Only by rejecting the big state can Labour achieve social justice

Public services built to cope with the demands of the previous century now operate in a landscape that has changed unrecognisably. Not only have the past few years of austerity starved them of resources but with people living longer and many facing increasingly complex socio-economic challenges, public services are coming under more pressure to tackle problems they were not designed to resolve. People’s expectations of quality provision are rightly growing, and the way they interact with public bodies in a networked age is shifting. Labour needs to make a once-and-for-all commitment to turn its back on the big, centralised state.

With power concentrated at the top rather than dispersed locally, initiative and innovation to creatively adapt to circumstances is stifled. Too much centralised state provision has become higher cost, lower impact. Services are forced to react instead of prevent, to treat illness when they should promote wellness and to address single aspects of complex problems when they should be able to devise whole solutions. This is no longer affordable or desirable. To continue this status quo or to merely tinker at the edges of traditional state machinery, will lead to the decline and retrenchment of many public services, with ever higher thresholds for use and the termination of some altogether.

Most of us in this society, our society, recognise the potential of good public services to contribute to greater social justice and to overturn the social determination of poor life chances. In a new report commissioned for Labour’s Policy Review, People-powered public services, we set out how reform can work in practice. Power and existing resources held at the centre should be devolved as part of a New English Deal in which local government takes responsibility and accountability for improving outcomes that matter to people. Stronger levers would be created to shape more effective services around people and places to achieve safer communities, more people in work, better care, good life chances for children and help for families facing exclusion. The language of devolved mechanisms and new constitutional settlements may excite a few policy wonks but for significant reform to be sustained people need to see that it will make their lives tangibly better.

Our case is clear: the extent to which the big state alone can support people to have better lives with better neighbourhoods to live in is severely limited. Given that we will not be in a position to simply buy our way to success – not that we ever were – we need smarter ways of working with people in their own community to make a measurable difference. The future state should be more focussed on creating value by supporting individual responsibility, building local capacity and mobilising networks around places. Interventions need to support, not bypass existing assets in people, families and communities.

We set out these aims as part of a New English Deal to devolve power and existing resources to local government- which can then work with people to improve with the full array of tools at its disposal. Our proposals overturn the patchy, incremental approach to devolution and propose more significant devolution of funding and power for areas that have a strong track record and effective governance. This will change the pace of devolution to those areas able to go further faster, which will better embed and spread innovation to meet people’s needs.

But let us be absolutely clear: devolution does not stop at the town hall. Power and responsibility should also be pushed out to communities. They must be engaged and ultimately trusted to be the architects of their own futures. Our proposals include local public accounts committees led by councillors that will bring more visible local accountability of all public services in a place. We call for a serious strategy for technology to support service innovation, including the potential role open data can play in creating the conditions for people to develop new tools and shape services.

We are also are robust on local authority performance – where councils are coasting they should be challenged and where they are failing there should be intervention. Weaknesses should be overcome, but those at the centre cannot keep falling back on fear of isolated problems as an excuse to avoid wholesale reform. Localising measures will reinforce, not bypass, a healthy local democracy which enables everyone to play their part and get involved in decisions that affect their lives.

Reform involves challenging traditional assumptions about the distribution and the nature of power in our system of governance. New secretaries of state who enter their Whitehall offices in May 2015 and try to pull the big levers of power will soon discover how few strings are attached. To wield power in our complex, networked age is to influence, enable and challenge. At all levels of government, to get results we must harness the power of people and build local capacity. Without doing so, we will continue to have too many people ill-equipped to take advantage of future opportunities, and alienation from traditional institutions of government will persist.

Spending big is no longer an option. The Coalition parties have chosen to simply spend less without substantial reform. Spending smarter is the only viable alternative. This is our greatest hope of advancing social justice in a challenging decade.

Sir Richard Leese is Leader of Manchester City Council and co-chair of the Local Government Innovation Taskforce