In my Hugo Young lecture at the Guardian tomorrow night I will set out the new culture that the next Labour government will seek to bring to our public services. It will not be about old-style, top-down central control with users as passive recipients of services. Nor does it rely on a market-based individualism that simply transplants the principles of the private sector – lock, stock and barrel – into the public sector.

Indeed, it is about much more than the individual acting as a consumer. We will put more power in the hands of patients, parents and all the users of services. We will help people work together with each other and with those professionals who serve them, giving them voice as well as choice.

This commitment to people-powered public services will be at the heart of the next Labour government. And it is rooted in the principle of equality that drives my politics.

Walt Whitman wrote that democracy was about people looking "carelessly in the faces of Presidents and Governors, as to say, Who are you?". In other words, whoever you are, wherever you come from, you are of equal worth to the most powerful. This is the foundation of my commitment to equality too.

For decades, inequality was off the political agenda. But there is growing recognition across every walk of life in Britain that large inequalities of income and wealth scar our society.

These insights are also at the heart of a new progressive politics emerging internationally. And that's because people the world over are beginning to recognise some fundamental facts again.

That it offends people's basic sense of fairness when the gaps between those at the top and everyone else just keep getting bigger regardless of contribution.

That it holds our economies back when the wages of the majority are squeezed and it weakens our societies when the gaps between the rungs on the ladder of opportunity get wider and wider. And that our nations are less likely to succeed when they lack that vital sense of common life, as they always must when the very richest live in one world and everyone else a very different one.

Public services – the NHS and decent schools – clearly have a huge role to play in tackling inequality of income and opportunity.

But I care about something else as well: inequalities of power. Everyone – not just a few at the top – should have the chance to shape their own lives.

I meet as many people coming to me frustrated by the unresponsive state as the untamed market. And the causes of the frustrations are often the same in the private and public sector: unaccountable power with the individual left powerless to act.

So just as it is One Nation Labour's cause to tackle unaccountable power in the private sector, so we will tackle it in the public sector too.

The challenges facing public services – from mental health, to autism, to care for the elderly, to giving kids the best start in the early years – are just too complex to impose solutions from the top without the active engagement of the people who use and rely upon them.

And the massive fiscal challenges facing the next government, which will have to cut spending, make it all the more necessary to get every pound of value out of services by showing we can do more with less.

Some think the answer is simply to import the principles of the private sector into the public sector.

Choice, contestability and competition do have a role. Labour showed in government how the private sector could help to provide extra capacity and speed up hip replacements and cataract surgery for the NHS. But parents cannot switch schools in the same way people go down to the shops or choose to go to a different cafe. And too often large public-sector bureaucracies have been replaced with a large private-sector bureaucracy. A Serco-G4S state can be just as flawed as the centralised state.

Labour will not retreat into some old-fashioned top-down model, and we know the answer is much deeper than a simple market alternative. Instead, I am setting out four principles that will guide the next government in tackling inequalities of power and improving public services.

First, people should own information about themselves. We should change the assumption that information on people's interaction with the state is owned by the state. Instead, there should be an assumption that such data is owned by and accessible to the parents, patients and those who use public services who it is about.

Second, no one should be left isolated when they could link up with others in the same situation. The old assumption of professionals delivering directly to the single user must change, because there is now a wealth of evidence that the quality of people's social networks can make a real difference to the quality of a public service.

Third, decision-making structures in public services should be thrown open to people so that we tackle inequalities of power at source – from personal budgets that help disabled people design their own care to councils that involve users in key decisions, to the empowerment of parents so that they don't have to wait for Ofsted if they believe things need to change in their school.

Finally, we should devolve power down not just to the user but also to the local level, because the national government's task is to set clear national standards for what people can expect, not to diagnose and solve every local problem from Whitehall. And if we are to succeed in devolving power to users, it is much easier to do it from a local level. In every service, from health to policing to education, and by devolving budgets more widely, we are determined to drive power closer to people.

I believe these principles will be welcomed by millions of public servants who work tirelessly, day in day out, often for low wages, to serve the people.

They often feel that we have a culture that stops them doing their best, because the system doesn't allow them to put those they serve at the heart of what they do.

These principles will define the guiding purpose and mission of the next government towards public services. We will stand up against unaccountable power, wherever it is found; we will tackle inequality in income, opportunity and power – so that we can give the people more control over their own lives.

This is an edited version of the 2014 Hugo Young lecture