Solution to Labour’s public services dilemma is just a train ride away

April 8, 2024

This article first appeared in the LGC briefing.

Labour lacks a strategy for a public sector under unprecedented pressure. The solution can be found on the frontline, says Adam Lent.

Labour has a 99% chance of forming the next government. That was the conclusion of elections expert Sir John Curtice last month – not a man known for a tendency to hyperbole. At the same time, psephological gurus Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher predicted that the Conservative party will lose no less than half of the 1,000 council seats they are defending on 2 May.

It’s all feeling very mid-90s when Labour stormed the local elections before heading to its famous landslide of 1997. But that is where the similarity ends – at least for local government and the public sector.

Unlike now, the Labour party of 30 years ago had a clear strategy for the future of public services. Public private partnerships were the talk of thinktank seminars and Westminster brainstorms. PPPs would take public services out of their slump by bringing in know-how and funds from the private sector, heralding a new era of well-resourced innovation.

Just a few months out from a Labour government and it is still unclear what the party’s strategy is for the public sector.

That vision looks somewhat tarnished now, to put it mildly, but at least there was a vision. Just a few months out from a Labour government and it is still unclear what the party’s strategy is for the public sector. Indeed, Rachel Reeves’s recent Mais Lecture barely mentioned public services. Given this was an 8,000 word, policy-rich speech about Labour’s response to our “age of insecurity,” that looked like a pretty glaring oversight.

To be fair, there are hints of interesting ideas emerging: an emphasis on prevention, place-based budgets, speeded-up devolution. But it all feels like a list of hopeful policies rather than a strategic response to a public sector that is having the life squeezed out of it by the vice-like grip of rising demand and shrinking resources.

There is currently a flowering of practical, hard-headed innovation on the frontline of local services across the country.

Fortunately, if Labour is looking for something more coherent, they don’t have to go very far. There is currently a flowering of practical, hard-headed innovation on the frontline of local services across the country.

It’s only an hour’s train ride (on a good day!) from Westminster to Brighton where shadow ministers could visit the physiotherapy team slashing waiting lists. Or they could jump on an Azuma to Leeds where they can find out how the council is bucking the national trend on child obesity. On their way back to Westminster, they could pop in to Southwark Works to see how a council-backed employment support project has out-performed all similar schemes.

When approached in a genuine spirit of equal partnership by the public sector, local places have the ideas and the energy to start solving the problems they face.

Funnily enough, the idea at the heart of these and many other innovations is partnership once again. But this time with local communities rather than with big business. The great discovery of the last few years is that, when approached in a genuine spirit of equal partnership by the public sector, local places have the ideas and the energy to start solving the problems they face. And while it doesn’t come for free, it is much, much cheaper than bringing in the private sector.

PPP was an idea dreamed up in Westminster and the City of London. Like many such ideas it looked far better on paper than in practice. Community power is something different. A very practical response to a system with limited resource but unlimited challenges developed by the public servants who work with that dichotomy every day. Labour frontbenchers only need to jump on a train to find out more.

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