Accountability is an urge and an aspiration rather than an identifiable process or end state. It often gets narrowed to mean controlling the powerful, for example by voting to remove them. But accountability could mean something more informal: by talking more, doctors, teachers and police officers could satisfy the public, whose appetite for more formal participation - in elections, say - is strictly limited.
This summer, accountability talk fills the air, with schemes afoot to alter police and health governance. But what's new? Enfranchising subjects is the oldest of constitutional themes and, in public services, the push to get better answers from professionals can be dated to the 1960s and illustrated in the years since by the community development movement of the 1970s, marketisation in the 1980s and the adoption of new public management in the 1990s.
A variant in the present decade is scrutiny. In local government, one bunch of councillors oversees the work of more powerful colleagues, hoping that the process of reviewing will strengthen the link between collective will and policy outcome. Labour has moved, crab-like, from central targets (upwards accountability to regulators and delivery units) to localism (answerability in place). The regulators have not disappeared so what is now being proposed could feel like an onerous duplication of accounts.
A chief constable might in future have to answer more specifically to a revamped police authority, while satisfying the inspectors of constabulary and the Home Office officials who show no sign of relinquishing their role as conduits of accountability to ministers and the MPs who vote the money.
Different and conflicting models of accountability are proffered. In health, foundation trusts claim their elected governing boards give them a lien on public confidence. But what if primary care trusts went beyond the Darzi proposals and became accountable either through direct elections or elected councillors joining them?
A contractual relationship between PCT and foundation trust could be undermined by competing claims of legitimacy. And accountability would still be exercised through multiple regulators, from the Care Quality Commission to clinicians' professional associations, safety agencies and the law.
Accountability overlaps participation and engagement, all buzzwords of public management in recent years. All point to prevalent anxiety about the relationship between citizen and government - it's not rich or friendly enough, it lacks confidence or credibility. Elected politicians usually turn to elections as a remedy.
As we describe on the following pages, the government is planning to introduce more voting into police management and local authorities are insisting the government's acknowledged wish for more public participation in health is accomplished through the ballot box. Councils themselves, facing low turnout and gaps in public appreciation, have been told to consider personalising political authority and establishing executive mayors - another idea that is far from new.
But are more elections the solution? In the London mayoral contest, widely publicised in the media, featuring two colourful personalities and an office with genuine power over transport, police and London's "shaping" as a place, barely 45% of electors turned out.
Might accountability be better achieved at the personal level? Some think that more words are the way forward. If professionals talked more to the people they serve, in tones of respect, people would feel their need for a narrative was being met.
Respect must, of course, be symmetrical and listening has to balance talk, but perhaps the limited public appetite for politics and formal accountability suggests this more conversational or "therapeutic" relationship between public and public services as the way forward.
From Flip Chart Fairy Tales
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
