Performance of Public Services

How does government attempt to manage the performance of public services, and what issues are raised?

How does government attempt to manage the performance of public services, and what issues are raised?

Introduction

Public Services include all the state services that the state provides to its citizens. Public Services ensure the provision of inherently collective consumption goods such as clean water, electricity and gas. The scope of public services also extends to the activities that involve use of state powers of compulsion over and above tort or contract law and protection of children from parental abuse. Services in which politics overrides markets and the publicly run banks also fall under the businesses of public services (Pollitt 2003). On a wider level defending the country against terrorism, securing our borders and controlling immigration, and enabling the police and local communities to step up the fight against crime and anti-social behavior are also regarded as public services.

Elected politicians and bureaucrats have some incentive to adopt public service management systems that will help secure their reflection. The data come from central performance targets for health and education in Great Britain in the early 2000s and are analyzed through a “consilience” approach that combines analysis of electoral and opinion poll data with analysis of press reports, legislative committee reports, Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development reports, and interviews with senior civil servants. We find little clear evidence for direct electoral benefits from the tough English targets and also little evidence for symbolic benefits for the incumbent government in support from other actors. These findings prompt questions as to why politicians should have invested significant time and political capital in such a public service management system (Hood 2010).

Understanding the population: identifying policy aims

Before they can formulate policies, policy-makers need to understand the population they serve, identifying both its assets and its needs (NEF 2011). They particularly need to understand what drives the overall outcomes they intend to promote. This understanding drives the identification of specific policy aims.

Some of these can be regarded as 'key intermediate aims', because they set priorities at the highest level of government and often affect the way that the work of the civil service is structured. Used in analysis at an early stage of the policy cycle, subjective well-being measures will allow the major drivers of flourishing to be identified. These can then be prioritised as key intermediate aims. This is especially important where there are trade-offs with competing intermediate outcomes. This early-stage analysis can also help identify new policy aims and allow the variations in well-being between different groups within the population to be examined (NEF 2011).

SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR MEASURING WHAT MATTERS

Measuring the social, economic and environmental outcomes

A number of measures could be taken measuring the extent of quality of information and positively relating it to our appreciation of the link between specific interventions and the individual well-being, communal networks and the surroundings. Best measure would determine the constructive and downbeat change in lives of people, social ...