Tony Blair on user needs

Tony Blair in a recent speech discusses how he envisions public services to be reformed and emphasises on empowering the user, diversity in supply, personalisation of services and finally the public sector work force.

“[…] The key to understanding what we are trying to do from government on the public service programme is that we are trying to move from a situation where you have very much a monolithic, very paternalistic service in which the services are handed down to the customer or user of the service, move to a far more personalised service where people feel that they have a far greater say in how the service is done and run, where things are very much more tailored to the individual needs of the user. […]

What is driving part of the change in public services is that people say, “look in every other walk of life you know the service runs after me, in the public services, particularly with this new investment, I want the same type of relationship, I want to feel it is a relationship where I, the user of the service, have got some power over it.”

So out of that has really arisen what I would say are basically four principles of public service reform. The first is to put more power in the hands of the user.”

Read full speech (as published in eGov monitor)