The Direction of Public Services under Brown

Introduction

The government’s agenda on the public sector been a defining theme for many assessments of their record. High and unprecedented levels of public expenditure have heightened public expectations to demand high quality, world class public services in an increasingly consumer orientated world. Such levels of expenditure even have forced the Conservative opposition to publicly match Labour’s commitment to sustainable levels of expenditure.

Yet the government’s mantra on public services, has created unique pressures on Labour’s trade union support base and generated a wider debate about the efficacy and equity of such an approach. The raising of the bar on public service investment and reform naturally raises the political temperature whenever there seem to be apparent shortcomings in the public services.

This paper aims to chart the development of this debate, the likely direction of public services under a Brown premiership and an analysis of the forthcoming legislative agenda and the recent CSR pre-budget report to discern the likely direction of the public services agenda. There will be a continued use of PFI, marketisation developments in social care and library services where we can expect a clear move towards further fragmentation.

The paper concludes that we cannot exaggerate the difference between a Brown premiership from a Blairite one on this subject. Yet, we must not be wholly gloomy. Brown has overturned certain Blairite programmes, and we must believe that alternative policy platforms can be calibrated and unwelcome public service developments challenged on a case by case basis. The New Labour narrative on public services will not change substantively. There may also be a sense that the Brownite camp is more amenable to dialogue on alternative paradigms on public services where such endeavours ultimately proved a fruitless exercise under Blair.

With the accession of Gordon Brown to the Labour Party leadership and ergo becoming PM, it is an opportune time to take stock of what has happened in public services under Blair and what is the direction of travel under Gordon Brown. Will there be a substantive shift in direction? Will the narrative be different? If so how can Unison frame it’s positively public campaign in the light of a different leadership?

Anatomy of Public Services Under New Labour

Under Labour the marketisation and part-privatization of the public services has continued apace, naturally this has attracted vehement criticism. The Labour Party has been able to publicly position itself as the custodian of public services, citing its high and unprecedented levels of public expenditure and defining itself against a Conservative Party who allowed themselves to be potential cutters of public expenditure. For example Oliver Letwin MP sabotaged the Conservative’s 2001 eelction campaign by indicating to the Financial Times that a Conservative Government would reduce public spending by up to £20bn. Given a change in stance from the Conservative Party and financial instability in Health Trusts it may be more difficult for the Labour Party to do this in the future.

Labour emphasised‘Schools and Hospitals first', in the General Election of June 2001 fusing the mantra of invest and reform, although a simple message it worked in defining Labour as pro-public sector as against the more ideologically bound Conservatives. 2001 election –Schools and Hospitals – narrative provided a very simplistic dividing line with the Conservatives. Blair had originally staked out his mission in reference to the public service agenda in the now infamous sound-bite summarising his priorities as ‘Education, Education, and Education’.
Sometimes the tone and rhetoric used by Tony Blair was unfortunate and alienated public servants, for example when in 2000 he referred to ‘having scars on his back’ due to his public service reforms. The reform agenda which seemed to take a step-change towards privatization during the 2001 election:

‘So this is a great challenge to us as a government and a cabinet, to our public services. There should be no barriers, no dogma, no vested interests that stand in the way of delivering the best services for our people.’

These tensions came to a head in Labour Party conference 2001.

‘The confrontation between ministers and unions over Labour's public service reforms has dominated Tony Blair's second term’

The government attempted to define it’s agenda for modernizing/reforming public services in 2002 by adopting an adversarial posture. Given that the decision to expand private sector involvement in the public sector would be problematic for trade unions in the public sector the government sought to define these forces as ‘producer’ interest, juxtaposed to the interests of the consume ie the public. This narrative even led to one government minister inferring that opponents to this agenda were ‘wreckers’. In a speech to the Labour Party Spring Conference 2002 in Cardiff the phrase wreckers was clearly used in thinly disguised attack on public sector unions.

The rhetoric has evolved but has never been de-coupled from the marketisation agenda. In particular, this point is evidenced by the governments promotion of the concept in choice in public services, particularly choice within the health service. Some saw this philosophical development as an attempt to construct a ‘trojan horse’ through which more marketisation could be pursued. Certainly the government felt they had to craft a modern health service that fitted the consumer orienated, information savvy aged. Fearful that public service legitimacy could be undermined by the middle-classes exiting the service in favour of private provision. The accession of Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP, has seen a toning down of the choice rhetoric.
To many observers Gordon Brown was inextricably bound up in this public services agenda. As Chancellor of the Exchequer oversaw a marked expansion of the PFI scheme, the Treasury’s preferred route for developing public sector infrastructure. Hence to expect him to oversee a substantive shift in direction would be a leap of faith. Brown was of course also the architect of the PPP for the Tube, so heavily criticized by Ken Livingstone and transport unions.

Brown seems to have the same implicit faith in the private sector that Blair had, which we could summarise as private sector good; public sector bad, in a conversation with academic and expert on PFI, Alyson Pollock Brown said, when pressed on the justification for PFI.

“ His response was simply to declare repeatedly that the public sector is bad at management, and that only the private sector is efficient and can manage services well. By 2003 the business paradigm was the only model that the Treasury and senior Department of Health officials could relate to”

There were however moments during Brown’s chancellorship, when it become clear (or politically expedient) that Brown was not wholly convinced by Blair’s direction of travel. For example, during the foundation hospital debate it became apparent that Brown was not happy with policy detail. The message conveyed, albeit discretely, was that Brown realized there should be boundaries to the marketisation process in way that either Blair did not recognize or was untroubled by. Brown may have allowed his lieutenant, Ed Balls to articulate on these differences by hinting that markets have limits. Yet Brown’s real misgiving may have been that foundation hospitals would stoke up private debts that would fall on the public purse ie the Treasury.

‘Brown is vehemently opposed - not to foundation hospitals having autonomy - but to the idea that their proposed freedom to borrow will somehow create private rather than public debt. He thinks the proposition is ludicrous. It will be taxpayers' money being used to service the borrowing; of course it is public debt and, of course, the Government is ultimately responsible’

(Will Hutton, the Sunday Observer, October 6 2002)

It is a safe assumption that now the PFI driven, marketisation trend within the public sector is now embedded in practice and in world-view and shifting it substantively would be a phenomenal development within the public policy world. Indeed the government is still committed to the PFI model.

The UK experience has to be seen in context, there is a global trend, encouraged by global financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.

“The story is not unique to Britain. Universal health care systems are being dismantled and privatized across the world”.

It is difficult to find an area of UK public services that has not been subjected to some degree of commercialization or market discipline, from the postal services to the BBC globalizing and liberalizing processes are all changing the configuration of public services, some of these are driven by EU processes eg the Postal Services Directive. Furthermore, the debate about the Directive on Services in the Internal Market (‘Bolkestein’ Directive) intensified fears that the pro-liberalisation agenda within Europe would further fragment public services.

Yet, the UK is not just mirroring the international context, it has been criticized for exporting its model of privatization to developing countries and that global institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF are ‘forcing’ developing countries to privatize their indigenous public services (particularly utilities) often to the detriment of the poor. Whilst the global financial system is often blamed in this instance clearly the UK government has pro-actively made decisions that enhance privatization in the developing world.

‘… the World Bank and IMF - to which the UK contributes many millions of pounds of aid money each year - continue to force developing countries to privatise their public services as a condition of loans and debt relief ’

Moreover, George Monbiot bemoans the assistance that DFiD has given the Adam Smith Institute to promote public sector reform in South Africa:

‘The agency keeping the South African government on track is Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID). This year it is giving £6.3 million to the Adam Smith Institute - the ultra-rightwing privatisation lobby group - for “public sector reform” in South Africa. Staggeringly, the Institute has been given its own budget - £5m of British aid money - to disburse as it pleases. By this means, DFID can generate all the support it likes for privatisation and public-private partnerships, while avoiding direct responsibility for the decisions the institute makes.’

( ‘Exploitation on tap’, George Monbiot, 19 October 2007, www.monbiot.com)

Stands New Labour where it did? – Can we anticipate any leverage in a new environment? Direction of travel under Gordon Brown as Prime Minister

To what extent then can we identify if Brown will oversee a tangible change in New Labour’s agenda on the public services? This paper seeks to identify the direction of travel of public services under the Prime Ministership of Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP. It would seem that we cannot exaggerate our hopes that the direction will be that much different to what we have witnessed thus far.

“..most commentators agree that a Gordon Brown led government would continue to steer the public services policy agenda in a very similar direction”
(The Guardian Society, 20 June 2006)

We can make some assumptions based on what happened under Blair, when Brown was
chancellor, what he has said and in detail what has appeared in the Legislative Programme and Comprehensive Spending Review/Pre-Budget Report and to some extent public statements since becoming PM. These are the most clear signs of any detailed policy that has emerged that may have a material impact on employees in the public services.

The new Prime Minister is conscious that he wants to define his tenure at No.10 on domestic policy and public services in particular. On becoming Prime Minister Brown stated that the NHS would be his priority and education his passion. He alluded to this a little more in his speech to Labour Party Conference, which did not hint at a distinct, necessary boundary mark between the public and private sector. He did focus on public services; health, education and social care and although this included some fresh thinking there was no hint at a change of direction. The references to choice and personalized care all sounded a touch Blairite.:

‘This is the future of our public services. Accessible to all, personal to you. Not just a basic standard but the best quality tailored to your needs. Education is my passion’

‘Our great ambition now: a National Health Service that is also a personal health service’

There exist of course urgent opportunities for Brown to develop a more detailed narrative. It is worth noting that one of his stated reasons to opt not to call a ‘snap election’ in the autumn is that he needs more time to articulate his vision. If so, then he has to articulate this vision fairly rapidly and we should observe what says and how he says it in case it contains some clues and hints that the public service narrative will be crafted in a different way.

It is worth noting however, there has been change in direction under Brown in some areas of policy, so there has not been an exact replication of all Blairite priorities. Perhaps this is of some significance. Change has happened in certain areas that indicate Brown was not wholly content with everything that happened in the Blair era. Some examples of this include the decision to review Super-Casino licences, reviewing the re-classification of the status of cannabis. Also he has hinted at changes in the constitution so we can watch that agenda to see what happens. Thus, we know that policy is not monolithic and more dynamic, adapting to the worldviews of different politicians and a changing environment. We should be hopeful that thoughtful, robust arguments on the public sector could still have effect. We need to be realistic about direction of travel but not wholly pessimistic.


The government’s agenda on the public sector been a defining theme for many assessments of their record. High and unprecedented levels of public expenditure have heightened public expectations to demand high quality, world class public services in an increasingly consumer orientated world. Such levels of expenditure even have forced the Conservative opposition to publicly match Labour’s commitment to sustainable levels of expenditure.

Yet the government’s mantra on public services, has created unique pressures on Labour’s trade union support base and generated a wider debate about the efficacy and equity of such an approach. The raising of the bar on public service investment and reform naturally raises the political temperature whenever there seem to be apparent shortcomings in the public services.

This paper aims to chart the development of this debate, the likely direction of public services under a Brown premiership and an analysis of the forthcoming legislative agenda and the recent CSR pre-budget report to discern the likely direction of the public services agenda. There will be a continued use of PFI, marketisation developments in social care and library services where we can expect a clear move towards further fragmentation.

The paper concludes that we cannot exaggerate the difference between a Brown premiership from a Blairite one on this subject. Yet, we must not be wholly gloomy. Brown has overturned certain Blairite programmes, and we must believe that alternative policy platforms can be calibrated and unwelcome public service developments challenged on a case by case basis. The New Labour narrative on public services will not change substantively. There may also be a sense that the Brownite camp is more amenable to dialogue on alternative paradigms on public services where such endeavours ultimately proved a fruitless exercise under Blair.

With the accession of Gordon Brown to the Labour Party leadership and ergo becoming PM, it is an opportune time to take stock of what has happened in public services under Blair and what is the direction of travel under Gordon Brown. Will there be a substantive shift in direction? Will the narrative be different?

Anatomy of Public Services Under New Labour

Under Labour the marketisation and part-privatization of the public services has continued apace, naturally this has attracted vehement criticism. The Labour Party has been able to publicly position itself as the custodian of public services, citing its high and unprecedented levels of public expenditure and defining itself against a Conservative Party who allowed themselves to be potential cutters of public expenditure. For example Oliver Letwin MP sabotaged the Conservative’s 2001 eelction campaign by indicating to the Financial Times that a Conservative Government would reduce public spending by up to £20bn. Given a change in stance from the Conservative Party and financial instability in Health Trusts it may be more difficult for the Labour Party to do this in the future.

In the 2001 election –Schools and Hospitals – narrative provided a very simplistic dividing line with the Conservatives. Blair had originally staked out his mission in reference to the public service agenda in the now infamous sound-bite summarising his priorities as ‘Education, Education, and Education’.

Sometimes the tone and rhetoric used by Tony Blair was unfortunate and alienated public servants, for example when in 2000 he referred to ‘having scars on his back’ due to his public service reforms. The reform agenda which seemed to take a step-change towards privatization during the 2001 election:

‘So this is a great challenge to us as a government and a cabinet, to our public services. There should be no barriers, no dogma, no vested interests that stand in the way of delivering the best services for our people.’

These tensions came to a head in Labour Party conference 2001.

‘The confrontation between ministers and unions over Labour's public service reforms has dominated Tony Blair's second term’

The government attempted to define it’s agenda for modernizing/reforming public services in 2002 by adopting an adversarial posture. Given that the decision to expand private sector involvement in the public sector would be problematic for trade unions in the public sector the government sought to define these forces as ‘producer’ interest, juxtaposed to the interests of the consume ie the public. This narrative even led to one government minister inferring that opponents to this agenda were ‘wreckers’. In a speech to the Labour Party Spring Conference 2002 in Cardiff the phrase wreckers was clearly used in thinly disguised attack on public sector unions.

The rhetoric has evolved but has never been de-coupled from the marketisation agenda. In particular, this point is evidenced by the governments promotion of the concept in choice in public services, particularly choice within the health service. Some saw this philosophical development as an attempt to construct a ‘trojan horse’ through which more marketisation could be pursued. Certainly the government felt they had to craft a modern health service that fitted the consumer orienated, information savvy aged. Fearful that public service legitimacy could be undermined by the middle-classes exiting the service in favour of private provision. The accession of Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP, has seen a toning down of the choice rhetoric.
To many observers Gordon Brown was inextricably bound up in this public services agenda. As Chancellor of the Exchequer oversaw a marked expansion of the PFI scheme, the Treasury’s preferred route for developing public sector infrastructure. Hence to expect him to oversee a substantive shift in direction would be a leap of faith. Brown was of course also the architect of the PPP for the Tube, so heavily criticized by Ken Livingstone and transport unions.

Brown seems to have the same implicit faith in the private sector that Blair had, which we could summarise as private sector good; public sector bad, in a conversation with academic and expert on PFI, Alyson Pollock Brown said, when pressed on the justification for PFI.

“ His response was simply to declare repeatedly that the public sector is bad at management, and that only the private sector is efficient and can manage services well. By 2003 the business paradigm was the only model that the Treasury and senior Department of Health officials could relate to”

There were however moments during Brown’s chancellorship, when it become clear (or politically expedient) that Brown was not wholly convinced by Blair’s direction of travel. For example, during the foundation hospital debate it became apparent that Brown was not happy with policy detail. The message conveyed, albeit discretely, was that Brown realized there should be boundaries to the marketisation process in way that either Blair did not recognize or was untroubled by. Brown may have allowed his lieutenant, Ed Balls to articulate on these differences by hinting that markets have limits. Yet Brown’s real misgiving may have been that foundation hospitals would stoke up private debts that would fall on the public purse ie the Treasury.

‘Brown is vehemently opposed - not to foundation hospitals having autonomy - but to the idea that their proposed freedom to borrow will somehow create private rather than public debt. He thinks the proposition is ludicrous. It will be taxpayers' money being used to service the borrowing; of course it is public debt and, of course, the Government is ultimately responsible’
(Will Hutton, the Sunday Observer, October 6 2002)

It is a safe assumption that now the PFI driven, marketisation trend within the public sector is now embedded in practice and in world-view and shifting it substantively would be a phenomenal development within the public policy world. Indeed the government is still committed to the PFI model.The UK experience has to be seen in context, there is a global trend, encouraged by global financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.

It is difficult to find an area of UK public services that has not been subjected to some degree of commercialization or market discipline, from the postal services to the BBC globalizing and liberalizing processes are all changing the configuration of public services, some of these are driven by EU processes eg the Postal Services Directive. Furthermore, the debate about the Directive on Services in the Internal Market (‘Bolkestein’ Directive) intensified fears that the pro-liberalisation agenda within Europe would further fragment public services.

Yet, the UK is not just mirroring the international context, it has been criticized for exporting its model of privatization to developing countries and that global institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF are ‘forcing’ developing countries to privatize their indigenous public services (particularly utilities) often to the detriment of the poor. Whilst the global financial system is often blamed in this instance clearly the UK government has pro-actively made decisions that enhance privatization in the developing world.

‘… the World Bank and IMF - to which the UK contributes many millions of pounds of aid money each year - continue to force developing countries to privatise their public services as a condition of loans and debt relief ’

Moreover, George Monbiot bemoans the assistance that DFiD has given the Adam Smith Institute to promote public sector reform in South Africa:

‘The agency keeping the South African government on track is Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID). This year it is giving £6.3 million to the Adam Smith Institute - the ultra-rightwing privatisation lobby group - for “public sector reform” in South Africa. Staggeringly, the Institute has been given its own budget - £5m of British aid money - to disburse as it pleases. By this means, DFID can generate all the support it likes for privatisation and public-private partnerships, while avoiding direct responsibility for the decisions the institute makes.’
( ‘Exploitation on tap’, George Monbiot, 19 October 2007, www.monbiot.com)

Stands New Labour where it did? – Can we anticipate any leverage in a new environment? Direction of travel under Gordon Brown as Prime Minister

To what extent then can we identify if Brown will oversee a tangible change in New Labour’s agenda on the public services? This paper seeks to identify the direction of travel of public services under the Prime Ministership of Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP. It would seem that we cannot exaggerate our hopes that the direction will be that much different to what we have witnessed thus far.

“..most commentators agree that a Gordon Brown led government would continue to steer the public services policy agenda in a very similar direction”
(The Guardian Society, 20 June 2006)

We can make some assumptions based on what happened under Blair, when Brown was chancellor, what he has said and in detail what has appeared in the Legislative Programme and Comprehensive Spending Review/Pre-Budget Report and to some extent public statements since becoming PM. These are the most clear signs of any detailed policy that has emerged that may have a material impact on Unison and it’s members.
The new Prime Minister is conscious that he wants to define his tenure at No.10 on domestic policy and public services in particular. On becoming Prime Minister Brown stated that the NHS would be his priority and education his passion. He alluded to this a little more in his speech to Labour Party Conference, which did not hint at a distinct, necessary boundary mark between the public and private sector. He did focus on public services; health, education and social care and although this included some fresh thinking there was no hint at a change of direction. The references to choice and personalized care all sounded a touch Blairite.:

‘This is the future of our public services. Accessible to all, personal to you. Not just a basic standard but the best quality tailored to your needs. Education is my passion’

‘Our great ambition now: a National Health Service that is also a personal health service’

There exist of course urgent opportunities for Brown to develop a more detailed narrative. It is worth noting that one of his stated reasons to opt not to call a ‘snap election’ in the autumn is that he needs more time to articulate his vision. If so, then he has to articulate this vision fairly rapidly and we should observe what says and how he says it in case it contains some clues and hints that the public service narrative will be crafted in a different way.
It is worth noting however, there has been change in direction under Brown in some areas of policy, so there has not been an exact replication of all Blairite priorities. Perhaps this is of some significance. Change has happened in certain areas that indicate Brown was not wholly content with everything that happened in the Blair era. Some examples of this include the decision to review Super-Casino licences, reviewing the re-classification of the status of cannabis. Also he has hinted at changes in the constitution so we can watch that agenda to see what happens. Thus, we know that policy is not monolithic and more dynamic, adapting to the worldviews of different politicians and a changing environment. We should be hopeful that thoughtful, robust arguments on the public sector could still have effect. We need to be realistic about direction of travel but not wholly pessimistic.