Summing up, political implications
The examples I have provided show how we all loose out and how little control we actually have over our own services and assets.
The examples I have given are symptoms of a wider malaise that runs through our entire political and economic system, we are voters, users, consumers but not citizens, we are granted things when it suites but are comprehensively excluded otherwise. Most people don't want to push themselves forward and jump through the hoops. The system is a mix of patronage, self promotion and selection of those who can show that are acceptable.
To reiterate then, instead of wide engagement with its citizens, as of right, the state is pursuing policies that make public accountability difficult. Some organisations are more open than others, some appear open but have (deliberate) blindspots. Where there is good practice it is at the discretion of the local management and not by right of citizenship. Where there are vested interests and obvious wrongs they cannot be sorted out either easily or quickly. It is at best a bit of a hodge-podge. Agencies and outsourcing are difficult to challenge. Both our experience of the service as well as he underlying service is degraded.
The governance process should be wide enough to include the users of services and the wider community it serves. This is not a partisan point, but so far as I know no party is investing the necessary political capital to overhaul the constitution. It is obvious that Parliament cannot oversee these bodies, and the executive has over the years moved them from direct ministerial overview to an arms-length arrangement. At arm’s length the key appointments become a form of patronage and vested interests can be disproportionately represented. There is little break on cronyism and the general public less and less influence.
This whole swath of government has to be opened up to scrutiny. A great fuss was made about getting rid of quango’s but this entirely missed the point; they all exist to do something, what they need is scrutiny and for the people in them to be held accountable. They have to be pulled away from being a (small c) conservative part of establishment and be made into a tool of the new order; not defensive, but accountable and capable of change.
This probably makes up an effective form of social control but it is not democracy or anything like it. Most of use barely notice, and as a result fails to see that we should have solidarity with the people at the sharp end. The people who really suffer are the ones who fall foul of the Hostile Environment, or Universal Benefit rollout.
There are a number of ways to fix this, the various agencies and trusts could be returned to the government administration that they were originally part of. Party political oversight could be reinstated but this brings in the risk of tribalism and token appointments. The political appointees on Hospital Boards or Watch Committees of the past were often filled by the party worthies. The scale of the oversight required is huge, party political issues aside, parliament or local government does not have the bandwidth to do the job. A new approach is needed, a democratic one. The organisations can be revitalised and democratised whist continuing to exist in their own right. The way to do this is to create oversight boards which as well as experts, users, managers and workers also includes randomly selected citizens. This is know as Sortition Note: Sortition? . Random selection provides the necessary level of disinterest, it is a form of inoculation against cronyism and special interests and it brings in the wider representation citizenry.