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Why the state can never deliver great public services
The standardisation needed to deliver what would count as equality of treatment for all can be achieved only by deliberately excluding competition and any serious incentives to improve services, says former UK ambassador Charles Crawford
One of the most striking reasons why modern government is failing lies in the essence of delivering democracy.
Part of the point of democracy is “equality of treatment”. Public services should be, as far as possible, similar for all citizens. This is easier said than done, as we see with the NHS. It's not “fair”, they hoot, that people in some parts of England might be getting better levels of care than elsewhere.
I experienced this personally with Foreign Office consular services to British citizens overseas. I was chastised as HM Ambassador in Warsaw for wanting to push over-hard to help one British citizen who had become utterly entangled in an especially impenetrable corner of the Polish legal system on a criminal negligence charge.
His case had dragged on for several years, and showed no sign of getting resolved. I said that the whole situation was absurd. We surely owed it to him to try to help him extricate himself, eg by using my friendly relations with the Polish Justice Minister to explore a way to help nudge things along.
Stop right there, Mr Ambassador! What would happen if the Embassy in Warsaw went out of its way at a senior level to help this one hapless citizen? That would set a precedent for the whole network -- word would get around that one person in Poland had had a lot of active support from the Embassy and the Ambassador personally, and everyone else would expect the same! Worse, it could even be a breach of their Human Rights if they did not get it!
After a certain amount of grumpy haggling a formula was found under which we managed to identify a legal procedure which might move the process forward without bringing the whole UK consular network to its knees. And, to my utter amazement, the British citizen himself was unwilling to use it.
This idea that all citizens should be able to expect a good basic level of service -- but never much more -- is a powerful one. No politician is ready to get up and defend a system which delivers varying levels of public service.
Yet it comes at a price, namely a drift towards pedantic and inefficient standardisation.
I thought I was the only person on earth with a fond memory of an episode of the 1960s BBC comedy series “Sykes”, in which Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques work as bus driver and conductrix respectively and decide to give customers a better level of service. Yet it is recalled here on a site about Buses on Screen (long live the Internet).
What was funny about the plot was of course the very idea that people working on a state bus service might actually improvise to start improving the service to passengers, eg by serving tea and cakes and taking helpful detours.
All of which is a long-winded way to getting round to what happened as I attempted, as a member of the public, to get into Leeds Crown Court (as one does) at 0855 last Thursday.
To cut a long and amusing story short, I was going to watch a court hearing and went in by an open door next to the main doors just before the court opened at 0900, to escape a howling rainstorm.
The serried ranks of Leeds Crown Court security apparatchiki ordered me to retreat outside into the storm to wait for the doors to open formally. I decided to stand just inside the doorway to avoid the monsoon.
A couple of anecdotes plus a bizarre reference to a 1960s episode of On the Buses does not an evidence-based case make. In fact, the argument is littered with non-sequitirs. Charles Crawford is forced to wait in the rain, so government is failing to deliver democracy and excluding competition? Rot.
Back in the real world, most public services are subject to lots of forms of competition. In many parts of local government, over 50% of some services are outsourced to the private sector. Social care is increasingly run on the basis of personal budgets and healthcare allows a large degree of patient choice.
The notion that there is no incentive to improve services is also silly. During the Blair years, chief executives who didn't meet their targets were frequently fired. Under the Tories, a school or hospital that doesn't attract enough customers will face closure.
I wish public service reform was as easy as Crawford seems to think, but sadly it is not. In any case, some 70% of the public are currently satisfied with the NHS, so the state appears to be doing reasonably well at the moment.
@Sparky Not sure you're being fair here. Crawford's point is simple and clear: there is an inherent problem for innovators or those who would seek to provide a better service in the public sector in that if one group of public servants start doing a better job for the punters, that inevitably results in "inequality". Politicians then get attacked for providing different levels of service in different places. The only way they can get round this is by standardising things at the lowest level so no-one can be said to be getting a better service in place as opposed to another. It's smart observation, I think, and explains the limitations of statism on providing better and better service, which I assume we all want.
There is no inherent problem. When was the last time you heard anyone call for a levelling down of public services? No one ever says 'my local hospital is awful, so we must make the one next door equally awful'. It just doesn't happen.
To the extent that politicians try to standardise things, they generally aim to set minimum standards, which do not at all preclude higher levels of performance.
And as my previous post pointed out, satisfaction with the NHS is currently at record levels and has been rising for much of the past 15 years. So it could be argued that it has been providing better and better service as judged by the punters.
@sparky I don't know what you're experiencing but it appears to be a different place to the one most of us experience. You apparently think the public sector has 'no inherent problem'. No one wants levelling down, but rather a lot of people would like public services to 'level up' or for there to be some potential for services to improve. A number of my family members work in the NHS and not one of them describes their place of work as anything better than 'completely dysfunctional' when describing the place.
Politicians may legislate for minimum standards and of course these do not 'preclude highler levels of performance. I think both the article and the comments from 'Dib', suggest that 'higher performance' simply does not happen!
Part of the problem is few people have experience of practical work.D Healey said war taught him the difference between theory and practice. When people had practical work experience -working on sailing ships, mines, farms, mines, shipyards, construction sites, factories, in the army; they realised any plan had to be modified in order to implement it. Also accidents happened so one had to be prepared to move to prevent death or injury. Consequently, a degree of initiative, mental agility and improvisation was required to achieve a a good result.
Now, most live work in the service sector and have never developed any practical skills and been forced to use their initiative to achieve an objective.I consider that because , historically so many Britons served on sailing vessels that we developed a practical,decisive , competent and agile minds . One cannot procrastinate if one is working on a sailing ship in a storm and close to the rocks and expect to keep safe. Sir John Harvey Jones said the RN up to the time of Nelson was the finest management training scheme the World has ever seen.The doctrine of all RN officers was " if in doubt sail towards the sound of enennmy gunfire".Avoiding taking a decision was not option ( unless wanted to face a court martial). The word "initiative" is hardly used nowadays.After all, socialism is about the collective, not about individuals using their initiative and making their own decisions.
Excellent piece explaining why statism fails even in its own terms...