Faceless Britain

Thank you for your interest in our Faceless Britain campaign. The aim of this consultation is hear your views and gather as much information as possible – to aid policy development in this area.

What is Faceless Britain?

Faceless Britain quite simply refers to the challenges experienced by millions of ordinary people every day in accessing public services. With every year that goes by, more and more services that used to offer face to face contact are being replaced by systems that are centralised, remote and inhuman. We are seeing the progression of an unaccountable state, creating increasingly remote systems that are divorced from the people they are supposed to serve.

This is evident in many different areas such as:

• The difficulty of getting through to a benefits helpline
• The closure of local Post Offices and the access to government and financial services that goes with them.
• The maladministration of the social fund
• The introduction of ID cards instead of putting more police on the streets.

Driving this agenda is the Government’s preoccupation with cost-cutting in order to deliver so-called “efficiency savings.” But in many cases Labour’s erosion of public services is not even saving the taxpayer money. Despite reporting savings of over £20 billion in the past three years alone, Brown has clearly forgotten to account for the billions of pounds that have been wasted on failed IT projects, or for the cost of mobile phone bills to Government contact centres that run to hundreds of millions every year, or for the expense and inconvenience to every single person who has to travel a little further on the bus to their local Post Office or Jobcentre Plus just to speak to someone face to face. And of course so many of these problems are made much worse because all too often the people who have to pay the most are the ones that can afford it the least.

How you can help us

We want to hear from you - whether you have a story about Faceless Britain in action, or a more positive story about where things are working well, perhaps in the private or voluntary sector. Similarly, if you have thoughts on proposals that would help to reverse Faceless Britain, we would be very pleased to hear from you.

Please post your comments on this website, or email us with your ideas at harrisonja@parliament.uk

Alternatively, you can come and see us at our consultation event during Spring Conference in March. This event is open to everybody and will take place at 6.15pm on Saturday 8th March at the Liverpool Arena (Venue 7). A copy of our full consultation paper (PDF, 154kb) is available to download from this website.

After taking the information and views on board from all these processes, we plan to produce a spokesperson’s paper and motion, to be debated at Conference in Autumn 2008.

Thank you again for your help.