Public Services

Something that the agencies involved in the Rotherham child abuse scandal have in common is that the local council and police are both public services, delivered just like Mid Staffordshire Hospital where up to 1200 NHS patients received poor care and died premature deaths.  

Now if South Yorkshire Police or Rotherham Council had delivered these services via a private contractor or some voluntary organisation, you can bet your bottom dollar that there would be a big campaign for the services concerned to be brought back under direct public control.

Yet in Rotherham and Mid Staffordshire this was the case already, so what went wrong and what is to be done, as they say.

Well the first thing to be done is to recognise that this 'Public = Good' is nothing more than an empty slogan because if your experience is the same as mine, the reality is that public services are a mixed bag: sometimes very good, sometimes indifferent and sometimes unacceptably bad.

And that goes for whether they are provided directly by a local council or the NHS or in some other way such as via a voluntary organisation or a private company.

For example, the backbone of the NHS is a GP (General Practitioner) family doctor service in which the vast majority of GPs are actually private contractors who are not directly employed by the NHS.

Yet the service is generally good and often first class in my personal experience and the employment status of GPs is neither here nor there to patients, the service users.

Likewise with the country's pharmacy service which supports the GP network, it is privately delivered and seems none the worse for that, as far as I can see.

Every hospice in Scotland is run by a voluntary or 'not for profit' organisation and residential care is a mixed economy with various private, public and voluntary providers.

So the issue is not so much who provides the service, but how good the service is, how is it accountable to the service users and does it represent value for money?

Because if you ask me Action 4 Equality Scotland has provided a much better service to low paid workers on equal pay, especially when you compare our track record to that of the trade unions and local councils.