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

PUBLISHING PUBLIC SERVICE PERFORMANCE
In spite of the negative notions and side-effects that could be brought about by adopting a “top-down” performance management style, the report is right to point out that performance targets will continue to play an important role in the design and delivery of public services. The rule of thumb is not to rely excessively on management by targets but to ensure that any performance target set should clearly indicate the key public objectives in each instance.

The report’s authors further advocate that government departments should publish their performance data in a bid to stimulate improvements to service quality through public accountability and ‘peer-pressure’, especially where quasi-markets operate. They cited an example where there is little performance impact on a hospital if its performance data is shared internally and privately, whereas publication of this data had tremendous positive effects, motivated by a concern for the hospital’s public image. By the same note, the authors believe the same can be applied to the public service. They are not alone in this approach: government departments in Canada and US already publish their public service performance data online to inform their citizens.

It is clear that with higher service expectations and greater general IT literacy the
public will become more demanding of information about their public services, and be more able to access and interpret that information. Already, some private sector organisations (such as Dr Foster, an independent commercial provider of healthcare information—http://www.drfoster.co.uk) have emerged to play an intermediary role in relation to public service information.

PUBLIC SERVICE WORKFORCE—ADMINISTRATORS OF PUBLIC SERVICES
In spite of increased resources and priority accorded to public services, the report found the UK public service workforce to persist in a state of disillusion and dissatisfaction. According to an MORI survey,² public sector employees had less confidence (about 10% lower) in their management compared to private sector employees on assessments of trust, confidence and view of their vision. This was found to be particularly acute in the healthcare sector, where public servants cited lack of resources, the scale and speed of changes, and a lack of clarity about priorities as significant contributions to their grievances. Clearly this had a knock-on impact on general perception of public services, since public servants are often the sole channel of delivery for many inimitable services, as well as the representatives and spokespersons for their service areas and the public sector as a whole.

CONCLUSION
Public Services at the Crossroads highlights the difficulties of managing citizens’ expectations of public services, the importance of the public sector workforce as a determinant of both performance and perception of the public service as a whole. In the UK experience, public service reform initiatives seem geared towards finding an effective but often elusive balance between policy objectives, service provision and citizen expectations. If executed well and in the right spirit, the report asserts that efforts to improve service governance should help to strengthen trust (clarity of reform objectives, availability of public services performance to the public, and more citizen engagement) in government. If managed badly, delicate but critical changes, necessary to bring a nation to the next level of development, may falter or even fail.

Garvin Chow is a Manager in the Public Service Centre for Organisational Excellence, Civil Service College, Singapore. The views expressed in this article are his own.