Foreword
Times of profound change are often the catalyst for fundamental revaluations in how we think and act.
The present financial crisis is changing the way governments serve the public: forcing us to reflect anew on the role of the state in a truly global age.
Each generation has had to reconfigure the relationship between government, market, community and individual. For the last century the debate has been about where the scope of one ends and the domain of the next begins; assuming always that if there were to be more markets there would be less state and if there were to be more state there would be less market. So for years the debate raged between nationalisation and privatisation; between regulation and deregulation; between those who said a private sector working inefficiently was better than a public sector working well and vice versa.
In 1997 we started to change the terms of the debate, arguing that the battle for territory between state and market was sterile, that we could build public and private partnerships that worked together for the common good. Our insight then was that we could harness the dynamism and enterprise of markets in the service of public needs. We believed - and still do - that enterprise and social justice could go hand in hand.
But it has become ever clearer that the settlement of 1997 is now inadequate for the challenges we face. Twelve years on, we have seen the biggest global financial market failure in history. But while financial markets need more supervision, government must also transfer more power to parents, pupils and patients. Both state and market must be underpinned by the ethics of opportunity and responsibility, and thus the question is not whether markets tame government or vice versa: the question is how we tame both with an ethic of fairness and duty.
What matters is not big or small government, but whether it values opportunity, responsibility from all, and fairness for all. That is why renewed and reformed public services are the key to strong communities and a more socially mobile society.
What follows are two challenges: how do we ensure that the teachers, doctors and nurses who deliver public services can respond in new and innovative ways to the diverse personal needs of those they serve?
And how can we ensure that the quality, sense of personal touch, and responsiveness that exists in the best of public and private sector practices is available to all users of public services?
Our principles for reform are clear.
We will put people first by placing power in the hands of those who use our public services. This will mean personalised services and greater choice - with personal budgets helping people choose the specific care they most need, education and training tailored to the needs of individuals, police services that respond to local priorities set in monthly neighbourhood beat meetings rather than national targets.
Underpinning all this will be an information revolution to enable parents, patients and citizens to share information and experiences on the performance of schools, hospitals and police forces. For I believe government has been much too slow to make use of the enormous democratising power of information. People take it for granted that they will access other people’s reviews and ratings before buying something on e-bay or Amazon, and yet we do not yet have systematic access to other people’s experiences when choosing a GP practice or nursery. We have clearly got the balance wrong when online businesses have higher standards of transparency than the public services we pay for and support.
In this instance, knowledge is power. When we give people knowledge about their public services, we give them power over them; power to shape and even transform them. We are ushering in a new world of accountability in which parents, patients and local communities shape the services they receive, ensuring all our public services respond not simply to the hand of government, but to the voice of local people.
We will recruit the brightest and best into our public services - for instance, with a new fast track teacher training scheme, taking six months instead of a year to bring career switchers into the teaching profession. And we will grasp the opportunity to put teachers, doctors, nurses and the police back at the heart of our public service mission, by providing them with new opportunities to run services in return for the greater accountability and responsiveness that we seek. The police will have less red tape, good schools will have even more autonomy, and the Commission we are establishing today to look at the future of nursing and midwifery will ensure that all our plans for the future of the NHS reflect the voice of our front-line staff. Moving from good to great public services can only be achieved by Whitehall letting go and empowering staff to shape local provision to meet local needs and priorities.
Service by service what does this all mean?
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We will make sure that GPs are available when you want them - with 75 per cent of GPs’ surgeries open in the evening, early morning or at weekends - and we will introduce new NHS services with 1 million people getting a free health check-up;
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We will give parents additional support with childcare with 3,000 Children’s Centres offering support to 2.4 million families;
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We will offer 140 thousand pupils one-to-one catch-up tuition in English and maths in the next school year;
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We will create greater choice and innovation by offering as many as 25 new Foundation Trust hospitals and 80 more Academies in 2009 alone; and
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We will reduce the fear of crime with neighbourhood policing in every community.
At the same time, reform of the state itself has become more urgent. As the reach of government has increased in some areas, so in others its role has become less important, opening up space to sell off assets. In this new era, hard questions must therefore be asked about the nature of government.
This is our ambition for world class public services in the years ahead. To fulfil it we must recognise that, as the challenges we face as a country change, so must the role of government. But on one principle I will never yield. The state has an inescapable responsibility to promote fair chances and fair rules for all. This is the moral compass that guides the new agenda of public service reform that we are setting out today.
Gordon Brown
Prime Minister