A revolution or a mild adjustment?

The prime minister’s article in the Daily Telegraph on Monday this week, about bringing a bigger private sector role into public services, is a classic example of two-plus-two making whatever anyone wants it to be, six, 12 or 23.
The right of centre immediately welcomed David Cameron’s comments as a code for backing wholesale privatisation, while unions and the left vowed to fight to the death this apparent commitment to returning to the days of Thatcherite compulsory competitive tendering.
The reality is more prosaic. The prime minister did not announce a dramatic new policy outside reforms already announced, other than to suggest a ‘presumption’ in favour of making public services ‘open to a range of providers,’ a comment which, by Tuesday, Number 10 was downplaying. Downing Street also confirmed that earlier plans for quotas of public services to be delivered by the private or voluntary sectors would be dropped in the forthcoming Open public services White Paper, out in the next fortnight, to which Mr Cameron had alluded.
Local government already has a plurality of service providers. If it did not, then it would have escaped the odium of making cuts to voluntary sector contracts. In education, free schools and academies are already up and running. Health is still largely a single provider but is, anyway, haring off in a different direction with the health reforms handing powers to GPs.
Councils will continue to operate as at present, namely, at different speeds. Neither the voluntary nor private sectors will be remotely interested if there is no or little money attached to their provision of services. Small firms and local groups will lack the economies of scale to make the necessary upfront investment required to make structural long-term savings. The private sector itself will always cherry-pick the big contracts. Councils will retain accountability for lack of anyone else to fill the gap and, as a result, the buck will continue to stop with them.
There will be changes, although not as much as the right and left have assumed from Mr Cameron’s comments.