Five years ago, long before he entered Parliament, Liam Byrne edited a book called Reinventing Government Again. It took its cue, as the title suggests, from David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s Reinventing Government which had set the template, five years before, for the reforms that the respective public sectors in the United States and the United Kingdom badly needed. Today Mr Byrne, now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, releases a document on smarter government which shows that this thinking was not done in vain.
The headlines from the document are that 123 quangos will be abolished, there will be a 20 per cent cut in national targets, as many as one in ten senior Civil Service posts will go and a further 10 per cent of the Civil Service will be transferred from London to cheaper locations. The Government claims that the projected savings from reorganising government in this way could be £12 billion over three years. After a period in which the Prime Minister was unwilling to accept the inevitability, let alone the desirability, of cuts to the public sector, this is a welcome recognition of reality. The financial credibility of the Government rests on it being able to chart a path from a substantial public deficit back to fiscal balance. The more specific and, unfortunately, the more swingeing, it can be in its proposed cuts the more it can hope to command financial respect.
But there are more lessons in the approach that Mr Byrne sets out than this, vital as it is. Today’s document offers further proposals on taking more services online and an extension of the information available to the public, a theme that the Conservative Party has lately taken up, to good effect. Serious and substantive reform of the public sector is, indeed, the only viable option now that the years of plenty are over.
This is something that, to put it mildly, not everyone in government has seemed to understand. While acknowledging the immediate financial context, Mr Byrne wants to locate his proposals in a wider argument about the development of public service reform. This is, he says, the latest stage in the unfolding of a plan, the first stage of which was to bring spending on British public services up to the average OECD levels while defining priorities through centrally imposed targets and national inspection regimes. The second stage added market-based reform, designed to place power in the hands of the public. The third phase is to reduce central targets and onerous inspection and rely on the pressure that is generated by more responsive users.
There is more than a little retrospective fitting of history here to the accident of reality. It deletes a lot from the account — the pensions Bill, for example — and public services are also too fitfully satisfactory. But there is at least the rudiments of an idea here. The document very clearly bears the hallmark of Osborne and Gaebler and their injunction that it was the job of government to steer but not to row, and that creating markets is preferable to public programmes.
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A general election looms on the horizon in which the Labour Party seems intent on fighting the Conservative Party on where its leaders spent their adolescence. A serious attempt to set out some cuts makes a mockery of such silliness. It shows that, in the end, good policy and good politics are one and the same thing.