The government's
Citizen's Charter, unveiled on Monday, is based on two contentious underlying assumptions. The first is that
"citizenship" is all about being a consumer: there is nothing in the
Charter's 50-plus glossy pages to suggest that citizenship has anything
whatsoever to do with political rights or active participation in the
democratic political process. The grand themes with which the idea of
citizenship has always been associated – freedom of speech, conscience and
assembly, the right to vote and so on – are entirely absent. John Major's idea
of an active citizen is someone who wants to complain about the lateness of the
7.55 train from Surbiton.
The second
assumption is that the problem with Britain's public services is their lack of
efficiency. If only the chaps who run our hospitals, schools, trains, buses and
council housing pulled their socks up, its reasoning goes, everything would be
fine and dandy. The Charter is essentially a list of measures designed to
secure "value for money": improved complaints and compensation
procedures, consumer rights to information, performance-related pay for public
service workers and the opening up of yet more of the public service sector to
competition through privatisation.
Some of the
Charter's proposals, such as those on consumer rights and complaints
procedures, are perfectly sensible if unexciting. Others are simply banal.
Controls on coned-off lanes on motorways and the introduction of name-tags for
public service workers who deal with the public are not urgent priorities.
In many areas, the
Charter does not go far enough. It contains no commitment to a Freedom of
Information Act and there is nothing at all on extending consumer rights in the
private sector. Its proposals for strengthening the power of regulatory bodies
are tame and its ideas about tenant control of council housing stop far short
of advocating democratic self-management of socially owned housing.
Worse, several of
its proposals are the sort of baloney that only dogmatic free-marketeers could
advance with a straight face. The service provided by the Post Office would be
severely harmed if a private rival were allowed to cream off its most
profitable business, and the privatisation of British Rail and London Buses
would only worsen the crisis in Britain's creaking public transport system.
The main problem
with the Charter, however, is that its identification of what is wrong with
Britain's public services is extraordinarily wide of the mark. The reason that
British Rail, London Underground or London Buses run such lousy services is not
that they are particularly inefficient but that they have been starved of
investment since the Tories came to power in 1979. Streamlining the complaints
procedure will not make the trains run on time. Similarly, the main reason that
hospital waiting-list times are too long is not that the National Health
Service is inefficient (although it is) but that the NHS does not have enough
money. Tougher standards for schools and publication of exam results and
truancy rates are all very well but, without more cash, the education system
will continue to fail. Much the same goes
for the social security system.
The Citizen's Charter is an attempt to get quality
public services on the cheap. For all the hyperbole in the Tory press, Mr
Major's "big idea" is really rather threadbare. It is certainly not
an election-winner.
