Customer focus not helping citizens

The findings of the latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey make chilling reading not just for managers of public services but also for those involved in their governance and those who write and campaign about them. For at least the past decade, we've talked about listening and customer involvement. The Audit Commission's swan song was the giant comprehensive area assessment, the point of which was to provide reams of information to a public that was supposed to be getting more involved, allowing them to make better judgements about services. The present government extols armchair auditors and, through the release of a mass of data about public services, enlists the public in new active participation in the way services are run. Yet the BSA survey shows that people are becoming less and less "engaged". They don't want communal participation and are less willing to vote. People, it appears, are becoming more and more individualist in their approach, more uninterested in what public bodies do, whether they are local or central. Their willingness to pay for services is on the slide. Anti-tax attitudes are hardening. The 2011 survey is based on a sample of attitudes in summer 2010. It's conceivable sentiment will have changed since, in response to austerity and cuts. Yet the BSA authors base their conclusions about the rise of a sort of anarcho-individualism in Britain on years of data; this is a rising trend goes back a decade and more. If so, how far are public services themselves responsible for strengthening this "me first" attitude? That sounds paradoxical. More and better provision of public services ought to have made people more, not less, enthusiastic. But the years of expansion saw intense criticism, for example by localists of Whitehall, by inspectors of service providers, and by consultants. Those years also saw the rise of "public service individualism", and it may have been as much cause as consequence of the broader trends in attitudes. Rights have been asserted. A dominant metaphor has been the idea of dealing with a customer, often at the expense of and in substitution for the idea of dealing with a citizen. The relationship of the former to public services is bilateral and analogous to that between a buyer and a profit-making company, while citizens take part in collective decision making in the common interest. If the British people are increasingly looking to themselves, as the BSA says, that may be because public managers have been encouraging them. Take health. The NHS boilerplate, to be found in trusts up and down England is that "the patient 'is at the core and centre of everything we do". Monitor, the care quality regulators and the NHS hierarchy all demand that providers of care in hospitals and in the community conduct intensive and individualising surveys, asking "how was it for you?" or "give us your 'personal' response". In local government as well, the style has become individualistic. People are rarely asked about their sense of the fairness of arrangements or how services broadly serve an area or community. Instead they are asked about themselves. Public services, however, aren't just about "you". They are about distributing benefits on the basis of need. Need, stemming from disadvantage and an unequal distribution of life chances, is asymmetrical. If patients knew as much as clinicians, they would not need to attend clinics. The NHS cannot be about "you"' – it must be about attempting, within constrained budgets, to address need for treatment as mediated by professional judgement, which again is asymmetrical. The nature of tides is that they turn. Now, as the chill winds blow, could be the right time to talk a different language, and start emphasising the collective and common benefits of services. Not "you" or "me", but "us". David Walker is contributing editor on the Guardian Public Leaders Network This article is published by Guardian Professional . Join the Guardian Public Leaders Network free to receive regular emails on the issues at the top of the professional agenda.