Ethos Issue 3, Oct 2007

Public Services at the Crossroads
Edited by : Richard Brooks
Contributors : Richard Brooks, Kay Withers, Miguel Castro Coelho, Tim Gosling,
Guy Lodge, Sophie Moullin, Nick Pearce and Ben Rogers
Published by : Institute for Public Policy Research, UK: 24 September 2007

Garvin Chow reviews the IPPR’s milestone report on contemporary public service delivery in the UK.

With a pool of increasingly educated citizens, a knowledge-savvy workforce and highly competitive market forces, many governments are feeling the pressure to continually improve the quality of their public services. This phenomenon is not felt in Singapore alone. The contributors to Public Services at the Crossroads, a report published by the noted UK-based Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), have also observed the same phenomenon in the UK. They argue that the design and delivery of public services should no longer be a prescriptive blueprint devised by the government independently, but should instead depend on the relationship between the government, services and citizens (Figure 1).

The demands placed on public services will continue to rise, as society becomes more educated and the problems it faces become more complex and broad-ranging.

The challenge to government is to balance high aspirations for public services against the risk of establishing unrealistic expectations, while also maintaining the trust and support of the public service workforce. For instance, can major improvements to public services take place without losing the support of incumbent staff, some of whom may have to be laid off or reassigned? The low levels of staff morale and confidence in management experienced by some public agencies in the UK point to the implications of an unbalanced approach to reform.

FIGURE 1. A MODEL OF CO-PRODUCTION
(Source: Public Services at the Crossroads, p52)

CITIZEN SATISFACTION—A PRIMARY GOAL OF PUBLIC SERVICES?
As the mindset shifts towards getting the relationship between government, services and citizens right, the desired outcomes of public services would need to be re-evaluated. Should customer satisfaction be the target and the means by which the civil service measures its success and allocates resources? According to the report’s authors, this appears intuitively appropriate: if citizens are not satisfied with public services, they would naturally withdraw their support from public services, lose trust in the civil servants who administer them, and reject the politicians who advocate them. Satisfaction with services gives voice to citizens, helps to redress the failings of unresponsive service agents, exposes policy decision-makers to public scrutiny, and may turn the spotlight on neglected services that are valued by citizens.

However, the heterogeneity of citizens’ expectations (“value pluralism”) means that few would share the same subjective interpretation of happiness or satisfaction. Besides, resource scarcity and environmental constraints mean that the civil service cannot fully satisfy those who adjust their preferences to ever higher levels of consumptions with little or no regard to constraints. Healthcare is a good example of a service type where such behaviour is observed in many countries.

By the same token, the report concludes that satisfaction or happiness maximisation cannot be the basis for measuring the success of public services and allocating resources. Where should we draw the line between meeting the demands of citizens and being an efficient and effective government? Perhaps we may concur with Public Services at the Crossroads, that procedural justice (making and implementing decisions according to fair processes with respect to consistency, bias suppression, accuracy, correctability, representativeness and ethicality¹) and distributive justice (what is just or right with respect to the allocation of benefits and burdens) must take precedence.

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