How far will Cameron go to break the state monopolies?

Call it the Big Society, decentralisation, people power, whatever – but David Cameron’s vision for society just became a good deal more concrete. In an article for the Telegraph this morning, the Prime Minister makes a quite momentous proposal: that there ought to be a new presumption towards diversity in public services, whereby the private, voluntary and charitable sectors are as privileged as the state is now. Or as he puts it:

“We will create a new presumption – backed up by new rights for public service users and a new system of independent adjudication – that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service. Of course there are some areas – such as national security or the judiciary – where this wouldn’t make sense. But everywhere else should be open to diversity; open to everyone who gets and values the importance of our public service ethos. This is a transformation: instead of having to justify why it makes sense to introduce competition in some public services – as we are now doing with schools and in the NHS – the state will have to justify why it should ever operate a monopoly.”

We shall have to wait for the government’s Open Services White Paper, in two weeks, for details. Yet the potential significance of this one is already clear enough. It could take the kind of Burkean thinking that drives Michael Gove’s schools agenda, and spread it across the fabric of state. Not even when Tony Blair was at his most evangelical about public service reform did he really ever suggest such a thing. The posibilities are such that they easily overshadow another sigificant point in Cameron’s article: that personal budgets – which I discussed here – should be expanded outwards and onwards.

All of this will, as Tim Montgomerie notes, be anathema to the union bosses. Any talk of breaking state monopolies will be taken, by them, as a challenge to their own monopolies of power. The same resistance that they have marshalled against academies will be marshalled elsewhere. But the PM’s forthrightness in this article suggests that he is, at least, prepared for that. The question now is how much confidence he has in his own proposals. Until now, for instance, the coalition has refrained from allowing schools providers to make substantive profits, lest it upset the public sector apple cart. I wonder whether that might soon change, despite Nick Clegg’s promises to the contrary.