In 2002, Dame Onora O’Neill used the BBC Reith Lectures to ask why we appeared to have lost trust in our public services, institutions and the people who run them.
Today, many of us continue to work against a backdrop of scepticism. The Brexit campaign demonstrated extensive public mistrust of politicians and experts of all types. Then the extraordinary US presidential election campaign saw ‘post-truth’ – a term describing the failure or unwillingness of people to accept objective facts in favour of emotional responses – chosen as Oxford Dictionaries 2016 Word of the Year.
All of us working to bring about positive change in public services can cite examples of similar failures in trust and are daily faced with the need to overcome scepticism about what we are trying to do.
As I begin my new role of Fellow of Practice at GO Lab, with a remit to innovate in public service commissioning and funding, I am acutely aware of the scepticism that we may face from both professional and public audiences.
The public will rightly question whether changes in public service commissioning are truly driven by the desire for better outcomes for service users or simply another way of cutting public spending. Professional colleagues may be equally sceptical about the consequences of involving private sector investors in funding public services.
Our challenge will be to demonstrate why we think new forms of public sector commissioning and new sources of social investment finance will achieve the improved outcomes that we seek. We will need to clearly explain what new public service commissioning will look like, who will really benefit from these changes and what will happen to the money.
We are just starting out and I relish the challenge ahead. Moreover I am sure we will succeed. As Onora O’Neill suggested back in 2002 we demonstrate trust in our everyday dealings across all areas of our lives – our world could not function without it – and I think it is the job of all of us involved in shaping public services to be worthy of that trust.