DESPERATE TIMES HAVE NOT LED TO TRANSFORMATION OF PUBLIC SERVICES

First Published by: The Guardian 

Where are the managers and elected leaders thinking great thoughts about changing the way services are delivered? 

The age of austerity has not transformed the public sector. Indeed, on the eve of a budget that will affirm the squeeze on public spending and may extend the period of pain high up towards the end of the decade, its remarkable how little has changed.

Job ads are scarce, pay is constrained, pension contributions increased, libraries have closed and regional development agencies have been abolished. But a dispassionate account of the culture, expectations, personnel and – yes – spending habits of the public sector would have to conclude that not a huge amount has altered.

It's worth noting just how familiar today's landscape remains. Whitehall departments are all still there, with their permanent secretaries and their silo mentalities. The marksmen on the quango cull gave up halfway, leaving some of their victims flapping half alive on the ground.

Shire districts are as numerous and dysfunctional as ever. But, on the insistence of communities secretary, Eric Pickles, they are still emptying the bins once a week. If they are an impediment to rational and cheaper local government, no one is doing anything about it. Very few types of council have scrapped their chief executives and taken on their neighbours'. Contracting out services remains marginal, and even the eventual passage of the health and social care bill may not change that.

So far, then, the basic shape of things looks the same as it did. The public sector still employs nearly 6 million people. At 2011's rate of attrition, it could still keep going for another 22 years. Spending is now below where it was when Labour started to turn on the tap in 2001, but social care spending this year is still two-thirds more than it was then, in real terms. 

Adjusted for inflation and expressed in 2011's money, councils in England spent £2,756m on environmental services in 2001-02 compared with £4,239m last year. Bins, waste disposal and so on in fact cost more last year than in 2009, the year the cuts came in.

Acknowledging that the sky has not yet fallen in, one school of thought says, just wait. "Fiscal consolidation" – largely meaning cuts in public spending – is the one policy that defines the Cameron government, so George Osborne will stick with it: the public sector will go on getting less in real terms till the 2015 election. The spending review later this year for publication in 2013 will push the pain beyond the election, to 2017. 

There is no way, say those "transformers", who predicted that cuts would lead to service redesign and a "new compact" between citizen and state, that councils and other public bodies can cope with successive real cuts in spending without fundamental changes – including profound adjustments to what the public expects local authorities and the state at large to provide.

But the transformers have to face the fact that, so far, none of that has happened. Looking at both central and local government, you simply don't see either political or managerial leaders thinking great thoughts. Instead, they have muddled through.

And, so far, pragmatic "decrementalism" has worked. A few councils have put up their council tax by a small proportion but we have just gone through the budget-making season in local authorities without blood on the carpet or scuffling in the corridors. Ironically one of the highest profile casualties of fiscal stress has come from a Tory local authority – Westminster, which wanted motorists to subsidise residential Council Tax payers.

It's easy to conjure nightmares. If the euro zone slides, if growth does not resume, if the ratings agencies turn on the UK … But short of Armageddon, the British public administrator's appetite for getting by – a taste shared by most councillors and a good few ministers as well – will ensure there is no "transformation". Instead, we will see more chipping away and public managers using their imagination to devise Heath Robinson contraptions to keep the show on the road.

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