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Britain’s public services are in better shape than ever before. In 1997, we trailed international competitors on both investment and performance. Today services are radically better. Crime is down 39%, with violent crime down by 40%. Public satisfaction with the NHS is at an all-time high. Over 70,000 more nurses are caring for patients than 10 years ago, and long waiting times have been virtually eliminated. In our schools, nearly 70,000 more young people a year are gaining five or more good GCSEs.

These changes are no accident. They are due to Britain’s outstanding public servants, our action to close Britain’s public service investment gap - and strong leadership from the centre. But the reality is that we dare not stand still. The next few years will present three big challenges for Britain’s public services. As we help to build new industries and create new jobs, we will need to give every citizen the power to take advantage of the new opportunities of the decade ahead. We will need to confront long-term changes in British society as our citizens age. And we will need to meet and exceed rising expectations for services to be as convenient as the private sector and personalised around citizens’ changing needs.

We can’t address this future by cutting spending on vital services. Vital targeted investment is part of our strategy for creating growth in the economy, growth that will help create prosperity, jobs and help deal with the fiscal position. But as the Budget made clear and those leading public services recognise, while future projections are very uncertain, our pathway back to fiscal balance will also involve a slower rate of public spending growth in the years ahead.

We believe this demands a radical dispersal of power to patients, parents and citizens and a drive to free up the front line of public services. We have made great strides in our work of repair, closing the historic investment gap with health and education spending up to the OECD average - and so innovation must now become the key force of change in the years ahead. In the next decade, we will need to be radical about power; realistic about money; and relentless on innovation.

That is why we conducted this study. It sets out insights from the best examples of innovative services, showing how to raise standards and provide greater value for money.

We show how five key changes lie behind the ‘power shift’ that is changing the relationship between citizens and state, front line and the centre, around the world:

• using entitlements to put power in the hands of users of services;
• transforming accountability of services through real-time, highly local information, often delivered digitally;
• incentivising the creation of tailor-made, personalised services which citizens can shape;
• answering people’s ambition for prevention rather than cure; and
• a new professionalism in front-line staff and leaders.

Delivering this agenda is now under way. In our recent strategy for Building Britain’s Future, we set out a programme for empowering people with new entitlements to high-quality education, health care and policing. We aim to be world leaders in making information on services accessible. As services are scrutinised for ways to deliver greater value to the taxpayer, we will learn from how the best services are delivering higher quality at lower costs by reducing the number of services trying to tackle the same problems in partial ways. More than anything, we will ensure that citizens and those who work on the front line are able to drive greater innovation themselves.

Liam Byrne
Chief Secretary to the Treasury and
Minister for Public Service Reform