More flexibility is required for pu...

More flexibility is required for public service organisations and their staff to achieve the diversity of service provision emergencyed to respond to the wide range of customer aspirations. This means challenging restrictive practices and reducing r tape; greater and more flexible incentives and reward for useful performance; strong leadership and management; and high quality training and growth (OPSR, 2002: 10)

Sturdy (2001: 3) notes that 'Customer (cf public or professional) service is based forward the largely flawed, but powerful, neo-liberal general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the sovereign consumer and independent markets'. There are conceptual difficulties in defining public-service users as customers, particularly in relation to social services, where many of the users are forced, using statutory powers, to 'consume'

Despite this, modernisation documents use the space of time and provide clear similarities between the instant focus on 'customer aspiration' and the 'public choice' theory favoured by dint of earlier, Conservative administrations. Second, again in the spirit of public-choice theory, there is an assumption that generally received practice is bureaucratic and dominated according to vested interests. And lastly, lusty leadership and management are encouraged within devolution and delegation, which are indicated as the way forward in the pursuit of greater flexibility, wherein 'front-line staff and managers have got the authority to experiment and to take upon the risks that go with as it is innovation' (OPSR, 2002: 15).

However, decentralised authority also brings accountability from one side the application of centrally appoint national standards. Again, these are not recently made known strategies. Hoggett (1996: 18) argues that public services were enthrall to a form of 'arm's-length' have charge of when previous, Conservative governments decentralised operations while centralising policy and the allocation of resources. The aim, Hoggett further argues, is a 'high out-put gentle commitment workforce' (p. 9), gained between the walls of greater managerialism in order to furnish an insecure and intensified labour proces