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GORDON BROWN may seem to do little else these days than strive to save the economy (and the world), but Labour spent its first decade in power trying to rescue the public services. On March 10th the prime minister returned to that theme with a newish-sounding idea: handing over more information, and thus power, to the users of these services. He proffered a vision in which patients choosing a family doctor or parents looking for child care could benefit from the same kinds of reviews and ratings that are now available for books and other products on internet sites like Amazon.
Yet just as Mr Brown has become preoccupied by the economy, so too has the public (see chart). Anxieties about health and education have fallen markedly while economic worries have vaulted. Despite all the prime minister’s efforts to blunt the recession, most people are giving him no credit and Labour is well behind the Conservatives in the polls. The prime minister’s hope is that by the time of the next election, due no later than June 2010, people will be paying more attention to public services again, traditionally a strong point for Labour, and listening not just to what it has done but also to what it can offer.
Mr Brown’s emphasis on empowering the users of public services through information is rather different from that of Tony Blair. The former prime minister came to endorse the view that greater choice and competition were essential to improve the public services. Mr Brown may invoke the idea of choice, but there is no longer the same drive from Number 10 to open up the public services to the invigorating winds of competition.
That makes Mr Brown’s analogy with reviews on Amazon and the like beside the point. Voice and choice make a potent partnership where informed consumers can choose between different suppliers. Voice without genuine choice, by contrast, is a feeble thing, offering little more than echo chambers for frustrated complaints by users facing monopoly public providers. This is true whether they are commuters on London’s Tube or parents trying to get their children into a half-decent state school.
The prime minister’s tame big idea for the public services—set out in a policy paper called “Working Together”—was the more disappointing because he made an important point in acknowledging that the financial crisis called for a fundamental reappraisal of the role of the state. What Mr Brown pretentiously called Labour’s “settlement of 1997”—its efforts to bridge the gap between the state and the markets through public-private partnerships—was “inadequate” because markets themselves needed more supervision. But he studiously ignored the elephant in the room: the damage dealt to the public finances by the recession and the banking bail-out, exacerbated by his persistent budget deficits in the good years gone by.
The likely hit was set out on March 6th in some gloomy figures from the International Monetary Fund in the run-up to the G20 summit Mr Brown is hosting in London on April 2nd. The IMF estimates that government debt will shoot up in Britain from 44% of GDP in 2007 to 69% in 2010. This increase of 25 percentage points will be bigger than that for most of the advanced G20 economies and compares with a rise of 17 percentage points predicted by the Treasury last November. And if the recession proves more severe and the recovery more anaemic than expected, the eventual outcome could be even worse.
What this heralds is a clampdown on government spending that will reshape the public services far more fundamentally than the prime minister’s innocuous reform. So much money has been thrown at them for so long without a commensurate improvement in what they do that a squeeze is overdue. A report from PWC, an accountancy firm, on March 10th suggested that a freeze on spending in real terms for the three years to 2013-14, together with big tax increases, would be necessary, and came up with ideas for making the public sector more efficient.
Mr Brown’s musings on the role of the state failed to tackle the crucial issue of how health, education and the like will cope with austerity. But nor have the Conservatives worked out what to do with them, let alone how much they should confide in the public about the hard times that lie ahead. One thing is certain: whoever wins the next election will dish out far harsher treatment to the public services than inviting comments on the web.
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