Andrew Lansley seems to be in trouble for giving the Conservatives’ game away on spending cuts.
The issue to me is not the necessity of cuts – it’s the way in which they would implemented. Labour have always had an advantage when it comes to the development of public service management. Many Labour MPs have a background in the public services – Laura Moffat, long championed by this blog, was a nurse before entering Parliament – that it seems their expertise at some point does feed into the system.
What Labour do right
The services are quite probably at their best ever in modern history. Although John O’Farrell, in his masterpiece of Blairite hagiography, “Things Can Only Get Better”, describes his own guilt at castigating the Tories for an NHS which really worked perfectly fine when his kids got to know the business end of it, after 1997 the health service has really only got better and no longer means waiting lists in terms of months, but weeks. Walking through my local hospital after a consultation over my congenital heart problem which sends me tachycardic at times of stress (nothing serious, it was what laid Tony Blair low in 2003-04 and when I was hospitalised with it myself in August 2004 that was the first thing my Labour activist now-ex-boyfriend pointed out when he phoned me to check I was all right – oh, the joys of being armchair politicians!) I did realise that the whole point of Labour was to sort out the services we all – though maybe not Tim Montgomerie – rely on and bring them into the 21st century. It is overstating the case to say however, like in The Sun before the 2005 election, that schools and hospitals no longer need voucher schemes from supermarkets to make ends meet (in fact I spent most of the summer of 2005 collecting leaflets to prove that this was another direct barefaced lie from the Labour press...) but certainly in my lifetime there is no doubt which party understands the concepts of public administration better.
This is obviously a double-edged sword. Arguably a communitarian society needs public, centrally funded services, but does that necessarily mean that these services mean that the government can and should construct a baroque structure, providing for every contingency and developing a straitjacket rather than a safety net? Can we really, honestly afford free prescriptions and the exponential increase in the uptake of prescription drugs to treat ordinary ailments that such schemes have seen, for example? Even Labour baulk at that (and Salmond’s plea for a Westminster bail-out from the English to support such a scheme when English prescription charges now stand at £7+ was probably what killed off Scottish independence for the time being, at least under an SNP government). What role should public services play in society, how should they be managed (I liked the Tories’ Right To Choose, based in the real world of continental models for reform and development, and feel that reform and streamlining the system should be on the agenda rather than just swinging, short-term, alarmist cuts that will never wholly eliminate waste) and what should government actually do? No-one is saying that health and education should be privatised to save the Exchequer a few bob. But what about the electoral oversight provided by bodies such as the Electoral Commission? What about assisting the homeless or mentally ill? How should services be administered and is there any role for charities or other bodies which are more directly faced by the people they are helping than, say, a Whitehall department?
What the system should do less – and what it should do better
At university, we had a visit from a representative of Centrepoint prior to a “sponsored sleep-out” (read: all night, open air street party with token itinerant drunks thrown in free of charge...well, we were all students at the time). The Centrepoint thesis struck me deeply as being an agenda for radical reorganisation of non-essential public services (by which I really mean, health, education and social security, three things which government only can really cope with on a national scale). Although he welcomed New Labour’s approach to housing policy (which was probably expected of him given that he was addressing Labour Students) – mainly, that Labour actually had one which didn’t involve selling off council houses to prospective Tory voters – he proposed that this policy could go a lot deeper into involving Centrepoint, that is, working with organisations closer to the actual problem – homelessness and what to do about it. Groups such as the Reading Resource Centre, a mental health charity I worked for in 2006 – I left when it was clear they were overstaffed and I was underemployed – are often best placed to cater to people who are most vulnerable and in need of direct assistance. I can also testify to the glacial bureaucracy of the benefits office leaving people stranded for months without a proper psychiatric or psychological assessment and being left to make do on benefits without assistance to find a job which may help people with mild depression or autistic-spectrum disorders more than enforced unemployment or cash-in-hand moonlighting to make ends meet. The government made a tentative attempt to address this problem by forcing new claimants of incapacity benefit to attend sessions with the Shaw Trust. But as far as I can see the Shaw Trust cannot help people get a job, it can only support people in work as far as they need condition management techniques. Talk about a chicken-and-egg situation.
A Community Resource
This is where Resource picked the pieces. As a social centre it provided crafting activities (of a high standard, particularly in terms of artwork for sale in the “gallery”; mental ill health can often be alleviated by creative expression if it is of a mild condition), a dingy little café which I was always afraid to eat in lest I pick up some stray salmonella somewhere, and gaming rooms. The centre also helped people who could handle employment find jobs (fine when you are not in a recession; my departure unfortunately coincided with the beginning of the credit crisis in mid-2007 so what it is like for people now I don’t know). I helped organise a week-long course with professional consultants who coached those able and willing to return to work to build skills like contacting employers with CVs, interview technique and assistance to imagine what kind of work they would enjoy most, something unfortunately lacking with potential employers, particularly from the public/local administration sector who approached us with a suggestion that they take on two lucky “mentally ill” people on a job-share placement which in my view put Resource’s cause back several decades. When I left Resource was trying to build up branches in Newbury and Wokingham to continue its work with people who could be genuinely helped; and one of my last projects was to apply for funding from the European Union social fund. The Church in Reading also does a lot of work with the mentally ill, particularly women, and the homeless under the auspices of CIRDIC (“Churches in Reading Drop-In Centre) and CIRWC (“Churches in Reading Women’s Centre”). I volunteered for both these organisations while unemployed last year.
Success in cultivating these kind of social organisations – and in developing a cadre of young people who through voluntary or even compulsory social service whose horizons might be widened by assisting with them – could be a real way in which government can withdraw from just doling out public money hand-over-fist but produce real results and real reforms without appearing to be mean with cuts which would arguably damage the fabric of society in a dangerous race to the bottom because of a short-term, temporary economic downturn. A one-size-fits-all approach to social provision in these areas failed people at the most vulnerable end of the system – and people who would in other circumstances want to work but were not provided with the means to do so and thus remain on £100-a-week benefit slavery. Community bodies like Resource on the other hand develop and expand genuine links between able volunteers and professionals and the people they need to be helping. These people in turn thus go on to become productive members of society rather than the living dead passed between mental health care teams – not always the most sensitive or compassionate of people – and the DWP.
The problem with the Tories – and the solution for them
However, overall, public money does need to be used wisely. Cameron is at a loss in proposing anything which remotely resembles a real framework for the public services he purports to support. He talks about waste as if it was readily identifiable – and fails to understand that Yes Minister is a thing of the past. Instead of a body like the Electoral Commission, he proposed a return to Home Office regulation of elections. Pardon me, but after the research I’ve done – on his own party’s behalf – that’s like telling a fox to look after the Department for Poultry, Eggs and Easter Bunnies. He must have spent his years advising Norman Lamont and Michael Howard in a weed-induced haze if he really believes government by Whitehall anonymity is really the best solution. Public money cannot be saved by targeting arbitrary waste – when this waste seems to equal “anything Tim or Quentin don’t like” – nor can it be spent by daily reference to the Daily Mail. While I am rightly sceptical of recent Labour initiatives (the plans to cut benefits to force alcoholics to seek treatment suggests to me, who worked with one case at CIRDIC, that we would have a lot of starving alcoholics living in the streets because you cannot wean someone off booze or other addiction simply by cutting off the money supply – they will spend any money they get on alcohol first and then food, clothing and accommodation) or their ability to make necessary savings or reforms to the ornate edifice of public bureaucracy, the Tories make me fearful that we will somehow manage to elect a bunch of wannabe Thatcherites who make the Grantham grocer’s daughter look like a Soviet minister of centrally planned industry.
Instead, the Tories do have the opportunity to articulate a clear alternative to the corporate statism that Labour embody. This could be achieved by networking groups like Resource and CIRDIC throughout the country, funding them (by streamlining other parts of the social security network and making genuinely sure that those that can work do work) and generating ideas for reforming the current unwieldy benefit system which doesn’t even give tax credits automatically to those who qualify, instead making them go through a costly and time-consuming application procedure that must cost more than the credits do themselves (cheers were heard from Wokingham Conservative Association in 2005 when Gordon Brown tried to pre-empt the Tories’ £500 automatic universal council tax rebate for those over 65 – by cutting it to £250, for one year only, and making it conditional on application...so that hopefully no-one would actually ever get it). That’s only one example of Labour’s public spending Achilles’ Heel: it costs more to administrate these things than it does to provide them.
If there is any life left in the Conservative Party after recent weeks spent banging their heads against the electoral wall, hoping for a random “Open Sesame”, planning for government should mean exploring ways to get more out of the system and to generate a real communitarian alternative to corporate statism, not strangling the public sector in arbitrary ways for the convenience of arrogant Daily Mail readers (the majority of whom, judging by the comments pages on their website, live in Australia anyway). A joined up approach to seeing how the public sector can be streamlined and devolved to rather than dismantled and degraded by quick-fix solutions is a must for any possibility of Conservative government and it makes the strongest case yet in the wake of Lansley’s comments – for a return to the top flight of people with genuine government experience – and quickly, because time is now running out in earnest, particularly if a general election may be this side of Christmas.
Coda
There is a sad ending to the Resource story that makes this kind of thinking all the more necessary and is one of the reasons to explore this approach to reforming and streamlining public services. I left Resource in early 2007 because of frustration at not having anything to do. More fool me. But when I caught up with people at CIRDIC a year later, they told me that the EU had cut funding to the charity – necessitating the closure of the Newbury and Wokingham branches – probably because of issues with the new entrants into the EU, Romania and Bulgaria, being more needy than bodies in our rich Western European state. Reliance on international funding killed Resource and Labour promised to match any funding which was withdrawn – which due to the recession meant that of course the promise was broken, as so many others have been. When someone is paid £100 a week to do nothing all day when they are capable of being helped by such an organisation to go back into productive work, that is the criminal aspect of all of this. But the DWP just ends up doling out the money and is too big to notice the individual. As I said – criminill. ;-)
