9. On 18 July, the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Andy Burnham, set out changes to the public spending framework in a speech at Kings College London.7 He argued that the Government would set a new approach by reducing the number of targets that it set for public services to around 30, with a reduced number of "indicators" to measure progress.
10. His speech, however, left the key problem with the public spending framework intact. As Reform's Commission on the Reform of Public Services argued in 2002, the key problem is that the framework makes Secretaries of State personally responsible for the achievement of public service goals such as the proportion of GCSEs passed at a certain grade. At one level, this locks in failure, since no Secretary of State - or even department of State - can oversee national public services.8 More importantly, it locks in centralisation, since it makes individual members of the Cabinet personally responsible. The public spending framework therefore acts against the kind of decentralisation that Mr Burnham also discussed, and that the Prime Minister has spoken of in his early remarks.
11. Public services need to be accountable but the lesson of the Blair years is that efforts to hold them accountable to the centre distort the activities of public service workers and deprofessionalise them without guaranteeing minimum standards. The right approach is to make services accountable to their users, either through choice (in health and education) or by democratic means (for services such as policing). It is noticeable that Andy Burnham proposed forward very weak examples of this kind of reform.9
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7 Burnham, A. (2007), Speech at the School of Social Science and Public Policy, Kings College London.
8 Douglas, R., Richardson, R. & Robson, S. (2002), Spending without reform, Reform.
9 Burnham, A. (2007), Speech at the School of Social Science and Public Policy, Kings College London. "We're already seeing that in some areas - neighbourhood policing is placing local inhabitants at the heart of local priority setting, and we're piloting individual budgets in social care, greater use of parent councils in schools, and choice-based lettings in social housing, to name just a few examples."