Hopefully the work by NESTA will be, in contrast to Demos’, coherent, well considered, correctly referenced and containing a logical argument. Demos proposed abolishing the Audit Commision and promised to show ‘the real cost savings that could be achieved if a range of reforms were introduced.’ Infuriatingly for an auditor, they omit any detail of ‘real cost savings’. They have managed to get press coverage by crudely calling for the abolition of quangos, yet to quote from their own report; the work of auditing and inspection bodies is ‘an important endeavour because public money needs to be spent well and services need to be checked.’ They talk of giving frontline staff more freedom, but with freedom comes risk, and, caught in a contradiction, the authors are forced to admit that the ‘central concern for governments is, rightly, to reduce various types of risk’, and that this is ‘the function of our auditing and inspection bodies.’ After wading through what is an incredibly badly written report, one sees that the authors are not calling for the abolition of auditing, just reform, examining outcomes rather than process. They even have the audacity to quote from a survey by the National Audit Office which shows that ‘few public sector employees [have] ever been asked to make a contribution to how their organisation works’. Abolish the quango and you abolish the information that is necessary to identify problems and improve service.

The contradictions continue. In another section of the report, now auditing is not required because ‘people are not just motivated by the drive for profit and personal success but also out of genuinely virtuous motives and the desire for excellent.’ But wait. Some public servants ‘are lazy, selfish and incompetent.’ At the centre of this report is a fundamental contradiction, probably attributable to the authors’ lack of experience in public sector reform. On the one hand they want to radically call for greater freedom for frontline staff while pandering to the general backlash against Quangos and bureaucrats. But on the other they have provided absolutely no framework for ensuring these newly independent public servants perform. That is why they concede that ‘Tight regulation from Whitehall, or from Quangos like Ofsted or the Audit Commission does allow for the identification of failing services and is an important instrument to intervene when councils or schools are seriously under performing.’ Seeing this contradiction, they backtrack and claim that ‘it is possible to combine front-line freedom and autonomy with public accountability’. They consider giving service-users a voice. But where will people obtain the ‘high quality information’ which they require in order ‘to make informed decisions’ if all the quangos have been culled? The report suggests that ‘Where high performers are delivering, they should be left to get on with it. Where they do not, inspection and bodies should have stronger powers than they currently do to intervene.’ But how do we measure ‘high performance’ or identify low performance with no auditing process? Without comparison between the best and worse, how can the gap in performance possibly be bridged? Perhaps this is not what the Progressive Conservatives want. The report dismisses the (one year) Postgraduate Certificate in Education, and calls for initial teacher training to be increased to at least three years. This is for the under-performers. For the high performers, such as Mr Olliff-Cooper, one of the report’s authors, additional training doesn’t appear necessary: he taught history at Eton College for two years despite not having studied for a PGCE. Devolving power to the frontline in public services is a worthy goal, but it will be a delicate process, one requiring a fine balance between freedom to innovate, accountability, and a framework for when innovation fails. This requires a far more nuanced vision than the one offered by Demos. Perhaps NESTA will tell us?