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Scotland's first minister Jack McConnell unveiled his strategy for public service reform last week - clear national standards plus lashings of independent inspection. This approach draws on New Labour's model of economic control. For all the praise of public services and those who devote their lives to it, the actions of politicians both north and south of the border speak volumes.

Ministers do not trust either the values or the personal aspirations of professionals to drive them to achieve excellence. Instead, our governments have decided that whether you are a police officer or a consultant, a teacher or a social worker, what you need is a detailed plan with precise targets, time lines, and milestones devised for you by the centre.


In the 1940s, the Labour Party's Douglas Jay famously said: "In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves". No politician today would dare to adopt such a patrician and condescending tone towards the electorate, yet they do not hesitate to take, in effect, a far sterner tone towards those who work for them delivering local services.

It is all the stranger because as Tony Blair's mantra "what matters is what works" sums up, we have a government that has self-avowedly made a virtue of being pragmatic rather than ideological in key policy areas. So, is there any evidence that the objectives and indicators of central planning have a beneficial impact. Not really, as the dumping of unfulfilled first-term targets suggests.

The fundamental difficulty seems to be the model of management that underpins the government's approach to reform. It is, at its worst, a debased form of how corporate conglomerates used to run their businesses. In becoming more nimble, innovative and consumer-friendly the best companies have abandoned centralism and empowered staff. They rely on a sense of vision, mission and values to set the framework within which different bits of the business operate. Tough on culture - what we do and why we do it; relaxed about process - how we get there.


And, perhaps, this explains why political managerialism is failing either to inspire or to achieve improvement. Public servants know what the government wants them to do, but do not really know why. There is no sense of what the government's vision is of the role of the public sector, despite the speeches praising it. Nor, in all honesty, are we clear about underpinning values other than an unarguable, if blurry, commitment to social justice. Developing a clear and robust mission statement of values is a difficult and time-consuming task, but then no one said that governing would be easy.

John McTernan is a political analyst.