Catherine Needham, Queen Mary, University
of London/Catalyst (CVP 10)
The questions that the Public Administration
Select Committee (PASC) raises about public service reform are
wide-ranging and complex. This memorandum does not seek to answer
all of the questions, but responds specifically to question 4
on the relationship between the customer of public services and
the active citizen. The memorandum argues that we need to understand
what it means to be a customer in the public sector in order to
assess the implications for citizenship. It draws on empirical
data from qualitative interviews with civil servants, local government
officers and councillors to identify three ways in which the citizen
may be treated as a customer. These three models of customer interact
differently with citizenship. The models also have different implications
for personalisation and choice within public services, the subjects
of other questions in the PASC inquiry.
The PASC Issues and Questions Consultation Paper
on Choice and Voice in Public Services asked: Is it possible
to have customers of public services as well as active citizens
and democratic accountability or are they mutually exclusive?
The answer to this question depends in large part on how the terms
are defined. Citizenship is a term that is highly malleable and
contested; it denotes membership of a political community, but
beyond that there is little agreement on its manifestations. The
active citizen looks very different when viewed through the lens
of liberal individualism than when considered from the perspectives
of republicanism or communitarianism. Disputes over the meaning
of citizenship are well rehearsed elsewhere, and are not replicated
here. [22]Citizenship
is understood here to denote membership of a political community,
necessitating collective choices and generating individual rights
and entitlements.
More interesting and relatively under-explored
is the question of what it means to be a customer of public services.
Customer is a term increasingly used within central and local
government. The PASC Issues and Questions Consultation paper noted
the emphasis that the Prime Minister and the Office of Public
Services Reform (OPSR) have placed on treating the service user
as a "customer". The PASC could equally have found endorsement
of a customer approach from Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull
and in several white papers on service reform. The shift towards
the language of customer is also evident within local government.
Content analysis of Best Value Performance Plans in eight local
authorities found that the term customer was used six times as
often as the term citizen. [23]
There is clear evidence that the language of
customer is used within central and local government. How far
is this language significant? One approach is to see customer
merely as a synonym for service user, saying little of importance
about the direction or content of public service reform. However
analysis of usage of the term customer by those in government
makes such an approach difficult to sustain. It is clear from
the way that Blair and the OPSR talk about treating the public
as customers that the language is designed to signify a shift
in attitudes to public service delivery. When for example Blair
says, "Instead of the old benefit mentality, individuals
are treated as customers", he implies that being treated
as a customer brings with it specific entitlements. [24]To
be a customer of public services is to be treated in a particular
way when using that service. It is this aspect of the term customer
that makes it worth exploring.
A second interpretation of the term customer
is that it is a private sector concept, related to a commercial
relationship between provider and supplier. This is the understanding
of the term customer given by Lusk, who argues that, "[B]oth
"customer" and "consumer" orientations in
social provision are equally the result of a "commercial"
construction of the user/provider relationship." [25]To
call public service users customers is thus to encourage them
to view public services as extensions of their private sector
consumption. This interpretation is hinted at in government claims
that changing experiences of private sector consumption are driving
expectations of public services. [26]If
the customer is cast in commercial terms, it poses problems for
any model of citizenship developed on the basis of the exclusion
of commercial considerations from civic life.
I have argued elsewhere about the potential
for a customer or consumer orientation to pose limits for a participatory
version of citizenship. [27]Rather
than replicating those arguments here, I will take a different
approach. Instead of presuming that customer has a commercial
orientation, I draw on empirical interviews with civil servants
and local government personnel to develop a sense of the extent
to which those working in public services adopt a customer orientation
and what they mean by it. From this it is possible to develop
a better understanding of what the practical implications of a
customer orientation will be for service reform and citizenship.
The discussion below draws on qualitative interviews conducted
with civil servants in the Departments of Health and Education
and local government officers and councillors. The sample size
is small (32 interviews in total) and the findings should be interpreted
as guides to how customer approaches are developing in central
and local government rather than generalisable findings about
either tier of government. [28]
Interviews with civil servants in the Department
of Health and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) indicated
that civil servants were comfortable talking about the service
user as a customer. A member of the Corporate Development team
at the Department of Health (DoH) stated:
"It's a bit of language that is extensively
used. I was on an interview panel yesterday and one of the questions
was what do you understand in the context of this job by the term
customer care. So the concept of finding out what the customer
wants, devising what you can, matching expectations, setting standards
and measuring whether you've met those standards, it's the sort
of language that is being introduced." (Corporate Development
team, DoH, Interview, 3 April 2003)
A civil servant in the Connexions Unit within
the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) affirmed the wide
usage of the term customer: "One of the DfES behaviours is
about involving customers, and its about saying that everyone
who works for the DfES should be driven by these behaviours"
(Connexions Unit, DfES, Interview, 14 February 2003).
The civil servants interviewed indicated that
they saw a shift to the language of customer as a positive development.
A respondent from the Learning Disability Unit in the Department
of Health when asked whether he thought it was useful to see service
users as customers said:
"In some ways I'm more comfortable with
the idea of talking about customers than with talking about service
users. It's much more helpful to think along those lines, to think
what kind of service do you try to give to customers. What expectations
should customers have of the service you give? How do you try
to deal with the customer?" (Learning Disability Unit, DoH,
Interview, 13 February 2003)
A member of the Youth Participation Team in
the Connexions Unit of the DfES answered the same question saying,
"I think we see our work as being driven by our customers
who are young people" (Connexions Unit, DfES, Interview,
14 February 2002).
For these civil servants treating someone as
a customer involved developing personalised services and responding
to the needs of the user. It was not necessarily linked to the
expansion of choice. As one interviewee put it,
"The reality is that for some services that
people need there is only going to be one provider, the best that
the customer model can do is to keep everyone on their toes and
make them think about the quality of service that they are providing
and how far it's targeted at the needs of the individual."
(Learning Disability Unit, DoH, Interview, 13 February 2003)
The customer care approach was associated with
internal change ("keep everyone on their toes") and
individualised care rather than necessitating an expansion in
choice.
Within local government, interviewees were asked
whether they felt it was helpful to see local people as customers.
Nineteen of the 28 said that they did see the language helpful.
Officers were particularly in favour of calling their users customers.
Sixteen of the 19 officers expressed support for using the language
of customer. Most of these felt that referring to people as customers
helped to instil a certain "mindset" or "culture".
One said: "I think that the reason we started to call them
customers was to improve, it was to change our internal culture"
(Head of Customer Services, London Borough, Interview, 3 June
2003).
The councillors interviewed were more sceptical
about the word customer, with five of the nine expressing reservations
about customer terminology. The councillors tended to see customer
language as an erosion of the role of citizen and the democratic
linkages between themselves and local people. One said: "No,
they're citizens. We work for them, they elect us, they put us
there, they can chuck us out" (Councillor, London Borough,
Interview, 1 June 2003). Another said, "They're more important
than customers—we're their servants," (Councillor,
Rural Borough Council, NW, Interview, 10 September 2003). [29]
In the local government interviews, respondents
were asked to explain what they thought it meant to treat someone
as a customer, to explore the extent to which a consistent definition
existed. Four broad approaches emerged. For a first group (5 of
the 28), the language implied that users were paying for the service
and so should receive good quality treatment. As one put it, "Yes,
they are our customers; they pay for the service. They are all
taxpayers, and we're the service providers" (Head of Communications,
Rural Borough Council, NW, Interview, 4 September 2003).
A second group saw being a customer in terms
of having choice. Six of the 28 respondents saw customers in those
terms. As one put it:
"Yes, there is a real move to looking at
anyone who receives our services as customers, and there's obviously
a lot more being done to actually enable them to choose what kind
of services they want rather than the old idea of the local authority
just systematically providing services." (Head of Communications,
Metropolitan Council, YH, Interview, 5 September 2003)
Some of those who conceived of being a customer
in choice terms recognised the difficulties councils faced in
offering real choice. As one councillor said: "Customers
can come and go—if you don't like Marks and Spencer you
can go to BHS. . . People who live in [the borough] are bound
to [the borough] council" (Councillor, London Borough, Interview,
1 June 2003).
For a third group (6 of the 28), customer language
implied that local services and information were oriented to the
needs of the individual user. As one put it, "I think what
we'd be trying to say is to think of the individual and each one
as being individual rather than thinking of 800,000 people at
a time" (Director of Policy, County Council, WM, Interview,
22 May 2003). All respondents with service responsibilities recognised
that there was a need to respond to individual needs, although
in a modified way: "Around individual users would be difficult.
Around groups of needs, that's what we're aiming to do. . . We
would as near as we could provide a tailored service" (Head
of Customer Services, London Borough, Interview, 3 June 2003).
This approach links closely to the aspiration
of making services and council staff more accessible to the public,
which is what a fourth group of interviewees understood by the
term customer (7/28). As one officer put it, "[We] try and
organise the council's administration in such a way that it's
convenient to the customer and not convenient to the administration"
(Chief Executive, Unitary Authority, NW, Interview, 26 September
2003).
A weaker variant of this model of responsiveness,
invoked by a fifth group of respondents (4 of the 28), was that
being a customer implied courtesy and respect. As one respondent
said when asked what it meant to treat people as customers, "We
will be polite at all times; we will ensure that everyone is treated
fairly and with respect" (Head of Customer Services, London
Borough, Interview, 3 June 2003). Some respondents linked this
notion of customer to their council's Customer Charter. As one
explained, "There is a customer charter which is a set of
10 promises, but they are more about style and respect than they
are about a measurable service standard" (Head of Customer
Services, London Borough, Interview, 3 June 2003). One interviewee
talked of the council's "Customer First Promise", which
set out what customers could expect from the council, such as
a timely and respectful service (Head of Communications, Metropolitan
Council, YH, Interview, 5 September 2003). Six of the eight councils
had customer charters, although not all were accessible through
the website and in some cases even officers were not aware of
them.
These five conceptions of the public service
user as customer (payment-oriented, choice-oriented, personalised,
access-oriented and courteous) have different implications for
the relationship between the customer and the citizen. Before
considering these implications it is important to note the extent
to which a customer focus was prompting internal change within
the case study councils. Three of the councils had set up Customer
Service divisions in their authorities, and all the councils had
introduced "one stop shops" to enhance access. A new
set of staff were being appointed, trained in customer care rather
than a specific service area, whose role was to respond as effectively
as possible to a whole range of customer issues:
"We'll have people drawn in from the various
departments with a generic training and the appropriate high-tech
kit so that they have the information in front of them, to be
able to give people the information with the first person they
contact." (Chief Executive, Unitary Authority, NW, Interview,
26 September 2003)
All of the councils had introduced or were introducing
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. CRM packages,
adapted from the private sector, compile data about service users"
dealings with the authority onto a database, which staff across
different departments can access. One respondent explained how
CRM works:
"It's just a big database of customers who
we've provided service to, and we add to the database when the
customer contacts us. So we develop a history of that customers"
needs and service requests from the council and their information
needs. And in the fullness of time we should have the information
for segmenting our market, so that we understand how to deal with
different parts of the market better and more responsively."
(Head of Communications, Rural Borough Council, E, Interview,
23 May 2003)
As at central government level, customer language
was being used by the local authorities in their recruitment strategies.
As one respondent indicated, "I was recruited just over a
year ago to bring some of the customer care concepts and service
performance with me from another authority" (Director of
Policy, City Council, SW, Interview, 22 September 2003). Another
interviewee reported that her authority used the term customer
in job advertisements, which attracted new employees to the council:
"It certainly has attracted people from
outside the public sector to the jobs here, and so we have people
with a different approach who see our customers as the centre
of their world rather than an intrusion into their world."
(Head of Communications, County Council, WM, Interview, 5 June
2003)
Interviewees were asked whether they felt there
were any problems with calling people customers. All the respondents
could identify limitations with using the language of customer
in relation to service users, although most (21 of the 28) only
raised limitations when prompted to do so by the interviewer.
Responses fitted into one of two categories. For some respondents
(12 of 28) the problem with customer language was that the council
could never provide services in the range and quantity that a
customer would want. In the case of social services support, for
example, one respondent noted that he might have to tell an applicant
for a carer:
"What we're saying is there are actually
other people who have greater difficulty and at this moment in
time in terms of resource allocation what we're saying is you
have to wait until you become worse." (Director of Policy,
County Council, WM, Interview, 22 May 2003)
For a second category of respondent (16 of the
28) the customer language was limited because it did not capture
the democratic role of the citizen. Councillors in particular
(7 of the 9) were keen to emphasis the citizen dimension to being
a local service user. One councillor raised concerns about the
extent to which the language of customer "privatised"
the relationship with local people, a concern shared by other
councillors (Councillor, County Council, WM, Interview, 30 May
2003). These findings suggest that the councillors and officers
interviewed did not see the citizen role as encompassed by the
term customer. Officers appeared to see the role of customer as
complementary to that of citizen, the former reflecting the role
of service user, the latter indicating the democratic role of
voter. Councillors were more likely to see the roles as incompatible,
with a customer orientation eroding the democratic foundations
of citizenship. This split between politicians and bureaucrats
is perhaps unsurprising, since bureaucrats engage with the citizen
primarily as service user, whereas councillors are more oriented
towards the citizen as voter. Perhaps more surprising is that
such a split is not evident at central government level, with
politicians and civil servants equally keen to endorse a customer
approach.
The evidence presented here suggests that the
language of customer is utilised with central and local government,
with implications for internal cultures and structures and for
treatment of the service user. Five different conceptions of treating
users as customers were identified from the local government interviews:
payment-oriented, choice-oriented, personalised, access-oriented
and courteous. It is possible to distil these five conceptions
into three models of the customer, all of which interact differently
with the citizen. The first model, based on payment and choice,
can be seen as an economic conception, drawing its inspiration
from economists" models of the consumer. Here services are
improved through encouraging services to compete for providers
and by channelling resources to the most successful. This model
aims to make service providers more directly accountable to their
users through market disciplines rather than relying on the blunt
instrument of democratic accountability exercised through Parliament.
The second model, bringing in personalised treatment
and improved user access, envisages a different driver of improvement.
Here service providers seek to enhance the accessibility of services
and to work with users to develop appropriate service provision.
User choice may be a component of this model, but here it is not
presumed to operate as a punitive mechanism and emphasis can be
placed on service providers working cooperatively together to
develop the best package for the user. Direct accountability to
the service user does not preclude democratic accountability and
collective voice in setting the parameters within which providers
operate.
The third model prioritises courtesy and respect,
without necessitating changes in services or provision. This approach
resembles the model of responsive service offered by John Major's
Citizen's Charter. The Charter used a series of rights and entitlements
to specify universal standards. Unlike in the second model, users
need not play a direct role in determining what those standards
should be. The Charter model was designed to force service providers
to be accountable to their users, but it offered compensation
when services went wrong rather than scope to respond to user
preferences in service design.
Of the three models, it is the second approach
that offers the best hope of reconciling the customer with the
active citizen. The citizen retains the personal autonomy and
dignity that underpin citizenship, whilst not precluding collective
decision-making over overall standards of service. It offers a
way of combining direct accountability of provider to user with
political tools of accountability. This model of customer care
need not squeeze out active citizenship. However there do remain
risks to bundling up the improvement of public services in a "customer
service" package. If all the "positives" of the
individual's relationship with government are experienced as a
customer, whilst all the "duties", such as paying taxes
and voting, are linked to being a citizen, this threatens to dislocate
the experience of paying for services from the experience of using
them. The government needs to consider the merits of delivering
good quality and responsive services to users as a condition of
citizenship rather than as a concession to the customer.
April 2004
22 See for example Faulks, K (1998) Citizenship
in Modern Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)
or Heater, D (1990) Citizenship: The Civic Ideal in World History,
Politics and Education (Harlow: Longman) Back
23
Eight local authorities in England were targeted for the research,
which was undertaken during September 2003. The local authorities
were selected to provide a variety of types, regions and political
control, although the sample is too small to draw generalisable
conclusions. Back
24
Blair, T (2002) Speech on Welfare Reform, 10 June, www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page1716.asp Back
25
Lusk, P (1997) "Tenants Choice and tenant management: who
owns and who controls social housing?", in Cooper, C and
Hawtin, M (eds), Resident Involvement in Community Action (Coventry:
Chartered Institute of Housing), p 68. Back
26
See for example Cabinet Office (1999) Modernising Government,
Cmnd 4310 (London: HMSO), 1.5. Back
27
Needham, C (2003) Citizen-Consumers: New Labour's Marketplace
Democracy (London: Catalyst). Back
28
Four interviews were conducted with civil servants in the Department
of Health and the Department for Education and Skills. Respondents
were selected for their involvement in policy matters relating
to service delivery. In local government, 19 officers and 9 councillors
were interviewed, drawn from the eight local authorities discussed
in footnote 2. Council websites were used to identify senior officers
with responsibility for service delivery, consultation and communication
respectively. Two or three officers were interviewed in each authority:
three from the larger authorities and two from the smaller councils
where a single officer usually took responsibility for consultation
and communication. One executive board councillor was interviewed
from each of the eight local authorities. An additional interview
was conducted with an opposition councillor in the county council
to explore the backbench perspective. Back
29
Regions are denoted by standard abbreviations: SE-South East,
E-East, SW-South West, WM-West Midlands, NW-North West, YH-Yorkshire
and Humberside. Back
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