Kathryn Mills-Webb vs Tom Kirkham
Following this week’s announcement that Gordon Brown intends to let citizens provide feedback on UK public services via the internet, two seasoned JK debaters offer contrasting views of the new proposals.
FOR: Kathryn Mills-Webb
There’s no doubt that greater transparency is needed in terms of how public services are measured and reviewed. At the moment, if you have a complaint about a particular organisation, you have two realistic choices. You can either phone them up and have a 45 minute argument, only for your grievance to be logged, filed and forgotten – without ever being seen by anyone in a position of authority… Or you can call up the Daily Mail and attempt to induce a national scandal…
The new proposals – if properly executed – could put an end to both the unsubstantiated mud-slinging currently engaged in by politicians, the media and the public at large, as well as the pass-the-buck, hide-the-culprit culture that does seem to propagate much of the public sector.
While a line needs to be drawn in order to protect against unprovoked, irrational attacks on individual public sector employees, the new system can provide a meaningful, open platform for feedback and dialogue on public services. It can offer a means of lavishing justified praise on the many organisations performing to a high standard, as well as identifying legitimate failings without over-stating the problem and thus wasting more of the taxpayer’s money setting up independent inquiries and review committees to investigate what went wrong.
AGAINST: Tom Kirkham
You can’t evaluate your local hospital or council in the same way as you would a hotel or an eBay seller. I know there’s a current obsession with trying to offer citizens more choice and flexibility in their public services, but any suggestion that the public sector can replicate current online buying habits seems insane.
You can move between eBay, Amazon, Tripadvisor and Travelsupermarket within seconds; the fact remains that we don’t have total mobility in the UK – you can’t just move from the outskirts of Newcastle to a village in Dorset on the basis that the local GP got a decent write-up. It would make much more sense to invest this time, effort and cash in remedying some of the deep-rooted failings that we already know exist, such as the public sector’s appalling record on IT project delivery.
Also, think about a typical customer service department, and the ratio between the letters of complaint and letters of praise they receive. As technology has progressed – particularly online commerce/services, which now offer unprecedented ease and immediacy – people simply expect services to work, and it’s when services don’t meet their expectations that they are most likely to vocalise their feelings.
Rather than providing a balanced perspective on public services, the new sites could just turn public sector complaints departments into open online forums, serving only to offer a soap box to the sizeable percentage of the population that don’t seem to have sensible and realistic expectations about anything!
CONCLUSION
Both participants veer seamlessly between offering brilliantly articulated, insightful perspectives and indulging in demented rambling. However, Ms Mills-Webb wins, as Mr Kirkham is afraid of her.
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