite the same importance and, indeed, as chancellor, often blocked attempts to reform health and education. The public sector reform agenda had a kick-start with the coalition government, driven, in part – but not entirely – by the backdrop of a sharp cut in spending. Education secretary, Michael Gove, is ideologically an ‘heir to Blair', tackling what he says is the in-built producerism of the education establishment, widening out the academies programme, tinkering with the school curriculum, and encouraging ‘free' schools with greater private sector input. Health secretary, Andrew Lansley, took everyone by surprise last summer by announcing – contrary to expectation – a huge shake-up in the health service with the scrapping of PCTs, transfer of commissioning functions to GPs consortia, and a big shift to a greater local authority role in public health. The Bill, announced last week, scrapping the PCTs, was met with trepidation by many Conservative and Liberal Democrats, fearing the shake-up could destabilise the health service just when cost pressures and spending squeezes were kicking in. The Government, too, plans changes for police governance, with elected police commissioners, while Ken Clarke has proposed a shake-up in sentencing to reduce the prison population. And welfare reform, long abandoned by Mr Blair, is back on the agenda. And what of local government, the two words that never appeared in the index of Mr Blair's autobiography, even though his reform agenda included introducing best value, CPA, elected mayors and cabinets within his first term? The present Government certainly has reformist plans, with more elected mayors and more localism – still an idea rather than a reality – but the real reform will come from within the sector, the result of spending cuts forcing mergers and a review of priorities for service delivery. So far, Mr Cameron has kept out of the fray, but last week, he devoted his speech to the Royal Society of Arts –headed by a former Number 10 adviser to Mr Blair – on ‘modern public services.' In his address, the prime minister said while the current focus was on cuts or, as he put it, ‘restoring the credibility and confidence that will mean jobs and growth in the future', he added that he wanted ‘one of the great achievements of this government to be the complete modernisation of our public services'. He wanted more choice, more ‘freedom to the professionals', and to ‘open up' schools and hospitals ‘to make them more competitive, more local and more transparent'. His argument was that ‘living within our means' and ‘getting more for less' will not occur with ‘unreformed public services and outdated welfare systems'.In reference to Mr Blair, he admitted that ‘many politicians have stood on platforms like this, stating similar ambitions and that… nothing really fundamental changes'. He also posed the question as to how such reform could occur during a time of deep spending cuts compared with the Blair period, when spending was rising. Mr Cameron's answer was that even taking the cuts into account, spending would still be at the same level as in 2006 – an argument that many will dispute, even before taking into account demographic pressures – and that public sector spending would still compare favourably with the EU average at 41% of GDP. Mr Cameron said he was ‘struck' by Mr Blair's confession in his memoirs that he failed to reform, and he agrees with Mr Blair that the right focused on the markets, and the left on the state, rather than what Mr Cameron calls ‘society' in between. Mr Cameron promoted the idea of mutuals for public sector employees as one such example of the middle way. But the prime minister also believed that spending was ‘allowed to run out of control', and that squeezing suppliers (that is, the private sector), cutting ‘wasteful spend' on ‘wasteful' IT projects (that is, the private sector), and cutting advertising, marketing and consultants (that is, the private sector) would help save money... ‘£3bn this year alone', without hitting services. The coalition has been more radical than predicted on changing public services, but Mr Cameron's keynote speech was disappointingly long on rhetoric and short on practical proposals other than to conclude that the Government wants to ‘renew the promise of opportunity, fairness and excellence for all our public services today'.

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WHITEHALL

The 'heir to Blair' banks on public sector reform

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