Objetivos de la investigación

to their personal security grows smaller (2 and the overlap above), as does the proportion of them who are in receipt of some form of means-tested support (e.g., a medical card, local authority housing) because their earnings are so low that they qualify for benefits targeted on those with very low incomes (2 and the overlap below).

3. There is a growing identification between being in receipt of means-tested

social supports and being reliant on universal public services, a development which reduces the effectiveness of public services in helping people to overcome social marginalisation and secure satisfying work.

It should be noted that the unfolding of the scenario outlined in this way would be satisfactory for a large number of people. The quality of education, standards of medicine, attractiveness of neighbourhoods and security in retirement which they would purchase could be higher than what they enjoy today and their sense of control would certainly improve. However, the Council does not support the deliberate pursuit of greater reliance on higher private social spending as an over- arching strategy for Ireland’s welfare state. It considers that such a strategy for Ireland would deepen rather than alleviate the dualism already characterising – to varying degrees – people’s access to health services, housing, pensions, education and much else. The strategy carries other risks too. It is extremely vulnerable to individual’s employment careers and can be fairly said to undervalue the signifi- cant role of public service provision in combating social exclusion and fostering social cohesion.

6.2.4 Challenges to the public sector

In avoiding this scenario, it is important to understand some of the structural factors with which public sector modernisation efforts are contending and to distinguish valid critiques of public service standards from those based on partial perceptions or exaggerated expectations.

Public sector service providers are frequently large. Very large organisations face particular challenges in identifying and responding to new developments on the supply side and demand side, which niche organisations may be in a better posi- tion to exploit. In Ireland, public service bodies tend also to be very centralised. Size and centralisation make them particularly prone to adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach and less likely to respond to diversity. Public bodies may enjoy a full or near monopoly position and not, therefore, be compelled by competition to generate or rapidly adopt new procedures for improving efficiency and effective- ness. Public services are labour intensive and particularly prone to see their costs rise faster than the rest of the economy (‘Baumol’s disease’) as innovation occurs disproportionately in manufacturing and wherever processes are standardised; the difficult of measuring improvements in service quality can make the rise in relative cost appear greater than it is. Public bodies can inherit and transmit a risk-averse and conservative culture where predictability and financial accountability within short time frames are valued to the detriment of innovation. Public bodies can have had their efficiency and effectiveness reduced by past political interventions that, alternatively, influenced the level and quality of recruitment, caused a dearth of funds seriously undermining service provision (LA housing in the early 1990s), or occasioned a surge in funding that ran ahead of their absorptive capacities (health spending after 1997). Public bodies may be called to respond to social needs where no prior experience exists in the public sector for dealing with them (refugees and asylum seekers) or which spill across boundaries more rapidly than innovation takes place in ways of working jointly.

A final difficulty is not unique to public service providers but experienced in a major way by them. Service providers across a wide spectrum (doctors, teachers, social workers, transport workers, call centre workers, etc.) face a better educated, more informed and more demanding public. Service users, through ombudsmen or the courts, acting singly or organised as associations or local communities, are insisting on entering into a dialogue, hitherto largely confined to government and service providers, as to how public services should be provided and at what cost. The prospect of litigation has become a major consideration — and, sometimes, a baneful influence — on service professionals and their organisations in several fields. It is argued that, if taxpayers choose not to rely on a publicly provided service because they are dissatisfied with its quality and purchase a private alternative instead, their expenditure should be tax-subsidised.

Understandably, existing public service providers stress the extent to which perceived deficiencies on their part are primarily due to inadequate levels of public investment and argue that extra resources allocated to them would be effective in raising the levels and standards of public services. However, it is inadequate to hold that current failures can be attributed primarily to an insufficient volume of resources being channelled through existing systems. As often as not, the design

re-conceptualising ireland’s welfare state 165

of systems is also at fault. Innovation and radical organisational change frequently need to accompany the extra investment if the public are to receive the services they seek and staff to experience a sustained improvement in job satisfaction and working conditions. Some public service providers face a major contraction in demand for their traditional services (e.g., post) but most face higher demand as Ireland’s population rapidly increases. Yet the shared understanding between management and workforce is too often lacking which would enable them to seize the favourable context of rising demand to accelerate restructuring and innova- tion, and improve the service and how workers experience their role. The work- force profile of several public sector service providers suggest that they should be leaders in innovating on-the-job training and adult learning opportunities and bringing the country to make a reality of its ambitions in the area of life-long learning. This is seldom the case and management in several public bodies has been unable to initiate a virtuous circle between reform and higher investment. At the extreme, reluctance grows even on the part of government to make new services a public sector activity because of concerns that cost effectiveness, responsiveness and flexibility will thereby be less than can be achieved through alternative delivery arrangements. Public service providers should be more pro- active in ensuring ‘value for money’, leading the way in particular on programmes for up-skilling and retraining workers.

Notwithstanding these structural features, public sector providers can — and do — play leadership roles in instituting new types and standards of service provision. There are several lines along which even large public service providers can be successfully ‘reinvented’:

s _{Through being at the forefront in assimilating advanced technology and}

introducing its benefits to the public;

s _{Through the management having the ability – and being given the freedom —}

to lead a workforce through painful restructuring to improved job satisfaction and greater security;

s _{Through central government divesting itself of operational functions —}

sometimes routine, sometimes specialised — so as to concentrate more on policy formulation and entrusting policy implementation to appropriately regulated executive agencies;

s _{Through accepting that non-public bodies can deliver social protection that is}

publicly paid for and innovating new forms of principal-agent relationships in order to enlist the characteristic talents of commercial and not-for-profit providers (the public voluntary hospitals, privately managed schools, etc.) in doing so.

There is a particularly rich international literature on the organisational changes in public services in many countries which have given deliverers more autonomy to decide how they use resources in the pursuit of agreed outcomes and more incentive to innovate in the search for improvements, while structuring their accountability to service users and central government in new ways. Among the most promising new arrangements are those described as ‘democratic experi- mentalism’ (Dorf and Sabel, 1998), ‘empowered deliberative democracy’ (Fung and Wright, 2001), and ‘accountable autonomy’ (Fung, 2001). In these approaches to public administration, local actors are given freedom to set goals for improvement and the means to achieve them. In return, they must propose measures for assess- ing their progress and provide rich information on their own performance. The centre pools the information and ranks local actors by reference to periodically revised performance measures. This approach increases local innovation, but makes the local transparent. The centre acquires two new functions while surren- dering all attempts to micro-manage what is happening at the interface between service professionals and service users. A first function is to increase the capacity of local actors to act autonomously by providing different supports; a second is to hold them accountable through monitoring and, where necessary, sanctioning and intervening. But the latter function is exercised to complement, not undermine, local autonomy (Fung, 2001; Leibman and Sabel, 1999; Sabel and O’Donnell, 2000). These organisational innovations go deeper than the new public management (NPM) reform agenda, which was largely based on the scope that existed for applying organisational and financial systems developed in the private sector to public bureaucracies. Significant developments took place. There was more separa- tion of policy formation from its implementation, more use of executive agencies, tighter performance management systems, more frequent and improved data flows, etc. However, downsides also attended the practice of seeking to apply private sector management techniques to public services (Kelly and Muers, 2002):

s _{Efficiency was not the only, nor even the most important, consideration for the}

public who also valued the quality of a service (e.g., its treatment of the ‘whole person’) and equity;

s _{What could be measured influenced the formulation of objectives while what}

could not be measured tended to be overlooked;

s _{Piecemeal improvement was the norm and it was difficult to have the case}

for larger scale innovation seriously considered;

re-conceptualising ireland’s welfare state 167

s There was a tendency to micro-manage which reduced discretion for front-line

workers while transactions costs increased because of the detailed supervision required by the centre;

s The ability to separate policy formation and policy implementation was

overstated. Executive agencies, through their experience of actually dealing with the situations to be addressed, developed insights into what policy should be and increased their power over the centre;

s _{Insufficient value was set on democratic engagement by service providers with}

service users and other stakeholder groups.

By way of learning, there is now much greater attention:

s _{To privilege outputs with clear links to desired outcomes in the formulation of}

targets, sacrificing detail if necessary in order not to exalt narrower outputs or activity measures and, thus, make instrumental outputs into ends;

s _{To have floor targets in order to keep the variation in performance to a mini-}

mum and thus enhance the priority given to combating social exclusion;

s _{To develop sophisticated performance metrics which throw light on the value}

being added by publicly funded interventions (see box);

The following example is suggestive only and does not support adopting the particular performance metric it describes in Ireland’s schools. It serves to illustrate how good performance metrics can reveal high standards in surprising places and protect service providers — in this instance, good teachers — from unfair criticism rather than expose them to it.

In order to assess the effectiveness of reforms in the management of Chicago’s public schools, a metric of school productivity was developed that attempts to isolate the impact of school factors — such as teaching, curriculum, atmosphere — on student learning while discounting factors that cannot be controlled through what is done within the school itself such as the preparedness of children at the moment of entering school.

First, the subset of children who have attended class for the entire year is identified. Second, comparable standardized test scores of this subset of students in a test adminis- tered at the beginning of the year are subtracted from their year-end test scores. This method discounts students who attend classes for only part of the year and also controls for differences in the preparedness of students prior to enrollment in the class. Annual ‘productivity gains’ (or losses) that result from school specific factors can then be measured by subtracting one year’s productivity from that of the preceding year.

Using this metric, it was found that, while the students entering Chicago’s public school system between 1987 and 1997 had become increasingly disadvantaged and less well prepared, the majority of schools had become more effective in educating them.

Archon Fung (2001), ‘Accountable Autonomy: Towards Empowered Deliberation in Chicago Schools and Policing’.

re-conceptualising ireland’s welfare state 169

s To incorporate some element of quality-related funding in payment arrange-

ments, with particular attention being given to ratings of user satisfaction as a relatively unambiguous indicator of developments in service quality.

In broad summary, the shift in paradigm governing service delivery that accompa- nies the emergence of the Development Welfare State is set out in Table 6.1.