Andrew Preston

" These people..."

Yes, I think I see where you're coming from about patronizing professionals. Indeed, you and your chums have been, and remain, the most prime of prime contributors. Unless, of course, they happen to do their doctoring in Harley Street.

Max Wind-Cowie

Andrew, thank you (again) for your comment. I accept that 'these people' has the potential to be misinterpreted - the phrase was used here simply for expediency (I was getting a little tired of writing 'public servants' over and over again).

As for your remarks on conservatives being guilty of 'patronising the professionals' - I think, for once, we agree. Indeed, in the report we are equally as critical of Thatcher's centralising as we are of New Labour's. The point, for the project, is not simply to look back and berate people for past misdeeds; rather to look forward and attempt to establish a progressive conservative view on issues such as public service reform. If you find the time it would be great if you could read the report and - as one of our staunchest critics - let me know what you think of the proposals.

Edmund O'Sullivan

Congratulations on your report. Its recommendations are compelling but don't go far enough.
In services, production depends upon two factors. One is the process (or infrastructure) that facilitates service value creation. The other is the interactive relationship between suppliers and consumers where service value creation actually occurs (for example, the interaction between teacher and pupil; doctor and patient; diner and waiter etc).
For value to be created in services, you need both process and relationship. You also have to recognise that the process facilitates value creation and is not the source of value. This comes about only through the constructive interaction between the service provider and the service consumer at the level of the individual.
Service providers that attempt both to manage the process (infrastructure) as well as the relationship are going to be at cross purposes. Process managers must focus on efficiency and cost-reduction. Relationship managers, in contrast, need to invest as much time as the participants in each service interaction subjectively conclude is needed to make that interaction productive.
Process managers need to be cost managers.
Relationship managers need to be value maximisers.
Public service managers are trying to be both. It's a mission impossible that is neither objectively efficient nor subjectively satisfying.
In our public services at present, everything is treated as if it were a tangible process. A building is managed in the way as the interaction between the participants in a service interaction. The spreadsheet and the MBA rule.
But the value created in a public service interaction is intangible and cannot be measured because it expresses itself in the extent to which participants in service interactions are subjectively satisfied with the amount of value that transaction produces and the way that it is shared. This is unquantifiable and probably can't even be expressed. It's a feeling not a fact.
As you rightly observe, participants in service interactions naturally regulate each other without the intervention of a detached auditor. This is because of the natural compulsion of human beings to form value-creating relationships (and not because people are inherently good or bad or simultaneously both).
The wider conclusion is that government should focus on providing the process (or infrastructure) required for public service value creation. This mainly takes the form of tangibles that can be quantified conventionally (buildings, equipment etc). Spreadsheets can work here.
But it is impossible for government, or any conventional corporation for that matter, to measure the true value of a public service transaction since it expresses itself in a form that can only be properly perceived by the participants in that interaction. This point was made in a radically different context by the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises in his book Socialism (published in German in 1922).
The conclusion is that the process (infrastructure/tangibles) in public service manufacture can be efficiently owned and operated by the state.
Service interaction, in contrast, should be entirely left to the individuals involved. Doctors, teachers and other public service providers should be allowed, subject to them achieving and maintaining appropriate professional standards, total discretion to work, individually or in professional associations, with their customers
Payments should be agreed between the participants in service interactions, and not centrally, and either paid for directly by the consumer or indirectly through the government tax and expenditures.
As a private sector service professional for more than 30 years, I have learned that customers discipline suppliers far better than regulators or managers ever can. This encouraging truth about the naturally constructive behaviour of the overwhelming majority should be embedded in the way public services are produced. Done properly, it will allow the abolition of hundreds of thousands of redundant middle and senior management positions in central and local government and in healthcare.
Those liberated from these pointless tasks can then be set to work to create additional service value by interacting constructively with public service customers.
Demos should not be afraid to press the logic of its argument to its natural conclusion. Governments can, and perhaps should, control the process (infrastructure) but must liberate those involved in relationship value creation.
This line of thinking may appear to be most attractive to supporters of the Conservative Party. But those that are not might recognise that restructuring public services to take into account the dichotomy in service value creation between process and relationship satisfies the communist ideal of a society where collective ownership of the means of production is combined with the complete liberation of the individual from the power of the state, shareholder, boss and bank.

Will Davies

At a brief glance, the report looks very interesting. I guess one critical question is how the media can be expected to co-operate with this more grown up approach, not least certain conservative-sympathising newspapers. But that's a slightly separate issue.

(On an irritating point of academic detail, I think you mean Frederick Taylor the analyst and purveyor of modern systems management, not Max Weber the theorist of bureaucratic vocation and legitimacy.)

Yvonne Bonifas

As a lowly middle manager in social services, this report comes as a huge relief that someone, somewhere understands what has been going wrong and has articulated it brilliantly. Managerialism has completely strangled and destroyed the public service ethos, although it still lives underground in the hearts of some of us. It is almost too late. the only people who are now promoted to management are those who robotically obey and care only about reporting and ticking boxes. Get the right people, train them properly and let them get on with it. But will you get the right people now? I have advised my bright 22 year old daughter to leave this country and go abroad, or if not, under no circumstances to consider public service as a career. I can only hope that these ideas can be explained more widely without falling foul of the old, dreary left/right battleground.

Jonty Olliff-Cooper

Will, thank you for writing. You are quite right to mention Taylor in this context, and indeed, he featured in an earlier draft of the report.

However, we went for Weber because we believe that Taylor's practical thinking was in part derived from Weber's initial theories.

On your other point about press maturity, that is a challenge. Brave leadership is part of it. However, we are not saying we will have less accountability. Quite the reverse. We are arguing for sharper, more local accountability.

Jonty Olliff-Cooper

Yvonne,

Thank you for your feedback. It is great to hear your frontline experience. On recruitment, there is an obvious virtuous/vicious circle problem, but we hope that the next government of whatever colour will seize this opportunity before it is too late.

Jonty

Andrew Preston

Max Wind-Cowie

No, I don't think I've misinterpreted you. The writings on what you call progressive conservatism make clear that a core purpose is to promote the benefits of capitalism.

Here's one.

There is a very rich man. I don't know exactly how rich, but it's exceedingly. In recent years he has bought every Victoria Cross that has become available, either from other private collectors, or from families trying to raise money. Later, he wrote a book about how the VC's were won...., in wartime that is, not at auction.

He commissioned a TV documentary series as a promotional vehicle for his book. The series was called 'Victoria Cross Heroes' and was broadcast on Channel Five TV here in the UK.

I do occasional film-extra work work when I can get it. I did some work on 1 episode about a warship, The Shark, sunk at the Battle of Jutland , and its captain , whose body later washed up on a Swedish beach. I played a fisherman. The other fisherman on that episode was played by a real, trained, actor, slumming it as an extra to earn some money. The fee for my work was £90.

I did the work in late September. Almost 3 months later I hadn't received payment. Despite calls to the casting agency..., "You'll get your money when we get it.", and messages I left on this man's website, outright begging to be paid..., I got no response, nothing appeared and it was a rather thin Christmas for me. I got paid in February, 5 months after I had done the job.

The name of that man is Lord Michael Ashcroft. On 24th September 2006, two days before I did thatpiece of work, he sold his stake in a company called BCA (British Car Auctions) for £215 Millions.

Michael Ashcroft is a Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. He has contributed huge sums to the party, and has been particularly involved in pouring money into marginal constituencies.
Much of his fortune has been made in South America, in Belize, and to this day he has refused to say whether he does or doesn't pay any UK tax.

You guys aren't interested in teachers, or doctors, or nurses, or street cleaners, harassed social services managers, or, anyone , really, other than yourselves and your desire to get into power.

Andrew Preston

Will Davies

Jonty - my discomfort at Weber being portrayed as some proto-management guru is probably irrelevant. What's more problematic about using Weber in the way that you do is the following.

Weber identified three sources of political authority:

- Traditional: you should obey me because that is how things have always been done
- Charismatic: you should obey me because I am aesthetically convincing
- Bureaucratic: you should obey me because I know best or most

Your critique is not of Weber himself, but ostensibly of bureaucratic rationality. However, you do not fall into the post-modern critique of bureaucracy, which elevates charisma over expertise (for which you should be applauded). Instead, sticking with the Weberian typology, you simply argue for shifting the balance of power from one bureaucrat (the middle manager) to another (the professional), with the implication being that this will hopefully be more efficient.

The alternative, still sticking with Weber, is that you are seeking to revive a form of traditional authority. Perhaps you are arguing that the professional classes have the greatest legitimacy because they have been around longest. Conservatism, indeed, but not so progressive.

Which is it? I suspect of the three (the charismatic critique of bureaucracy, the bureaucratic critique of bureaucracy, and the traditional critique of bureuacracy) it is the second, but how is that really different from NPM or other neo-liberal attempts to come up with a new calculus to impose upon the old one? Maybe you are making some appeal to 'trust' as the glue that's needed, but even the most optimistic communitarian would not suggest that this is a tonic for the ills of modern government.

Andrew Preston

To Will Davies

Trust..

The following is taken from the opendemocracy.net website.

" ....... As it is, I remain to be convinced that "progressive conservatism" is a coherent and distinctive political ideology rather than an intellectual affection calculated to show the Tories are no longer the "nasty party". This is to say, I suspect that, instead of staking out an electoral position based on a set of practical proposals derived from ultimate values (which, I suggest, is how the relationship between political philosophy, policy and electoral positioning ought to work), the ProgCons are working backwards towards ultimate values from the electoral position they believe will be the most successful. Wind Cowie's reaction to the apparent success of Cameron's re-branding strategy - "It's working, now let's do the philosophy bit" - only confirms this sense. "

I'm not familiar with Taylor and Weber. However the above seems to say, at least to me, that there are in fact no intellectual or any other kind of underpinnings to 'progressive conservativism' .

Andrew

Edmund O'Sullivan

Mr Preston is wrong.
In a service economy like the UK where 80 per cent of production is in the form of intangibles, value creation requires two factors of production: processes, including infrastructure, and relationships, which involve people working togther constructively (like this email exchange).
The efficiency of processes can be increased by the rapid and radical adoption of new technology, like this weblog.
That's progressive.
For relationships to deliver maximum value, people need consistency and stability.
That's conservative.
So which ever party adopts it, progressive conservatism is the relevant political outlook for the economic era we are now in.
That's a theory.

Andrew Preston

Hi Edmund

A large part of relationships is mutual trust. Wind Cowie and Olliff Cooper are political operatives not some kind of doctors. The only doctoring they've ever done in their lives is doctoring the script on their so-called reports. And their recent history is that one or both of them were/are personal researchers for D Cameron. Cameron is a marketing man, or to be more exact a PR man.

And the technique in use here is the practice of throwing lots of beautifully articulated stuff in the air, that hardly anyone on the face of it could possibly object to. Watching where it falls, and then to keep doing it, with variations, noting the responses, re-writing a bit here, a little bit of re-scripting there...... And it all sounds wonderful, and reads beautifully.

And then there comes the point to say...... "Trust me..." "Trust me " And you sort of laugh, and wander off, and .., but later you think.... well, they hardly said anything at all that I could possibly object and, and, so maybe yes, I do.

And that, as far as the processes , and sequences of traditional election campaigns, is about it really. The electoral consent has been fabricated.

What Cameron and his chums represent, in my opinion, is a grab for power without politically, economically , and in just about every other way having earned it.

As I said, these guys are just political operatives, and discussion with them is a pseudo discussion. Designed to find the hotspots of people who come here, and then turned round later to reinforce their message elsewhere.

Yuk.

rgds

Andrew

Juan-Pablo Velez

This reminds me of a report the management consulting firm McKinsey put out last year on for operational reform for the public sector. (http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/publicsector/transforming_government.asp)

Your calls for less red tape and front-line worker autonomy echoes some of their recommendations.

Do government agencies in Great Britain get to keep whatever budget they don't chew up? In the US, excess funds get pinched by Congressional appropriations committees. This pushes agencies into wasteful year-end spending binges to ward off budget cuts.

What if agencies could take what they don't use and invest it back into themselves - say, into workforce training, which is so often underfunded. This would improve performance and incentivize efficiency.

Juan-Pablo Velez

(Very) loosely related question: do you know of any budget visualizations such as this one (http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/) for the British government, or for any European country?

If not, this might be an interesting direction for Demos to go in. Media discussions of the welfare state tend to be highly general and fragmented - I've been having a hell of a time trying to derive a general outline of it from them.

Visualizations give citizens the big picture ("ah... this is the government with all its manifold tendrils") and can strengthen the case for welfare reform by making it easier to highlight points of intervention.

Clive Griffiths

Congratulations on your quite excellent new report - Leading from the Front.
Having worked as a police officer for the last 29 years I find your assessment of the current situation and how we got here depressingly accurate.
The worst aspect is the lack of trust, and the strangulation of the service through micro-management and bureaucracy that measures bits of processes not overall outcomes for the public.
The Home Secretary may have said that there is only one Performance Indicator for the police - public confidence - but the reality for front line staff is rather different. The typical front line officer is subjected to more than 100 internal targets and in most cases the public neither know nor care about them. The effect however is a reduced service to the public because so much time and effort is put into meeting these internal targets.
Even setting obvious targets can have an undesirable result. Focusing on detection rates has led to the prisons being full to overflowing and a jammed court system. At a time when sentences are being cut to free up space, can we afford the such police success? Or perhaps more effort should be put into preventing crime in the first place? I know which one the public would prefer.
No doubt colleagues in the other public services will also report perverse outcomes that result from ill considered performance indicators. Perhaps the NHS should just have a single measure, that of patient recovery?
I truly hope that we can get closer to the vision you have put forward so well.

Jonty Olliff-Cooper

Dear Juan-Pablo,

data visualisation is taking off here too. recent government paper on it was tepid, but futuregov will be able to point you to more original work.

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/datavizimprovedatavisual

http://www.futuregovconsultancy.com/

Jonty Olliff-Cooper

Thank you for your comments all.

Juan-Pablo, yes, I have seen the McKinsey work. Ours is a little bolder I think, but in the same vein. We try to put the question of accounability centre stage.

Clive, thank you for your kind words.

Andrew, as ever, we are delighted by your close interest in the project. I fear you credit us with more machiavellian skill than we deserve though.

Andrew Preston

To Juan-Pablo Velez

Ah, the management consultants, always floating around with their quick fixes for public services, big business, medium business..., well, anywhere they can smell money.

On budgets....

"What if agencies could take what they don't use and invest it back into themselves - say, into workforce training, which is so often underfunded. This would improve performance and incentivize efficiency."

Taxpayers don't like 'slush funds'. It's called accountability.

Although..... I noticed recently that a large Conservative council in London, Hillingdon, has just dismantled its Scrutiny Committee. As the Leader of the Council recently said (not comletely word for word) " If anyone objects we'll just railroad it through. "

Recipe for corruption.

rgds

Andrew