Prioritization

Privatization placed inefficient and ailing state industries, businesses and some services out of state hands and into the private sector. It was done to make them efficient, innovative and consumer responsive. It changed nationalized industries into privately-owned ones, subject to the rigours of market competition and consumer demand.

The Citizens’ Charter was implemented to change the thinking of both the Civil Service and the public at large about state services and government departments. The purpose was to have government bodies examine what it was they were trying to perform for the public, and to implement procedures that would click into place where they failed to deliver that. In effect, it turned citizens who were previously simply the recipients of whatever government felt able to deliver, into consumers to be consulted about the quality of services they wanted to be delivered to them, and where something would happen if that quality was not provided.

It is now time to change yet again the thinking of government at all levels and the Civil Service which administers its activities and puts them into effect. This third revolution, following in the wake of privatization and the Citizens’ Charter, must put into place a system under which government will concentrate its resources onto the things that are the most important, the ones that matter most. It is a process of prioritization, and must permeate all departments of government.

To prioritize means “to determine the order for dealing with a series of items or tasks according to their relative importance.” Precisely. Government, like private individuals, does not have unlimited resources. Opportunity cost tells us that we cannot spend the same monies twice. When we choose to spend it on one thing, we cannot also spend it on another. We prioritize, and spend it on what matters most to us. Money spent on a restaurant meal cannot also be spent on a day at the races or a night at the theatre. We choose between them according to our scale of priorities.

We need every part of government to do the same. First must come an examination of each activity that falls within the remit of that department, and the grading of it on a scale to represent its relative importance. We might choose a 1-5 scale in which activities deemed less important score lower on the scale, whereas more important ones score higher. For example, selling food by non-metric measures, where still illegal, might score 1 on such a scale, whereas keeping open containers of petrol close to a primary school playground might score a 5.

Each department must have a unit set up to determine the relative importance of its activities. This has to be done using extensive opinion research to ascertain how the public at large regards their importance. It is a simple matter to present people with a list of 10 items and ask them to pick out the 3 or 4 that they consider most important. When this is done with respect to crimes, for example, it might emerge that public opinion might place hate speech as a 1, as opposed to murder, which would almost certainly merit a 5.

In terms of health provision, people might rate cosmetic surgery less important than life-saving operations. The point is that there are not unlimited resources anywhere in government, so it makes sense to swing them heavily towards the activities that people think matter most.

In some aspects of public service there is an incentive to go in for box-ticking, listing the number of activities that have been carried out, regardless of their relative importance. Police might boast about the number of e-scooters they have seized because they were privately owned rather than hired, but the public might be more interested in hearing about their success against murder, rape, mugging and burglary. A public service programme of identifying the high priority targets would diminish the incentives of low priority box-ticking.

Such a programme would indeed constitute a revolution. Just as privatization and the Citizens’ Charter changed opinion about state industries and services, so would a programme of prioritization change the attitude of government towards its own activities.

The Adam Smith Institute will be developing this theme into a concrete policy proposal, and commissioning opinion research to ascertain what public reaction would be to such a programme, as well as preliminary research to establish what some of the public’s priorities might be.