Then he seemed to slam on the brakes, kicking most reforms into the 2030s. Local government reorganisation is on hold, along with an overhaul of the much-maligned water industry. Social care and significant welfare reform are matters to be resolved by the next government.
A delay is understandable when the issues are knotty and plans on the left to replace the word “rewire” with “renationalise”, stir up accusations of taking Britain back to the 1970s. And yet delay is unnecessary when the knowledge is available now to get on with the kind of changes that rebuild public trust in time for a 2029 election. There are oblique ways of achieving success, and the measure of success should be customer satisfaction.
Without this aim, the hopes of reform are lost. The economist Sir John Kay, a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford and former head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is a keen advocate of organisations that remember for whose benefit they exist. That means their primary aim should be to achieve customer satisfaction.
In the private sector, profits will follow. In the public sector, there will be savings. In his book Obliquity, Kay shows how those companies that pursued shareholder value as their primary aim failed.
And those that wanted to produce the best product secured long-term success. Just as a devotion to shareholder value – a financial metric of the benefit to investors -proved a blind alley for thousands of now-deceased companies, so the reliance on protocols in the public sector as a substitute for understanding the task in hand leads to failed outcomes and wasted money. You can see it now in the NHS, where satisfaction levels are rising in relation to GP and hospital visits.
The new system for booking appointments has its drawbacks, but people are finding doctors are available more quickly, especially for GP and outpatient appointments. You can see the failures in the NHS from the cover-ups by maternity unit managers of rising mortality rates. Neither the success nor the failure can be attributed to the regulation of the health service.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
