EXCLUSIVE: Breaking the grip of the 'database state'

Friday, February 27, 2009

It's time to make local service providers accountable to citizens and parliament, not to the government of the day, says Sam Talbot Rice

If the past 12 years have taught us anything it is that vast spending increases coupled with centralised command and control-style management do not achieve improvements proportionate to the cost nor do they bring greater satisfaction among taxpayers.

After all, we can hardly be satisfied with a system that has given us falling productivity in the health service, despite a doubling in the NHS annual budget. Or with a school system that costs £50bn a year but leaves one in five 11-year-olds without basic literacy and numeracy skills. Meanwhile our police, suffocating under the weight of red tape, spend the equivalent of fewer than two hours per 12-hour shift on patrol.

A Centre for Policy Studies report 'Freedom for Public Services', examines the delivery structures in health, education, policing and local government and calls for the current spider's web of centrally imposed targets, regulations, quangos and guidance to be replaced with a system of proper local and Parliamentary accountability.

Authors William Mason and Jonathan McMahon argue that we need to transfer accountability for, and control of, public services to the local level – allowing the professionals to do their jobs and local communities to hold them properly accountable through the ballot box. Clearly, there still needs to be a system of rigorous and expert central government inspection, not least in providing comparative information for taxpayers. But that system should be accountable to Parliament, rather than the government of the day. In so doing, they conservatively estimate potential savings to be £15bn a year.

Of course we should not be under any illusion about the difficulty of shifting our political culture away from central control. After all, whenever a crisis breaks, ministers are hauled onto the Today programme or to the dispatch box to be asked what they are going to do about it.

Notwithstanding the difficulties of reform, the report outlines the key principles needed to wean us off our centralising drip:
• Decisions made by professionals on the spot tend to be better than those mandated from afar
• Central government targets should be reduced, as should central involvement in the provision of local services
• The nature of public sector regulation should be reversed so that it addresses the causes of problems rather than regulating the consequences of failure
• Barriers to entry in public service provision should be reduced so that competition fosters innovation
• Local citizens should have the information and ability to challenge those who provide public services.

So far, we have heard the language of personalisation of public services, but have not seen the reality. Rather than devolving power and choice, ministers have set upon a course of transformational government that seeks to collect, in the words of their adviser, "a deep truth about the citizen based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs and rights". This path to a database state is both hugely expensive and liable to spectacular breaches of security. It is also wrong in principle, as it tips the balance of power between state and citizen overwhelmingly towards the former.

If we are going to move into what David Cameron has termed the post-bureaucratic age we will need to think not just in terms of the percentage of GDP spent by the state, but also about the fundamental balance in the relationships of government, the individual, communities and businesses.

The idea that Whitehall knows best has been under attack for many years, but it is only now that we have the tools to achieve the much-promised, but rarely delivered, decentralisation of power. Indeed, true localism – with proper local accountability – will only be possible if voters have access to the information, whether it is crime maps or hospital infection rates, they need to make meaningful choices and hold those in power to account.

Sam Talbot Rice is research director at the Centre for Policy Studies