Accountability (public sector newspeak version) is complexity.

Scrutiny

“Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.” Franz Kafka, The Castle

Accountability in public services matters and probably matter more than accountability in traded private services. As consumers we do not get much choice in who provides our refuse collection service, our health care, our social services and much else besides - short of migration, that is.

I don't know about you but I've a suspicion that accountability is talked about more and made more complicated than it needs to be, and because of this the extent to which public services - and servants - are accountable is compromised. You only need look at the contortions engaged in by NHS grandees in avoiding personal accountability for services under their direction, to know there's a problem. And just so you know, the same goes for local councils, for the MoD and for services such as prisons and courts.

Part of this lies in the perversion of accountability as a concept. Here's a paragraph from an interview with academic, Toby Lowe, who specialises in public sector management. I present it in two halves so you can appreciate the point I'm making:

True accountability is not about counting but asking people to give an account of their actions as part of a dialogue in which they explain the decisions they have taken in the specific context they are working in.

This is a pretty good description of accountability and something that happens too infrequently and, when it does, very badly. You only need sit in a typical local council scrutiny committee or watch MPs parade their prejudgements at a select committee to appreciate the problem with our process of holding public servants to account for "...the decisions they have taken in the specific context they are working in."

Lowe chooses, however, to complicate the simplicity of "what did you do, give us the basis for that decision, how did you plan to assess whether your decision was right, what was the review process" - straightforward scrutiny - by producing an elaborate and extended further qualification of accountability:

It’s also not just about the traditional hierarchical relationship. There are multiple accountable relationships. Your peers could ask you to account for your decisions, as could a member of the public who is receiving the service – or an ombudsman or professional body. The main thing is that real accountability involves a conversation.

For sure we're broadly accountable in all these ways (to a greater or lesser extent) but the essence of public sector accountability is that services are accountable, through their representatives, to the public. It's not that, in an purely administrative context, there aren't other relationships involving accountability but that if you don't understand how accountability in the relationship with a colleague is less important than accountability to the public you serve then you've missed - and I suspect Toby Lowe has - the whole point of public accountability.

The problem here is that accountability becomes just a management tool - Lowe talks about 'learning' and 'autonomy' but at no point recognises the central requirement that the service is, first and foremost, accountable to the public. The process becomes personal or management development rather than accountability:

The learning element in particular requires a radical rethink. How within an organisation do you create safe spaces for learning and reflection, where people can talk openly about errors and uncertainty with their peers?

Probably a good thing but we need a further step - if we are to base service delivery on greater autonomy (again probably a good thing) then those delivering the service have to "give account of their decisions" in a place and a manner that allows those to whom they are accountable to make a judgement as to the effectiveness, the ethics and the efficiency of those decisions. Simply saying "it's complicated" strikes me as a cop out and merely provides a screen behind which those who should be accountable are able to hide.

We have a variety of problems with public accountability, from the distance between the theoretical decision-makers and the actual service through to the use of appointed boards to oversee provision without providing adequate space for any real scrutiny of the service's ethics, behaviour, decisions, and effectiveness. This is made worse by the conflation between 'accountability' within the decision-making process (to colleagues, managers and so forth) and real accountability to the public. This not only provides cover for politicians but also allows senior management to bury their responsibility and accountability in a confusing and complicated set of management processes.

Accountability is not complicated. In the private sector, if I don't like the service I get from one supermarket, I can complain and get satisfaction or exercise consumer sovereignty - make the supermarket accountable - by taking my shopping elsewhere. We don't get this option with public services and this is doubly true for vulnerable groups like the ill, the disabled and the homeless. And right now the effectiveness or otherwise of these services - their accountability - is either lost to the point of non-existence in Kafkaesque bureaucracy or else is under the direction of badly chaired, poorly briefed and overly partisan political scrutiny processes. Changing this, not creating "safe spaces for learning and reflection", is what we need but that would require political leaderships and senior managers to accept real accountability and the responsibilities that go with it.

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Council's haven't enough cash to look after the roads we've got. Why adopt more?

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There's a set of reasons for Council highway departments 'adopting' new highway. Partly this is because, if the developer does the work to standard, they have no choice and partly it's because we seem incapable of creating any means of managing highway that doesn't involve the very inefficient process of collecting taxes in one place and setting budgets in another.

The roads on new estates - the one's thrown up by the big housebuilders - aren't serving the wider public. They are there specifically and absolutely for the benefit of the people who buy the houses on that estate. Yet our system believes that looking after those roads should be a duty for the local council rather than a sensible responsibility for the residents.

Now think about looking after those roads. And then read this:

What would our neighborhoods look like if we voluntarily reduced the amount of infrastructure? This isn’t a purely academic question. As municipal, state, and federal budgets get squeezed there’s going to be a point at which we have no choice but to stop building new roads and even reduce the amount of maintenance on the roads we already have. We could approach this situation with dread and a sense of loss, or we could embrace it as an opportunity to get a better quality of life for a whole lot less money.

This isn't about not filling in potholes nor is it about Council's not taking responsibility for what we might call the "strategic road network". Rather it's about whether you could simply hand over the responsibility for looking after estate roads to the beneficiaries - the people who own the properties and who live on the estate.

John Sanphillippo, who wrote the quote above, is an American (and we should recognise that the system over there is a little different) but he makes a pretty convincing case for us reconsidering how we design, build and manage local roads - the ones that do nothing other than take folk from the strategic network to their houses. And Sanphillippo makes the point that we'd build roads rather differently if we were responsible for their upkeep - here he is describing a new development with what we in the UK would call 'adopted highway':

What does all that paving really do for the neighborhood? You could land an Airbus A380 on this much tarmac. But what’s the point? You can be quite sure that when these roads become cracked and potholed the wealthy well-connected residents of these grand homes will mobilize and bang heads at the public works department. Somehow the government will be made to absorb the expense of repaving things even if the (very high) property taxes from these specific homes doesn’t come close to covering the real cost of maintenance. Would these home owners accept a different standard if they were directly responsible for maintaining their own road?

And it would be perfectly possible for the owners of those properties to collectively own and manage the road network serving the estate. If we are to change the relationship between citizen and government and to reconfigure public services, one of the things we have to do is ask whether some of the things we do actually are public services - the owning and managing of estate roads might just be one of the things that has to go.

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Participants or customers - the people and public services

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I was prompted to thing about these two different relationships by the publication of the "Smart Cites Health and Wellbeing Discussion Draft" by some folk called the "Smart Cities - Health and Wellbeing, Leeds Task and Finish Group" who are, it seems part of the wider "Smart Cities Forum". First lets get the biggest problem out of the way.

We recommend that we rapidly explore and then build city scale facilitated networks, focused equally on well-being and health, the terms of reference for the networks being clearly established to identify and deliver the benefits of smart technology – for all parts of our community applying the concept of Solution Shops & Value added Services, within the boundaries of new institutional thinking which aligns interest. 

Now forgive me if I'm being a bit thick but this recommendation is simply gibberish. I mean what is a "city scale facilitated network" and, more to the point, what on God's earth are "Solution Shops". Now I'm sure the folk who wrote the report - and the names of the guilty are listed (including not just one but two 'Smart Cities Policy Leads' from the Department of Business, Industry and Science - and they say there's no scope for savings) - meant well in writing their jargon-ridden, barely-comprehensible 'summary' but they have revealed again that public service design is an echo chamber that completely fails in the aim of getting the wider public involved in the 'co-production' of those services.

During the subsequent interaction on Twitter, one participant provided a link to the 'Our Cities Network' and pointed out that in Rio de Janerio over 150,000 people are involved in this network. Which is fine until you appreciate that the population of greater Rio is over 13 million (and within the old city limits, some 6 million) meaning that this brilliant participation only engages between 0.1% and 0.2% of the populace.  Nearly everyone in Rio isn't part of the network, aren't part of the in-crowd who:

...(put) pressure on decision-makers, contribute their ideas and share their talents in order to build cities that are more inclusive, sustainable, creative, collective and that are always becoming better places to live.

The assumption here - and it is a common one - is that greater levels of 'participation' result in better policy-making. Those defending the 'Our Cities Network' will, I don't doubt, observe that the 0.1% participation is better than the 0.01% participation before the initiative. But is it? I'm making a guess here but probably a safe one - the members of the 'Our Cities Network' are better educated, older, wealthier and more likely to work in public service, academia or the 'creative industries' (plus those who make a living from selling things to the other members of the network). The demographic profile of those participating is completely different from that of the City as a whole. So the process of participation becomes, rather than 'co-production', an extension of the existing echo-chamber around public policy. We get policies that these middle-class people want themselves or think that poor people (who aren't in the network) might want.

The second aspect of participation is around the exploiting of data - the Smart Cities work stands and falls on the government permitting this:

We recommend the government considers changes to data legislation to enable appropriate data sharing and linkage between different government departments, health and social care bodies and statutory agencies based on more proactive and explicit consent models.

This is a long way from government acting through consent and with the willing participation of the public it serves. More to the point is raises some more questions about the use of 'Big Data' in designing public interventions. Now this isn't just about Vince-Wayne Mitchell's research into horoscopes but also reflects the fact that, just as the participation in Rio seems good but isn't, the data is not structured - there's just a lot of it. By way of illustration we have Boston's 'Street Bump' app which used a smart phone app to identify damage to road surfaces in the city - loads and loads of data all to be crunched thereby allowing the City Council to respond better. What could go wrong?

“Why?” Jake asked the audience gathered in BAM’s Harvey Theater. Why were there more potholes in rich areas? A few answers came from the crowd. Someone suggested different traffic patterns. Then the right answer came: wealthy people were far more likely to own smart phones and to use the Street Bump app. Where they drove, potholes were found; where they didn’t travel, potholes went unnoted.

Just because you have lots of data doesn't mean you have better information, it just means you have lots of data. The health and social care system generates lots of data. But it's data about old people and ill people and most of us aren't old or ill right now. Just as the liver doctor thinks liver disease is a massive problem because that's all he sees, the use of Big Data in health runs the risks of policy-decisions about all-population health or wellbeing issues being determined by analysing only the part of the population who are ill or old (or, indeed, ill and old).

So the use of modern technology to create 'facilitated networks' and manipulate 'Big Data' doesn't actually extend participation even if the process is designed (as with the Our Cities Network) with the specific aim of securing participation. To use a local, mundane example in Bradford - for the current consultation on budget options I was told officers were 'pleased' that 30 people had turned out to a public meeting in Bingley. It's not that I think these processes are without value but they are the city level equivalent of a focus group and should be treated as such. The problem is that people 'participating' are led to believe that their 'engagement' means they can influence the policy-decisions being considered. No focus group participant knows anything other than they get £20 of M&S vouchers in exchange for an hour or so chatting with a dozen others about something.

The real point here is that the population are not participants in public service delivery let alone 'co-producers' - they are customers and see little difference between the behaviour of the council or government department and any of the many large private businesses they buy from. We pay our local taxes and we get our bins emptied, the litter picked up and the potholes fixed. We pay taxes and receive education for our children and a health service when we're ill. We do not consider ourselves participants in the provision or delivery of these services - we are customers of those services.

If you want people to participate in creating, designing and delivering public services then you have firstly to do so at the scale of their understanding (this isn't to dismiss them but to observe that they aren't usually interested beyond securing what they need or want - and who's to argue with that). This means working as close to the individual level as you can.

Secondly people have to be in charge. Not in the 'empowering communities' manner but really in charge. The problem is that most people don't want to be 'in charge' of bins or schools or doctors any more than they want to be 'in charge' of the supermarket, the electricity board or the train company. What we want is for those services to work for us, to allow us to have what we need (and most of what we want) without us having to fuss and bother about it. And most of the time public services do just that and we are happy to carry on being a customer.

If we want to fuss about how to use smart technologies to get people better services that's great. But it isn't about getting more participation, it's about customer service, developing and extending the services we provide and behaving a lot more like Waitrose and a lot less like old-fashioned public agencies.  This means changing how we speak - dropping the management babble and academic over-elaboration, using short sentences, words with fewer syllables and phrases that folk might have a fighting chance of understanding. Imagine if the John Lewis Christmas ad was written by public sector professionals!

And we need to start treating the public as consumers - asking them (with real research using proper samples and good design not a self-selected audience in a draughty community centre) what they want and what it should look like. Rather than trying to pretend we can create some sort of on-line agora - bear in mind the demos of ancient Athens was only about 30,000 at most - we should build a relationship with the audiences we serve using the communications techniques that successful big consumer-focused businesses use.

In the end most people, in the manner of Ms Garbo, just want to be left alone. They have no interest in being 'consulted', in 'empowerment' or in 'participation'. What they want - and what we should try to give them - is high quality services that meet their needs and go some way to satisfying their wants. Emptying someone's rubbish bin or treating their bad back isn't a question of ideology but one of efficiency and effectiveness. Instead what government fusses about is variously saving the planet, reordering society, scaring the socks off people and coming up with new and innovative ways to waste the money people hand over in taxes. Instead of trying to get people participating when they really don't want to participate, we should should be doing the much simpler task of asking - through good research - what people want and setting about giving them just that.

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In which I agree a little bit with Owen Jones

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It's OK folks, I've not turned overnight - as if in some Kafka-esque horror - into a socialist. But I think that Owen Jones, Boy Socialist has a point when he talks about the elite and what the Americans would call 'corporate welfare':

Who are the real scroungers? Free-marketeers decry 'big government' yet the City and big business benefit hugely from the state – from bailouts to the billions made from privatisation. Socialism does exist in Britain – but only for the rich

Now our youthful leftie then goes on to spoil his argument a little by missing out on some of the corporate welfare but his points have some merit. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that Owen's criticism of what he calls 'privatisation' also has merits.

The point however relates to a different cause than Owen suggests and the solution lies in less socialism not more socialism. The problem with what Owen calls privatisation is that it is nothing of the sort. Privatisation involves taking a state-owned monopoly and placing it - usually through sale - into an open market environment. We did this with telephones, gas, electricity and water with considerable success (although the state kept its fingers in the pie by fixing all these markets in one way or another - mostly to the benefit of businesses rather than consumers).

Issuing contracts to run trains on a state-owned rail network is not privatisation. Nor is outsourcing the collection of municipal waste or the commissioning of hernia operations. This is just the state opting to buy rather than do itself - for it to be true privatisation you have to change the customer - to have to have a system where consumers make choices in a free (or relatively free) market.

However, to return to Owen Jones, he is wrong when he argues that big business rejects 'statism' but right when he points to the benefits that the grandees of big business get from big government. The switch to a smaller state with more of what we call 'public services' delivered through the market simply doesn't suit those powerful businesses that deliver those public services on contract. Or indeed the equally large businesses that fund those businesses allowing them to compete for large public contracts.

However, the problem here isn't just the fact that public services are outsourced but that the market is, mostly because of regulation and legislation, seriously constrained. Owen points to the big public services contractors like Serco, G4S, Atos and Capita and makes reference to the 'Big Four' accountancy firms. What he describes here is a marketplace constrained by the scale of the contracts and by the specification of those contracts. While the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would partly open this market - and some of the regulations, its main outcome for public services would be opening up EU 'markets' to large US contractors (and vice versa).

The problem is that, so long as people like Owen insist that services are delivered through a planned system rather than a market, the producers - whether state employed management or the managers in private contractors - will fix the system in their own interests rather than in the interests of the consumer. And while there are areas - basic scientific and medical research, for example - where only the state will invest, in areas where a market can operate there will be more investment under capitalism than in a state-directed monopoly.

Owen Jones is right to identify corporate welfare as a problem but completely wrong in offering a 'solution' that merely transfers the self-interest to the managers of state enterprises. If Owen wants real change he needs a system where the self-interest is transferred to the consumer of the service - you and me, the public. And this system - in most circumstances - is called a free market.

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Why don't people complain about bad public services?

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Perhaps it's the futility of the exercise?

Nearly half of people who complained about problems with a public service in the past year felt their complaint was ignored, according to new research from Which?

The research also found that a third of people who experienced problems with public services did not complain, with most saying it was not worth the effort. Of those that did complain, 39% said they were unhappy with the outcome.

I don't know about my councillor colleagues but these findings are something of a damning statement about our councils' services (not to mention other public agencies services). Not that we get stuff wrong and generate complaints but that the public - or a whole lot of them - don't think complaining is worth while and, when they do complain, the response from the offending public service isn't good enough.

We spend a lot of time (well I don't but lots of officers and councillors do) pontificating about 'public sector ethos' and sneeringly referring to the private sector as a place of wickedness and ethical inadequacy. What this Which survey tells us is that all this grand talk of public sector moral superiority is just a load of wibble when is comes to the very basics of service.

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On national wage deals...

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Up here in the relatively less well paid North the pay of the teacher, the nurse and the social worker - set by national collective bargaining or through a national pay body - is a good wage. In truth a better than good wage compared to average earnings in the North's private sector.

The opposite is true for London.

Which is why we should welcome this:

Foundation trusts are showing an unprecedented willingness to publicly consider moving away from nationally negotiated staff terms and conditions.

Of course the unions don't like it:

In April, the Royal College of Nursing passed a motion allowing it to ballot for industrial action if an employer attempted to impose any proposal “which challenges the nationally agreed pay agreement”.

But then we don't run our health services for the benefit of those employed by those services do we?

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Er...no. Competitive markets do not come from government managing those markets.

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History tells us that in this country we tend to opt for a form of ‘pro-competitive disengagement’, removing those barriers and letting ‘market forces’ dictate. Instead, we should introduce a set of policy instruments that can both facilitate the provision of the services our communities really need, and contribute to the health of our local economies.

Apparently.

The author also believes that:

...we see policy initiatives that will disincentivise these types of organisations from entering the market. Payment by results and outcome based commissioning are examples.

Clearly this bloke has little substantive grasp of how business works - you do something for me and I pay you.  In the private sector it's all payment by results you know! But no, our friend believes that markets must be managed:

If public sector reform is to produce stable and genuinely competitive markets for local public services, such that result in quality public services, the government must create and implement an industrial policy for the sector. Such a policy would enable central and local government to make strategic interventions to manage markets, the demand and supply side, rather than simply removing barriers to entry.

So "genuinely competitive markets" come about because of government intervention? What nonsense!

And these people are not only given space at CLES but are paid to advise local councils - save us!

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UK Uncut's campaign is offensive, immoral and wrong

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Today I have been sorely tried indeed. Not, dear reader, as a result of problems with the weather – we can’t really get cross with nature however annoying she may be and however futile our hubristic pretence of control. No, my irritation has been sparked by UK Uncut and their offensive, immoral and selfish mission to:

…become part of an army of citizen volunteers determined to make wealthy tax avoiders pay.

The basic premise of this campaign is that individuals and businesses that have done nothing wrong, have broken no laws and, in reality, contribute enormously to the betterment of our nation must be targeted because they are “tax dodgers”.

Alright, I hear you, how can you describe these protests as ‘offensive’ and ‘immoral’ – surely folk have a right to protest? Well let me explain a little.

The first thing to observe is that governments determine the nature and level of taxation not businesses or individuals – however wealthy or successful. Any complex tax system – and dear old Gordon made ours among the most complicated – contains contradictions, loopholes and provisions that can be used to reduce tax liability. The businesses and individuals being attacked by UK Uncut are not responsible for the problem (assuming we see it as a problem) – the British Government is responsible. And let’s remember that, for the arrangements criticised in Vodaphone and Sir Philip Green’s case, it was a Labour Government.

Which brings us to the morality of all this. Rightly or wrongly, the UK Government has settled the tax affairs of these organisations and individuals for the money to which UK Uncut refer. We may feel that not enough tax has been paid but it would be wrong – unjust, to use the sort of language beloved of protesting folk – to retrospectively change the tax treatment.

A second problem with UK Uncut’s morality is their belief that it is right for them to demand other people hand over more money to the government – to, in effect, demand money with menaces. Not, I might add, to argue that government should change the rules on which we are all taxed but to demand specific extra taxes from identified individual people and businesses. Simply because UK Uncut has decided that these people did not pay enough. Not only are such demands offensive they are again immoral – attempts to use mob violence to force voluntary payments from individuals is a negation of liberty.

Finally, we should remind ourselves of the selfishness these protests represent – that uniquely smug selfishness we associate with some on the left. Some kind of magic garden filled with money trees has been identified – look there at those rich people, they have money. Take it off them and, you’ve guessed it, give it to us. Or we will disrupt you business – and the lives of ordinary folk who just want to do a bit of Christmas shopping. As Labour blogger, Luke Bozier put it:

No group of protestors has the right close down a store which is operating legally. It's illegal and wrong to walk into a store and stop it from carrying out its legitimate business. Who on earth do UK Uncut think they are to stop people from using popular shops like Topshop and Marks & Spencer? The customers and staff are adversely affected, the company loses money from the sales lost and ultimately the state suffers from a reduced tax receipt.

And all to preserve whole floors of policy officers, rooms full of equalities advisors, armies of training officers, HR consultants and cabinet support teams. To carry on taxing ordinary – and some creative and extraordinary people – to penury so as to maintain a bloated, arrogant and ineffective state system. A system where millions are spent on a CCTV system that can’t identify the thugs who hammered my son. Where we double the spending on schools and get more semi-literates. And where we pour money into the bottomless pit of the NHS and get a service-free, ignorant and nannying health system that sees us less healthy and shorter-lived compared to our near neighbours.

The Big State has failed. It’s not just the need to reduce spending because of the deficit – although that’s to be sorted. It’s that the model – the tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend – does not deliver what we want; good services. We should stop pretending that our public services are – in any respect –comparable in service quality to the typical standards in the private sector. And we should also stop pretending that those public services offer value-for-money – compared to the private sector they are expensive, rules-bound and ineffective.

So get off your high horses UK Uncut – your campaign is immoral and your objectives would condemn our nation to further decline, higher unemployment, poorer services and a depressed, cowed public. Or at least the ones who can’t plan their escape!

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How to do it George!

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From former NZ Minister, Maurice McTigue:

When we started this process with the Department of Transportation, it had 5,600 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the Forest Service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished, it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28,000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works, and ended up being the only employee. In the latter case, most of what the department did was construction and engineering, and there are plenty of people who can do that without government involvement. And if you say to me, “But you killed all those jobs!”—well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn—on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.

It's been done before. What's stopping you?