The 'Little Heresies' seminars provide an important public platform to
debate the future of public services. This book takes its title from the
first seminar, 'Kittens are Evil', suggesting that what appear to be
well-intentioned policies not only create perverse incentives but also
lasting damage to the social fabric.
Public services' management practices, underpinned by neoliberal
thinking, were imposed by Margaret Thatcher. Successive governments
continue to be duped into believing, against plenty of evidence to the
contrary, that New Public Management, as it is now called, works; it
work much better if people tried harder to become more machine-like, and
to make more of an effort to eat less, exercise more, to stop getting
older, to be more enterprising, to tick the right boxes, to remember
their unique customer reference number, be digital by default and,
frankly, become more service-shaped.
The pros and cons of New Public Management are already well-documented
in the academic sector. In this first publication from the Little
Heresies series, eight heretics, all leading thinkers and practitioners
in their professional fields, explain the effects of neoliberal thinking
across a wide range of services; of marketisation, target and league
tables, of family interventions, designer-babies, and ineffective
management practices designed by Whitehall.
