The Lost Ethos of Public Service

Ethos. What is it? One only realises it's missing when it's not there.

I remember it was there when I joined the Local Government Benefits Service in 1988. I was inducted into the ethos of public service by my colleagues. The guiding principle of the Benefits Service was to serve our tenants by getting the benefit due to them paid out as quickly as possible so that they would not be evicted for rent arrears and be made homeless. That was our public duty. It was based on trust and confidentiality and professionalism.

Many of my colleagues at the time were graduates. They joined the public sector as a vocation - a calling to a higher moral purpose than those who went to work in the City or the private sector for the money or the prospect of a more glittery career. Other colleagues had worked their way up from sixteen-year-old filing clerks or similar lower level jobs. They expected to be there till they retired. We all expected to be there for the long term. Most of us lived locally. We felt a sense of pride and importance working for our local council.

The more people we helped the more satisfied we felt. Our efficiency flowed from this ethos.

In those days we had personal caseloads. We got to know the people we were paying benefits to: whether they were vulnerable and needed a visit, whether they needed a quick reminder to inform us of changes in their circumstances or whether they were having trouble getting their student grant. This guaranteed an important element of accountability. We even went to the inconvenience of making emergency cash payments to private tenants if they showed up with a notice to quit to make sure they did not lose the rooves over their heads. As recent graduates we could empathise with their experience of grim flats and dodgy landlords. All private landlords were seen as possible Rachmans.

When we went on strike for better pay and conditions we had one leaflet for our fellow workers and one leaflet for the public to explain why we were striking; more often than not they supported us.

In general we were a close-knit, happy group of employees with a common vision of the service we worked for, good relations with our tenants and a fairly good sense of our value and worth if our employers tried to erode our pay and conditions.

Of course, we could have worked better. There were the usual slackers and idlers and cheats who abused the trust of colleagues. There was undeniably the smug confidence of job security. Performance management could have been tighter but to a large extent as we began gearing up for privatisation in the mid-90's we had pretty much got to where we wanted to be. So we were all the more horrified to be chucked out like carefully farmed fish to the swarming sharks of the private contracting companies.

When did this 'ethos' begin to disappear and how did it start to change the service we offered?

To be continued...