Daily Mail, February 22 2002

The worm has finally turned. Among the great and the good who gave Tony Blair a drubbing this week for the way he is handling the public services, one name in particular leapt from the page.

Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, put his name to a round robin which warned the Prime Minister to stop suggesting that the private sector has all the answers and that the public services must only carry out tasks set by central government.

It is thought to be unprecedented for the most significant police officer in the country publicly to express his anger with the government of the day. Nurses, doctors, teachers – we are accustomed to those people having a go at politicians.

But things have come to a pretty pass when the police service, normally the most buttoned-up, stoical and, above all, apolitical of our public services is moved to such deep anger that it sticks its helmet above the parapet in this way.

Stung by such a high-profile revolt, Tony Blair tried to calm everyone down by praising the dedication and talent of public sector workers who, he said, were the ‘lifeblood’ of Britain, performing miracles every day in our hospitals and classrooms and on our streets.

The Prime Minister is performing more changes on this issue than a stripper working the buses.

One minute he is attacking public service workers as ‘wreckers’ standing in the way of reform. The next minute, he is talking them up as public heroes, bizarrely implying that any criticism of the condition of these services is an attack on those who are keeping them running at all.

Now he has said he is going to pour untold extra billions of our money into the ailing NHS, and that we will all have to jolly well put our hands deep in our pockets to pay for it. So does this mean he is abandoning his ‘radical’ reform agenda after all, concluding instead that throwing money at the public services is all that’s needed -- and that they can then be left alone to get on with the job?

On the contrary. With money come the strings – more and more of them. For the Treasury, all too aware of the dangers of pouring yet more taxpayers’ money into a public sector black hole, is producing targets and performance indicators for virtually everything that moves. This is the way it thinks it can make sure the public sector gets its act together (and the way Gordon Brown makes sure he keeps his hands on the levers of power by assuming unprecedented control over day-to-day delivery).

This is an egregious error. Whitehall cannot run the public services. It does not possess the expertise and it cannot make well-informed judgments from such a distance. The targets it dictates merely distort priorities, as we can see from the waiting lists débâcle, or exam grade inflation.

Whitehall’s misplaced and muddling managerialism is responsible for the shambles in health, education and law and order. Even worse, it is destroying the priceless ethos of the professional.

The essence of professionalism is independence. This is crucial to allow the doctor, teacher or police officer to respond without outside interference to the needs of the patient, pupil or victim of crime.

Whitehall’s pathological target-setting has taken an axe to that professional independence. The police, for example, have been unable to respond to variable local needs because they have been paralysed by diktats emanating from the Treasury.

But worse has issued from the Home Office. What undoubtedly sent Sir John Stevens into orbit was the recent threat by the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to send in a hit squad if the Met hadn’t brought London’s spiralling violence under control within six months.

This threat displayed a quite astounding indifference to the delicate balance of our constitutional arrangements. For the essence of our policing system and a guarantor of our liberties is the independence of the constabulary.

The police are – or should be – answerable to the public. Politicians must not tell them what to do. The tripartite relationship between chief officer, police authority and Home Secretary is a system of checks and balances instituted precisely to ensure that independence.

This independence has been whittled away by the managerial apparatus of target-setting, and the blizzard of instructions not to offend the sensibilities of self-designated interest groups. All this has crippled and demoralised the police whose top brass, to their undying shame, have mutely gone along with it.

Now at last, Sir John has stood up to be counted. For the Home Secretary to threaten to dump a chief police officer if he is not delivering what the government wants is an abuse of power. It is not an exaggeration to say that down the end of this road lies a police state.

It also fails to grasp what has gone wrong with policing – because there certainly is a big problem here. After the corruption cases and miscarriages of justice of the 1970s and 1980s, police morale collapsed. Target-setting and bullying made that demoralisation worse.

Now, Blunkett is attacking police overtime. There’s no question that overtime is abused. But there’s a danger of turning policing into a nine-to-five job – and thus crippling it.

What’s failed here is police management. The New York police brought crime down in large measure through a management revolution. Its chief officers hold up for weekly microscopic scrutiny everything going on in the force. Such accountability would not only improve our own police performance but minimise both corruption and malingering – while raising officers’ morale.

But our government won’t allow the police such a free hand. Moreover, its control-freakery is similarly undermining all the professions. Nurses are being encouraged to do the job of doctors; classroom assistants to do the job of teachers; untrained community wardens to do the job of police officers.

All this means independent professionals are replaced by a more tractable set of people who can be more easily controlled by Whitehall. And it all means deteriorating standards of service.

Certainly, the professions badly need reform. Doctors don’t regulate themselves properly. Too many teachers fail to disseminate knowledge and culture. Too many nurses have forgotten what it is to care.

But the public services will only improve if professionalism is restored. That means two things must happen. Professional leaders must emerge who recall their craft to its own ethic of service; and these workers must become accountable, not upwards to Whitehall but downwards to the people they serve.

The professions are an essential bulwark between the individual and the state. They create networks of trust, competence and confidence. They are the essence of public service.

Tony Blair appears to have convinced himself that the public services are nicely on the road to recovery. They are not. They are on the road to control, and the professions are on the road to extinction.

Posted by admin at February 22, 2002