Some regard the prospect of public spending cuts as an opportunity to clinch the argument for long-term prevention programs. Invest in proven early intervention models now; save on service costs later.

Others are seizing the gloomy moment to make the case for changing attitudes to services altogether. We can't afford them; maybe we can do without quite a lot of them – and think afresh about how society functions.

In the second camp, with a foot in both, is Charles Leadbeater, who describes himself as "a leading authority on innovation and creativity" – generally a bad sign – but who has been confirmed to be so twice by the global management consultants, Accenture, and also by a former employer, The Financial Times.

Leadbeater has been an adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has been associated with the Leftish, going-Rightish think tank, Demos; he has done a TEDTalk, and he is credited by Wikipedia with having devised the blockbuster phase of Bridget Jones's diary.

So when he writes in The Guardian's "Joe Public" column as he did this week, in a seven-point guide to avoiding Ryanair-style public services: "1. Prevent demand arising in the first place…" he claims more attention than other bloggers might.

"After a decade in which we have done more with more, we will spend the next decade trying to do more with less – in some services, a lot less," he says.

The conventional public service response would be to restrict eligibility to services, cut back to a basic, low-cost offering. Those who want more will have to pay more.

But down that road lies a decade of tension and conflict, he argues, marked by rising resentment and declining trust.

"We have to devise ways for people to find solutions to their needs that cost radically less and are more effective."

So to the list:
After the Ryanair reference, Item 1 turns into something more resembling an early interventionist's argument: fewer people die in house fires not because of better fire engines, but because of the prevalence of the low-cost smoke alarms.

Item 2 urges meeting needs without resorting to public services. Here the example is from Western Australia, where Leadbeater says 15 or 16 of the care options offered families of adults with learning disabilities encourage a response from someone other than a social worker.

Item 3 is about self medication; 4 is about investment in recuperation and rehabilitation; 5 is about service integration - but includes a familiar observation on the need for decommissioning:

“The London borough of Barnet recently found that a single workless household on one of its poorest estates was receiving 31 different services, to almost no effect,” he writes. “A more personalized, integrated approach is likely to save money, compared with the scatter-gun effect of disconnected services.”

Item 6 is about personalization – crediting service users with the intelligence to improve services for themselves; 7 is about efficiency transparency and the value of the online – we should be able to track the progress of service inquiries as if they they were parcels in transit.

His own mouthpiece is the website Participle “addressing the big social issues of the time” whose mission invokes the 1942 Beveridge report that became the cornerstone of the UK’s modern welfare state.

Leadbeater admires the founding principles: “a determination to be radical; an attack on the five giants of ‘want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness’; and a commitment to co-operation between the state and the individual”.

All of this might be related to the needs of children and young people, Participle suggests, though notions of connectedness.

“It’s about the relationships young people have to themselves, their families, supportive adults, and the worlds beyond where they live. Most programs and interventions aim to do something else: to reduce teenage pregnancy, to stop antisocial behavior, to curtail drug use.”

Here preventionists may sense that it all starts to go hazy: a case study describes a small-scale service design experiment involving 25 teenagers in Brighton and Croydon. “We use prototypes to help us learn about what works and what doesn’t in real-time, and to continuously iterate our propositions, training and tools, materials, front and back-end systems, and metrics,” Participle explains.

The business describes itself as a “studio” and the interest in design language is represented also in the activity of another partner, Hilary Cottam, Davos Young Global Leader in 2006 and UK Designer of the Year 2005, who led the UK Design Council’s RED team, a “do tank” that has attempted to draw the UK design community into new thinking and practice on social and economic problems.

So, whereas a designer’s expression of professional interest in politics might once have stretched about as far as the organization of public spaces, Hilary Cottam’s studio draws on her previous experience as a World Bank urban poverty specialist to challenge UK Conservative party leader David Cameron’s views on social inequality.

Quoting Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level, she writes: “Longitudinal research shows there is a clear correlation between income inequality and social glue. Britain is one of the most unequal societies in the world. Unless we are willing to talk about and address this disparity, neither a re-imagined state nor an army of social entrepreneurs can build Cameron’s ‘big society’.”

[For more about The Spirit Level see: Getting the egalitarian spirit back on the level.