An FT Harris poll confirms that most people see little improvement since 1997 in schools or hospitals. A truly staggering amount of public money has been spent on services and the public are increasingly noticing that a lot of this has been wasted. The idea that the main problem with public services is a lack of funding is being rejected by the public.
Attention will have to be paid to the deeper causes of public sector failure: politicians without management experience and in their post for just a short time trying to run the huge bureaucratic conglomerates that are government departments.
Only decentralisation and an acceptance by governments that a greater involvement of civil society is the way to run these services will see a genuine improvement in public sector performance. To start off with we could look at the consumer choice in the provision of education and healthcare that is on offer in a number of Continental countries but not in Britain.