Is the 450 bus the solution to public service intractability?

There is a kind of experiment you can do with public services where I live in Crystal Palace, and I was reminded of it today when the bus driver for the 450 waved at me as he drove by.  I wondered at the time whether it might be part of my answer for Mark Pack (see below).

There are lots of buses where I live.  If I get the 450, it is a small single-decker bus. It is usually packed full of pensioners hanging onto the supports for dear life as the driver swings them round. When everybody gets off, young and old, they often thank him. If somebody very old is clambering aboard, someone usually leaps off and helps them on. Sometimes the driver does. People also chat to each other, which is very unusual, even in Crystal Palace.

But if the 468 comes first, it is a different experience. It is the same cross-section of passengers, but this is one of those broad red double-decker buses, the motoring equivalent of a brontosaurus, making a meal of its own tail. The atmosphere is completely different: nobody talks. Nobody even smiles. Nobody speaks to the driver, though he occasionally swears at us. Nobody helps anyone on or off. You can cut the distrust with a knife.

I have thought about this a great deal. It isn’t that there are more regulations on the smaller bus; the driver ignores them anyway. The government doesn’t regulate smaller buses more intensely. It is subject to no extra government targets or funding for social cohesion. The passengers have undergone no extra community training. 

Nor are there extra targets which the 450 keeps in neighbourliness and humanity, or even special surveys of how happy the passengers are.

No, I think the success of the 450 is more about its size. It is smaller and, because it is smaller, the drivers’ human factor comes into play. We are aware of them as people: they can – and often do – make people’s day. 

On the 468, the poor benighted drivers are forced to be adjuncts of their machines. Like the policeman in Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman, they are already part metal. “Size seems to make many organisations slow-thinking, resistant to change, and smug,” said the great investor Warren Buffett in his 2007 letter to shareholders. He was talking about companies, but it applies equally well to buses.  Or services.

This is not definitive. The 450 and 468 don’t follow exactly the same routes; one route might involve more schoolchildren – but the phenomenon is instantly recognisable. 

We know from personal experience that there are knock-on human effects when systems get bigger. We have all stood behind an elderly customer at the supermarket checkout trying to chat with the cashier about the weather – just as she used to when the small shop was there – while the queue behind taps its collective feet. We know what happens when organisations are too big: the systems take over.

We know, in fact that organisations built on an inhuman scale, with their inhuman architecture, and terrifying marble lobbies, don’t find it so easy to provide the kind of simple regime that allows human beings to make things happen. That is why, if we want our organisations to work more effectively, we have to end the tendency of all of them to strive towards empire.  More on this in my book The Human Element.

So that is my partial answer to Mark Park.  

Now, Mark has developed his blogging style down to a fine art, and I'm not sure there is anyone to beat him for insight and good sense these days. He and I are both due to be serving on the long-awaited Lib Dem commission on the future of public services (in fact I feel like I've been waiting for it to begin for decades, but that must be a delusion).

For this reason, I was fascinated by his very clear exposition of the problem - or at least part of the problem - with the story he told about the scaffolding up the side of his house which has been there for years, and which even resulted in a gagging order preventing him from naming names.  It definitely repays reading.

Mark's solution to this staggering inefficiency, by the local authority, is at least partly right - he wants some kind of measure of how happy with the service people are to replace the dysfunctional targets that still tie our services in such knots after the New Labour years.  In short, he wants something like the new Friends and Family test in the NHS.

But to really tackle the problem, we need to somehow define the basic problems that public services face now, and I think there are three of them:

1. They cost more than we can afford, even without austerity, and the costs are rising (see the Graph of Doom) without having any strategy to prevent future illness, ignorance, want etc.

2. The extreme inflexibility (and therefore relative ineffectiveness) of the service system as currently organised - partly the legacy of the New Labour years.  This is also the cause of the gap between the management of services and the people who use them.

3. Their extreme complexity makes them difficult to manage effectively.

Now, you can be too glib about this, and I am about to be.  But at least part of the problem here is the same problem as the 468: it is too big, the driver is miles from the engine so he can't pick up the subtleties, and nobody takes much responsibility for the other people on the bus (least of all the driver).

The solution?  Much smaller units, less hierarchy, people who can build relationships with those they are supporting and, above all, simpler systems so that staff can not just feel responsible for the costs of scaffolding abandoned for years - but actually do something about it.