The Prime Minister in a recent speech discusses how he envisions public services to be reformed and emphasises on empowering the user, diversity in supply, personalisation of services and finally the public sector work force.
Thank you very much Victor and thank you for the opportunity to come along and say some words about the Public Service Reform programme, and then leave as much time as possible for questions and answers. Actually a lot of what I wanted to say, John has already said. In fact I got slightly alarmed because there is a sort of countdown clock there, which you won't be able to see, but it had on it minus four minutes, so I was wondering how I could speak in minus four minutes. But what I wanted to do is just outline what are the main principles of public service reform. I want to say something particularly about issues to do with criminal justice reform. First of all, as John was just saying a moment or two ago, we need the extra investment and there has been a massive extra investment put into our public services, and incidentally sometimes people say well look all this money that has gone in, nothing has happened. Actually when we look, for example, at Health Service waiting, at the treatment of cancer or heart disease, if we look at the hospital building programme, there has been a huge amount of progress achieved. In our schools we have the best results ever, we have got a massive investment going into every single community in our school system, and across the whole of the public services, whether it is in inner city regeneration, right through to many of the local authority services, the results are there for all to see.
However, as the additional investment goes in, so people's expectations of the type of service they can have rise. And so what people might have contemplated as adequate when public services first began and in the post-war period where it was very much a case of you know the National Health Service, what a wonderful thing to create it, 50 - 60 years on people now want to say well in every other walk of life I get an increasingly individualised and customised service, how can I have that from the public services? And really the key to understanding what we are trying to do from government on the public service programme is that we are trying to move from a situation where you have very much a monolithic, very paternalistic service in which the services are handed down to the customer or user of the service, move to a far more personalised service where people feel that they have a far greater say in how the service is done and run, where things are very much more tailored to the individual needs of the user.
Now the key thing is to keep the basic public service ethos, and what is that ethos? That ethos is providing a high quality service irrespective of your wealth; it is not however providing a high quality service irrespective of your wealth in the same way as it has always been done. In other words let's distinguish between the basic ethos that is about equality of access and the method of delivering that, which is very different and which needs to change if we are to meet the rising expectations of the user of the service.
And I think this is paralleled incidentally by the move away in industry from mass production of goods and services, you know the old factory production line, the fact that people would turn out the same type of consumer product, that has shifted over the past 30 - 40 years to far more customised private services and goods for people. And in exactly the same way what is driving part of the change in public services is that people say look in every other walk of life you know the service runs after me, in the public services, particularly with this new investment, I want the same type of relationship, I want to feel it is a relationship where I, the user of the service, have got some power over it.
So out of that has really arisen what I would say are basically four principles of public service reform. The first is to put more power in the hands of the user. One of the things that I said before coming to office, and which I have regretted since being in office, and you know it is always important to learn from the experience over a period of a decade in office, but I said before we came to power that we had to focus on standards and not structures, and I think truthfully standards and structures go together, that if for example you want a higher standard for the individual user of a service, you also have to have the structure for organising that service in such a way that the person has some power over it. So for example the reason for greater patient choice in the National Health Service, or as I think will happen increasingly, where people have for example a chronic condition that they will have to manage over time, or for example you have an elderly person and a social care budget, increasingly over a period of time people will want the structures in place that allow them the chance to have some say over how the public money spent on them is used.
And you know this also I think applies for example in the criminal justice sphere where I think one of the things that most aggravates feelings about the criminal justice system is where the victim of a crime feels that they have got no power to have any say in how their situation is handled or in how the criminal justice system reacts to them.
And not just incidentally about choice for the individual, but also in respect of local communities as well. One of the things again that I have learnt particularly in relation to things like anti-social behaviour and inner city regeneration is that in today's world local communities want a say in how their communities are regenerated. They want for example as tenants on a housing estate to have a real input into the way the estate is run, they don't want somebody sitting in local government, never mind central government, simply saying this is the way it has got to happen, this is what we determine. They want a different relationship.
So that is the first thing, which is the empowerment of the user of the service.
The second thing, and it leads on from that, is then also of course to have a greater diversity of supply and break down some of the barriers between the public and private and voluntary sector. Now what we have actually got here today are some of the interesting examples of where people within the public service have innovated and done public services in a different way, but also we have today a voluntary sector out there, a third sector, that can be brilliant at creating new ways of working. For example with some of the youngsters that are playing truant or getting into trouble it is often a voluntary sector solution that will be better than a traditional public service solution. The providers of services therefore may not necessarily be done or organised in the traditional way, but what you are doing by bringing that greater diversity in is making sure that if the proper service isn't there, someone else has got the opportunity to come in and do it.
Now we are doing this for example in the under-doctored areas with GP services, foundation hospitals of course operate in a different way, you have city academies and trust schools. In relation for example to the national offender management service, the legislation going through Parliament will allow local probation trusts to commission services from a range of different providers.
So that is the second thing, which is the provider diversity, or diversity of supply.
The third thing is something I was saying a moment or two ago and that is also as part of this personalisation to make sure we recognise the problems of the hardest to reach people. I think one of the things that is interesting about programmes like Sure Start for example in local communities is they have been very successful, but when you come to those right at the very bottom, those that maybe have a multiplicity of problems, the difficulty is they very often won't go to the Sure Start, so you have got to provide the means by which you can both go out into the community and find those hardest to reach families, and also you need very targeted interventions with them.
So for example the Dundee Family Project which looks at how you combine a fairly disciplined structured housing relationship with families that have got a huge number of problems, that maybe the kids are going off the rails, or the parents have got drug or alcohol problems, you know they are finding new ways to reach those people who are otherwise shut out from society's mainstream. So that is the third thing.
And the fourth principle is the workforce itself. I mean again if you look at any other walk of life, you know the old demarcations are coming down, and we have got to be doing the same. What we have had here today are examples of people who it is not in their traditional job description or qualification that this is what they should do, but nonetheless they have the ability to do it and what they do improves the service at the frontline.
Now we have got to be breaking down again quite deliberately the old demarcations in the workforce, we have got to be encouraging new types of skill, we have got to be recognising that if you want a quality service then that quality service is not going to be provided by people at the frontline who feel themselves hemmed in and constrained, and everything we were talking about a moment or two ago about liberating the frontline is important. That means incidentally for a school they may decide that instead of another teacher they need a classroom assistant, they might need an IT specialist, it may mean for example in the social services or Jobcentre Plus we should be saying to the frontline staff look let's change, for example in the Jobcentres, let's change some of the benefit rules to give you greater discretion as to how you handle the case of an individual which will allow you a better chance of getting them off benefit and into work, or helping them with their problems. Or as we have just heard with some of the frontline services, for example I was very interested in the example for the families whose kids are going to have special needs and helping them during pregnancy, I mean this is not something that fits within the normal way the job is done, but actually what the frontline is doing by being given the freedom to innovate is then delivering a different type of service in a different way.
Now the interesting thing is when you talk about this in relation to health or education or local government, everyone says fine, we understand those principles of public service reform, my point however is that actually in the criminal justice system the same is true. And the paper we are publishing today on Security, Crime and Justice is an attempt to apply those principles of public service reform even to something as difficult as the criminal justice system.
The first point is that if we want a criminal justice system that works, we have to target the offender and not simply the offence. Now we know that the bulk of crime, or at least half of crime, is committed by 100,000 of the most prolific criminals. What we have already done is allow a greater focus on the prolific offenders, but what we also want to do now is to go further and say for those who are the most prolific offenders, when they finish their sentence they can be under licence to limit what they can do, even when released from prison, so that for example we would be able to ensure that somebody who has got a multiple set of problems and who otherwise is going to be turned back out on the street and reoffending again, can be actually looked after, given the proper support but also know that they have got to take advantage of the support that is being given.
This incidentally is not an alternative to prison, it is in addition to prison. There are 20,000 more prison places since 1997, we are building another 8,000, so if people deserve to be in prison, that is where they should be. But where we have tried to target these prolific offenders, and we have done so with several thousand over the past couple of years, there has been a 62% reduction in recorded convictions and over 1,700 of those offenders have been taken off the programme because they are no longer considered to be prolific offenders.
Now that is an example of how a public service is being changed so that it is personalised, in this case actually around the offender, to make sure that the public is protected on the one hand, and we have the best chance of making sure that those prolific offenders who may have multiple drug problems, they have been in organised crime, they have maybe been in prison for a long period of time, that even after they leave and after they have served their sentence, then we are able to make sure again that the public is properly protected but they are also given the chance to change and reform their lives.
In addition to that we are also introducing an extension of the powers in respect of the seizure of assets, because one of the difficulties is, and this again is part of the changing nature of public service, the criminal justice system today has to deal with completely different types of criminal offence - terrorism, organised crime, anti-social behaviour. What we are trying to do is to make sure that those things are dealt with in different ways because they are part of a changing pattern of crime where the old methods, a uniform method of dealing with these things, doesn't work. So for example on the seizure of assets the police can already when they raid a house that has been used for drug dealing, they can seize the money, they should also be able to seize the car of the drug dealer or the jewellery and other assets that the drug dealer may have.
Now what is all this about therefore? It is about, one, accepting that in public services today there is a completely different and changing context in which those services are being implemented, it is changing because expectations are changing and rising, it is changing because the world is changing and the public services are subject to different pressures, it is changing because of technology. And our response therefore has to be to get the right structures in government that focus on empowering the user, opening up the service to a diversity of supply, making sure we get to the hardest to reach and allowing the workforce the innovation and creativity that they want and need in order to create a service that is genuinely fair to all, but personal to each.
Now I believe that those changes that have been in part, the foundations that have been laid in these past few years, I think frankly, and this is honestly I think almost outside the party political or ideological battle today, I think whatever happens people are going to want that type of service more and more in the future. And if we want to be able to get the consent of people for continuing to resource public services properly and invest in them, then we are going to have to show that these services are ever more responsive to the changing needs that people have.
But finally there is this. None of that works unless there is a proper partnership with the frontline and in a sense what we need to get right, which is one of the reasons for the conference today, is we need to be able to understand from you what is holding you back, to be able to make the changes that you want to see in order that you can deliver the very best service and make sure that we in government have if you like the right relationship with you for the future. Because just as what I am saying is that for the user of the service the old paternalistic top-down method won't work, there has to be a relationship today between the user of the service and the provider of the service, so in the same way the old top-down approach from central government to the frontline won't work either, we need a partnership with you. And so the reason for having the conference today and the reason for the engagement with you is so that we get back from you what is necessary to make your life not necessarily easier but certainly more fulfilling, and a better service for the public.
And I think you know that one of the things that just occasionally we should reflect on, and it came home to me when I was talking to a friend of mine who runs a major business in the country and he had a problem with part of his business, and when they were all sitting around in his boardroom worrying about how they would deal with this problem, one of them said: "You know we have got a problem with these several thousand customers, but imagine if you were running the National Health Service." And sometimes I don't think we realise just how difficult running a public service is, it is a fantastic challenge. And therefore it is not surprising that a lot of the focus is on the negative, but actually what has happened over these past years has been a process of immense improvement in our public services, and what we have got to do now is to learn the lessons of that and apply them with ever greater vigour in the years ahead.
Thank you.
