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This is the third of a series of Reports on our inquiry into Public Services: Putting People First. One of the key themes of this inquiry has been how to guarantee that people receive minimum levels of public service provision and service quality.
In this Report, we consider the lasting legacy of the Citizen's Charter programme—in particular, its core idea of empowering public service users by defining their entitlements to public services. We look at three aspects of that initiative in particular. First, we re-examine the underlying principles of the Citizen's Charter and assess their continuing relevance to public service delivery (Chapter 2). We then explore the part of the Citizen's Charter programme concerned with improving service to users, the Charter Mark, and its recent successor, the Customer Service Excellence standard (Chapter 3). Finally, we consider the issues raised by setting entitlements to minimum standards of public services, and propose that a set of 'Public Service Guarantees' be created to allow people to claim their rights to agreed standards of public service provision (Chapter 4).
The Citizen's Charter marked a significant shift in thinking about public service provision in this country. Introduced under John Major's Government, the Citizen's Charter put the users of public services at the heart of public service delivery. It is this key idea that endures, particularly as elements of the Charter programme are reassessed and updated to meet the needs of public service provision today.
The Charter Mark is one aspect of the Charter initiative that has recently been reviewed and revamped. The Charter Mark and its successor, the Customer Service Excellence scheme, represent the Government's standard for excellence in customer-oriented public services. We conclude that there is a continuing need for a standard focused on improving public services, especially one that emphasises the interests and perspectives of service users. This standard should be based on user-focused measures including, but not limited to, user satisfaction.
One of the most important features of the Citizen's Charter was its stated aim of setting out people's entitlements to public services. Charters for individual public services were intended to outline the standards of service that people could expect to receive. In this crucial area, however, the Citizen's Charter programme was rather confused—promises contained in the charters were often vague and aspirational, confounding the aim of defining a tangible set of entitlements to public services that people could readily understand and use.
We set out the case for a clear and precise statement of entitlements to minimum standards of public services, which we term 'Public Service Guarantees'. This would empower people by allowing them to understand the level of service provision they could expect to receive, and to claim that as of right. Some commitments to provide minimum standards of provision already exist in a number of public services, and the Government is setting out others in new initiatives such as the NHS Constitution. The process of defining Public Service Guarantees would consolidate existing public service entitlements, while also indicating where new entitlements might be needed.
Creating Public Service Guarantees would raise numerous issues—the level at which they should be set, the resource implications they entail, the responsibilities expected of service users, and how to ensure effective enforcement and redress. The basic idea is, however, quite clear-cut. It involves putting people at the centre of public services and enabling them to claim the standards of service to which they are entitled.
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