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The state needs a Self Determination Act

July 20, 2012 11:40 am

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The British state is a monster and it’s a consequence of its constitution. Ministerial responsibility, the centralised, unitary state (inEngland) and departmental separation have left an inefficient, ineffective, unaccountable and wasteful state apparatus. We should be getting far more for the £700 billion we spend each year.

The scale of duplication is horrendous. This is a result of departmental organisation and silos. The last government’s Total Place strategy outlined how, in Leicester and Leicestershire, there were 450 face-to-face access points for service users, 65 call centres, all at a cost of £15 million per year. Ministerial responsibility means that initiatives proliferate and duplicate with different departments spending resources in aiming to achieve similar things. The same report found 120 projects or programmes delivered by 50 providers across 12 funding streams to help people into work in Lewisham.

People are furious at public sector waste – and they are right. This is nothing to do with service providers and public sector workers, who are efficient. It’s simply a matter of the British state and how it is structured.

Only minimal change can come from top-down efficiency drives. As soon as one programme is eliminated, another initiative is innovated that creates more duplication and waste somewhere else. All of this matters far more in an atmosphere of fiscal constraint – better outcomes per £1 spent become imperative.

We need a radically different approach. Let’s just take the welfare-to-work and support in work agenda. To get the best support for the individual possible, it is necessary to marshal resources devoted to skills, childcare, tax credits, welfare support, the work programme, rehabilitation and addiction management, job centre plus, careers advice and support, economic development and many other areas besides. It is simply not possible to co-ordinate all this from the centre or to respond effectively to individual and local needs; democracy also suffers a deficit. For a Total Work approach, there has to be some co-ordinating local mechanism.

The approach up until now has been for central government to push powers down at a painfully slow pace. Instead, why not put rocket boosters on the process? Give any local authority or group of local authorities or Local Enterprise Partnerships the ability to insist on being granted powers over resources impacting their area, subject to basic minimum requirements and a commitment to improve outcomes. A Self Determination Act of this nature could reverse the logic of the British state. Anything else is just fiddling round the edges and will fail.

This article was originally published in the Fabian Society’s Summer edition of the Fabian Review. It forms part of the Fabian Society’s Next State project. We’ll be publishing other articles from the series this week.

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  • treborc

    One way of adding a few million more to the dole line..

    • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

      Don’t feel you have to read the piece before commenting. In some ways, it’s more fun not to – a bit like roulette. 

      • John Ruddy

        I wouldnt worry. Yours is not the first piece he has commented on without bothering to read it.

        Thank your lucky stars you didnt get some polemic about New Labour and how we’re no different to the Tories.

        • John Dore

          It ain’t over yet, hews probably still brewing something epic.

  • John Ruddy

    An interesting piece, and correct in the analysis of the problem. I’m just not sure that the proposed solution would actually resolve it, or just move the problem further down the food chain.

    • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

      Yes, you are right to raise institutional capacity. I guess my thought is (i) Power wouldn’t be requested unless they could be properly used (and there would need to be some sort of emergency brake I guess) and (ii) I can’t see how this can be resolved without it being devolved so worth experimentation.

  • http://profiles.google.com/jrccollier James Collier

    I’m really confused as to what you are suggesting, and what issue you are addressing. Are you intending to increase co-ordination between differing local bodies to offering support to peoples with different requirements, and you hope to do so by giving greater powers down the chain? 

    I also don’t like the name. Who could disagree with “self determination”, but to use that as a title of such an act certainly makes me suspicious of it’s motives and your argument, as you don’t appear to offer much statistical evidence (at least in monetary terms) of such large scale public state wastage.

  • derek

    Small and medium sized businesses are fine but tend to employ fewer people, so I’m thinking we need some national co-ordinated action! we really should be looking at how we secure the nations future energy needs, it’s something every household needs and seems to me to be where we should be concentrating a national co-ordinated response, it’s time to stop thinking small and think big, a nationalised energy industry should to our main focus.

  • derek

    Anthony you seem to becoming the standard bearer of Englishness, continually pushing for greater self determination and the lone star theory for every county. Wont your cavalier approach result in little pockets of successful counties collecting and spending their taxes in their own communities lead to greater poverty levels elsewhere.

  • http://www.youngfabians.org.uk/blog/ Louie

    I like the idea- especially as studies suggest that empowering local government more could motivate people to get more involved in the democratic process. 

  • Mr 0a

    This is a good article Anthony, and identifies the problem that many of us have dared to notice, but that is fashionable to dismiss as “waste that can’t be removed”.

    I would say as well as needing a local coordination approach, we need a national coordination approach.

    Examples I have come across where this is needed are database contracts (worth hundreds of thousands of pounds) being sourced locally for national public sector organisations. I could not believe that many tens of these contracts for the same database function for the same organisation were being replicated from county to county.

    Another is individual local authorities negotiating supply contracts when they should be squeezing more value nationally.

    Any rational person can see that the above makes little sense. The issue is that jobs (pointless ones) would go – as they should – and this is therefore painted as an ideological move to reduce the size of the state and opposed by many Labour party supporters.

    However, the “size of the state” should be judged on what it delivers, not on employment levels alone or the resources it consumes. 

    I don’t think a “self determination act” is what is required, as correcting these situations would remove self-determination from many government departments.

    It should be along the lines of a procurement department in private sector organisations – a national department to scrutinise where effort is duplicated – be that call centres within a county (your Leicestershire example) or duplicated negotiation efforts.

  • PeterBarnard

    Good article, Anthony, with examples of how things can get out of hand.

    There’s not much for which a business line/project management structure (and principles) can’t be used to advantage. I don’t think that it has helped in the last few years that local authorities now have “partners” (often from the third sector) and the ordinary citizen is left wondering (if not bewildered) who actually does what.

    Local authorities must be the first place to whom citizens – and companies, when applicable – for most local services : “one stop shopping.” 

    As far as the example that you give on finding work for people in Lewisham, the “one stop shop” has to be the local Job Centre. It is quite ridiculous that other departments (whether local or national) are operating in parallel with the Job Centre.

  • Vicky Seddon

     There are parallels here with the proposals from the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee (quite radical) on the status and financing of local authorities. Our over centralised state  needs a massive shake up.

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