Public services start 2008 on the back foot. Last year ended badly. It's partly politics. When incumbent ministers are in the doldrums, the people working for them are tarnished. But they don't help themselves when admissions of "systematic failure" (some press reported him saying "systemic") come from officials as eminent and honest as Dave Hartnett, the acting chair of HM Revenue & Customs.
It's hard, this new year, to escape the pervasive sense that public bodies lack basic competence: in this edition we ask how much blowback there will be from the data loss debacle. It could be a vicious circle. On transformation, it's argued, hinges the restoration of trust in government; only if people feel the state is better attuned to their needs, organised in a more user-friendly way will they extend it their confidence.
But transformation requires agencies and departments to share personal data on citizens. Their mood is now antagonistic. They don't appear in a mind to approve the fluid movement of personal information between different bits of the government machine. Yet without data sharing how might a one-stop shop for services be created? That's not the only reason the mood is dark.
During the period of spending growth it seems to have become more difficult to gauge the impact of public services: what effect do they really have? Mortality and morbidity tables tell us the overall health of the population is improving (though health and wellbeing may not be the same thing).
But could that be despite rather than because of extra spending on healthcare? Access to formal healthcare improves, though not uniformly, as those seeking NHS dentistry would attest.
Why then are people so ambiguous in the responses they give to pollsters about the state of the health service? In education, formal attainment appears to rise and the public say they are satisfied (markedly more than with health) and yet collectively the schools are doing worse, as measured in international league tables.
As for the people doing government work, they cannot be called happy - as measured by sickness absence, propensity to take industrial action or indices of mood. And yet 2008 does not begin with anyone anticipating some great leap forward to what used to be touted as the cure-all for the public sector's woes: competitive provision of services by non-government contractors.
The very fact the business secretary has commissioned a review of the supply market shows there has been no seismic shift. If she has her wits about her, American economist DeAnne Julius will conclude that contracting out depends, paradoxically, on government being cleverer and more self-confident; competition is no panacea.
It follows that solving the problems of government depends on government itself, on the long run wisdom that management prowess needs to be valued and extended, that systems need to be painfully reconstructed to ensure quality in delivery.
Are those aims, at once so conventional and yet so hard to attain, compatible with the efficiency targets and constraint demanded during the spending period to come? If not, it is hard not to see trust in public provision going from bad to worse.
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
