The doyen of Liberator magazine, Simon Titley, just sent me through a cutting from the Leicester Mercury which gives us just a glimpse at the reasons why public services became so expensive under New Labour.
The report tells us of the unused regional fire control centre for the East Midlands, standing empty in Castle Donington, but still costing £5,000 a day to run, with burgeoning interest accruing in the PFI contract. It wasn’t just the dream of regional government, or the manifest problems of PFI, that caused the problem here. It was another example of a huge misconceived and failed IT project, like so many others.
One estimate suggested that the last government spent over £70 billion on IT projects and IT and management consultants over the past decade. The basis for that spending included a whole raft of wholly unproven assertions, from economies of scale through to ‘lean’ management systems and the fatal division between front office and back offices.
Most of these, along with other aspects of the McKinsey world view, still seem to have the Cabinet Office in its grip.
But the real problem is that the coalition are only half way through a revolution in service thinking. They have got rid of targets, half chucked out the Audit Commission… yet still our commissioning units get bigger and bigger, the disastrous shared back office systems continue to grow, and McKinsey consultants are still at large in the corridors of Whitehall. The result? Sclerosis.
In fact it’s worse than sclerosis. The response of the NHS establishment to the appalling revelations about the care of older people seems to be more systems and more training -– as if either can make up for diminishing humanity.
There is no real mystery about why such modern institutions, targeted and standardised to within an inch of their lives, have become so inhumane.
The trouble is, because they have only half-grasped the public service reform nettle, our own Coalition has not been able to articulate this critique of the previous Labour government’s disastrous record on public services -– leaving them increasingly inhumane, ruinously expensive and decreasingly effective (a miserable combination).
Thirteen years of centralised targets, standards and auditing has sucked the human element out of these and other institutions. They have been treated like assembly lines — and that is what they have become.
The reason, according to my new book The Human Element: Ten new rules to kickstart our failing organisations, published Nov 3), is that human beings have been increasingly taken out of public service systems because they are regarded as fallible.
That is true, of course, but humans are also the only real source of success and the only source of genuine change. Removing them is increasingly expensive and wasteful because our institutions are that much less effective.
Services and organisations are failing because conventional ‘efficiency’ destroys human contact and human relationships. The new agenda -– real public service efficiency through public service effectiveness -– means putting them back in again.
* David Boyle is a member of FPC and the author of The Human Element: Ten new rules to kickstart our failing organisations (Earthscan).
