British prime minister David Cameron will today promise a shift in power from government to the people as Whitehall departments publish business plans setting out what they intend to do and how voters can hold them accountable for it.
Mr Cameron said that the move would help reverse the trend towards centralisation of power in Whitehall and would encourage ministers and officials to govern for the long term.
He will present it as an alternative to Labour’s culture of targets, which he argues encouraged short-term thinking, as public sector managers sought immediate results to meet centrally-imposed deadlines at the expense of long-term improvements to services.
Speaking at the launch of the business plans, Mr Cameron will argue that Labour’s targets “bred bureaucracy ... created inefficiency and unintended consequences (and) crushed morale in the public sector”.
And he is expected to say: “Today we are turning that on its head. Instead of bureaucratic accountability to the government machine, these business plans bring in a new system of democratic accountability - accountability to the people.
“So reform will be driven not by the short-term political calculations of the government, but by the consistent, long-term pressure of what people want and choose in their public services -and that is the horizon shift we need.”
The business plans will “bring about a power shift by changing what government does”, Mr Cameron will say.
“For a long time, government’s default position has been to solve problems by hoarding more power to the centre - passing laws, creating regulations, setting up taskforces. The result is that Britain is now one of the most centralised countries in the developed world.
“We will be the first government in a generation to leave office with much less power in Whitehall than we started with.
“We are going to take power from government and hand it to people, families and communities - and how we will do that is set out right here in these business plans.
“In one of the biggest blows for people power, we’re shining a bright light of transparency on everything government does.
“Because each of these business plans does not just specify the actions we will take. It also sets out the information we will publish so that people can hold us to account - plain-English details about the progress of the reforms and the results they are achieving.”
Treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander said that the plans will include costings for policies, as well as timescales for progress, such as the dates for the introduction and completion of legislation and the date when changes will take effect.
"It is, if you like, a quiet revolution in how government works," Mr Alexander told BBC1's The Politics Show.
“It is going to be opening up much more transparently to the public what things cost, when they are going to be delivered, how they are going to be delivered.
“It will put into the public domain what we are going to be doing over the next couple of years, so people can hold us directly to account.”
Mr Cameron will today reject claims that scrapping targets will lead to a decline in standards. The publication of business plans will allow voters to check up month-by-month on progress being made and to hold ministers to account for their promises, he will say.
And he will dismiss suggestions that he is simply reinstating a target regime under a different name.
“These plans are about running Whitehall effectively so public services are steered by the people who work in them, responding to the people who use them,” he is expected to say.
“And publishing information about the progress we’re making and the effect our reforms are having is not targets, it’s just the basic information that the public needs to hold government to account.”
PA