Have public services forgotten the public?

At the end of March last year there was a yawning gap in Ministry of Justice accounts of £2bn . The state was owed £600m in unpaid court fees, and had failed to collect a further £1.26bn in confiscation orders. The ministry told the National Audit Office there was "no chance" of recovering £900m of the money. Maybe the phrase "failed to collect" is pejorative. Perhaps the gap is just another sign of the complexity of modern government, how difficult agencies find it to reach into households and how recalcitrant people are to part with their money. Maybe it's not the fault of civil servants. But even the most generous-hearted advocate of public services finds such figures disturbing. Something is amiss in the relationship between public services (in this instance courts and the various agencies involved in collecting fines) and the public. If it's not the fault of civil servants, they appear remarkably complaisant. Since the present government came to power, more than one commentator has puzzled over how "easy" it has found making spending cuts. The public have assented because, it seems, majorities think public services bloated and public servants' pay excessive. Labour leader Ed Miliband will have been assured by his pollsters he was on the right track before precipitating this week's row with the unions over pay. You don't have to be Lord Justice Leveson to ascribe responsibility for some of this to the biases of the newspaper press and, from the public service point of view, a poisoned climate of opinion. But that won't do as an explanation. At some point during recent decades the public services lost a critical margin of public support – enough to permit the rhetoric of "reform" to become a commonplace of politics. I'm struggling a bit, because we lack in-depth history, or indeed any history at all, in the form of studies of the frontline, of how public attitudes to public services are formed and sustained. How, for example, people can simultaneously entertain strong positive views of a specific service (their GP or children's teacher) and say starkly critical things about the NHS or schooling. But without a shift in basic public views about public services, it's hard to explain what has happened during recent decades. A new book, Public Service on the Brink , due out in March, can't help but expose what is missing. It sets out to be a vindication of public services, but too often becomes an uncomfortable celebration of victimhood. In it Mark Serwotka – a union leader whose communication skills seem to be in inverse proportion to his political realism – writes eloquently about his experience in social security offices. He cites decent evidence in favour of public and direct provision of jobs and welfare. But what he doesn't offer is any account of why political (and public) opinion swung. If public service has been denigrated, why have its beneficiaries been so passive or, often, complicit? Contributors complain about "new public management" but its introduction was enabled by a public service setup that lacked evidence for its effectiveness and was, too often, simply inefficient. Other writers in the book, such as the ex-diplomat Sir Rodric Braithwaite, merely wallow in nostalgia. It's a besetting sin for old Whitehall hands. For Braithwaite the rot set in long before Margaret Thatcher; for him, the ruination of the civil service began with Harold Wilson and Labour's demand that Whitehall modernise – a project yet to come anywhere near completion almost 50 years later. Braithwaite succumbs to the tired line of blaming politicians, as if they were not also the people who raise the tax and take the heat. Only occasionally does the public get a look in. Libby Goldby, a former headteacher, admits the damage caused in the 1960s and 1970s by "the failure to take parents and the community with us on our search for more varied and appropriate approaches to education". Somehow the public services have to get them back. David Walker is contributing editor to the 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.