The Efficiency/Trust Dilemma in Public Policy Reform

Government is spending more on key social services and performance is (arguably) improving, yet there is widespread concern about declining trust in the state sector. This is important because new developments throw increased emphasis on the role of organisational trust in enabling co-ordination of increasingly complex and decentralised organisations and on public trust in the acceptance of controversial and far-reaching reform programmes as legitimate. New research in psychology and sociology provides an explanation, with strong implications for future public sector reform: trust includes both deliberative and affective dimensions. Recent reforms are based on an organisation theory derived exclusively from a rational actor model. The new public policy operates through careful management of the framework of incentives presented to service providers and users, so that their deliberations will produce the behaviour desired by policy makers. It fails to engage the affective component in trust and may actually undermine it. The argument is illustrated through analysis of British Social Attitudes survey data to demonstrate the importance of the affective component in public trust. Current reforms may generate improved services, at the same time as they undermine the pattern of relationships that sustains affective trust. The result will be better welfare at the price of an increasingly unstable welfare state settlement. Nothing is easy.