An excerpt from Stand & Deliver: A Design For Successful Government (2014) Ed Straw
The next part of the new approach would be in a set of duties to provide personal motivation to everyone in the public sector that has all of the power of something written into the constitution. What are or should be the principles applicable to working in the public sector? Is it ethical simply to ask for more and simply to defend the status quo in funding and outcome? Or should these organisations and people have duties to work out how to do the same for less, for example? Then be awarded more? Where (and what) are the principles in play here?
We must be clear what is expected of all PSOs and the people working in them, including the government private sector, through a set of statutory duties:
- Deliver results.
- Use the best process to achieve those results. • Otherwise, use controlled experiments.
- Minimise costs of the service.
- Deliver within the whole of public sector and not in silos or fiefdoms.
- Balance power in relation to consumers and citizens.
- Be proportionate in public services with regard to health and safety, speed cameras, etc.
- Be transparent.
- Speak straight. This would see an end to corporate speak, spin, obfuscation, evasion, gagging clauses, and straight lying. All staff and management would have a duty to say publicly what is really going on, and thus to contribute to improving services. This duty would go well beyond a whistle-blowers’ charter and the proposed duty of candour for NHS inquiries. Bent speaking would replace straight speaking as a potential cause of disciplinary action or dismissal. (The duty of straight speak would further reinforce the discipline of dealing in reality and results. This would of course be encouraged by failure investigations wanting to learn, and replace guilt-seeking inquests. The latter inevitably promote bent speak. Straight speak would announce ‘The train is crammed due to our lack of planning, and due to our slack contract specified and managed by the Department for Transport.’ Attributing a delay to signal failure when the true causeis the cause of the signal failure would go the same way. Thus would commence the change in cultures needed in much of the public sector, closing down the self-excusing wiggle room, and opening up the collective intention to reduce errors and to improve. The accountability on the individual would be for straight speak, and not to obey management edict to deny.)
- Maintain an attitude to work of enquiry and learning, to produce something useful to society.
- Adopt fair harmonised mid-point terms and conditions throughout the public sector – a policy of both fairness and equal opportunities, as well as facilitating movement across the sector and the transfer of knowledge and experience with this movement. Pay would vary as it does now, between jobs, bodies, and geographies. But the terms and conditions would represent a uniform mid-point in the current distribution. Redundancy terms should not be prohibitive and should be fair to the employee: a maximum of six months’ pay would meet these criteria – and all those hideous pay-outs for the managerialists would end. Pensions should be funded, invested with the Universities Superannuation Scheme or similar, and based on contributions not de ned bene ts, and be entirely transferable across all government bodies. Harmonised pensions at least across the public and Civil Service would promote beneficial movement between public bodies. Harmonised pensions across all sectors would not only be a rather important equality, it would also increase the ow of people between sectors and organisations, transferring knowledge, practice, skill, and understanding in all directions. Equality in recruitment should be established too with organisations like the BBC opening most of its vacancies to outsiders.
- Sample the PSO’s services in order to experience these services as the public do.
- Abandon the ineffective.
These duties would serve several purposes, prime amongst them the creation of something like the sense of personal accountability sought by a former head of the British Olympic Team amongst everyone working for it. The athletes had an obvious motivation, but the staff did not. Thus he sought to instil in each member of staff the desire to do a good job always. PSO staff today are largely demotivated by the organisations in which they work – top down, directive, forms, checklists, managerialism, protective terms and conditions. These and their demotivating effect would go and the new duties would provide some of the positive motivation by pointing staff in the right direction, mandating thought, and directing their attention to the PSO’s purpose and to customers and citizens, not internally to the bureaucracy.
