Haranguing is not polite, but it's something we tend to do to our nearest and dearest. Perhaps that's the reason Kevin Brennan, the minister for the third sector, last month felt confident enough to give the sector a right telling-off, chiding it for not putting its own house in order enough to provide more public services.
Or, as Brennan put it, "issuing a challenge" to the third sector, to "work with us in partnership at all levels of government" and provide more public services.
Like children's services, perhaps? The government appears to be keen to continue outsourcing and privatisation, as the proposed part-privatisation of the Royal Mail illustrates. It would be rather convenient, would it not, if the government were able to offload even more of its perceived troublesome services to external providers. We all know that when services are outsourced, the blame game becomes more complex, the lines of accounting more blurred and the result can be, as many in the private sector know all too well, a game of pass the parcel when things go wrong.
Perhaps the government prefers it this way, rather than having to admit that the very structures it has set up to monitor complicated services are failing to tackle the real issues.
Complex services are exactly those where we want to feel the strong arm of government, as has been made clear by the failings of Haringey's children's services.
But the baby P case and the resignation in December of Ken Boston, the former chief executive of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority, following the damning report by Lord Sutherland into last summer's exam marking fiasco, illustrate a problem: public sector regulation is perceived to be failing. Regulators have too often ticked boxes, but missed the point, runs the argument.
There are areas of government where scrutiny can claim to have improved services, but critics will point to Ofsted, which is responsible for inspecting children's services in England, and the acknowledgement, forced from its chief executive, Christine Gilbert, that flaws in the largely paper-based evaluation of children's services meant her organisation - widely admired for its work in education - failed to pick up on problems in Haringey's children's services.
Trust in government has been dented badly. But while regulation of public services faces some uncomfortable questions, where is the evidence that outsourcing services to the private sector will result in better services?
Outsourcing still seems to rest on dogma and belief. But the government knows it needs to rebuild some of the trust that has been lost. It needs to take a long hard look at how frontline services are held to account. Regulators of public services need to think carefully about how they balance the need for robust scrutiny against demands to cut red tape. Risk-based government may in fact prove too risky.
Outsourcing may have some benefits, but it should not be an ideological starting point.
