The Covid-19 pandemic placed public services under unprecedented pressure and a future edition of Public Money & Management might usefully look at how different systems have responded around the world. In the UK, an early analysis might suggest that successes have tended to be where ‘normal’ approaches have been overturned—leaving us to ask whether we should ever revert to a model which was failing long before the pandemic hit.
The UK has, for example, built one of the most centralized governance systems in the developed world and sought, therefore, to initially respond to the pandemic in a centralized way. Attempts were made to recruit a national army of volunteers, while a track-and-trace system was managed from Whitehall in a way that marginalized local authorities and local public health officials. As a result, local agencies were denied vital information which would have helped target efforts more effectively. Stand-offs between locally-elected mayors and central politicians created further confusion and sapped confidence. Only when responsibility and power were increasingly devolved did the response to Covid begin to look convincing, but the country’s faith in Whitehall and Westminster may have been dealt a fatal blow.
What also became increasingly apparent was the need to find new ways of making services more accessible to users. Services too often designed for the convenience of providers were found to be in the wrong place, delivered at the wrong time and often subject to unnecessarily bureaucratic rules. Innovative workarounds became the new norm but reinforced, at every turn, the need for users to be better involved in the codesign and coproduction of services to ensure greater relevance, better access and less waste. Surely the days of well-intentioned, but out-of-touch, Whitehall mandarins deciding the detail of how services should be delivered must now be over. Perhaps the missing link in successive attempts to reform UK public services has been the reluctance to involve and listen to citizens, except by way of poorly-managed consultation exercises. We need now to take coproduction and codesign more seriously.
The pandemic also showed how important local charities had become in the delivery of services. The majority were agile, innovative and well informed in their response while users trusted them more than they did statutory providers. The voluntary non-profit sector deserve to be partners in public service design and provision but are rarely seen in that way. Too often, instead, necessary data is denied them because they are not seen as ‘professionals’. Local as well as central government have been guilty of under-valuing the voluntary sector to the detriment of service quality.
Belatedly, the potential of digital technology began to be realized as a way of reaching isolated users and protecting providers during lockdown. The majority of UK GP appointments became virtual almost overnight but that begged the question why it took a pandemic to achieve something which could have been the norm long ago. The challenge now is to understand that not all business can be done virtually and not all users are comfortable with it. So we now need to learn how to be selective in its use and ensure that is driven by user not provider convenience. We also need to ensure that policy-makers better understand the potential of digital technology and that those on the frontline are skilled in its deployment.
Perhaps the most significant lesson of the pandemic has been the way in which agencies have collaborated to deliver outcomes which met the needs of users. The fragmentation of service delivery in the UK has grown apace—often to the detriment of users—but this crisis caused agencies to focus on outcomes and to break down many of the organizational barriers which had developed down the years. That, in turn, allowed much greater innovation, it reduced bureaucracy and helped create a culture driven by risk management not risk avoidance.
The danger now is that the many vested interests will seek to re-establish their power as, hopefully, we begin to exit from the pandemic. Specialist agencies will want to reassert the need for their separate existence and professionals will see much of what has happened as a threat to their status. The priority given to outcomes will fade, and narrow targets coupled with process based procurement will once again triumph to the great disadvantage of users and citizens. The challenge in the UK is to resist the pressure to re-establish the traditional ways of doing things and, instead, to design and deliver services in a way that meets need more effectively.