The cones hotline's legacy...

By Brian Wheeler Political reporter, BBC News

Westminster sophisticates sneered at it. Comedians were guaranteed a laugh just by mentioning it. The Labour Party could hardly believe its luck.

Who can motorists turn to now that the hotline has gone?

John Major's "cones hotline" was probably the most ridiculed policy ever to be introduced by a British government.

How the critics hooted at its apparent pettiness and lack of ambition. Could the party that gave us Churchill and Thatcher really have come to this? A telephone line for motorists to moan about road works?

But Mr Major and his modest proposal may be about to have the last laugh.

For although the cones hotline itself is long dead (it was quietly killed off in 1995) its spirit lives on.

And the initiative that spawned it - The Citizen's Charter - has been revealed as the inspiration behind Gordon Brown's latest attempt to reform the public services.

The government has spent the past 11 years wrestling with what should, on the face of it, be the simple task of finding out what people want from public services and then giving it to them.

'Unsung success'

Its latest initiative, the Customer Service Excellence standard, based on the recommendations of former Passport Agency chief Bernard Herdan, aims to involve people in setting targets for local services.

But although it is dressed up in fashionable buzz words, such as "empowerment" and the dreaded "bottom up", it is essentially a refined, less centralised version of the Citizen's Charter.

The debt is acknowledged in the government's response to a recent select committee report, which describes the Citizen's Charter as "something of an unsung success story" with an "important legacy" in shaping the relationship between citizens and public services.

Will John Major be having the last laugh?

Not bad for something that was written off in 1991, by the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock, as "a mixture of the belated, the ineffectual, the banal, the vague and the damaging".

The Citizen's Charter was, in fact, the first serious attempt to raise standards in public services by listening to the demands of consumers. It guaranteed waiting times for hospital patients, introducing performance-related league tables and new scope for ordinary citizens to complain (hence the cones of hotline).

And despite ridiculing it at every opportunity, New Labour secretly coveted it, embracing its culture of targets and league tables as a way of ensuring the extra money it poured into schools and hospitals was not wasted (something its critics say it has signally failed to do).

Blue plaques

In 1996, John Prescott said he wanted to go one better than the Citizen's Charter and create a "complainer's charter" - allowing voters to register their protests via their television remote controls or, in the quaint jargon of the time, "on line".

It never happened.

The Charter itself survived until 2000, when the unit in charge of it at the Cabinet Office was replaced by Service First team, which was then closed down itself a few years later.

The Charter Mark is being phased out in favour of a new scheme

But the Charter Mark - the blue plaques awarded to organisations for excellence in customer service, without which no leisure centre foyer would be be complete, survived until June 2008 when it was finally scrapped in favour of the new Customer Service Excellence programme.

In its response to the public administration committee report, the government seems in awe of Mr Major's modest little policy, expressing the earnest hope that Customer Service Excellence "like Charter Mark before it - upholds and develops the aims of the Citizen's Charter programme".

Before the economy became the government's top priority, the idea of putting citizens in the driving seat of public service reform was Gordon Brown's big idea.

A whole series measures in last month's Queen's Speech - from the NHS Constitution, sets out the rights of patients for the first time, to more police accountability - were designed to hand more power and control to the consumers of public services.

Rubbish collection

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have also seized on the idea of citizen empowerment - both claim to be the true party of localism and the sworn enemy of Labour's target culture.

Labour, for its part, admits it was too obsessed with centralising control in its early years in government and did not give enough thought to how the thousands of targets it set from Whitehall would actually be met by hard-pressed teachers, doctors and nurses.

It has promised to repent, claiming the plans contained in its Local Government Empowerment White Paper will finally shift power and influence "away from existing centres of power into the hands of communities and individual citizens".

But 12 years after John Prescott first dreamed off angry citizens firing off complaints from their armchairs before flipping over to Coronation Street, the government is still trying to find an effective way of making people feel they have a say in the way things are run in their local area.

If only they could come up with a simple, easily understood way for the public to voice their dissatisfaction with local irritations like rubbish collection or road works.

Perhaps some kind of hotline....

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