When the mountain keeps moving, is it time to get personal?

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Making services more flexible to meet local needs is one way of tackling inequality, says Duncan Hiscock. But can it bridge the north-south divide?

You know the feeling – you're driving towards a mountain but the mountain doesn't seem to get any closer.

Reducing the north-south divide can sometimes seem a bit like that from the perspective of the North East. The region's public services and local authorities are actually moving along at a good pace, but it still seems like the mountain is as far away as ever.

If performance statistics are anything to go by, the North East's public services are doing a pretty good job. The Audit Commission's comprehensive performance assessment awarded 10 out of 12 local authorities in the North East the maximum four stars and said they are improving well or strongly, while the Healthcare Commission rates 39 per cent of NHS Trusts in the region as excellent, compared to 26 per cent nationwide. And the region has posted a steady improvement in everything from life expectancy to crime statistics.

Yet while there are some promising cases where local outcomes are gaining ground on the national average – for example, last year's GCSE results show that pupils in the North East are doing better every year – in many cases the gap in outcomes with other English regions has refused to disappear.

There appears to be a paradox – if the region's public services are performing so well, why aren't they closing the gap? One persuasive argument is that as fast as they are travelling, the mountain is moving away from them – the same improvement is visible in public services across the country, usually at roughly the same tempo. If public services are still largely centralised and one-size-fits-all, then perhaps it's no surprise that they tend to move in the same direction at the same speed.

The question is whether more local, more personalised services might help to close the gap. Until recently, all three main parties spoke enthusiastically about localism and personalisation. With the credit crunch biting, such language has become more muted, but it is unlikely to disappear entirely. In fact in some areas it is being argued that more local, more personalised services are needed now more than ever. Look at welfare, where the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, James Purnell, speaks of the need for a triple devolution – to providers, communities and individuals – to create a more effective and responsive system. Refusing to be put off reform by the economic downturn, Purnell argues that personalised conditionality and support is exactly what is required for those who are furthest from finding work and to ensure that no one is written off.

Is the same true in other sectors? If we are concerned about inequality and if we want our public services to support people through the economic downturn and come out stronger, are localism and personalisation part of the solution? And what does that mean in practice? These questions are being investigated by ippr north's Commission on Public Sector Reform in the North East, the first such commission to be based in the region.

In its early discussions, the commission has heard two contrasting stereotypes of the North East. One portrays it as a bit more old-fashioned, comfortable with "traditional" public services and cautious of the disruption that further large-scale reforms might cause. The other image, by contrast, says that the region is poorly served by centralised public services and is keen to adapt its public services to better suit the local population.

The North East thus presents an interesting test bed to try to understand what elements of the rhetoric around localism and personalisation actually offer something useful. It is also a region in which a number of initiatives are already under way, with a rich seam of experiences and opinions to mine.

These should help us to understand when personalisation goes beyond being a policy-making buzzword into something that genuinely improves the lives of local people.

They should also provide some clues as to where services should be most flexible towards local needs and where the focus should be on providing a standardised, universal service to all.

The commission has published a call for evidence to draw in local opinions on what works and what doesn't when we want to localise and personalise our public services. What problems relating to health, education, criminal justice and welfare could be dealt with more effectively if greater power was exercised by local people? What powers should be devolved to the local level, and to whom? How would you go about redesigning services to make them more genuinely citizen-centred and tailored to the needs of the individual? And are there any potential downsides to decentralising power to the local and personal level? Might this not lead to unacceptable variations in standards, for example?

Returning to that mountain in the distance, the commission's findings should help policymakers both in the North East and nationally to decide what kind of transport is going to help the region travel faster. Should we keep things the way they are and just put more petrol in the tank, or do we need to adapt the vehicle to suit its passengers?

Duncan Hiscock is a senior research fellow at ippr north and author of Prospects For More Local, More Personalised Services, a discussion paper published by ippr north's Commission on Public Sector Reform in the North East. It is available free at www.ippr.org/north