We will be hearing a lot more about "personalised" public services in 2008

The big idea of 2007 - and the nearest thing to the revelation of a Gordon Brown vision - was the "personalised" public service. In his Labour conference speech, Brown, incongruously reminding me of those email spammers who ask if you wanna get personal, promised services "accessible to all, personal to all". Schools would provide "learning personal to each pupil". Other services would be "personal to the needs of the elderly". The NHS would be very personal indeed.

What does it mean? To some extent, it is another example of rebranding. When Brown talks of "an NHS personal to you because you are seen by a consultant in a matter of days", he is using new language to address the familiar issue of hospital waiting lists. In other respects, however, he is recognising that choice - envisaged by Thatcher, Major and Blair as the main engine of public service reform - has proved inadequate. It's not so much a choice of providers that people want - the poor often can't get access to the full range of choices in any case - as flexibility and responsiveness in how services are delivered. Choice has always been a flawed concept in the public sector, partly because of asymmetry of information, and partly because, if you don't like how the surgeon is taking your appendix out, you can't just storm off.

So a personalised service will mean, as outlined in this month's Children's Plan, your child takes school tests when he or she is ready (like the graded music tests) rather than at predetermined ages such as seven and 11; regular emails from the school, rather than just termly reports; and one-to-one tuition if the child falls behind. In the NHS, it will mean GPs open at weekends and evenings, regular check-ups, and health centres that don't require patient registration.

But the idea goes deeper. The new Labour guru Charles Leadbeater talks about "Public Services 2.0", echoing Web 2.0, where user-generated content - MySpace, Wikipedia, Second Life and so on - is all the rage. "For the past decade," writes Leadbeater (www.charlesleadbeater.net), "most of the debate about public service reform has focused on . . . making the public sector value chain work more efficiently to resemble private service delivery. But you cannot deliver complex public goods the way that Fed Ex delivers a parcel."

So people should no longer be treated as consumers or users, but as participants.

If you've got a long-term medical condition or disability, for example, or you are an elderly person needing care at home, you might be given a personal budget to spend as you see fit. The rest of us might be taught to manage and monitor our own health. Even more radically - and going beyond anything ministers have yet mooted - parents might be allowed to educate their children partly at home. DIY schooling has always been an option but, at present, it's all or nothing. You can't tell the school that your child will be taking Thursday and Friday mornings off because you'd like to teach history yourself.

"Personalised services" sound ruinously expensive. But not if the bolder, more participatory version comes to pass. Think of the savings if we all took our own blood pressure, if more old people could be cared for in their own homes, or if thousands of parents taught their children for a day a week. Expect to hear more of these ideas in 2008.

Fear of free markets

The most pregnant thought towards the end of 2007 came from Michael Lind of the Washington-based think tank the New America Foundation. Writing in the Financial Times, he suggested globalisation was reviving the case for the conventional welfare state.

In the 1990s, politicians told voters in western democracies that welfare entitlements had to be slashed to make them competitive in global markets. Now, economic populism is a rising force, appealing to widespread anxiety about globalisation. It demands a return to trade protection, subsidies for vulnerable industries, more job security and tight restrictions on immigration. To prevent populists from exploiting anxieties about global free markets, politicians of all stripes will have to guarantee economic security and offer firm support for old-style welfare.

This, according to Lind, changes the political landscape. Since the 1970s, the centre has been occupied by what was once moderate economic conservatism - the Republicanism of Eisenhower and Nixon or the Toryism of Macmillan and Heath - and the right by economic libertarianism. The latter has collapsed. Voters are too frightened of the global free market to want any more liberalisation, a point illustrated by the result of the Australian general election, which (as I explained in early December) John Howard lost mainly because he made it easier for employers to sack their workers.

The advocates of the Third Way, after taking the centre ground, have, as Lind puts it, "awakened to find that they are now the extreme right".

As they used to say on the exam papers, discuss. Like many Washington pundits, Lind tends to write as though the universe ends at the Potomac. If he is right, how does he explain Nicolas Sarkozy's success in the French elections? Or - since the French usually settle things on the streets rather than at the ballot box - will the new president find himself unable to implement his reforms?

With Sarkozy being tested in France, presidential elections proceeding in the US, and Brown (we must hope) elaborating his vision for Britain, 2008 should provide ample evidence both for and against Lind's thesis.

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