The following is a cry of pain from the Director of a left-leaning think-tank who is realising that participatory democracy is not working, and is unlikely to work. He is saying that only professional middle-class people are prepared to join civic committees and take responsibilities for the public good (and even then there are not enough of them). The remainder are indifferent.

As someone who has been in voluntary 'do-gooding' organisations for several years earlier in life in my home town I can only concur. But I am not keeping this article in order to crow about it. This is an interesting parallel to the main theme of my projected book. Philip Collins' participatory middle-class are also the very same people who have sufficient income to initiate the purchase of new consumer products which, if they are significant enough, are primarily responsible for keeping the economy growing. If they haven't enough time to attend public committees they might not also have enough time to bother with new products during their increasingly busy day. But without this constant stimulation, the economy siezes up.

Keith Hudson

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CIVIC ENGAGEMENT WILL NOT TRANSFORM SERVICES

Philip Collins

Socialism will never work," Oscar Wilde once said. "There are not enough evenings in the week for all the meetings." There is an argument coming into vogue that will have us sitting on committees eight days a week. It goes under a number of sobriquets participation, civic engagement, active citizenship, co-production. It has an eloquent advocate in Hazel Blears, the Home Office minister, who recently published a thoughtful pamphlet on the subject through the Fabian Society.

One of the hopes attached to greater citizen involvement is that it will lead to drastically improved public services. This is a misleading assumption. It is not that participation is a bad idea. Who could possibly object to more, rather than less, engagement of citizens in the administration of schools and hospitals? When the objective of the service is clear and close to people, we should indeed trust them more. The transfer of municipal housing to tenants' ownership and arm's-length management organisations is a salutary example. The management of troubled estates is helped enormously, indeed made possible, by the involvement of the people who live there.

In public services where professional providers interact, it is much more difficult to make the voice of the citizen effective. It is still true that electing more lay members on to a primary care trust is a good idea. It is just that allowing patients or general practitioners to choose the trust they belong to is better. There are two ways to express dissatisfaction to moan or to leave. Yet, whenever the left thinks again about reform of the public sector, its first instinct is to add volume to the voice of the people.

But, to take an analogy from taxation, civic engagement is hopelessly regressive. Eighty per cent of school governors work in professional, managerial and technical occupations. And even if the inequality of participation were miraculously altered, it is a matter of simple arithmetic that this would not place the widest possible power in the hands of the people. The Office of Public Appointments looks after 834 public bodies, such as National Health Service boards, which require 30,000 people in total. There is already a 6 per cent vacancy rate. There are 300,000 places for school governors but the vacancy rate is 9 per cent nationally and 30 per cent in London. A generous estimate of the number of positions for active citizens is 600,000. Even if citizen engagement doubles, there will be room enough for only one in 40 of the country's 48m adults, assuming that nobody, heroically, takes two positions.

There is a danger that the good but essentially modest idea of citizen involvement will crowd out the principal problem. The biggest deficiency of the public services is easy to state but desperately difficult to change services are worse for the poor. Choice, a subject on which the left is apt to get into a terrible tangle, is already a brute fact in health and education services for the well-off, as John Reid said in his first address as Health Secretary. With all the talk about localism, there is a risk that we forget that devising proper competition between suppliers is, as Professor Julian LeGrand of the London School of Economics has said, "the least worst way to improve public services".

Critics of choice argue that we do not use public services as consumers but as citizens. Hence, free discussion in the public realm rather than consumer sovereignty is the appropriate mechanism of change. But the distinction between consumerism and citizenship is nothing like as important as its advocates suggest. It would be extremely odd to say that we either complain as a citizen or opt out as a consumer. In most cases we do one and, if that does not work, we do the other. With the threat of exit, a strong complaint is usually enough. Does my citizenship mean I am restricted to voicing my complaint to an unresponsive monopoly supplier? Surely a genuinely empowered citizen has more purchase than that?

The hardening distinction between consumers and citizens is, unwittingly and inadvertently, also a plaything for the Conservatives. Forget the need to change the incentives, they say, the services will be scrutinised by a stakeholder board. Never mind assigning responsibility correctly; there is a management committee meeting this time next week. Nobody should be in the least bit surprised if, a few years from now, we discover the citizen participation committees have become captured by interest groups and tenacious defenders of the status quo. It is easy to suppose that the power to guide, to suggest, to bully and to complain will improve the quality of public services. It is a tempting illusion but it is an illusion nonetheless.

Financial Times I July 2003