If the whispers in lobby correspondents’ ears are to be believed, Theresa May and her ministers are contemplating taking steps towards alleviating austerity, perhaps as part of their attempt to manage or distract attention away from Brexit. It’s not inconceivable that a bung for the NHS on its anniversary might just be accompanied by moves to stop local authorities, the police and other services spiralling downwards.

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But May may not survive and who knows what shape politics will be in as the 2019 public spending review is concluded? While more money and/or an end to the cuts look like a possibility, there is a catch. Before they break out the prosecco, public managers would be well advised to look at the small print and listen to ministers’ caveats: the words to look out for include efficiency, innovation and (the killer) reform.

If there were any new money from this government, it would come dangling long strings. Funding “must be accompanied by reform”, says the Nuffield Trust and others in their plea to health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Reform is the constant refrain. Public services could get more, provided they improve efficiency and get better value for money – that phrase comes from a recent thinktank report, sponsored by Sopra Steria, the business services and IT outsourcing company.

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For companies like this, “reform” has a very particular connotation. Bluntly, it means business. Reform becomes another reiteration of the old claim that public services can’t be trusted to spend wisely and need to be hollowed and contracted out.

Let’s not be conspiratorial. Ministers are still reeling from the collapse of Carillion and some have genuine misgivings about the nostrums that have ruled public management for the past three or four decades.

Other ministers do not: the Treasury publishes a quarterly report listing who its ministers have seen, had lunch with, accepted gifts from and so on. The minister in charge of the forthcoming spending review, Elizabeth Truss, sees lobbyists and journalists but who else does she see with impressive regularity? Andrew Haldenby, the head of the Reform thinktank. Reform. And by reform, Reform means one thing: replacing public provision anddismantling public bodies.

Haldenby says his aim is to improve the delivery of services. He and ministers such as Truss like the cuts and would prefer not to have to raise spending. But if it has to happen, Haldenby says there should be a “quantum leap” of fundamental reform that would bring more non-state providers into schools, hospitals, employment support, prisoner rehabilitation and more.

If that sounds like warmed-over Thatcherism, it is. Truss herself was a contributor to the book Britannia Unchained, published in 2012, in which various backbench Tories – many of them now ministers – talked of freeing Britain from the underperformance of its lazy workers and featherbedded public servants.

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Haldenby and other thinktankers would deny they are going back to the future. He supports a licensing model: the state would issue licences to provide services to any organisation, not just private firms. They would recoup their outlays from service users, some of whom would qualify for state support in the shape of vouchers.

But vouchers are old hat, first suggested by Thatcher’s guru Keith Joseph in the 1970s. Various attempts were made to introduce them under Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron. They are a classic instance of a zombie idea. Reform, as understood by Haldenby and Truss, has been tried, failed but just won’t die. Contracting, fragmentation of public services, autonomous hospital trusts, academy schools: they all stem from the doctrine of new public managementimported from the US in the 1980s. They have all been put into practice and found wanting. But don’t underestimate the commitment to old doctrine.

Everyone – the public, service users, managers, councillors, ministers and their shadows – is surely in favour of maximising the efficiency and effectiveness of public services. There is some evidence that the first two years of austerity did help councils, Whitehall departments and other public bodies shape up. But austerity has gone on to reduce not just the quality and volume of public services but the efficiency with which they are delivered.

It’s not “reform” that is needed now but funds.

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