« What do women doctors want? The chance to work part-time | Home | The Left has no time for liberty: just ask the Gordonstoun Girl »
Public sector partnerships are a dangerous medicine
Universal panaceas are what we all crave - something simple, to make everything better, fast. Unfortunately they tend to be unreliable; the rule in medicine is that the more ailments the panacea claims to cure, the less likely it is to have any effect at all.
It is hardly likely that snake oil can cure impotence and gall stones and cradle cap. So it may well be with the fashionable universal panacea of the moment - public private partnerships or PPPs. It would be very comforting to think that all the ills of public sector services could be cured by partnerships of one kind or another with the private sector. It is perfectly obvious, and now at long last most people are prepared to admit it, that the private sector does things much better. Perhaps by cosying up to this much healthier sector, public services will take on some of the same much-needed vigour.
My fear, however, is that, on the contrary, this cosying-up will merely transfer the infection of the public sector mentality to the private sector; it will be merely to spread the old British sickness. And this would have the result in some cases - to switch metaphors - of killing the golden goose that was supposed to lay some nice New Labour public service eggs.
I hope I am wrong. But I do feel that, in the current talk of public private partnerships and private finance initiatives, this is a point that is being overlooked. Why should we all blithely assume this partnership will necessarily be beneficent? Isn't it just wishful thinking in some cases? The central difference between the private sector and the state sector - and which explains why one works and one doesn't - is one of mentality. There are other factors of course, but the main difference is one of entrenched, institutionalised attitude.
The battle to put the public services right is seen these days as taking on the unions, as the Government is painfully trying to do as I write, over platters of top-secret canapes. But this battle is not merely a matter of taking on the unruly union barons over questions of pay and working conditions and jobs for the boys. It is - much more importantly - a wider matter of taking on a statist, intrusive, wasteful, self-protective mindset, which I believe now flourishes quite independently of union power, as well as in the unions themselves. It is this mindset that explains, in large part, the failure of the state sector. Yet in PPPs this mindset has, and will have, the force of the state, and of state money behind it.
Speaking of failure, I once asked my favourite City pundit, at a time of spectacular bankruptcies, what he thought was the most dangerous error in running a company. Pursuing something other than the job in hand, was his answer. What he meant was when executives, instead of concentrating on virtual widgets or pork belly futures, are absorbed in other goals of doubtful relevance to the business, or of no relevance at all - the pursuit of personal prestige, empire building, external political manoeuverings, job protection, getting permanent seats at the opera and so on. Taking one's eye off the ball, in other words.
That's what happens persistently - and I would say institutionally - in the state sector. Surely I hardly need list all the gender awareness and racism awareness and social inclusion and anti-oppression and social change agenda issues under which police and nurses and social workers are staggering. The amount of time, money, effort, training and paperwork consumed by these very peripheral concerns is simply astonishing; an idea of the best (misguided or not) drives out a very modest idea of the good, or even the faintly acceptable. And it's not always an ideal of the best; it can be something less altruistic. Why, for instance, are some trainee nurses made to read impenetrable French structuralists on sociology, but not taught how to take blood samples? I suggest that is all in pursuit not of nursing, but of higher status and professionalisation, imposed on them from the top by ideologues interested in things other than nursing.
To take another example, a training pack for workers with people with learning disabilities emphasises that the primary focus - the central value - of their work lies in creating social change. Yes, social change. You might have thought the primary focus lay in providing the best attention, support and encouragement for people with intellectual disabilities - an immensely demanding and time-consuming job in itself. But that, it seems, must take second place to the uphill work of creating social change. Quite aside from whether public servants should attempt it, this requires further training, monitoring, workshops, accountability, paperwork and, therefore, further employees, without any direct benefit to the client, but at ever increasing cost.
So what happens when public sector workers team up with a private sector organisation to provide a public service? Is it likely they will leave all that baggage and all that make-work behind? Isn't it more likely they will bring it and try to impose it? This is precisely what has been happening for some time now in parts of the voluntary sector, where PPPs have been going on for years. I've seen this in all sorts of charities, to my intense frustration, for many years. Any charity that depends on contracts from the public sector will find itself forced to adjust its ideals and aims to whatever the public sector orthodoxy happens to be. Ministers know this. Pressure groups know it. Charities, apart from those who go along with it, admit it. It is not partnership. It is nothing less than the nationalisation of compassion in other terms. People interested in freedom and choice should be wary of the notion of public private partnerships. They should look elsewhere for solutions.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, June 30, 2001
