“It’s like Blair and Brown — but without the acrimony.” So sayeth one
Cabinet Office source, describing the prolonged build-up to today’s public services
White Paper to me a couple of months ago. His point was that, although the yellow and blue halves of the Downing Street operation are genuinely chummy with one another, their differences can
still put a block on reform. In his story, the Tories are like Blair, striving to go further, faster, stronger. Whereas the Lib Dems can occasionally stand in the way.
So what has been blocked from the White Paper? Listening to David Cameron today, you wouldn’t guess that anything has been. “Let me assure you of this,” he said in his speech this afternoon, “we are as committed to modernising our public services as we have ever been. I’m not going to make the mistakes of my predecessors — blocking reform, wasting opportunities and wasting time.” And there is some substance behind this swagger. As I said on Saturday, even a cursory glance at today’s publication will give cause for enthusiasm. Personal budgets; the “right to choose” between alternative providers; more and more transparency — it’s all in there. The overwhelming emphasis of Cameron’s rhetoric, and of the White Paper itself, is on decentralisation.
But there has been some dilution of the Tories’ original plans. The main loss, I’m told, is the removal of provisions to “apply a proper competition regime to the public sector.” The original idea was to have bodies as assertive as the Competition Commission to prevent anti-competitive practice in the public sector; be it excessive red tape, or local authorities ignoring private sector providers. But much of that has been plucked out of today’s document, a casualty of internal wrangling.
The question now is whether this is the sort of omission that might derail the coalition’s reform agenda, or merely slow it slightly. And, in truth, even the Tories I’ve spoken with believe it’s the latter. Perhaps those Lib Dems aren’t as difficult as Brown, after all.
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