Andrew O’Brien is Director of Policy and Impact at Demos. The Preventative State, their new essay, can be read online.
It is a dozen years since the Coalition Government launched the ‘Open Public Services’ White Paper. This radical document was driven by an “urgent moral purpose”, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the then Prime Minister and his Deputy, wrote. “It is only by tackling the unfairness and inefficiencies that still exist in the public sector that we can play fair by all.”
The vision was bold. Initially, there was significant progress in realising this ambition from the academisation of schools to the creation of Police and Crime Commissioners to boost accountability.
However, battles over Health and Social Act 2012, the debacle over reforming rehabilitation services, and counterproductive cuts in public spending effectively killed the Conservative vision for public service reform. Since 2015, the Conservatives have sought to close down the debate about public services by promising ‘record’ increases in spending every year (even if this spending has failed to reverse previous cuts or keep up with inflation in many areas).
The impact of the pandemic, the worsening fiscal environment, and the rising public dissatisfaction with public services has shown that the call for reform can no longer be ignored. Rishi Sunak has called for “genuine choice” and “radical transparency” in our public services. The Health Secretary has put £250m aside to ‘shift the dial’ on NHS reform. It is good to see the Conservative Party once again looking seriously at public service reform.
But conservatives need the right sort of reforms and a genuinely conservative vision for the future. We need to learn the lessons from the past twenty years of attempts to reform public services and to build a new consensus for how to enable people to lead better, healthier, happier lives.
The truth is that even if the Prime Minister gave striking public sector workers everything they wanted and increased public spending further, it is unlikely to change the fundamentally unsustainable path of our public services. On the flip side, the Conservative Party must not get locked into thinking that improving the efficiency of the public sector will make the sums add up either. We need to move away from ‘The Crisis Management State’ to ‘The Preventative State’.
This is the subject of a new essay by Demos, called The Preventative State. The essay argues that for too long all parties, including the Conservatives, have been looking at the challenge of reforming public services the wrong way. Instead of focusing on the social, cultural, and civic foundations that have a major impact on the quality of peoples’ lives and demand for public services, we have been sucked into a technocratic debate about how we can squeeze the most public sector professionals and services.
The state has become wired to primarily service problems that it can’t ignore, such as acute physical and mental ill-health, violence, and social breakdown, rather than looking at the underlying causes – our weakening social bonds and unequal distribution of social capital.
If we want to reform our public services, we need to look to these forgotten foundations which the state has neglected for decades. These foundations are underpinned by the social infrastructure that shapes our everyday lives. These are the voluntary associations and charities, the community centres, the sporting facilities, the churches, mosques and temples and the parks and green spaces that bring people together.
These are the places where people can meet and build strong social connections, both within their own households and with the wider community. We’ve ignored this infrastructure and cut back spending on this infrastructure, driving up demand for public services and making problems more acute.
The evidence base is clear that those areas with greater access to social infrastructure see better outcomes in health, education, and employment. The reasons are clear. Stronger social bonds lead to higher levels of trust, creating the conditions for people to help each other and the communities they live in.
They make individuals, households, and communities more resilient. Investing in social infrastructure not only strengthens our economy and society, it also improves our quality of life. This is why investing in these social, cultural, and civic foundations has been called a ‘double dividend’.
This is not just the opinion of Demos. There was recognition of this ‘double dividend’ in the Levelling Up White Paper which highlighted the importance of social infrastructure and social capital. The New Social Covenant Unit brought together a dozen Conservative MPs that called for the government to focus on rebuilding our social foundations if we wanted to boost growth and improve public services.
The danger is that the Government thinks that quick fixes to public services such as hiring more people or creating new structures of oversight will lead to fundamental change. Most experts agree that we need to move from ‘top-down’ visions of public service delivery to models where we put citizens and service users at the centre of delivery and listen to them.
But we can only unleash this ‘community power’, if we have a strong social infrastructure fostering strong social relationships and, more importantly, increasing trust in the system. This is the real prevention agenda.
The public recognise that we cannot continue on as we are. They want to understand how things are going to get better. Paper promises about radical investment plans and training more staff alone are not going to cut it. The public has heard it all before.
Time is running out for the Conservatives to shape the debate about public services at the next election. The Preventative State offers a bold vision for how the government can create the conditions for popular, high-quality public services.
Andrew O’Brien is Director of Policy and Impact at Demos. The Preventative State, their new essay, can be read online.
It is a dozen years since the Coalition Government launched the ‘Open Public Services’ White Paper. This radical document was driven by an “urgent moral purpose”, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the then Prime Minister and his Deputy, wrote. “It is only by tackling the unfairness and inefficiencies that still exist in the public sector that we can play fair by all.”
The vision was bold. Initially, there was significant progress in realising this ambition from the academisation of schools to the creation of Police and Crime Commissioners to boost accountability.
However, battles over Health and Social Act 2012, the debacle over reforming rehabilitation services, and counterproductive cuts in public spending effectively killed the Conservative vision for public service reform. Since 2015, the Conservatives have sought to close down the debate about public services by promising ‘record’ increases in spending every year (even if this spending has failed to reverse previous cuts or keep up with inflation in many areas).
The impact of the pandemic, the worsening fiscal environment, and the rising public dissatisfaction with public services has shown that the call for reform can no longer be ignored. Rishi Sunak has called for “genuine choice” and “radical transparency” in our public services. The Health Secretary has put £250m aside to ‘shift the dial’ on NHS reform. It is good to see the Conservative Party once again looking seriously at public service reform.
But conservatives need the right sort of reforms and a genuinely conservative vision for the future. We need to learn the lessons from the past twenty years of attempts to reform public services and to build a new consensus for how to enable people to lead better, healthier, happier lives.
The truth is that even if the Prime Minister gave striking public sector workers everything they wanted and increased public spending further, it is unlikely to change the fundamentally unsustainable path of our public services. On the flip side, the Conservative Party must not get locked into thinking that improving the efficiency of the public sector will make the sums add up either. We need to move away from ‘The Crisis Management State’ to ‘The Preventative State’.
This is the subject of a new essay by Demos, called The Preventative State. The essay argues that for too long all parties, including the Conservatives, have been looking at the challenge of reforming public services the wrong way. Instead of focusing on the social, cultural, and civic foundations that have a major impact on the quality of peoples’ lives and demand for public services, we have been sucked into a technocratic debate about how we can squeeze the most public sector professionals and services.
The state has become wired to primarily service problems that it can’t ignore, such as acute physical and mental ill-health, violence, and social breakdown, rather than looking at the underlying causes – our weakening social bonds and unequal distribution of social capital.
If we want to reform our public services, we need to look to these forgotten foundations which the state has neglected for decades. These foundations are underpinned by the social infrastructure that shapes our everyday lives. These are the voluntary associations and charities, the community centres, the sporting facilities, the churches, mosques and temples and the parks and green spaces that bring people together.
These are the places where people can meet and build strong social connections, both within their own households and with the wider community. We’ve ignored this infrastructure and cut back spending on this infrastructure, driving up demand for public services and making problems more acute.
The evidence base is clear that those areas with greater access to social infrastructure see better outcomes in health, education, and employment. The reasons are clear. Stronger social bonds lead to higher levels of trust, creating the conditions for people to help each other and the communities they live in.
They make individuals, households, and communities more resilient. Investing in social infrastructure not only strengthens our economy and society, it also improves our quality of life. This is why investing in these social, cultural, and civic foundations has been called a ‘double dividend’.
This is not just the opinion of Demos. There was recognition of this ‘double dividend’ in the Levelling Up White Paper which highlighted the importance of social infrastructure and social capital. The New Social Covenant Unit brought together a dozen Conservative MPs that called for the government to focus on rebuilding our social foundations if we wanted to boost growth and improve public services.
The danger is that the Government thinks that quick fixes to public services such as hiring more people or creating new structures of oversight will lead to fundamental change. Most experts agree that we need to move from ‘top-down’ visions of public service delivery to models where we put citizens and service users at the centre of delivery and listen to them.
But we can only unleash this ‘community power’, if we have a strong social infrastructure fostering strong social relationships and, more importantly, increasing trust in the system. This is the real prevention agenda.
The public recognise that we cannot continue on as we are. They want to understand how things are going to get better. Paper promises about radical investment plans and training more staff alone are not going to cut it. The public has heard it all before.
Time is running out for the Conservatives to shape the debate about public services at the next election. The Preventative State offers a bold vision for how the government can create the conditions for popular, high-quality public services.