The Modernisation of the Public Services and Employee Relations: Targeted Change

Citation

Procter, S. (2013), "The Modernisation of the Public Services and Employee Relations: Targeted Change", Personnel Review, Vol. 42 No. 2, pp. 241-243. https://doi.org/10.1108/00483481311309401

Failings in employee relations in the public services can have catastrophic consequences. Stephen Bach and Ian Kessler open their book with an account of Lord Laming's 2003 report into how failures in the co‐ordination of services in London led to the death of a vulnerable eight‐year‐old child, Victoria Climbie. Cases such as this highlight the important part that employee relations can play at a more general level in the delivery of any government's public service priorities, and it is this relationship between policy and employee relations that Bach and Kessler address. Their particular concern is the “modernisation” agenda of the UK's “New Labour” governments of 1997‐2010.

The first task the authors face is to establish precisely what is meant by “modernisation” in this context. They argue that policy under New Labour drew directly on the ideas of New Public Management (NPM) which had been developed under the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s. For those critical of New Labour, the idea of modernisation represented no more than a relabelling of the NPM's attempt to impose essentially private sector techniques and disciplines on the management of public services.

Bach and Kessler, however, go along with the view that the modernisation “project” also contained some distinctively New Labour elements. These elements were based on a “network governance” model which placed a greater degree of trust in those working in public services and which embraced more co‐ordinated forms of policy and organization. These were combined with NPM to form what Bach and Kessler describe as New Labour's “hybrid” model for the management and delivery of public services.

The employee relations implications of this are examined using the framework developed by Howard Gospel, which divides the broad area of employee relations into three parts: employment relations, work relations and industrial relations. The first of these covers the basic, individual aspects of employee relations, and we see here some of the tensions contained in the New Labour agenda. Thus while a lot of the target‐based performance management introduced by the Conservatives was retained, pay and payment systems were able to take greater account of wider social needs. Similarly, when looking at issues of workplace flexibility, New Labour were at the same time able to pursue a policy based on fairness and equality.

Where we see the most recognisably New Labour approach is in the domain of work relations. As Bach and Kessler point out, this is a domain that is often neglected. What New Labour did, however, was to bring it to the centre of the employee relations agenda. The power of the professions is something that is often taken to characterise the public sector workforce (especially in the National Health Service (NHS)), and New Labour's answer to this was a policy of what Bach and Kessler describe as “tough love”. This was designed to combine a greater responsibility for the professions with an acceptance on their part of a greater degree of flexibility in how services were delivered. Linked to this, reform of work relations also took the form of development of radically restructured or, in some cases, completely new working roles. Bach and Kessler's own work, for example, has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of support workers in such areas as health, education and social work.

Perhaps the most striking element of change that Bach and Kessler identify is the emergence of the “citizen‐consumer” as an actor in the sphere of employee relations. This took place in part through a collective input into decisions on the design and operation of services in health and social care; in part, too, through the representation of particular groups of service users, such as the elderly or those suffering from mental ill‐health. In its most developed form we have seen the introduction of “personalisation” initiatives in areas of social care.

Developments in the third of the book's three domains – industrial relations – are inevitably intertwined with New Labour's broader relationship with the organized labour movement. For New Labour there was going to be no return to what was seen as the cosy but ultimately counter‐productive intimacy of the 1970s: there was to be, in a phrase of the New Labour era, fairness but no favours. From the trade union perspective, involvement had to take place within the context of falling membership and declining influence. Where the two sides came together was under the banner of “partnership”, the meaning and impact of which has been the subject of much debate. Bach and Kessler conclude that while at a national level the trade unions remained an important force, a renewal of their influence is much more difficult to discern at the level of the workplace.

Bach and Kessler are to be congratulated on this very timely and extremely stimulating book. They provide a structured and comprehensive account of public sector employee relations in this important period, providing an excellent illustration of why issues of work organization need to be an integral part of this. Just as importantly, they show how employee relations can and should be understood in the context of the broader political developments of the time. This book is sure to become an important point of reference in these areas.

In highlighting and widening these debates, Bach and Kessler also show how much work there is still to be done. A theme that runs through the book is that we need to be aware of differences between the different parts of the public services – the NHS, the civil service and local government. The difficulty then, of course, is how we balance recognition of these differences with an approach that claims some degree of unity and distinctiveness for the public services as a whole. We also need to look at the conceptual tools available for analysis. While Gospel's three‐fold distinction works well as a framework for the book, Bach and Kessler's efforts to overlay or integrate it with three “narratives” of public sector employee relations – model employer, work experience and institutional infrastructure – is perhaps less successful.

Where research effort might also productively be made is in looking at the relationship between employee relations and the more general policy towards the public services. In Bach and Kessler's book, the former are portrayed very much as a “downstream” concern. While this might be necessary in order for us to be able to focus on employee relations as our main area of analysis, it does tend to deflect attention away from consideration of a more two‐way relationship. How do employee relations considerations shape policy in the first place? And how do developments in employee relations impact on policy over time? The current massive reductions being planned in public expenditure make it all the more important to provide answers to these questions.