Why then do we sometimes treat the public as though they have unlimited supplies of this precious and limited resource?

This is not just an issue for the public sector. There are examples of good and bad service in both public and private sectors. My point today is that a consideration of time — the customer’s and the citizen’s time — should be at the forefront of thinking about how services are delivered.

Sometimes, when we call a government department or agency, perhaps not knowing if we’re starting at the right place, we can get passed along, or have to make the call all over again because the process went wrong in the first place. It takes time and when it does not go well it can be frustrating and debilitating.

Then there is waiting at home for a delivery or an engineer to call when we have been told it is an all day appointment and the company cannot be any more precise.

Something that may take just a few minutes in terms of the delivery or the job needing done can end up taking the whole day, with people having to go through the inconvenience of taking time off work or time not being able to be spent on something more positive in order to wait all day for the person to arrive. It’s even worse of course if the person doesn’t turn up.

Service like this is time stealing.

The all day appointment, with no call to say the service is coming or no window within the day to say when it will arrive, is in a sense the hallmark of poor service. The terms of such a transaction are clear. The company will deliver in a manner geared to its convenience and the customer’s inconvenience.

And this demonstrates that this is not just about time. It is about power. It gets to the heart of the question, who is working for whom? Who is important in this situation? Making people wait like this is a transfer of part of the burden of delivering the service from the provider to the user.

If the customer’s time or the citizen’s time is treated as precious, if every effort is made to ensure they don’t waste time, then this says a lot about how the organisers of the service feel about their customers and their importance.

If it is thought this doesn’t matter, that the citizen or customer can wait, then it is clear that those organising the service think that they, not the customer, have the power.

Of course some companies offer a fantastic service and do much better than the all day calling slot. They give a one or two hour slot and in doing so they are making clear that they understand the customer’s time is not free.

They know people are busy and have a lot of demands on their time, and they are making an effort to do things at the convenience of the customer, even if that means inconvenience to them.

I recently noticed ads taken out by a major electrical goods supplier advertising narrow delivery slots, a call to let you know they were on their way and removal of the packaging after the products were delivered.

None of this was about the price of the goods. It was a realisation that their customers’ time was precious and by taking out the ads, they are letting their customers know that they know this is the case and that they have, at least in part, organised the business around it.

Service like this is time giving.

And it’s also an explicit acknowledgement that it is the customer who is in charge and that the service will be organised around them, not the other way round.

This issue of time and service is not just about deliveries and engineers calling but is also critical to public service reform.

And the reason it goes to the heart of public service reform is because it recognises that the essence of this is about changing the power relationship to one that empowers the public, the service user.

Now some public services do a great job of time giving, and some major changes have been made in this direction in recent years.

But before coming on to specifics let’s just pause for a moment on the question of who benefits from a public service reform which seeks to save people time.

There is a stereotype that this is just an issue for the cash rich time poor section of the population, for blackberry man and woman. It certainly is an issue for them, and it is important that public services help to make life easier for hard pressed tax paying busy people. They have a right to expect that service will respond to the way they live their lives.

However it is also profoundly important for poorer income groups. It is often those with the least income and other resources who may be more likely to have to deal with a number of different government agencies and departments, who may be passed from office to office or call centre to call centre, trying to sort out the business they have to do with government.

For people in this position, it is not just a matter of being busy. It’s often a matter of battling through the day to get the help they need and are entitled to.

A wasted trip to a public service office for a single mother could involve the expenditure of considerable social capital as well as very limited funds. She may have to ask a neighbour or a relative to baby sit. She may have to pay for this and to spend money on public transport. And if, through no fault of her own, all of that is wasted the cost to her can be very large.

Or the person who doesn’t have a job where access to a phone or the internet is easy, who has to use their lunch hour to deal with a government office. They need the transaction to go well and the problem to be dealt with.

The Dutch Government recently measured some public service transactions in terms of their time cost to the public.

They found for example that the parents of a disabled child spent 124 hours organising the care, benefits and education for their child. This was just the parents’ time dealing with the authorities, not the time spent actually educating their son.

A woman trying to organise care for her mother with Alzheimer’s disease spent 31 hours dealing with government agencies.

A man who lost his job spent 81 hours sorting out his benefits and jobsearch help.

I recently met with representatives of a charity called Headway which helps people with acquired brain injuries. One of the issues they raised was the time it takes for carers to chart their way through the system of getting the information and help their relatives need.

So time matters, and it matters for everyone, though the hardest pressed sections of the population are often more likely to have to have more contact with more government agencies and less likely to be able to buy time back by hiring domestic help, having a car to get from A to B quicker or spending money in other ways to free up time.

There is then, I believe, a link between time giving and enabling people to have more opportunities. If Britain needs to use the talents of all the people to prosper in a competitive global world as I believe we do, then we need to waste less of our people’s time to enable them to spend it more productively.

In the past, labour saving devices like the washing machine liberated people enormously from some of the drudgery of day to day life, allowing more time to be spent positively, be that in work, with family, on leisure or whatever else we are doing.

But for today and the future a critical question is not just new inventions but how we organise things, how we ensure that the services we provide free up people’s time. Because to do so is profoundly empowering for those who can benefit.

In the public services, there are already major timing giving reforms under way.

Let’s take the example of the NHS. This is a system which has been close to the hearts of the British people ever since it began. Our health care is based on need not ability to pay. This is seen as fair and offering vital security to people. Whatever else goes wrong in our lives, the NHS is there for us and our families if we need it.

The advantages of the system are familiar and huge. But there has always been one problem with a system provided free at the point of use yet with limited capacity and that is that in the past, people had to wait, often for long periods, for non emergency treatment.

Before 1997, this problem had gotten so bad that people were routinely waiting 18 months or two years for operations like knee and hip replacements.

This was time stealing on a grand scale. It was also security and peace of mind stealing as the months went by and people waited, and waited, in pain.

The centrepiece of government health reforms has not been to do away with the good parts of the NHS like the free treatment or the treatment based on need.

Instead, when it came to reform we chose to tackle this issue of waiting. The aim was a fundamentally progressive one — a system of health care free at the point of use but also one with vastly reduced waiting times. And of course it was those who could not opt out who had most to gain from the reduction in waiting.

And this desire to reduce waiting times drove a lot of other changes too.

It meant a bigger system all round, with more doctors, more nurses and more modern hospitals.

It meant sometimes controversial reforms like bringing in extra capacity from outside the NHS — though the patients’ treatment continues to be free.

It meant offering choice so that if there were long waiting times at one hospital, the patient could go to another where they would have to wait less.

And it is working. As waiting times have fallen, first to 12 months, then 9, then 6 months people have been given time back. And the hidden time issue is also being tackled. The government’s target for this parliament of treatment within 18 weeks is 18 weeks from referral by your GP to the surgery itself taking place. It measures the whole journey, not just a part of it.

This change is a huge exercise in giving time back to thousands of patients who in the past would have been waiting in pain.

There are other examples of public sector time saving too.

For example, the government gave people a choice of continuing to renew the tax disc for their car in the traditional way during office hours or doing it online whenever they wanted. Nine million people have chosen to do it online. The ability to offer the service meant matching up databases from both public and private sectors for the convenience of the car owner. It not only saves the public time on the actual transaction but like all online services it means it can be done at a time of people’s own choosing not just during normal office hours.

This aspect of online services is crucial to time giving. Online transactions have rendered obsolete the concept of opening hours for those transactions. Twenty four hour availability means transactions can be carried out a time of the customer’s choosing, not hours of service defined by the provider.

Another good example of public sector time giving is the reformed pension service.

In the past, when people approached retirement in this country they had to fill out a number of forms and the whole process took significant time. Recently, that process was reorganised and is now done mostly on the phone, with home visits for the minority who need them. It usually takes about 20 minutes.

Moreover, as extra time saving help, if someone is entitled to pension credit, the pension service now offers to talk to the local authority to make sure the person also gets the council tax benefit which is based on the same information.

Here, time giving has been taken an extra step, not only to ensure that the particular service you are dealing with operates well, but also to talk to another part of government — in this case your local council — to save you time on another transaction.

This aspect of time giving - the sharing of information between different parts of government - has huge potential because one of the frustrations of dealing with government is giving the same information over and over again. This was explicitly cited by the couple in the Dutch study with the disabled son.

So the task for public service if we are interested in time giving is not only to make sure our own processes are more efficient but that where it can make life better for the citizen we make sure different parts of government co-operate with one another to save that person time.

Most people expect that to happen now but too often it does not.

This issue of information sharing can be controversial. Some campaigners believe information sharing endangers privacy. Whether you believe that, or whether you believe it is just good service improvement is a matter of opinion. Certainly, few pensioners have complained about the idea when offered the council tax benefit service by the pension service. I acknowledge concerns over privacy but I also believe that time should be a factor in the information sharing debate.

And some of this issue around information is about seeing the benefits and knowing what it is used for. People who take out supermarket clubcards do not normally object to the supermarket knowing their buying habits. And the vast majority of the population with mobile phones tend not to object to the fact that the technology allows the mobile phone companies to know where we are most of the time if they needed to find out.

It is easy to conjure up an image of a big brother state but it should not be a principle of liberty that different parts of government never talk to one another when to do so could save citizens valuable time.

I have cited some examples of good public sector time saving today. But I know there are also poor ones. Inefficiencies in call centres, with a large volume of calls being about problems which should have been dealt with elsewhere. Too many boundaries still in place between different agencies and departments. We have definitely made progress but there is much more to do.

One area government is working on is over critical moments in any family’s life such as bereavement or childbirth or moving house.

At the moment, apart from the pain and personal loss of bereavement, it can also mean contact with many parts of government, local and national, for the family of the person who has died. More could be done to make this process easier.

The other day I visited the pioneering Bereavement Centre run by my own local authority in Wolverhampton. Staff there have developed a service which helps families in these most painful of circumstances. The Bereavement Centre undertakes to contact a number of government agencies for the family, not just giving them the numbers or the forms but taking care of the bureaucracy for them. In fact the philosophy of those who work there is “we’ll do that for you” — a very good principle in time saving public service reform.

The government also wants to do more on this issue at a national level so my colleagues at the Department of Work and Pensions are following through the process families have to go through when something like bereavement or childbirth happens to see if we can make this easier for people by reducing the need to give the same information over and over again.

Over the next few years, I believe this issue of service organisation and time will become far more important. As options open up for people, and in some respects, lives become faster, people will expect service both public and private to respond.

How important in all of this is choice? When different delivery companies offer an all day slot or on the other hand one hour slots, choice can play an important role by allowing us to choose the company which is going to go the extra mile to save time for us.

In a similar way, choice has been important in driving down waiting times because hospitals know that patients can choose to go where waiting times may be less than at the local hospital. In a different way, choice has played a crucial role in allowing people buying a car tax to do it in their own time. In this case the provider did not differ — the choice came in the means of accessing the service.

In some cases though, choice is not so easily available as a means of change. For example, we only get our state pension from the state. However here too big time saving improvements have been made thanks to good leadership and a willingness to reform how the service is delivered. Choice certainly can be a driver of time saving but we also need to ensure that time saving changes are made in areas not readily geared to choice driven reforms. Good leadership and thinking about service delivery from the point of view of the public can save time in these areas too.

Why for example, should processing applications for free school meals take up to six weeks when a pilot study has shown it is possible this could be done in a day?

All of this is important not only for good service but also for the national interest. Often, when we talk about efficiency the image conjured up is one of the financial balance sheet. But consideration of the public’s time is also an important dimension in efficiency. And not wasting time is crucial to Britain’s efficiency as a country. There is, if you like, only so much time in our national time bank. And using it well can benefit us all.

For all the detail of changes made to public services in recent years, at the heart of it has been a single issue — that change had to happen because we were moving from a world where the provider of the service had often seemed in charge to one where the customer and the citizen are in charge.
This is not a process that can be stopped or reversed. Wider change in the world means that the days of the provider being in charge are not coming back. In many spheres of life people are more empowered than they were before. In public services the process has to be taken forward, to further empower citizens and ensure that services revolve around their needs and the pressures upon them.

We are already doing this through shorter waiting times, through putting services online and through reorganising others.

But there is much more to be done. The process of empowerment must go on.

Time is at the core of this.

We only live once. There are many more things we’d all rather do than wait in a boring queue.

Let those of us who care about public service see the freeing up of time as a liberating empowering good in itself, and let’s change things so that we give people more of their own precious and limited time.

Pat McFadden MP is Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office. To respond to this article contact Alan Johnson, Editor of Social Democratic Futures

This is astoundingly innocent. Instances of a status quo preferable to destructive, unnecessary reforms are not hard to find. German Labour laws in January 1933, for instance, were infinitely preferable to the “reforms” which the newly elected Nazi government introduced. That does not make Weimar Germany a “utopia”, but it does serve to illustrate that reform is not always and automatically a good, positive and beneficent alternative.

Other generalisations by the Prime Minister are equally dubious. He claims that “In the early days of universal services the standard of service provision, in all aspects of our lives, was poor”. This is a definitive and damning statement for which he provides no evidence at all. All public sector universal provision was poor? Health? Education? Welfare? Not mixed, even, but simply and completely poor. This is a ridiculous argument, which nobody with any knowledge of the welfare state from 1945 would dream of making (leave aside the gratuitous insult offered an entire generation of dedicated, low paid public sector workers).

As ever, the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for new technology unbalances his argument. He moves from the obvious need for improved service delivery to exploit the benefits of new technology — changes that can and should be introduced within a properly funded public sector model of public service — to conclude that public services must therefore be provided through an entirely different model of public services based on increased private sector provision, outsourcing and a variety of other delivery methods, none of which on their own necessarily enhance or integrate new technology into service delivery any better than adequately funded, well managed public sector provision.

Nevertheless the Prime Minster asserts that the alternative to reform “according to our values” is not no reform at all, but reform lead by the values of “another political creed”. He leaves unclarified what “our values” are, and why they differ from that of “another political creed”. As well he might, as there is no serious difference between the current Labour public sector reform agenda and that of the Conservatives’ rather vague visions for the same. As we know, David Cameron’s Conservatives have pledged to maintain current levels of public service spending and there is no reason to believe that is essentially untrue. What then? Methods of delivery? Labour is keen to press on with its programme (already far in advance of John Major’s government) of privatisation and outsourcing of public services. So are the Tories. Labour favours use of the “Third” (voluntary) sectors in public service delivery. So do the Tories. All use “choice” and “contestability” as their mantra, leaving aside what that might actually mean.

But these polices are hardly immune from challenge. To take but one example, my own union (the Public and Commercial Services Union — PCS) have already established from discussions with management in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) that not only do the skills required to fulfill the tasks envisaged in the DWP reform programme not exist in the private and voluntary sector, but their decision to use only private and voluntary sector providers for the proposed Pathways to Work programme is driven by the Treasury’s demand for a reduction in staff numbers in the Jobcentre Plus network, arising from the implementation of the Gershon “Efficiency” programme.

In reality, the evidence supporting a move to further private and voluntary sector provision in employment services is weak or non-existent. It is unfortunately the case that many of the advocates of such involvement have a vested interest in accruing a profit-making business for their sector, which will generate funding to support their existing infrastructure, or in plugging the gaps left by a mechanical pursuit of staff cuts in the DWP.

The Treasury maintains that greater labour-market “flexibility”, and the increasing use of the private sector in the public sphere will produce efficiency savings and improve the overall performance of public services. However, there is no reliable evidence that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Private companies are not producing the anticipated improvements in delivery time or cost, nor are they meeting quality standards, as the record of companies like Balfour Beatty have evidenced.

Privatisation does, though, mean massive profits for multinational companies such as Fujitsu and Siemens. Since 1993 these two companies have won contracts in areas such as taxation, defence research and the Driving Standards Agency. These profits made by private companies are out of all proportion to the risks taken, which — especially when providing a basically monopoly service such as water supply or a train service — are minimal.

It is of particular concern to PCS that despite previous assurances from the government, core frontline services in the DWP are now being privatised. For example, after the closure of Jobcentre Plus Action Teams (previously praised for their high performance) the government announced that their replacement would provide employment services exclusively from the private sector. No in-house bid was allowed. This is simply political dogma riding roughshod over “what works”.

Similarly, over 20 000 MoD civilian staff currently faces job cuts and privatisation, which PCS fear will adversely affect the current high quality of logistical support to our armed services. Areas under threat of privatisation include specialist and basic training, and most of the defence supply chain — including procurement and delivery of frontline equipment, IT and military communication systems, and maintenance of military vehicles. PCS believes these plans will make the MoD less accountable to Parliament and weaken the cohesiveness of Britain’s defence forces at a critical time for those forces. But, again, such wider considerations are being ignored in the rush to impose a simplistic model of private sector provision, despite the clear need for an integrated approach.

Perhaps the most alarming example of this approach was the government’s plans — unveiled in 2003 — to privatise the UK’s Forensic Science Service. Only a campaign by PCS and Labour MPs forced the government to pledge that the service would remain in the public sector for two more years. If privatisation now goes ahead, it will make the UK the only country in the world that considers the detection of crime should be a matter for private profit. The possibilities of miscarriages of justice are obvious.

PCS does not put its head in the sand. We have endeavored to engage with the government’s reform agenda, by acknowledging their criteria for debate and responding with constructive proposals of our own. A PCS sponsored conference in December 2005, attended by senior civil servants, business leaders and cross-party political figures, made a significant contribution to taking forward the debate. The conference launched a major publication by Professor Roger Seifert and Mike Ironside of the Centre for Industrial Relations, Keele University, The Case for Civil and Public Services: An Alternative Vision (PCS, 2005).

But engagement with the government’s reform agenda can not preclude serious and fundamental criticism when major planks of that agenda are so misconceived. PCS has grave concerns about the nature and impact of the Gershon Efficiency programme, announced by the Chancellor in the Comprehensive Spending Review 2004, which included a commitment to achieve 104 000 civil service post reductions by 2008. PCS is on record as opposing this headcount reduction as the very epitome of the top-down “diktat” model for public services that the Prime Minster now so strongly opposes, especially as the post reduction was not decided upon after a careful, evidence based analysis of performance targets, workloads and staff in post across individual departments and NDPBs from which appropriate “efficiencies” were concluded as practical and desirable, but rather a centralised imposition of broad brush targets on a wide variety of different bodies performing different tasks.

The result of this has been predictable — many front line services such as Benefit Offices, Pensions Centres, Tax Offices, Child Support Offices, etc, have cut back on delivery to the public in order to achieve their targets, with a subsequent negative impact on service delivery (to take but one example, the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee found that the DWP’s efficiency programme has led to many calls now going unanswered and benefit calculation taking much longer, resulting in a “catastrophic” level of service delivery). This flows directly from an ill planned and impractical programme that may have initially aimed for qualitative improvements in service delivery, but is now focused more on crude headcount reduction than reforming public services to become more effective, innovative and user-friendly.

PCS’s analysis and concerns are not based on a narrow view of “producer interest”, nor we do we suppose that the only required solution to better public services is a huge injection of cash, without efficient and accountable administration (including full and flexible use of new technology to meet the requirements of a diverse population) Yes, we seek to protect the interests of our members, but we see no contradiction between doing so and promoting the health and effectiveness of the services they devote themselves to delivering.

In that regard we are ready to engage with the government at any level about the future direction of public services, and to consider all options for reform, if they are necessary, fair, effective, and the product of genuine consultation with all stakeholders, including public sector trade unions. Sadly, the Prime Minster’s article hardly demonstrates that he is pursuing such options, and is not supported by very clear evidence of the failures of private sector provision of public services.

Charles Cochrane is Secretary of the Council of Civil Service Unions (CCSU), Head of the Protect Public Services Unit, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS).

Michael Cox of the London School of Economics, Richard Saull of Queen Mary, and Robert Singh of Birkbeck will respond.

The full address of the (revised) venue is Lecture Theatre, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Charles Clore House, 17 Russell Square London WC1B 5DR. All are welcome. Contact olga.jimenez to attend. The event is being convened by Tim Linch of the ISA, timothy.lynch

You make a very important point that there is a progressive case for public sector reform. You should know that I am one of those business school academics who nonetheless is critical of the unchallenged spread of managerialism in the public sector.

Yet we should recognize that in the drive for what is called New Public Management there was often a progressive agenda. It was as much late 1980s demands for fair employment for ethnic minorities and women as it was Thatcherism that led to the establishment of processes which are now seen as best human resource management practices. So you are hooking into a noble historic tradition, which you could argue goes back to the early Fabians.

Yet, again, there is much about the public sector which is as good as — no, better than — the private sector. An example: the notion and sense of vocation. Vocation is why, historically, nurses, teachers, and even some university lecturers did great work for little money, but with the perk of society’s respect. The latter cost the exchequer nothing, but delivered the public sector lots and lots.

In the meantime, people’s experience of the private sector is not good — and it may be that it is one of those issues which demonstrates the out-of-touchness of political life. I am one of the Google generation, and the web certainly has changed my patterns of engagement with the private sector. But read the money pages of all the quality newspapers. They are full of stories of private sector incompetence and rip-offs. I’m kind of guessing you haven’t in your life had to spend hours waiting on a 0870 number (do you know what that means?), nor had a disappearing e-ticket, nor had an internet service company help itself to cash from your account. Most people have.

So, yes, there is a progressive case for public sector reform. But what is needed, and maybe is impossible to achieve within the political setting in which you have to work, is nuance and pragmatism, rather than big change initiative one after the other (with, perhaps, the exception of IT based change). For me there is a simple rule. Look to outcomes first over processes.

Targets, fine. But assuming particular institutional frameworks (e.g. quasi-market) might be better than others, particularly when it is hard to get disinterested advice, is problematic. Of course, there must be a care for delivery. But maybe you need to engage the progressive people engaged in delivery to work out how best it might be done.

Yours,

Bill

Dr. Bill Cooke is Senior Lecturer in Organizational Analysis at The University of Manchester, Manchester Business School.

Tony Blair’s sally into the world of Euston certainly has all the hallmarks of a classic, using the techniques that Jamie Whyte mercilessly pilloried. There are instances when banality poses as profundity — what on earth does “We are a much older people than we were” actually mean? These are supported by generalisations asserted without empirical foundation — I am sorry, Tony, but being employed in the public sector feels more like being a participant in a continuous revolution than working in institutions that “were established in something like their current form in the 1940s”.

However, the heart of his appeal for the support of the left in his programme of public sector reform is more important and is contained in the following statement.,

“There is always a progressive case for reform. What progressive case is there for the status quo, except in utopia?”

The obvious question that arises is what reform? The introduction of compulsory human sacrifice to propitiate the Gods would certainly be a reform, but hardly a progressive one. The debate is not about reform versus stasis; it is over which out of a range of reforms are preferred. Trying to make a case for reform per se is not enough to convince.

There is more though. There is a progressive case to be made against change. This was beautifully put by Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook:

We began to wonder if the reason why parties advocating radical change were so unsuccessful was because they were striking against the resistance of people who had changed, who had been compelled to change, too much. … In this context the desire to conserve, to protect, to safeguard, to rescue, to resist becomes the heart of a radical project. A form of conservatism — to be most sharply distinguished from its multitude of imitations, its travesties and caricatures, and scarcely know to those who carry the banners of conservatism in the modern world — becomes indispensable to this work of resistance. This conservatism leads us to search for all those valuable resources that have been thrown away in the process of eager industrialisation. For the greatest casualties in this version of development have been human, perhaps even more than material, resources.

The Revolt Against Change. Towards a Conserving Radicalism. Vintage, London. 1993. pp.3 – 4)

Part of the reason for the decline in Labour support does not lie in those issues that the media obsesses over, notably Iraq, but in an inchoate desire for a more stable and kinder future. Blackwell and Seabrook saw these ‘forces of conservatism’ being the centrepiece of a left project. They were ignored. Instead, they are David Cameron’s secret weapon. Labour take note.

Choice is not power

One of the more bewildering aspects of the language of New Labour is its penchant for picking two irreconcilable concepts and saying that Labour is neither, yet is also both - simultaneously. This is what happens in Blair’s defence of choice.

It is more subtly stated here but is present none the less. The first phase of public sector reform is described by Blair as being based on “strong central direction and public targets”. The current phase is now, apparently, a process of “transfer of power from providers to citizens”. Note the language here; it is a transfer of power from providers not government. Implicit in this is a view that the public sector behaves as a monopoly with, at best, complacency, and, at worst, an intrinsically hostile attitude towards its users. In this way there is a supposed unity of interest between government and citizens against the recalcitrant providers of public services. The circle is squared. Centralised government direction can happily co-exist with the devolution of power to citizens whereas I had always assumed that increasing the ability of people to decide for themselves had to result in a reduction of central power.

This analysis would be fine if it were true. Those of us in Adult Education, which has long operated in a genuine market with provision solely driven and determined by consumer choice, are acutely aware that there is currently a shared interest between providers and users against the government as it uses its powers of funding to effectively impose a narrow model of instrumental education to be delivered at NVQ level 2, regardless of the choices of citizens. A swathe of popular adult education provision is disappearing across the country because it does not match the government’s funding criteria.

In reality, choice is a very limited form of power compared to ownership, control and democratic governance. This is even more so in a model based on central direction and targets. What results is not a choice of provision, which will remain centrally directed, but a choice of provider. In other words, “you can have any colour as long as it is black - but you can choose from all these showrooms where you buy it”. This is hardly, “Power to the People”.

Peter Ryley works at the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Hull. He blogs at Fat Man at a Keyboard.

Tony is blogging to tell us all the case for “reform” of our public services.

If I think his views are worth noting (bearing in mind he is thankfully on the way out) I may have a proper look.

In the meantime I am amused by his introductory paragraph which states that:

There is always a progressive case for reform. What progressive case is there for the status quo, except in utopia?

This is a wonderful example of Bair’s (mis)use of language. As I have observed here previously he thinks that reform of public services means privatisation. However his actual words are a statement to which no one could possibly object. And one sure thing about statements with which no one can disagree are that they are pointless. Indeed he nowhere defines what he means by “reform” in any rigorous way.

He goes on to argue (at unnecessary length) that society has changed and therefore public services need to change. Doh! Come and do a real job for once in your life Tony and you would find that public service workers are pretty much used to constant change.

The next paragraph of Tony’s irritating dross that is probably worth picking out is this one:

“The driving idea behind reform is to transfer power from providers to citizens. To give power to the people — it is as traditional a left-of-centre slogan as there is.”

Again he manages to utilise a platitude you would have to agree with in order to advance policies with which most people disagree. Because he goes on to say:

“If the citizen has a choice they have a power. The service is likely to be more responsive to their needs. Their voice is a lot more likely to be heard and acted on. The service has a stimulus to improve.”

This begs so many questions. Can we have an informed choice about every public service. Should I, as an individual, choose whether to have my tonsils out or instead to have a vasectomy? Should my children choose whether to study literacy or numeracy?

There is an alternative stimulus to improve public services in the public service ethos to which so many public servants are committed — an ethos which Tony will never understand.

This ethos is continually undermined by a “choice” agenda which is invariably about “choosing” between providers but almost never on a level playing field for the public sector.

Tony then claims that “reform works” and quotes some of those interminable New Labour statistics that so fail to persuade the electorate just now.

All in all, a disappointing little essay from someone who has been running the country for nearly a decade. He can’t see the difference between changing and improving public services on the one hand and opening up opportunities for people to take profits out of them on the other.

Few blog posts I have read so well make the case for a change of policies as well as personalities as soon as possible.

Perhaps it is all a spoof and the Euston Manifesto people are just having a laugh at Tony Blair?

Jon Rogers is a member of the National Executive Council (NEC) of UNISON, the public service union. UNISON is not responsible for the contents of his blog from which this article is taken.

There is always a progressive case for reform. What progressive case is there for the status quo, except in utopia?

One of the original aspirations for universal public services was that they would help to equalise British society. Education would make for fair life chances. The NHS would equalise life expectancy. We still have a long way to travel.

It is not just that the results are unfair. Access to services is not yet fair either. There is a wealth of evidence that lower-income, less educated and unemployed people do not use health services as much relative to need as their richer, better educated peers.

And remember: there has been a progressive dividend in the very fact that public services today are so healthy. A decade ago it was seriously being debated whether or not tax-funded public services could survive. The long period of under-investment had taken its toll. People had become fatalistic about the mortality of their services. Now, the argument is no longer about whether there should be public services provided publicly at all. It is about how they might best be managed.

Society has changed and its demands along with it. Universal public services were established in something like their current form in the 1940s. They offered a service to a society that was ethnically homogeneous, socially patriarchal, economically industrial and recovering from the experience of large-scale unemployment and rationing at a time of war.

We are a much older people than we were. Our lifestyles have changed. The tides of global markets wash up on our shores. Migration is now more extensive than ever before. The competition from other nations is more intense. The ways in which we deliver services are changing all the time, powered by new technologies.

Perhaps more important than anything else, the expectations of the public have risen. In the early days of universal services the standard of service provision, in all aspects of our lives, was poor. This is not any longer true. The standard of goods is vastly superior to what it once was. It would be naïve to suppose that these rising expectations have not been extended to public services. They have. People are now accustomed to a level of service and convenience that is new.

All of these changes have meant that services have to change too.

First, that we need to do a better job at understanding and explaining the changes that have taken place in Britain over the last 10 years. Second, we need to engage positively and actively with the development of a new agenda for the future.

On the first count, the departure of the Prime Minister at some point in the next six to nine months, along with the 10 year anniversary of Labour’s election in 1997, provides the basis for a sustained "reckoning" on the Blair years. This is a vital part of the political jigsaw — not because it is an opportunity for Labour Ministers and supports to reel off ‘lists of achievements’ (though a bit of that would not go amiss), but because across the country individuals, businesses, voluntary organisations, newspapers will draw up a balance sheet on the last ten years. Some will give a D-minus out of ideological or personal antipathy, providing an interesting counterpoint to those who argue that the government has been so pale blue it has failed to annoy the Right. But most will acknowledge significant economic, social and cultural change in the country, political change too, and many will recognise that while all this change is not the responsibility of the Government, a lot of it is.

The Reckoning is important; it provides the foundation for the second task, developing a new agenda for the future. My starting point for that task is the belief that Britain has changed a lot in the last twenty years, but will change more in the next twenty. That change can be reactionary or progressive. Our job is to understand the new world better than the Right, and respond better.

It seems evident that interdependence is the defining characteristic of the modern world — from traffic to terrorism, from the economy to the environment, we are dependent on others for our personal freedom.

I believe successful countries in 2025 will be egalitarian in their ethos and structure, pluralistic in their systems of power, and globally linked at the level of the individual and the community (think cities) as well as the nation. I have called these ‘empowered societies’.

Those of us concerned with the success of this country need to engage with the demands of these requirements — demands that will require us to go far beyond the agenda set in 1997 and followed since then. The Blair era is not some kind of aberration — it is right and successful, more right and more successful than any Labour government since 1945. But it cannot be frozen in stone. The only way to preserve new labour is to change it in fundamental ways — not by moving to the right but by defining clearly what it means to be on the centre-left in the 21st century. In ideological terms this means fusing the traditional social democratic commitment to social justice through collective action with a liberal commitment to individual freedom in a market economy.

New Labour has been good at national leadership, but needs to do better at promoting strong community self-government; good at paying teachers and nurses and police more, but needs to do better at making them feel like real entrepreneurs with the power to reshape lives; good at creating new laws and expectations of social behaviour, but needs to do better at giving young people a sense of commitment to the country; good at keeping inflation and interest rates low, but needs to do better at making the most of the new knowledge economy; good at driving the international environmental agenda, but needs to do better at finding the game-changing drives that shift the country’s carbon footprint (think the Congestion Charge); good at promoting rights and responsibility in the welfare state, but needs to do better at promoting rights and responsibilities across society; good at legislating for constitutional reform, but needs to do better at building a new political culture; good at shaping national policy, but needs to do better at defining the future for our regional alliance in the EU.

Finding the way to make good on these aspirations requires, in my view, first of all distinctive and insightful social and economic analysis, and second real imagination about how to shape social and economic (and political) change. This dialogue is part of that process. The attempt to lift our eyes to Britain 2025 is not an attempt to avoid controversy, but is an effort to get beyond the debate about the number of Academy schools that is optimal.

My interest is in the trends, ideas and ways of thinking that have the potential to shape Britain of 2025. What will the economy be like? What will be the international benchmark for educational effectiveness? How will the ‘new old’ (baby boomers) have redefined the culture of ageing? With 7-8 billion people on the planet, and significant greenhouse gas emissions from simply feeding them, where are the zero carbon solutions for energy and transport?

There is a lot to think about and a lot to do. We need to open the shutters and really understand what is going on, and who is thinking best about how to respond. I am all ears.

David Miliband is Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

To respond to this article send your comment to Alan Johnson, Editor of Social Democratic Futures Alanjohnsonsdf

A good tax system, in the commission’s view, has several properties. It must be fair, involving redistribution of both income and wealth; simple, reducing the Byzantine complexity and bureaucracy of Gordon Brown's tax innovations; and "green", creating incentives for environmentally sustainable development. It should also recognise the economic impact on peoples' willingness to save, to work and take risks, and to compete internationally. And in any democracy, it must command the support of the electorate. Reconciling several objectives in this way is not easy and several tough decisions have been made. The Commission has produced a self contained and balanced "package" of tax changes, to be accomplished in a parliament and also set a longer term "direction of travel".

It is a long time since our party looked at taxation in the round. We have offered strong campaigning themes — one penny in the pound for education, "axe the tax"; fifty pence in the pound — which, in their context, have been valuable. But when Charles Kennedy proposed setting up the Tax Commission, under the Chairmanship of Mike Williams, it was with the aim of looking at tax policy afresh and comprehensively, albeit within the framework of our party's values.

The "package" was carefully constructed and costed and involves raising taxes on the wealthy and environmental taxes and using the revenue to cut national direct tax — income tax and national insurance — on low and middle income earners. More than two million low income tax payers would be lifted out of tax and NI altogether and middle class tax payers would gain from a lower national tax rate (20p rather than 22p) and higher allowances.

The proposals were debated at Conference in September and debate centred on several issues. Do they meet our "social justice" concerns? Actually they are more radical than the original 50p top rate, raising over three times as much from wealthy people in several different ways: on income (roughly 45p after LIT is imposed), on wealth through capital gains on shares and property and by withdrawing general higher rate tax relief on contributions to pension pots. The 50p rate is, we argue, no longer necessary and to retain it would unbalance what is currently a balanced package.

Our proposals reinforce our commitment to localism, with a bigger tax gathering role for local and devolved government. We do not yet know how the current Lyons review will deal with the unfairness and regressivity of the council tax and we shall continue to campaign to replace council tax with one based on ability to pay.

And are the proposals "green"? The rationale for green taxation is set out in a paper by Chris Huhne and myself entitled The Green Switch and is available on the Party website. We are the first party to have campaigned strongly on the need to curb emissions from aviation by taxing, in particular, the most polluting and least utilised aircraft. (When this idea was raised, very tentatively, at Tory party conference, delegates opposed it).

One final comment: how far can a "tax neutral" package of the kind we have devised be reconciled with a wish to make additional specific spending commitments, as we already have with the citizens' pension and for students?' We are, in parallel with the tax exercise, looking at government spending with a view to identifying £15bn a year in low priority spending which can be cut and reallocated. There are some big potential savings from ID cards, industrial subsidies, big defence contracts like Eurofighter and bureaucracy like that involved in the control and monitoring of local government. We are working towards a manifesto for the next election which will involve a radical shift in tax and spending priorities, but within a framework of financial discipline and responsibility.

The Tax Commission report will shortly be sent out to conference delegates and will be available on the Party website. The title of the paper Greener, Fairer, Simpler reflects the values of the tax commission membership; indeed these are values long held by our Party. I believe this set of tax proposals provides a powerful basis for delivering the Liberal Democrat programme for government.

Vince Cable MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor. Email tax

Do you want to respond to this article? Send your comment to Alan Johnson, Social Democratic Futures editor. tax

A conservative foreign policy, which can be practiced by any political party, is one that will place national interest always and everywhere above anything else. If we believe that this is the beginning and the end of the foreign policy question then we should accept that the attempt to construct an ethical foreign policy is impossible. It is worth pausing on this question for a moment. Is social democracy about building walls around our own polity to defend ourselves and keep our people safe from various threats? If so we should venture out from this little island only when material threats exist to ourselves. When civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia we should be with the Tories and do nothing. We should leave the Iraq people living under a genocidal dictator. Today, we should be arguing hard against any form of intervention against the Khartoum government. If that is really what progressives want, then let us say so.

A conservative foreign policy defines national interest in terms of security but also in terms of the economic interest of a broad entity called "the west." Therefore it will pursue intervention in pursuit of the control of resources, particularly oil, because of the pressing political and economic need to deliver stable supplies. While it would naïve to believe that in the realist world of the global economic and the competition for resources that economic interests never influence foreign policy choices, economic interests should not be the deciding factor in making progressive foreign policy choices.

A conservative foreign policy is one that will act unilaterally or, more often, work hard to stop collective action through the United Nations when it does not see vital economic or strategic gains for the United Kingdom. Ideally a progressive foreign policy should be conducted through the United Nations and in line with international law and international humanitarian law. I say ideally because the responsibility to protect and the rights of victims to be saved from gross violations of human rights are more important in certain circumstances that the mechanisms of international law. We should also see the responsibility to protect as a umbrella concept that involves not only prevention of harm and rescue but also a long term commitment to reconstruction.

So we shape a progressive foreign policy by putting victims first, by understanding our national interest in terms of promoting, protecting and enforcing human rights around the world and by working through the mechanisms of international law and the United Nations.

Then we come up against cases. Take Darfur. We all agree that gross human rights violations in Darfur should be stopped, but how?

The African Union (AU) force that has pushed the Janjaweed back does not have enough money or equipment to do the job properly. They do not have the planes to enforce the no-fly zone. They are constantly being attacked by the rebels and by the government's militia. According to one report, they do not have sufficient funds to withdraw.

The best option is for a United Nations force to replace the AU peace keepers. But this is real dilemma the UN system faces us with. Resolutions have authorised the sending of a peacekeeping force to the Darfur region. That force cannot go to Darfur unless the Khartoum government agrees to its entry. This government — which is a coalition and not an Islamic government but which is targeting its African population in Darfur — has broken many agreements. It is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of both the victims and the perpetrators in Darfur are Muslims. Yesterday, Kofi Annan sais, "the message I have tried to get to the Sudanese government is that the international community is not coming in as an invading force, but basically to help them protect the people … If the government had been able to do it itself, I don’t think we would be having this debate".

The rebels fighting the government who did not sign the peace agreement have committed their own atrocities. In response the Khartoum government is organising a force of 10,000 to move south. A Human Rights Watch report on the 6th September stated that the government was indiscriminately bombing civilian-occupied villages in rebel-held North of Darfur. The African director of the HRW Africa said: "Government forces are bombing villages with blatant disregard for civilian lives, "A penalty for indiscriminate bombing in Darfur is U.N. Security Council sanctions, which should be imposed now." But would the impositions of sanctions make the deployment of a UN force more or less likely?

The HRW reports goes on: "Firsthand sources report flight crews rolling bombs out the back ramps of Antonovs, a means of targeting that was often practiced by government forces in their 21-year civil war with rebels in southern Sudan. This method is so inaccurate that it cannot strike at military targets without a substantial risk of harm to civilians. International humanitarian law prohibits such attacks, which can constitute war crimes. Deliberately attacking civilians is in all circumstances prohibited and a war crime."

So here is the rub — the government that plans on ethically cleansing part of its territory as a "counter-insurgency" operation is the government that can say yes or no to a UN force intervening to stop the genocide.

A progressive response should be that international law needs to be enforced, that the structures exist and need to be used, these need to be made to work.

That is what was said in Rwanda in 1994. Then we had a Tory government indifferent to the fate of the Rwandans and instrumental in blocking intervention. Now we have a Labour government that is deeply concerned with the fate of the people but is not prepared to go down the NATO road again, although this has been suggested by the US administration in the past. What should a progressive think — that it is ok for between 250 000 – 400 000 Muslims to die while the legal structures that should deal with this situation are not allowed to work?

In this case these seems to me to be a need to square the circle and that is to accept that some states can sacrifice their sovereignty when they fail to protect their own citizens or when they are attacking their own citizens. The ethical debate for progressives should be about what the threshold of violence that should mean that a state no longer has the right to agree or disagree to intervention. The ICC could be the institution that makes such a decision. And this does not then lead to full-scale invasion — there are many measures that can be taken short of that, but they must be taken in line with international law or else, like Kosovo, they will not be repeatable.

This is the key — the victim-centred progressive foreign policy we need is one that is permanent, repeatable, enforceable and predictable. Only international law can give us these things and the only way international law can be made to work is if it recognises that some states do not belong in the community of nations.

Brian Brivati is Professor of Contemporary History and Course Director of the MA in Human Rights at Kingston University.

To post a response to this article contact Alanjohnsonsdf.