At last Labour’s talking about how we’ll win the next election

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

After the shock of the formation of the coalition it has taken a couple of months for the party to dust itself down and start a debate about how we actually win the next election.

This brilliant post by Luke Akehurst in response to an interesting article by John Woodcock MP shows that healthy debate between sensible people is alive and kicking in the wider party, and that is a very good thing. Luke’s opinions are very similar to my own so I won’t waste time by repeating his points.

The key for Labour is that in forming plans for government we need to prepare for where the country will be at the time of the next election and not where it is now.

Luke is absolutely right that even if the Tory-Liberals only last one term the next Labour government is going to inherit services that have either collapsed, or are on the verge of collapse, because of massive spending cuts. Just in the children’s services area great swathes of the country will have no effective youth services, no publicly run play services and no early years service beyond the core nursery offer – and that’s just for starters.

The capacity of the voluntary sector to provide innovative services that quickly plug gaps will have been wiped out through a lack of funding.

Services will be run by deeply demoralised and over-stretched staff who will, understandably, have very high expectations about a new government.

Buildings will be starting to show the effects of five years without proper repairs.

Change will be made even more difficult because of management capacity will have been decimated by government policy of cutting ‘non front-line’ staff.

And to compound problems a sluggish economy reeling from 1.3 million cuts-related job losses won’t be generating enough tax revenue to allow the taps to be turned back on quickly.

This isn’t scaremongering, it is the inevitable result of the 30% cut in local spending the Tory-Liberals seem likely to impose.

I don’t think that even most Labour Party supporters, let alone the public, have yet grasped the implications of a 30-40% cut in local spending. We all know it’s going to be bad, but I don’t think we yet get the fact that whole services performing vital work will completely disappear.

Looking at the country as our best guesses predict it will be in five years time, talk of “public sector reform” will seem very dated.

As it happens I slightly disagree with Luke about public attitudes to choice in services. Of course all universal services should be good but, for example, my Dad has Parkinsons and wants some choice in how this is managed; and chronic conditions like this lend themselves to high levels of patient involvement and choice in their treatment. Similarly, when my partner was pregnant we did want choice about how Junior was delivered. But Luke is spot on to say that providing real choice is dependent on generous funding – and so there will be precious little of it in public services in 2015.

One of the useful things to come out of the leadership contest is an emerging consensus that Labour needs to regain the sense that we are on peoples’ side.

For much of Tony Blair’s time as PM desire to reform public services was driven by a feeling that Labour had to be seen to share peoples’ view that public services could and should improve. However, so much of the language we used to describe our work was managerialist, technocratic or just gobbledegook that the public didn’t really associate better services on the ground with the actions of Labour politicians in government.

In order to meet the needs of a 24-hour media to show we were busy improving public services we made with lots of announcements about initiatives that were, in reality, tweaks.

As anyone actually involved in improving services will tell you – whether they be local councillors, head teachers or hospital managers – real improvement in public services comes from excellent leaders working with staff and users to transform expectations about what that service will deliver, and being challenged and held to account if improvement doesn’t happen. This is unglamorous, long-term and cannot easily be explained in sound bites or controlled from the centre. But it does work.

Instead of talk about reform, what we actually need from government is long-term investment creating the conditions where excellent leaders and motivated staff to improve their services without money and time being wasted on managing yet another top-down reorganisation of structures.

Against a background of services across the country being devastated by the Tory-Liberal government, simply talking about reform will be seen as completely out of touch.

By 2015 improving public services will seem a very daunting task indeed. We will engage with the public if we are seen to really understand their problems and be fighting for them. At his best, Blair was brilliant at this but the way the next leader will perform the same trick in 2015 will be very different from how Tony managed it in 2005, let alone 1997.

In the meantime, we’re not going to capture the hearts and minds of people who voted for Cameron or Clegg but will be regretting it after their local hospital has lost it’s A&E, their child’s new school building has been cancelled and their mum’s care home has been closed by using the same managerialist language of ‘reform’ that caused the public to tune out in the first place.