Martin Henry, Contributor

Comrade General Secretary Bunting is defiantly sticking to his guns, which places him at ideological odds with the party president. Bunting, a successful investment banker and the opposition spokesperson on industry and commerce, when he spoke in the Budget Debate, was highly critical of the carte blanche removal of school fees and health-services fees by the Government.

In a subsequent interview with The Gleaner on the matter of him filing quarterly constituency reports via newspaper adverts, the Central Manchester MP said, "Certain principles of the corporate world and public administration cut across each other. While the outputs might not be measured in the same way, the principles of management are the same."

I watched MP/manager Bunting at work back in the mid-1990s when he held the South East Clarendon seat and I worked with him and a non-partisan team of constituency people on a project for environmental protection and youth development. I was impressed with the managerialist approach.

While participating in Budget Debate analysis in another media forum, I made the point that the Shaw Budget could never fly in any serious corporate boardroom. It was too long on promises, wishes and hopes and too short on concrete specifics about managing income and expenditure for 'profitability'. The presentation of the leader of the opposition, Mr Bunting's party boss, with its powerful, pathos-laden pitch for the poor, was no improvement as Portia the career politician forgot that 'it takes cash to care' and 'balancing people's lives' cannot happen without balancing the books.

During the Patterson administration, I poured a lot of time and effort, free, into the drive for public-sector modernisation, particularly the citizen's charter aspect. The British High Commission even sponsored an observation visit to the UK to see how their citizen's charter programme and world-class public service operated.

Quality of service

As a critical element of 'modernising' the public sector, the citizen's charter programme was intended to improve the quality of service delivered by public agencies with greater cost-saving efficiency and customer satisfaction. In short, agencies were to be operated in a business-like manner with perfor-mance driven by customer expectations and customer satisfaction and agencies held to higher levels of accountability.

Drawing on the British model in particular, the service charter programme was to be based on six key principles: 1) Setting, publishing and applying explicit standards for service delivery to customers/ citizens; 2) Providing full, accurate and easily accessible information in plain language on the services of the agency, what they cost, how to access them, and who is in charge; 3) Regular and systematic consultation with users and offering choices for use where possible; 4) Delivering services with courtesy and helpfulness, equally available to all who are entitled to them and delivered to suit users' convenience, as far as possible; 5) Agencies are to operate a clear and simple complaints procedure and offer a swift and effective remedy if obligations to users are not met; and 6) Providing value for money, to both clients and the Government, through efficient and economical delivery of services within the affordable resources.

A number of agencies produced their own citizen's charters and a few were converted into executive agencies. The executive agencies enjoy greater management autonomy and income streams independent of budgetary allocations from the Consolidated Fund. And they have performed better. In fairness to the Patterson initiative for public-sector modernisation, the delivery of public service has shown some improvement in quality and efficiency - but very unevenly, and not deeply and widely enough.

Politicians of both sides are missing a crucial point from our experience with public-sector modernisation.

Unanimous

The two leaders and most of their desk-thumping followers in Parliament, Bunting excepted for sure, are unanimous in publicly espousing the social-welfare necessity of 'freeness' and in privately thinking that it is a political necessity. The truth on the ground is that the Jamaican people, by and large, prefer to pay reasonable fees for quality public service than to endure the punishment of freeness, which the Government can't, afford. Bunting is saying let those who can, do so, in paying for public services, and those who genuinely can't be directly targeted for state assistance.

Some of the best-performing public service agencies today are those that are charging commercial or near-commercial rates for their services. Some of the worst are completely free. Even schools and health facilities have shown real, if only modest, improvements in service delivery as fees allowed some improvement which budgetary support alone was not providing for.

Let me back Peter Bunting, and advise the Government, with some vintage stuff from one of the world's great management leaders, Peter Drucker. In People and Performance, a collection of his writings, Drucker discusses 'Managing the Public Service Institution'. "The one basic difference between a service institution and a business," Drucker argues, "is the way the service institution is paid.

Satisfying the customer

"Businesses (other than mono-polies) are paid for satisfying the customer. Service institutions, by contrast, are typically paid out of a budget allocation. Performance then means something different from what it means for a profit-driven business. "'Results' in the budget-based institution means a larger budget. 'Performance' is the ability to maintain or increase one's budget."

Citizens' charters are explicitly intended to allow public service not-for-profit organisations to mimic profit-driven ones in customer-focused performance.

Here is the Drucker formula for raising the performance of service organisations: 1) Answer the question, 'What is our 'business' and what should it be?' 2) Derive clear goals and objectives [SMART objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound; 3) Set priorities and thoughtfully selected targets; 4) Define customer satisfaction-based measurements of performance; 5) Apply the measures to provide feedback, building into the system 'self-control' from results; and, crucially, 6) Organise audits of objectives and results so as to clearly identify objectives that no longer serve a useful purpose or have proven unattainable; and have a mechanism for getting rid of unsatisfactory performance and obsolete and unproductive ac-tivities. "This last requirement may be the most important one," Drucker says. For "being budget-based makes it even more difficult to abandon the wrong thing, the old, the obsolete. As a result, service institutions are even more encrusted than businesses with the barnacles of inherently unproductive efforts."

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com