More questions than answers

When is a target not a target? When it’s a public service entitlement. Of all the policy announcements the Prime Minister made on 29 June when he launched Building Britain’s Future, a sort of prototype manifesto or pre-Queen’s speech, this is the issue that caused most puzzled expressions and scratching of heads among local authority leaders and managers.

Gordon Brown outlined three areas – health, education and police – where enforceable public service entitlements would replace centrally dictated targets. In health, for example, this means a guarantee for all over-40s to be granted a free medical check-up from the NHS. For parents of schoolchildren it means a guarantee of individually tailored education, including catch-up classes. And for residents the PM promises guarantees that will allow them to hold their local police service to account at monthly beat meetings and to vote on how offenders pay back to the community.

The key words behind the public service entitlement policy initiative are ‘guarantee’ and ‘enforceable’. How can these measures be guaranteed when public finance is so tight, and who is going to enforce them? Answers to these questions remain conspicuous by their absence.

Liam Byrne MP, the new number two at the Treasury, explained the Government’s thinking at the CBI’s public service conference earlier in June. ‘When public servants are driven by citizens’ entitlement – not Whitehall targets – they are more free to innovate in the way they serve the public,’ he said.

Not many people – in local government at least – would argue that a shift from central diktat to people power isn’t long overdue. But the wish for a looser but more responsive hand on the tiller still doesn’t explain how this system will work in practice.

Implicit in the Government’s proposals are that it has alternative providers up its sleeve if, say, a school is not delivering the guaranteed service. Failing schools usually get a couple of years to raise their game. Public service entitlements suggest much quicker action to satisfy the demands of disgruntled parents. In the current economic climate it’s very hard to see how that demand can be met.

Enforcement looks even trickier. Downing Street officials have told us that it doesn’t mean encouraging people to sue public and local authorities (‘they’re not a beanfest for lawyers’) but they haven’t told us what sanctions can be applied – or how – to underperforming service providers.

If council managers and leaders were confused by this section of Building Britain’s Future, there was (very) slightly better news for their senior housing officers. The Government announced that it was more than tripling the budget for social housebuilding over the next two years, from £600 million to £2.1bn.

You have to wade through a veritable truckload of double-accounted and frankly misleading figures to make sense of this announcement, but essentially it comes down to this: 20,000 ‘affordable’ homes of which 3,000 will be rented council properties. That will bring the total of new houses the Government has pledged to fund the building of to 110,000 over the next two years, or about one-fifth the number required. There are no signs whatsoever that the private housebuilding industry will be able to take up the slack in the near future.

Councils have been screaming out for a change in the rules that currently gather council rents into a central fund, which the Govennment then distributes in grants as it sees fit, while retaining a sizeable proportion for the Treasury. There has been at least a nod in that direction with the promise of a policy review. ‘We will consult on reforms to the council house finance system to allow local authorities to retain all the proceeds from their own council house sales and council rents,’ the PM said. Who will be consulted and how long the review will take has not been made clear.

A similar smokescreen obscures where the money will come from to supply the £1.5bn added to the social housebuilding programme. The Home Office and Department of Transport are giving up pet projects to lend a hand, but most of the money is coming from the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), which is slashing its Decent Homes refurbishment plans to provide the money.

This could prove a real bone of contention, leaving councils across the country with more old homes unfit to let than are created by the new build. In short, they might have fewer properties for social tenants in two years than they do now. The plan is obviously good news for housebuilders and, heaven knows, they could do with some. But whether it will do anything to help the 1.8 million families on council housing waiting lists is much less certain.