easyCouncil

This story in from the UK:

Conservative-run council adopts budget airline model as part of an efficiency drive

A Conservative-run council is using the business model pioneered by budget airline such as Ryanair and easyJet in an attempt to reduce public spending.

Barnet council plans to allow residents to pay charges in return for priority service as part of "a relentless drive for efficiency". Householders, for instance, will be able to pay a surcharge to jump the queue for planning consents, in the same way that passengers pay extra for priority boarding.

The plans, which would also allow elderly residents to manage their own care budgets, have led to the Barnet being dubbed "easyCouncil".

"Some things will be cheap and cheerful and in other areas we will provide complete services," Mike Freer, the council leader told the Guardian.

"This is not about rolling back the frontiers of the state, but about targeting our interventions."

A spokesman for the council said the measures were designed to make services more response and to offer choice but insisted that traditional services would be unaffected.

"The traditional model of public services has been like walking into a shop and finding everything is a size 35 and medium blue. People are getting used to having choice, and public services have to follow."

http://www.newstatesman.com/2009/08/barnet-council-model

Presumably this will offend those for whom the essential characteristic of public services is precisely their mandate to ignore the commercial imperative to distinguish levels of service and access according to how much you are prepared to pay?  The whole point is equity, isn't it?  Everyone is a citizen, everyone pays taxes, everyone therefore is entitled (key word) to get the same level of access and service. 

So does the Barnet experiment launch an ethic for public services that sets a dangerous precedent?  Or does it make sense to give citizens the same level of choice for service features in their public services services, and the associated variations in cost, as they increasingly enjoy, and expect, in other domains?

If you wan't afford equity, the risk presumably is you end up with "equal shares of mediocrity" as Mrs Thatcher might have put it.  If you have limited resources, presumably you have to discrimimate and vary costs according to service levels.  But it's a slippery slope...