Sir John Redwood is MP for Wokingham, and is a former Secretary of State for Wales.
Putting customers first should be engrained in the attitudes of public service providers and private sector businesses. If smaller businesses in competitive markets do not concentrate on understanding and meeting customer needs they struggle to survive as others take their business.
If the public sector ethos means anything then it is identifying the needs of your patients, pupils, constituents, transport users, and others and taking pride in serving them well and promptly. The public sector provider does not face the loss of business to keep them honest so we look to ethics – to belief in public sector principles of great service and value for money – to see us through. There is then the weight of public opinion and Parliamentary scrutiny to highlight where things are still going wrong.
Some large private sector companies with near-monopoly powers (often owing to inflexible regulations) today annoy large numbers of customers. Their unwillingness to talk to patrons, the use of emails from ‘do not reply’ addresses, the bossiness created by regulations, and the impact of price and capital controls is leading to consumer frustrations with some energy businesses and water companies.
Unfortunately, the public monopolies some would prefer in these areas would be even more annoying for users. All are horrified by murders and avoidable deaths in the NHS. Many are unhappy about ever-lengthening waiting lists despite ever-larger sums of public money for the service. Travellers are fed up with a largely nationalised rail service which all too often cancels or delays trains and now wish to shut ticket offices, one of the few places where passengers can interact with rail staff.
The long delays in considering asylum claims, the endless barriers and blockages created on our local highway networks by Councils who are monopoly suppliers of local roads, and the huge losses on bonds bought up by the Bank of England at very high prices that are sent to taxpayers are a few more examples of where the public feel let down by the public sector.
Many of these bodies have claimed independence. By this, they mean they wish to be free of ministerial interventions, yet when something goes wrong they are usually happy to see the minister have to face the difficult interviews and take the blame.
The senior management of NHS England says it is independent of ministers other than to agree on funding and general budgets with them. When things go wrong a lack of funding is usually blamed when there has been a rise in money available. Often we need to discuss priorities for spending, productivity, quality levels of service, and the size of the overhead NHS England places above the wards, medical staff, and active departments in hospitals and surgeries.
The Bank of England claims it is solely responsible for setting interest rates and curbing inflation. When inflation overruns the Government ends up with much of the blame. The Bank, meanwhile, has been carrying out a policy of manipulating interest rates by buying and selling bonds on a huge scale. All of this has been done with a full Treasury guarantee and sign-off, undermining the claim of independence.
Recent events make it more imperative that we have a serious debate about what Ministers are responsible for and what Chief Executives and their senior team are responsible for in these so-called independent parts of the public sector.
Where something extreme happens as with the murders of babies in an NHS hospital by a nurse we can all agree that the main cause of the evil was the perpetrator who will be punished for the murders the court attributed to her. There will also be an inquiry. It will need to ask questions of the managers who recruited and monitored the work of that nurse and who responded to the worries of some doctors who thought she might be doing harm. It is not easy saying how high up the management scale associated blame should go, and it will need to be judged based on evidence of who did what and who reviewed what.
Where the failings are widespread, and being widely discussed by patients, public, ministers and others, the attribution of blame will rise higher and be more widespread too. Clearly, the Health Secretary himself is very exercised about waiting lists, has set clear targets to reduce them, and provided more money to help bring this about.
What else should he do, and what can he expect from the senior management of the service? How much should we expect by way of success from this clear leadership? How much blame should attach to NHS England senior management if the lists do not come down? How much to the senior management of the individual hospitals where waiting lists stay high or rise?
Should ministers get into the detail of how many staff are needed in each place, how they are promoted and rewarded, how they are rostered, how many operating and diagnostic sessions are created, and how much admin work medics have to do to unblock the system? Or can management do those things?
In the case of the Bank and the dropped ball of inflation, shouldn’t the Government show some impatience to get the Bank to change its economic model and improve its forecasting to give it some chance of getting it right from here after such a bad period of making the wrong calls based on wrong estimates? The Bank itself admits it got inflation badly wrong before, and agrees that it could lurch from allowing too much inflation to helping create too deep a downturn.
The task of controlling the inflation that has been unleashed would be achieved faster and more easily if the Treasury would reinforce the already tough actions of the Bank by helping boost the supply side and reducing at least temporarily some consumption taxes that are keeping prices high. The Treasury can take a mixture of measures that both reduce public spending a bit and tax rates a bit to help the deficit down.
The railways are edging towards a fully nationalised model, with more and more decisions about what services to run, what fares to charge, and which investment projects to back being taken in Whitehall. This was the model that in the post-war period saw massive job losses, big financial losses paid for by taxpayers, and falling passenger use until privatisation.
We need instead a model based on competition and choice, so a variety of users of the track can respond to actual and potential travellers and find a pattern of services that boosts use and revenues. There also needs to be the ability of companies to add track or track capacity through technology by being able to contest decisions of the rail track company or to provide a challenger track subject to planning. Full rollout of digital and on-board signalling would increase capacity substantially without the need for such an expensive project as HS2.
There are many other parts of the public sector that need attention. State Budgets are at record highs. Public sector productivity has dropped away badly this decade. We need a new look at how these services are managed. We need a new concordat about how where the blame lies for different levels of decision. At the moment the Government takes the blame as the ultimate boss, whilst lacking many of the powers to put things right owing to the doctrine of independence.