Getting More, For Less

Partners in Government

9th March 2010: Power to the People?

Experts and senior public servants at Fujitsu's latest Partners in Government event argued over the best ways to improve services when budgets are slashed.

The public sector can tackle the financial imperative of delivering better services for less money, but only if it sweeps away the bulk of compliance and risk regulation, raises leadership standards among those responsible for delivering services and puts more power in citizens' hands.

These were the key messages to emerge at Fujitsu's latest Partners in Government dinner, "Getting more for less". The meeting featured two prominent speakers: former Chief Inspector of Schools Chris Woodhead, and founder of think-tank ResPublica Phillip Blond, who is also the architect of so-called "Red Toryism" and a key advisor to David Cameron.

While both agreed on the need to cut bureaucracy and make frontline public sector professionals accountable to the public they serve rather than to quangos and politicians, they differed on the best way to do this. Woodhead's years of experience in education left him sceptical of politicians' ever-changing "big ideas and initiatives". The key, he thought, was to maximise individuals' choice by, for example, introducing education vouchers which parents could spend in either state or private schools. This, he said, would promote a whole new market of responsive, innovative educational services.

Blond, while agreeing with Woodhead's voucher idea, thought it wasn't just individuals who should control budgets directly, but new community groupings. Then in the subsequent Q&A, which also featured Eithne Wallis CB, MD of Fujitsu's Government division, the speakers' differences came into sharp relief. Blond defended his ideas about community empowerment, which are the basis for the Conservative Party's recent pronouncements on public-sector co-operatives. He said: "New technology can facilitate new groupings in a way that was never possible before - across time and space. Allied with new codes of practice, this can dispense with bureaucracy, produce flat management systems and give more power to the frontline. I think that is a step change."

But Woodhead, and much of the audience, remained sceptical. "I'm much less optimistic about communities," he said. "If we want more for less, we ought to be honest and recognise most of us are driven by individual aspiration. If we empower individuals to make choices then we're far more likely to see movement than by talking about some whizz-bang idea about co-ops."

Wallis agreed with Woodhead that the public is far more concerned with specific, targeted policies than big ideas, but she also thought communities had a role to play. "As former director of the National Probation Service, I absolutely believe, for example, that some of the crime happening in local areas can be dealt with by more community involvement and ownership," she said. "But there are bigger, more complex issues at the macro level. The key is making sure what you do at the centre has the right impact on individual communities."

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