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Public services without government?

A picture tells a thousand words about the Government’s philosophy of public service reform.

A picture tells a thousand words about the Government’s philosophy of public service reform

Two weeks ago, David Cameron set out his vision for public service reform in the Open Public Services White Paper. Let’s see how the language of the paper compares to previous white papers from Tony Blair (2006) and Gordon Brown (2008).

Figure 1: 2006 The Government’s Approach to Public Service Reform

Figure 2: 2008 Excellence and Fairness

Figure 3: 2011 Open Public Services White Paper

Such things can be over-interpreted – but they are certainly interesting. Here are just three things that are striking to us:

  1. ‘Government’ appears less prominently in 2011
  2. ‘Providers’ get plenty of mentions in this week’s paper – and there are far fewer mentions of ‘professions’, which featured prominently in Gordon Brown’s 2008 vision
  3. Terms like ‘delivery’, ‘strategy’ and ‘performance’ have all but died out

Feel free to comment with your own observations!

Keywords
Public sector
Publisher
Institute for Government

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