The Politics of Children's Services Reform by Purcell Carl

Author:Purcell, Carl [Purcell, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447348764
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Published: 2020-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

Public service reform

The Coalition leaders framed the deficit reduction plan as necessary and unavoidable. However, critics of the government argued that the plan demonstrated an ideological commitment to ‘shrinking the state and opening up more of the public sector to other service providers: charities, not-for-profit organisations, private companies, social entrepreneurs and voluntary bodies’ (Dorey and Garnett, 2016: 83). Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had criticised Labour’s centralised approach to public service delivery. Thus, Cameron and Clegg framed the deficit reduction plan as an opportunity reorganise public services and devolve control to the local level. In their joint foreword to the Coalition programme, they stated:

We share a conviction that the days of big government are over; that centralisation and top-down control have proved a failure. We believe that the time has come to disperse power more widely in Britain today; to recognise that we will only make progress if we help people come together to make life better. In short, it is our ambition to distribute power and opportunity to people rather than hoarding authority within government. That way we can build the free, fair and responsible society we want to see. (Cameron and Clegg, in HM Government, 2010b: foreword)

In the early days of the Coalition, Cameron also talked about the ‘Big Society’ taking the place of big government. Sharing this ambition, if not the language, Clegg promoted ‘radical decentralisation’ (Clegg, in HM Government, 2010c: foreword), an idea at the heart of the Localism Act 2011. Clegg repeated the argument that Labour’s command-and-control structures needed to be dismantled in order to not only save money, but also spur innovation and make public services more responsive and accountable to the public.

However, in the context of public sector austerity, Coalition and Conservative government leaders were not as closely involved in the restructuring of public services as their Labour predecessors. The rhetoric of decentralisation was used by party leaders to distance themselves from difficult decisions taken in Whitehall departments and at the local level. In contrast, Labour’s centralising approach was driven by a desire to ensure that additional resources were allocated to support the government’s social policy priorities. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the outsourcing of public services has been consistently promoted as a solution to the challenge of restructuring public services. In the Open Public Services White Paper (HM Government, 2011a), it was stated:

In the services amenable to commissioning, the principles of open public services will switch the default from one where the state provides the service itself to one where the state commissions the service from a range of diverse providers. Commissioning public services in this way – what is known as the purchaser/provider split – brings a host of benefits. For example, it encourages new, innovative providers to compete for contracts, allows payment by results and/or incentives for supporting particular social groups to be built into contracts, and enables the disaggregation of services into specialist functions. (HM Government, 2011a: 29)

The Open Public Services White Paper did not set out any specific plans in relation to the commissioning of children’s services.

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