Open Public Services White Paper

Debate between Stephen Dorrell and Oliver Letwin

Monday 11th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Letwin]

In answer to the right hon. Lady’s first point, I would say that when assets are being transferred provision needs to be made to ensure that they are there for the public good and on a permanent basis. We intend to do that in every case in which it applies. On her point about the Work programme, I think she is missing a vital component of what the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), who has responsibility for employment, has done. It is a textbook case: he was concerned that not all the bids would come from consortia in the voluntary and community sector—only a few did—so he took steps to create a protocol relating the prime contractor to the subcontractors, as a result of which the prime contractors have to treat properly the small voluntary and community bodies that in many cases are also the subcontractors. We desperately need—and intend—to get that into the mainstream of how the Government go about business.

[Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)]

In welcoming this White Paper, may I ask my right hon. Friend whether he agrees that one of its key foundations is the doctrine that information is power, and that if we want to make public services really accountable to the people who use them and pay for them, we will have to learn the new discipline of telling sometimes uncomfortable truths about those areas in which public services do not live up to the standards that we all want to see? That is what Mr Gorbachev used to call “glasnost”. May we have a policy of glasnost in our public services?

[Mr Letwin]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend that glasnost has to precede and accompany perestroika; we cannot have reconstruction, or proper choice, without transparency. That is why we have put in place exactly what he recommends—namely, a transparency regime that will in many cases cause difficulties and embarrassments for the Government. That will be worth bearing, however, to achieve real improvement. I shall give my right hon. Friend an example. In the past, there were many people, not only Labour Members but among the public at large, who said that crime maps would have no real effect and that no one would be interested in them. However, millions of people have now started using crime maps. When we also give those people the right to use beat meetings and make them electors of locally elected police commissioners, we shall be transferring power from the central state out to the people who are being served. That is a very powerful combination.