What 40 per cent cuts mean for public services

It is hard to interpret the call for 40 per cent spending cuts in some departments, reported over the weekend.  On the face of it, cuts on that scale would transform the nation, and almost certainly for the worse.  It is hard to imagine the welfare state, as we currently understand it, surviving.

On the other hand, what is almost certainly happening here – if you read between the lines of the Sunday newspapers – is that the Treasury is trying to get the various government departments to think outside the box.  Is there not some shift in thinking which might turn accepted ways of doing things on their head?  If so, then they want to set it down and consider it.

Fair enough.  There are reasons why we might want to rethink government radically, and they are not all because we fear the bond markets.  Another reason is that, if we are urging a new kind of economy that doesn’t have to grow exponentially just to stand still (and we are), then that has implications for public services in the future.

nef is now at the heart of a whole range of new innovations which might shift the way government works, and might – if they are done right – also mean that it cost considerably less.  They include:

• Re-organising services so that they don’t just treat symptoms, they also reach out and prevent crime, ill-health or family breakdown.
• Embedding what we call co-production, a kind of mutualism and reciprocity at the heart of services, which will also mean they knit neighbourhoods back together – and prevent problems in the future.
• System thinking, which can end the huge inefficiencies that follow from the big back-office service silos.
• Radical localism, which will mean more face-to-face relationships at the sharp end of services – and make them more effective.

All these may be possible, but they won’t be possible overnight, or in the schedule demanded by the bond markets.  Nor will they be achievable if services are salami sliced.  Nor will they happen without a clear idea of how the new systems are going to work that is widely shared.  Unfortunately, what we actually have is a corroded public service infrastructure which has been moulded by ten years of targets, standards and centralised micro-management.

Are some of those ideas sufficiently embedded in government to be put into effect?  Unfortunately not, or the 40 per cent fishing exercise would not have been necessary.  We have to hope that Whitehall is open to a series of linked big ideas that have some chance of making the shift – rather than the big ideas (‘Lean’ springs to mind) that really haven’t.