Any parent is familiar with the cry: “It’s not fair.” To which parents used to reply (or at least mine did), “Life isn’t fair.” I guess they stopped doing that years ago – preferring, I suppose, to enter into “dialogue” with the child – and that might explain why new Labour has got itself into a tangle over public services. Whether it’s social housing, school places, police time or health service treatment, large sections of the population believe there is something unfair about how these goods are allocated. For a few months, Gordon Brown can still their dissatisfaction by announcing appointments, new advisers and policy reviews, but then, I’m afraid, everyone will start moaning again.
New Labour’s approach to public services has been to reform them so that they offer more choice, more personal service and more efficiency. It has neglected to talk about fairness or, if you want to use a more sophisticated word, equity. That’s why people are always complaining, despite ministers quoting statistics to prove that everything is getting better. They don’t understand why the NHS is denying them a particular drug or treatment. Or why they can’t get their child into a decent school. Or why they can’t get a council house but an asylum-seeker can. Or why the police won’t investigate who burgled their house, but will find time to prosecute them for driving a few miles over the speed limit.
All these grouses might be put down to ignorance, prejudice and sheer pig-headed selfishness, failings that the Sun encourages among the working classes and the Mail among the middle classes. But I suspect the government must take some of the blame for failing to articulate the idea that public services exist for something other than personal gratification. It keeps telling people about their “rights”, but doesn’t sufficiently explain that public services also have obligations to others. Nor does it engage them with developing the procedures that are needed to discharge those wide obligations.
Efficiency, choice and personal service are all jolly good things, but they are not the same as fairness. Indeed, they may sometimes come into conflict with each other. It’s not efficient to use medical resources on the very old – the inputs are quite disproportionate to the extra years of active or sentient life gained – but most people feel it would be unfair to deny them. It is efficient to target welfare at lone-parent families – because the savings on keeping children out of poverty and delinquency are potentially enormous – but couples with children, to say nothing of the childless, might think that’s unfair to them.
If you offer parents a choice of schools, some won’t get what they want, and they will perceive the outcome as unfair. Very often it is, because they weren’t as well informed as the successful parents about the rules of the game. If you try to solve the problem by creating enough spare school places to accommodate everybody’s choice, the public sector increases unused capacity (waste) and becomes, by conventional measures, less efficient. Which, you might say, would again be unfair to taxpayers who don’t have children.
As Nick Pearce, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, argued recently in the institute’s journal (Public Policy Research, vol 14, issue 1, May-June 2007), politicians now focus so heavily on outcomes that they neglect these issues of fairness. They strive for personalised services, giving “consumers”, as we must now call them, the same attention for their individual needs as they might get in the private sector. Officials who adhere inflexibly to the rule book are denigrated. Yet the rule book existed for good reasons. It was designed to ensure that people were treated equitably, consistently and impartially – in short, fairly. The more we allow discretion to officials in how they deal with the particulars of each case, the more we run the risks (I quote Pearce) of “arbitrariness, bias or inequality” – in short, unfairness.
For several reasons, the old, rule-bound approach to providing public services had to die. People lead more complex lives, with more diverse aspirations. They come from a greater variety of cultural backgrounds. Their consumption of privately provided goods is no longer limited to a few, standardised products.
Governments have tried to adapt by satisfying the wishes of these more sophisticated consumers. But, as Pearce argues, “we should resist the idea that maximising satisfaction, utility or happiness . . . should be the overarching aim of public policy”. That is the role of the private sector and, if the public sector is to follow the same path, it may as well be privatised, as the right proposes, with poor people getting vouchers to “buy” basic services.
To survive, public services need to reconnect themselves to ideas of fairness, equity and justice. And to regain public confidence, they need to pay as much attention to how they do things as to what they do.
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