Charlotte Pell – författare

Behind the doom-laden headlines, a quiet revolution is taking place in the public sector. In the police...hospitals...local government...social welfare...costs have been significantly reduced, services have improved exponentially, and there is a real 'danger' of improving morale. There is now no politician or executive in any branch of local government or any area of the public sector who can say: "It won't work here". The evidence is clear: it does work here, and right across the board. It's four years since John Seddon's first assault on the regime of 'choice', targets, delivery, inspection, incentives, 'free market' reforms and back-office 'economies of scale' that was paralysing UK local authorities. In 2010, and in response to calls for evidence that Seddon's Vanguard Method really did offer the kind of dramatic improvements that he claimed for it, a first collection of Case Studies showed Vanguard's Systems Thinking approach at work in (mainly) housing and housing benefits departments.This latest collection spells out the kind of dramatic performance improvements that have been consistently achieved in the NHS, the emergency services and a wide range of local authority departments. Taken together, the briefings and case studies offer compelling evidence for anyone in the public sector (anywhere in the world) trying to transform service delivery on a falling budget.

The 'Little Heresies' seminars provide an important public platform to debate the future of public services. This book takes its title from the first seminar, 'Kittens are Evil', suggesting that what appear to be well-intentioned policies not only create perverse incentives but also lasting damage to the social fabric. Public services' management practices, underpinned by neoliberal thinking, were imposed by Margaret Thatcher. Successive governments continue to be duped into believing, against plenty of evidence to the contrary, that New Public Management, as it is now called, works; it work much better if people tried harder to become more machine-like, and to make more of an effort to eat less, exercise more, to stop getting older, to be more enterprising, to tick the right boxes, to remember their unique customer reference number, be digital by default and, frankly, become more service-shaped. The pros and cons of New Public Management are already well-documented in the academic sector.In this first publication from the Little Heresies series, eight heretics, all leading thinkers and practitioners in their professional fields, explain the effects of neoliberal thinking across a wide range of services; of marketisation, target and league tables, of family interventions, designer-babies, and ineffective management practices designed by Whitehall.