Brown pledges 'personal' services

The prime minister has pledged that the role of the private sector in public services will "intensify" but also "widen and deepen".

Making his first appearance before the Commons liaison committee of MPs on Thursday, Gordon Brown insisted he was not backtracking from his predecessor Tony Blair's drive to diversify the provision of health and education.

"I think you will see it intensify and I think you will see it wider and deeper in future years than it has been in the last few years," he said.

But Brown said the programme was now moving on from simply "diversity of supply" to include more "personalised services".

"The next stage is to combine the diversity of supply with greater attention to diversity in demand," he explained.

"In other words, services that meet the personal needs of the individual citizen."

"Not just about a universal service that seems to be uniform, but a service that is tailored to people's needs".

In education he said this would mean one-to-one tuition for all pupils, particularly high and low achievers.

Choice

He also maintained that he was committed to "parental choice" through "academy schools, trust schools and specialist schools".

And in health he promised that "the role of the private sector will continue to expand" and in a few years will be "a lot bigger than it is now".

He said the independent sector would be "expanded in primary care" and is already taking £22bn of NHS funds per year.

He also denied that the number of independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs), a flagship project of Blair's, was being cut.

ISTCs would be performing "about five per cent" of NHS treatments by the end of next year, Brown claimed.

'Control'

However he added that the "issue is about how much local control there should be".

The original wave of ISTCs had been "decided nationally", he said, with the next wave to be decided by individual NHS trusts.

Financial rigours will mean local decision-makers will use the private sector, the prime minister pledged.

"The test at the end of the day is not private versus public," he said. "It is value for money."

As well as "personalisation", he said his second public sector priority would be "rooting out failure".

"We have got to root out failing schools, we have got to deal, as we will, with failing hospitals and failing trusts," he said.