The state and local government
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2) That councils themselves are more than capable of transforming their services (see Table 9.10). 3) That public sector unions:
Moreover, as ESSUs recent report for Cardiff Council’s UNISON branch concludes ‘working with partners’ is the current neoliberal public management speak for wider use of strategic partnerships and increased outsourcing to private contractors, voluntary organisations and social enterprises to create a diverse market of providers. This inevitably means widening the role of procurement and contracting and fragmenting service delivery to a raft of companies, organisations and enterprises whilst reducing direct delivery by the Council and other public sector bodies.730 Recent developments in Essex County Council, Barnet Council and Lambeth Council – the start of another phase of radical reorganisation Until 5 February 2010 the Tory peer Lord Hanningfield was leader of Essex County Council (ECC) when he resigned from both his council post and as a frontbench Conservative business spokesperson in the House of Lords. Hanningfield’s resignations coincided with him being charged under section 17 of the Theft Act 1968 for false accounting between March 2006 and May 2009 for dishonestly submitting numerous claims for overnight expenses, which he knew he was not entitled to, for staying in London when records show he was driven home and did not stay in the capital.731 Hanningfield – and the three Labour MPs who were also charged with similar offences on 5 February 2010 – could face seven years in jail if found guilty.732 In October 2008 ECC placed a notice on the Official Journal of the European Union website asking for bids to run ‘any or all’ of its services for a period of 8 to 12 years at a total cost of £5.4 billion. Earlier the Council had adopted a target of £200 million savings over 3 years. The first that staff and some members knew about this was when they read about it in the Press. The Council appeared to have made no business case for this, nor has it produced any appraisal of options as to how it intended to do this, which would be the usual way of doing things. In December 2008, 11 pre-qualification questionnaires for this ‘external transformation partner’ were received, from which ECC management selected five, mainly consortia, to proceed to the next stage. The five chosen included consortia headed by Capita, Mouchel and IBM. Trade unions did not see the questionnaires nor did they play any part in evaluating the responses. These bidders were invited to visit ECC, to talk to staff in January 2009: but trade unions were not allowed to meet the bidders. This was because of the way the tender was organised; and the unions had no way of knowing what the first services to be examined were and no indication of potential job losses, or their timing at this stage.733 On 23 June 2009 ECC indicated that IBM was their preferred partner.734 Then in August 2009 ECC proposed that councils be given powers to set eligibility criteria and payment rates for income support, jobseeker’s allowance and employment support allowance.735 Similarly, the London Borough of Barnet – which lost £27.4 million in October 2008 when the Icelandic banks collapsed (25 per cent more than its £22 million reserves)736 – in December 2008 agreed to examine proposals to shrink the council to a ‘strategic hub’ that will commission services from a joint venture vehicle, with services delivered by ‘service delivery vehicles’.737 The national significance of Barnet’s approach, as Robert Booth points out, is that: ‘A leading Conservative council is using the business model of budget airlines, Ryanair and Easyjet, to inspire a radical reform of public service provision which is being seen as a blueprint for Tory government’.738 Mike Freer, the Council’s leader said: Going back to the Ryanair example, some things will be cheap and cheerful and in other areas we will provide complete services. This is not about rolling back the frontiers of the state, but about targeting our interventions.739 Freer also wants to persuade residents to do more to look after themselves and intends to forge "a new relationship with citizens" which will include the understanding that, as with budget airlines, the council will not automatically provide blanket coverage of services as they have tried to do before.740 In his day job Freer is a consultant to the banking sector; and he s stood as the Conservative parliamentary candidate at the 2010 general election in Finchley and Golders Green covering Margaret Thatcher's former stronghold. One of Freer's most controversial proposals so far has been to cut live-in wardens from sheltered housing. The council says this level of support is too costly at £1.3 million a year and it was planning to replace live-in wardens with "floating" wardens across the borough run by the private sector to save £400,000 a year. It is an approach which upsets the opposition, which believes the Conservative administration has developed a blind spot for the poorer areas of the borough and focuses instead on appealing to affluent residents of areas such as Mill Hill, with its manicured golf courses. "There is a real danger of problems in the local community and that vulnerable people will lose out," said Labour leader Alison Moore, who opposes the reforms. "People who are dependent on care services may find they aren't there at the same quality as before."741 Fifty other councils are introducing “floating” wardens affecting 500,000 old people across the country; and in September 2009 the UK Pensioners Strategy Committee recently obtained a High Court injunction ordering Barnet Council to take no further steps to remove residential wardens from 52 sites across the borough pending a judicial review.742 In December 2009 a high court judge stopped Barnet, which is likely to appeal against the decision, from removing the residential wardens on the grounds that the councillors had not adhered to their obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act.743 Reconfiguration would have created a three-tier council, with democratic accountability remaining only at the hub. The ‘strategic’ council would have been limited to collecting and analysing evidence on local needs, consulting residents, service users, staff, businesses and partners, setting outcomes, commissioning services and managing performance at a strategic level; and almost all of Barnet’s 4,000 staff would have had to transfer to the planned joint venture or service delivery vehicles, leaving a few hundred staff in a strategic role. As Dexter Whitfield – whose funding as the unions’ chosen expert was withdrawn by the council when they did not like the advice he was giving them744 – notes: The strategy is based on the premise that Barnet does not have the capacity or resources to improve the cost and performance of all its services, align priorities, track changes, transform services, plan early interventions, build social capital and plan for future changes.745 The ESSU therefore drew up a TUPE Plus employment charter for Barnet UNISON, GMB, NUT and NASUWT together with reports and briefings making the case for in-house provision and innovation.746 The latter exposed weaknesses in the council’s commissioning and procurement policies and practices indicating the council was ill-prepared for large-scale procurement; and showed that even a PricewaterhouseCoopers review of existing contracts concluded that client and contract management was inconsistent and inadequate.747 Moreover, the belief underpinning the Future Shape project –that social enterprises and the voluntary sector will have a major role in delivering services for the strategic council – is rejected by Whitefield as ‘wishful thinking and a diversion from the economic reality that national or transnational companies will be delivering most services’.748 The ECC plan for a mega-strategic partnership and Barnet’s proposal therefore indicate that local authorities are ‘commencing another spate of radical reorganisation’, which as Whitfield concludes is rooted in the same policies and ideology that led to the current financial crisis. The marketisation of services, outsourcing, the transfer of services to special purpose vehicles, public private partnerships and the obsession with performance management, are part of the new public management practice.749 Conversely: New transformational strategies for local government must be built on a new terrain, not the failed policies and values of neoliberalism. Simply, we need to NOT reinvent local government but to reinstate public sector principles, rethink organisational structures, service delivery and adopt progressive strategies using evidence, transparent language, honesty and the genuine involvement of staff, service users and residents.750 Subsequently, just before a lobby of the cabinet meeting held on 6 July 2009, Barnet UNISON branch secretary John Burgess said: Before Christmas, we had a cabinet report which placed the whole workforce outside council control. They have backtracked on that now but the new report does propose that ‘radical and revolutionary’ reforms to public services will be delivered in Barnet.751 They are using the financial Armageddon scenario….Our concern is that services are being put into bundles so that private firms can come in and take the contracts….They can’t be surprised if staff are worried….Under previous privatisations, staff have seen wages fall by a quarter…We have been kept on the outside.752 The joint trade union response to Barnet Council’s second phase Future Shape report welcomed ‘the conclusion of the Vehicle Group that “a single ‘vehicle’ for the delivery of all Council services….is not feasible”’ because: This was the centrepiece of the Future Shape Cabinet report in December 2008 and appeared to be imposing an organisational model prior to a comprehensive options appraisal on the future responsibilities, organisation and structure of the Council without the participation of public sector partners, service users, staff and their representative organisations.753 But the response also points out that the Risk Matrix in Appendix 2 of the Interim Report – although it identifies the risks associated with set up costs, procurement skills and legal issues – omits any reference to business continuity risk, the risk of financial control failures and the risk of miscalculating transaction costs, in particular contract management and monitoring costs.754 The report’s reference to ‘a waved approach to developing alternative delivery models for specific services or, where appropriate, larger service bundles’755 also appears ‘to confirm community and service needs have taken second priority to bundling together services for the market’.756 The latter scepticism is confirmed by the lack of an ‘evidence base’ for the projected savings figures; the report’s failure to define ‘services that could provide quick wins’, ‘non-core services for which there is a ready market’ and ‘a messier environment with multi-partners and customers across a wider base, mainly accessing services remotely’ by 2014; and the suspicion that the Council is considering a stock transfer (the Housing Stock is included in Bundle 3: All Housing Services).757 The joint unions therefore recommended:
On 21 October 2009, however, Barnet’s Cabinet approved its Future Shape strategy, which will allow some residents to pay extra for a higher level of service from some departments.759 Households, for example, who are seeking planning consent will be able to pay extra to jump the queue, just as budget airline customers can pay to board the plane first.760 Services which could be personalised in the future include waste collection, school and public transport and disabled child care. Barnet's leader Cllr Mike Freer said the plans will allow the council to make savings of up to £25 million a year, while gaining a better understanding of the wants and needs of residents. But Communities secretary John Denham said that the plans will see residents pay for services “twice”. David Cameron’s commitment to allow local councils to do whatever they want as long as it is within the law was “the green light for Barnet’s ‘Ryanair Council’ in which citizens have to pay twice – once in tax and once in an extra tax – to get decent services.”761 The Guardian on 18 February 2010, moreover, reported that Lambeth Labour Council wants to become a “John Lewis” Council. But, as UNISON Joint Branch Secretary Jon Rogers stated: “The Council isn’t a Department Store we don’t need political sound bites – we need adequate funding for public services.”762 Under Lambeth's plans, residents will take part in regeneration projects and could receive a council tax rebate for being part of voluntary organisations. At John Lewis it is intended that partners work harder because they want to maximise the firm's profit, and therefore their own bonus. Lambeth hope that their scheme could similarly result in efficiency savings for the council. Steve Reed, Leader of Lambeth Council, said: There are going to be reductions in funding from 2011. We are looking at different ways of coping with that. The idea is that some things can be managed by the community. For example, imagine you have a piece of waste ground which you want to tidy up. Instead of the council doing it, you give the community the tools and neighbours do it themselves. Instead of costing several thousand pounds, doing it that way will cost £300. But it also has other benefits. The community have a sense of ownership of the finished space. And neighbours will be introduced to each other, increasing the strength of the community.763 But Councillor Reed denied there were similarities with the Barnet approach: There is a big difference. We are trying to protect services by involving the community – theirs is a two tier approach which will mean different services depending on how rich you are. The Barnet model means sub-standard services for the majority while the rich get more.764 Conversely, as Professor Tony Travers said: I am not sure you can extend the model far without losing the ability to ensure public money is used in a way that councillors would approve of. There are limits to how far you can hand things funded by public money to groups which the council has little control over. I just don't think it can ever be as radical as the people proposing it would hope. Nationally the Conservatives have used the idea of the 'big society' and Lambeth's plan does seem virtually the same thing to me.765 Moreover, as the ESSU’s briefing for UNISON Barnet points out, ‘the current promotion of “alternative” privatisation’ such as ‘management buy-outs (MBOs), social enterprises, the “John Lewis” model and other mutual forms of ownership as an alternative to outsourcing or partnerships with private contractors....is not new’ – ‘MBOs and cooperatives were promoted in the 1980s and more recently leisure trusts’.766 Chapter Ten The global public private partnership market, South Africa and Britain This Chapter first discusses the global public private partnership market. Recent developments in South African local government from three different theoretical perspectives – liberal democratic, luxemburgist and state monopoly capitalist – are then analysed in depth: to further test the central theoretical hypothesis of this study that state monopoly capitalism’s hegemony explains the neoliberal ‘local governance’ arrangements Britain and other advanced capitalist countries have introduced since the 1980s; and post-apartheid South Africa and other medium plus low income countries have also adopted in the last decade or so. The global public private partnership market Table 10.1: Public private partnership investment in low and medium income countries by region 1990/2007
[a] Low and middle income countries only Source: World Bank, 2009 Between January 1994 and September 2005, according to Paul Davies and Kathryn Eustice, approximately US$260 billion was invested globally – mainly in Europe, Australia and Canada – by the private sector in public private partnerships. The estimated value of projects in Europe in this period was one billion Euros, with Britain accounting for two thirds of deals, and Spain and Portugal accounting for nine to 10 per cent each.767 The World Bank’s public private partnerships database shows that telecoms, accounted for 53 per cent of the total public private partnerships in low and medium income countries in the 1990/2007 period; energy projects accounted for a third, followed by transport with 10 per cent, and water/sewage projects a mere five per cent (see Table 10.1). Throughout the financial crisis, new private activity has continued to take place with projects being tendered and brought to financial closure. In the first months of the financial crisis (August-November 2008), the rate of project closure was 26 per cent lower than in the same period in 2007; and the project closure rate in August-December 2008 was 15 per cent lower than in the same period in the previous year. The slowdown reflects an initial impact of the financial crisis which has made financing (both debt and equity) more onerous and difficult to secure. Infrastructure projects are facing higher cost of financing, and lower demand for infrastructure services is beginning to impact some sectors. The major impact to date is projects being delayed, and, to a lesser extent, cancelled. Transport and energy are the worst affected sectors so far, while Europe and Central Asia Region and upper middle income countries are the most affected groups of countries. Yüklə 5,87 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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