Problems With The Roller

This may never turn into a Rolls Royce

Now don't laugh, but there used to be a theory that the Civil Service was a finely tuned Rolls Royce. Ministers had only to point it in their chosen direction, settle back in the plush leather seats, and leave the purring giant to convey them effortlessly down the road.

Of course, it was never actually like that in practice, but for politicians keen on expanding the scope and reach of government it was a useful and comforting myth. Attlee's New Jerusalem government reckoned Civil Servants were capable of managing everything from the commanding heights of the economy right through to the allocation of bedpans in their newly nationalised health service. Wilson's government pushed up the proportion of our economy under Whitehall management from 35% to 45%. And we all know what the Blair/Brown government did.

But if your base your approach on a myth you end up with a disaster. And far from settling back in the Connolly leather, ministers spend most of their time flat on their backs under the car wrestling with the transmission.

And this week we've got two very good examples.

First, the latest attempt by a Health Secretary to stop the dysfunctional NHS killing so many of us. The bureaucrats at the Department of Health having failed to come up with anything other than more paperwork, Jeremy Hunt is issuing his own Orders of the Day.

Order Number One. All hospitals and care homes will be officially rated by a the new Chief Inspector of Hospitals.

Order Number Two. Any state healthcare operative who fails to freely confess his own shortcomings will be shot. Well, maybe not shot exactly... but their employing organisation will be given a jolly good talking to.

Order Number Three. Before they qualify, all student nurses must spend a year... well, let's say "up to a year", actually doing some nursing with real patients.

Mmmm... no matter who's sitting in the big leather chair, the NHS just goes on fighting the Battle of Stalingrad. As we've blogged many times (eg here and here), running a huge organisation through top-down orders and fear may have worked for Stalin in 1942, but he wasn't trying to save lives (other than his own of course). In the NHS it's been a total flop: successive Health Secretaries have tried it, and it simply doesn't work.

As for the new Chief Inspector of Hospitals, he's only being introduced because Labour's Care Quality Commission has failed. And the Care Quality Commission itself was only introduced because its predecessor, the National Patient Safety Agency, also failed. A government regulator regulating a nationalised industry is always going to be the public sector marking its own homework. And while the Government Inspector may strike fear into the hearts of employees - witness the hatred of Ofsted among many headteachers - that's because the regulator becomes an instrument of Commissariat control rather than an objective assessor of standards.

And who ever thought it was good idea for nurses to qualify without having a hands-on apprenticeship of feeding and washing patients? When my Mum trained as a nurse back in a flagship pre-NHS hospital, one of  her duties was to make sure the patients in her care were eating and drinking properly: years later she still recalled being pulled up by matron for not cutting the crusts off some old boy's sandwiches. It was the Department of Health - miles away from the sharp-end of patient care - that later ruled that wasn't part of a nurse's duties.

Meanwhile our energetic Home Secretary has announced that she's breaking up Labour's useless £1.6bn pa UK Border Agency. The UKBA has become a byword for ineptitude, with among other things, an immigration case backlog well in excess of 300,000 cases.

According to Mrs May, creating this gigantic immigration super-quango may have looked neat on paper but in practice it was disastrous :

"First, the sheer size of the Agency means it has conflicting cultures, and all too often focuses on the crisis in hand at the expense of other important work. Second...UKBA was given agency status in order to keep its work at an arm’s length from ministers. That was wrong. It created a closed, secretive and defensive culture. The new entities will not have agency status and will sit in the Home Office, reporting to ministers."

This echoes two points we've long made on BOM - one, that bigger is almost always worse, and two, that delegating power to arms length quangos means rule by bodies unaccountable to anyone, let alone us poor schmucks out here paying for it all.

So good for Mrs May.

But not so good for Mr Hunt.

Because although both of them are attempting to fix the broken old jalopy of of Civil Service management, Mr Hunt ought to be trading it in for a superior model.

With border control Mrs May has little choice but to somehow get her Civil Servants working better: protecting our borders is an essential function of government, and she can't turn it over to others. She has to make it work, however hard that is.

But healthcare is something else entirely. It's not an essential function of government, and Hunt should be learning from the workings of superior systems elsewhere. The European Social Insurance systems put customers in charge via their freedom to choose between competing providers. In all likelihood their Civil Servants are no better than ours at running things, but it doesn't matter because they're not required to do so.

Unless we can shrink government back to its core functions we will never enjoy the standards of service we're already paying for. No matter how hard ministers may try, you simply can't build a Rolls Royce from the bits off an old Austin Allegro.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: civil service, nhs, quangos

Spotted By BOM Correspondents

BOM correspondents have spotted the following, including news of some real old favourites:

1. NHS Supercomputer still haemorrhaging cash

Were you by any chance under the impression that our new broom government had scrapped Blair's wildly expensive and wildly useless NHS Supercomputer (see many previous blogs)? Er, no. All they've actually done is attempt to renegotiate the contracts with the IT suppliers.

AMB highlights an interesting post on the latest position by Tony Collins, the former Editor of Computer Weekly and a man who did much to expose the lunacy in the first place. He tells us that the Department of Health are signing a new agreement with one of the main suppliers (CSC) to deploy a system (Lorenzo) that the hospitals themselves don't want and may never use. Collins writes:

"The deal will commit CSC to deploying the Lorenzo system to NHS trusts that have no intention of deploying it; and the deal commits the DoH to paying CSC for a minimum number of Lorenzo deployments even if NHS trusts don't actually deploy the system.

For some in the NHS, the deal will mark a new low in the history of the NHS IT programme. It may also show why central government is congenitally ill-suited to signing big IT contracts."

So WTF is Lansley's Health Department doing this?

Well, on the positive side, the new agreement will apparently save around £0.5bn compared to the previous contracts. But it will still leave this bit - that may well not ever be used - costing us £2.7bn. That aside, Collins suggests three other highly plausible explanations for the Department going ahead:

1. Pulling the plug might have led to CSC suing the Department, just as another main contractor (Fujitsu) is already doing
2. It "defers any day of reckoning within Whitehall over what many in the NHS regard as a failed programme"
3. It "relieves the health minister Simon Burns from taking any tough decisions about the future of the NPfIT, at least for the time being".

And the cost to us taxpayers? As always, it's virtually impossible to know. All we can say is that the Supercomputer has already cost us something like £6bn, for which we have got sweet FA in terms of value.

(PS This of course is not the first Labour contract our new government has tried and failed to get out of. The contract for those two new aircraft carriers had been so heavily tilted against taxpayers that it was actually cheaper to carry on rather than pull the plug. Even though we can't now afford the aircraft to go on them, and we will have the first navy ever to sail two carriers with nothing to carry. Nelson must be spinning - see this blog)


2. Student Loans Company still malfunctioning

Peter T highlights the fact that the Student Loans Company (SLC) is still not managing to pay loans on time when they are needed. In other words, despite all their promises to do better in 2010 after the shambles of 2009, the SLC still failed to pay 26% of students by the first day of term this year.

Which meant of course that many students were forced to look for emergency employment so they could eat. Bar-keeping and lap-dancing may well be good experience for later life, but that's not what we pay the SLC £94m pa in administration cost to deliver.


3. British Council still cocking-up

David Blackie reports on the latest cock-up by our old friends at the British Council.

The BC has a marketing arm for British education institutions seeking to sell courses to overseas students - Education UK. It was established a few years ago to provide a Big Government Solution in place of the private marketing operations that had existed previously. And yep, you guessed it - it's a disaster.

In fact, it's so shambolic, and its website is so dysfunctional, that the BC has now been forced to refund subscriptions to participating institutions. David writes:

"...the organisation has used taxpayers’ money and the machinery of government to send students to a site which is so bad that everyone gets their money back. Well, actually not everybody, because there will be no refund to the taxpayer for the extraordinary waste of public money, no refund to the schools and colleges who have lost business as students, parents and agents gave up trying to use a dysfunctional site, and – interest declared – no refund to the businesses compromised by the organisation using taxpayers’ money to divert monies into its own pockets."

As we've blogged many times, the hopeless BC should be abolished. And we're seriously disappointed that Cam has not only allowed it to survive, but reportedly clasped it to his bosom on those recent trips out East.

Gah.

4. International sports bunfights still losing money

Bobby Charlton (hmm... sounds familiar somehow) emailed to point out that South Africa didn't make nearly as much out of the 2010 World Cup as had been billed:

"South Africa made a return of just £323m on the £3bn it spent on building stadiums and infrastructure for this summer's tournament, according to official figures

Mike Schussler, director of consultants Economists.co.za, said: "The country made a bit of money but less than expected. We got a small part of the ticket sales and the foreign visitors' spending, but it's not as much as we expected."

Well, who'd have possibly guessed that?

Thank God we got shafted by that nice Mr Blatter.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: Bonfires, British Council, npfit, quangos

Lessons From A Damp Barbecue

Are we having fun yet?

Less a bonfire, more a damp barbecue. There is widespread disappointment that yesterday's cull of the quangos wasn't nearly as decisive as originally billed.

In summary, out of 901 quangos reviewed, 380 will remain entirely unchanged, with a further 40 still undecided (ie too difficult to close). On top of that, another 171 will be retained but "substantially reformed", and a further 57 new ones formed from mergers. Overall, out of the original 901, we will still be left with 648. And even among those that are going, many of the functions and staff will simply transfer back to their sponsoring departments.

So was the whole exercise a waste of time?

No, that would be too gloomy. Some of BOM's all-time favourites are definitely going - eg the Audit Commission, the Regional Development Agencies, and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Some praise is certainly due.

But many other old favourites survive. The notoriously profligate British Council survives, as does, ahem, "public service broadcaster" C4.

And those mergers are a worry. We recall what happened to the much mocked Potato Marketing Council (the quango responsible for National Chip Week - see this blog). By 2008 it had become such an embarrassment that Labour merged it into the £50m pa Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB). And as far as anyone can see, it's still there, taxing the potato industry £6m pa to fund its half-baked campaigns for more oven chips.

The fundamental point is this: rearranging bureaucratic deckchairs will never save much money. Simply switching the name plates on the front doors will not do it.

What Cam's government has to do is to axe functions. That's the way to save real money.

Take the British Council. It spends an eye-popping half billion per annum on all manner of bizarre cultural enterprises in the far flung corners of the world (of which £250m comes direct from general taxation), and yet nobody has ever been able to show we get value from it. Let's close it altogether and see what happens.

More broadly, as we've blogged before, there are basically only two ways of cutting public spending.

The first is known as "starving the beast". That involves the beastmaster (aka the Chancellor) cutting a fat beast's food budget and hoping that the thing will get itself in shape. That it will make economies by cutting down on cream cakes and other luxuries, and spending its smaller budget on stuff that's really needed. Like broccoli and oily fish.

Beast starving undoubtedly has a role in budget control, especially when prolonged control is required - as now. But the problem with fat beasts is that they may not like broccoli and oily fish. They may go on buying the same old cream cakes and oven chips and end up slumped on the sofa in front of daytime TV and no use to anyone...

Hmm... another metaphor that's spun away from us. The key point is that simply cutting budgets from the top without specifying what functions are being cut risks a serious degradation of frontline services across the board. In a public sector without customer choice and the pressure of competition, leaving the decisions entirely to frontline managers is likely to result in worse services to us, the helpless victims.

Which is why when George announces his long-awaited spending review next week, we must hope we get some chapter and verse. We need to know not just the departmental spending allocations, but also the functions that are being scrapped or privatised.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: cuts, quangos

Quango Bonfire - Smoke Seen

Yes, that's definitely smoke

Today's leaked list of quango terminations makes interesting reading. Out of the 1000+ currently in existence, 177 are definitely going, 129 are being merged, and a further 94 are still awaiting sentence.

Onto the bonfire go some of BOM's real old faves: the Audit Commission (eg see this blog), the Qualifications and Curriculum and Authority (see this blog), the Thames Gateway Development Corporation (see this blog), the UK Film Council (see this blog), the Union Modernisation Advisory Fund (see this blog), and others too numerous to mention.

The DT has an absolutely excellent visual summary of the cuts here.

So where do we stand against our list of priority candidates set out in the TPA/IOD cuts paper? Here's our top 13 candidates for abolition/privatisation, along with their most recently published annual costs (as summarised in the TPA's 2009 quango report - see there for details):

1. Standards Board for England (£10m) - chopped
2. Office for Fair Access (£0.4m) - still awaiting sentence
3. National College for School Leadership (£83m) - still awaiting sentence
4. BECTA (£10m) - chopped
5. School Food Trust (£6m) - chopped
6. Welsh C4 (£98m) - apparently reprieved
7. Football Licencing Authority (£1m)- apparently reprieved
8. Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (£12m) - still awaiting sentence
9. Thurrock Thames Gateway Development Corporation; London Thames Gateway Development Corporation; West Northamptonshire Development Corporation (£125m) - all chopped
10. British Waterways (£68m) - chopped (although presumably that really means spun off - as recommended by the TPA)
11. Sustainable Development Commission (£3m) - chopped
12. Carbon Trust (£94m) - still awaiting sentence
13. Regional Development Agencies (£2,212m) - chopped

Overall, it seems 7 of the 13 are already chopped, with a further 4 still awaiting sentence.

Which is all quite impressive. But there's still a lot to do.

To start with, the 94 quangos still awaiting sentence include some prime candidates for the chop. Not just the Carbon Trust, but also our old friends the British Council, and the BBC (well, the World Service anyway). We mustn't have any last minute wobbling on them.

And then there's the Regional Development Agencies. They may have been chopped, but are they actually in the flames yet? We wouldn't want to find they've been hoiked out of the bonfire and surreptitiously given a new life under an assumed name.

Which raises a broader point we mustn't lose sight of. While chopping quangos has a huge appeal to most of us, what really matters in terms of cost saving is chopping the programmes they are responsible for. Thus chopping the RDAs only saves big bucks if the underlying spending is also cut - if the spending carries on, only administered direct by St Vince, nothing much gets saved at all.

When the Comprehensive Spending Review is formally announced next month, we'll need to probe very carefully behind the quango headlines.

PS Talking of the BBC, it's good to hear they've finally agreed to allow the National Audit Office full access to the BBC's books. Except of course, they haven't quite - "stars" pay will apparently remain secret. It is disgraceful that a tax-funded quango should have been able to stop us knowing how it spends our money for so long - behaviour that stands in stark contrast to its own strident calls for transparency in everyone else's financial affairs (eg bankers bonuses). And compare their own lack of disclosure with the lip smackin' detail they are pumping out on who will lose from the public spending cuts.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: quangos

The Government Inspector

Ofsted are coming - we're doomed!

Autocratic regimes always employ legions of government inspectors. Their job is to tour round the various outposts of the centralised state and put the fear of God into local bureaucrats - to remind them who's boss.

It was back in 1836 that Nikolai Gogol wrote his classic comedy about how the Czar's inspectors terrorised the officials of provincial towns in Russia. The play's joke is that the government inspector actually turns out to be a conman, who finally scarpers with his bribes and the mayor's daughter. But its underlying truth is that the inspection regime does nothing to contain the endemic corruption and inefficiency of the Czar's local officials.

Gogol could write virtually the same play today in Brown's Britain. In councils and schools and hospitals throughout the land, bureaucrats and frontline staff quake at the prospect of a visitation from the inspectors. The inspectorates now cover all aspects of local services, employ many thousands of inspectors, and have budgets running into hundreds of millions (for more details, take a look through the excellent TPA quango report).

One of the most high profile inspectorates is Ofsted. It costs us £228m, has a staff of 2700 (2007-08), and is headed by the wife of disgraced Labour minister Tony McNulty (honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up).

According to Ofsted's website:

"We inspect and regulate to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages."

Which gives it an extraordinarily wide brief. It now inspects and regulates not only schools, but also "colleges, initial teacher education, work-based learning and skills training, adult and community learning, education and training in prisons and other secure establishments, and the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (Cafcass)". Not forgetting childcare services (aka prosecuting members of baby-sitting circles), and childrens' social care.

Ah yes, childrens' social care.

We blogged the appalling case of Baby P several times (eg see here). Ofsted was centrally implicated, having awarded Haringey childrens' social services excellent marks virtually at the same moment Baby P was dying.

It turned out their inspection had been little more than an elaborate box-ticking exercise, largely carried out by those actually being inspected. At the end of which, Ofsted praised the council for providing “a good service for children”, and improving their "life chances" - a sickening testimony to the uselessness of their inspections.

So how have they responded?

Well, by increasing the number of boxes that require ticking of course. According to those at the sharp-end (HTP HJ), since the Baby P case, social workers have been submerged in a deluge of new bureaucracy. The chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers says:

“What social workers are having to do 80 per cent of their time is serve a bureaucratic machine, which actually has nothing to do with good social work and has everything to do with keeping a really ineffective inspection regime operating in a way that does not support really effective work with children and families.”

Which sounds spot on. And note the response of Childrens' Commissar Balls, when asked if he would intervene to stop the lunacy:

"The answer to that is no. The idea that social workers who are dealing with complex cases of potential child abuse or neglect wouldn’t be making records or keeping track of what they do doesn’t seem to make much sense."

Yup. Yet another here-today-gone-tomorrow amateur who knows better than the frontline professionals how they should do the job.

And if by any chance some courageous council might consider ignoring the government inspectors, and backing the judgement of their own people instead, they should expect a visit from the Cossacks.

Already in the last few months, two previously well-rated shire counties have fallen foul of Ofsted's rage.

We already blogged the case of Surrey County Council, where the failure to tick all of Ofsted's child care boxes properly led to Whitehall intervention, mass sackings/resignations (including Surrey's Chief Exec), and a stinging critique of the entire council delivered publicly by the commissar parachuted in to conduct the purge.

Now a similar thing seems to have happened in Cornwall, where Ofsted has condemned local childrens' services for inadequate record keeping, and various other perceived organisational failures. Only this time, the Chief Exec immediately ran out into the market square to confess his council's shortcomings and promise they will obey all future orders without question. Local democracy it ain't.

Cam reckons he's going to take an axe to Labour's inspectorates. He needs to. We've already suggested axing the Audit Commission. Ofsted can join it. Total saving £450m pa.

PS Tyler used to do the odd spot of acting at school. And The Government Inspector was the first production he ever appeared in. No photos alas, but a quick Google produced the following cutting of another school performance at about the same time. It gives a pretty good idea of the kind of nuanced acting we're talking about, and it even seems to feature the same rented costumes:

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: Local Authorities, localism, quangos, social services

Whacking The Middle Class

The middle class isn't so docile everywhere

To paraphrase Willie Sutton, the reason Chancellors rob the middle class is because that's where the money is.

Sure, politicos like to wave their arms and pledge to tax the undeserving rich, but in reality that never raises enough cash. For one thing, there aren't enough undeserving rich to go round, and for another, the rich have an anti-social tendency to move their cash out of harm's way. For example, the new 50p tax on incomes over £150 grand may show we're all in this together, but in reality it's likely to reduce tax revenue (see this blog).

So as Darling/Osborne run through the options for closing our £100bn fiscal gap, the middle class finds itself right back in the crosshairs.

Much of the action will be on tax. The middle class can expect to see income tax allowances and thresholds frozen (just like Howe did in his famous 1981 budget), and you certainly wouldn't rule out Darling extending his 50p tax rate further down the income scale (nicely stitching up Cam and Oz in the process).

The middle class will also be whacked by the forthcoming increase in VAT to 20% (watch this space). The VAT net may even be extended: the National Institute calculate that abolishing the reduced rate of VAT on fuel, and extending VAT to cover everything except food and childrens' clothing would raise £28bn pa by 2015. True, VAT is highly regressive, so proportionate to income, the poor will suffer most. But it's the middle class who will pay most.

The same goes for the planned further increases in eco-taxes, which also tend to be highly regressive. However with a little hippy ingenuity, such taxes can be shaped to hit the middle class especially hard: today's proposal to impose a £3,300 tax on new cars (heavily promoted this morning on the good old BBC) shows the way.

And then there's the sharp hike in business rates facing many small business owners after the government's recent revaluation exercise.

But of course, it isn't just through higher taxes that the middle class can expect to see their incomes cut. There's also the thorny issue of cash benefits.

Last week Tyler attended an interesting session organised by the ever-excellent Reform to launch their new paper on welfare reform - The End of Entitlement. Its key proposals include handing benefit rules and operation to social enterprises and companies, flexible Personal Protection Accounts modelled on ISAs, and replacing social security benefits with private provision.

But the headline item was a further refinement of Reform's proposal to abolish middle class welfare.

According to Reform, £31bn pa is currently being spent on welfare benefits for people who are not in need. Which is a quarter of the entire cash welfare bill.

They define the need threshold on the basis of every adult having an income of £15,000 pa and every child £5,000 pa, so that for example, a two adult two child household needs an annual income of £40k. On that basis they identify the following benefits as being the least well targeted, with high percentages of the benefits spend going to those above the threshold:

As well as pushing up the state pension age to 68 more quickly than currently planned, they recommend eliminating a raft of benefits for those above the needs threshold, including:

• Scrap Child Benefit and streamline the Child Tax Credit - net saving £7.2bn pa after increase in means tested child support
• Scrap the Child Trust Fund, Employer Supported Childcare Schemes, Health in Pregnancy Grants, the Healthy Start Scheme and the Sure Start Maternity Grant - saving £1.3bn pa
• Abolish winter fuel allowance and free TV licences for pensioners - saving £3.2bn pa
• End concessionary bus fares - saving £1bn pa
• Charge student loan borrowers at the market rate - saving £1.2bn pa
• Abolish the Educational Maintenance Allowance - saving £0.5bn pa

In other words, Reform propose an end to Beveridge-style universal benefits, and a much greater reliance on means testing.

Now, whatever you think about more means testing - and several people in Reform's meeting were aghast at the idea - this proposal means a £31bn pa cut in middle class incomes.

As it happens we like Reform's idea. But that's because the state should not be in the business of churning money from tax to benefits for people who don't need the help. It should cut both benefits and taxes (eg see this blog where we estimated the deadweight cost of fiscal churn at £5-6bn pa). .

But unfortunately, that's not where we are today. We have a huge fiscal hole to fill, and while benefits will be cut, there is no immediate prospect of a corresponding tax cut. For the middle class, their benefits cut will come on top of all their tax increases.

So are they going to sit there and just pay up? Put country before themselves?

Or are they going to shout and scream and demand that government cuts its own spending first? Like our middle class American cousins have long done.

Your call.

But you can join the TaxPayers' Alliance here.

And unlike Big Government, it's free.

PS Talking of the TPA, their latest research report is published this morning. Snappily entitled ACA-to-YJB: A Guide to the UK Semi-Autonomous Public Bodies, it's a comprehensive guide to what you and I know as Britain's 1,152 quangos. Here are the key facts:

• Direct cost to taxpayers - £90bn pa (2007-08)
• Additional fees and charges levied by quangos - £32bn pa
• Staff - 534,000, which is more than the entire civil service

It is a fantastically useful survey - everything you ever wanted to know about the cost of these unaccountable, crony-stuffed excrescences. Well done to Ben, John, Katherine, and James for wrestling the facts to the ground. We'll be keeping a copy at our bedside for easy reference.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: cuts, quangos, tax, welfare

Tax-Funding On The Shopping Channel

Driving through England's green and pleasant the other day, Tyler once again found himself shouting at the car radio.

The object of his spluttering harangue was an interview with Will Day, the new head of the Sustainable Development Commission. Well, we say "interview" - it was actually more like a paid-for slot on the Shopping Channel, with Mr Day being given a warm and unchallenged opportunity to present his wares (listen again here).

When Tyler returned home he looked up the Commission's website. Founded in 2000, its first head was old Etonian the Hon Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt. He flounced out earlier this year after the government finally faced facts on the urgent need for new nuclear power stations.

His replacement is another member of the Prog Con ruling elite: Day is the son of a diplomat, with a career in international charities and - yes, you guessed it - the BBC.

Tyler also discovered that the Commission is fully funded by government and costs us £4m pa.

And its role?

To lobby government.

Yes, you heard that right. The government gives it £4m pa - of our friggin' money - so that it can get itself lobbied to tighten our eco screws even further.

Or as the Commission puts it:

"Through advocacy, advice and appraisal, we help put sustainable development at the heart of Government policy."

They are tax-funded government lobbyists.

And you know the really shocking thing?

The Sustainable Development Commission is not alone. Every year we taxpayers are shelling out millions so that the government can lobby itself for more stuff that many MANY of us do not want.

Now the TaxPayers' Alliance has added up the damage. And in a paper published this morning, they provide a detailed 54 page analysis of just who gets what.

On a very conservative estimate, the overall total in 2007-08 was £38m, including:

• £4.9m on hiring political consultancies
• £23m on trade associations (Local Government Association, Association of Police Authorities and NHS Confederation)
• £1.8m on health policy campaigns, including £515,000 paid to Alcohol Concern, £191,000 paid to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and £130,000 paid to the Family Planning Association.
• £6.7m on environmental policy campaigns, including our friends at the Sustainable Development Commission, Friends of the Earth, the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences and numerous other groups
• £1.6m on usual suspects Prog Con think tanks – Demos, the New Economics Foundation; the Institute for Public Policy Research and the New Local Government Network

Teeth grinding aside, TPA Research Director Matt Sinclair explains precisely why it is so wrong:

• It distorts decision making in favour of the interests and ideological preoccupations of a narrow political elite
• It slows adjustments in the direction of policy in reaction to new evidence or circumstances
• It increases political apathy among the public
• Taxpayers are forced to fund views they may seriously disagree with.

Spot on.

We need to remember it for the next time one of these tax-funded lobbyists lectures us on the tax-funded £3.5bn pa Prog Con Shopping Channel.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: BBC, cuts, progressive consensus, propaganda, quangos, spin

Fear And Loathing At The Audit Commission

One of these men will soon be looking for a job

We know all about the fear and loathing it induces in Surrey, but the Audit Commission spreads its bureaucratic misery far beyond the leafy enclaves of Guildford and Dorking.

On BOM we have generally focused on its £210m pa cost, pointing out that taxpayers get no tangible benefit. But it's actually much worse than that.

The Commission is an instrument of central control, and just like government inspectors throughout history, its activities leave a trail of devastation across all the local organisations they inspect.

Now John Seddon - the occupational psychologist and "reluctant management guru" (right pic above)- has penned an excellent article for the Local Government Chronicle in which he pins down precisely why the Commission is so damaging:

"... the Audit Commission fosters compliance rather than improvement; and compliance with bad ideas to boot...

...they descend into our public services and distort the way services are designed and managed – ensuring people are focused upwards to the regime, not outwards to their customers.

The Audit Commission is just part of the wider specifications industry – the army of people in Whitehall who spend their time creating specifications for public-sector managers’ compliance.

Getting rid of all of them would create two savings: The money it costs to have these jobs (significant) and the waste caused by complying with their wrong-headed ideas (much larger)."

And he goes on to illustrate his argument by highlighting the latest Whitehall fad being promoted by the Commission, which is to combine back offices across different bits of the public sector in order to reap "economies of scale".

Not only has the government adduced no serious evidence that this will work, but in the private sector such "scale economies" in service functions are now widely viewed as a myth - they promised much, but have often delivered little, other than a drastic deterioration in service standards (have you tried speaking to your high street bank lately?).

Seddon's article has triggered an explosion of supportive comments from LGC readers who've actually experienced the real world damage wrought by the Commission. You should read them, but here's a taster:

"I am a manager at a Local Authority that was inspected last year. My organization spent over £100,000 on preparation for inspection not including staff time. When the Audit Commission came they gave us a reasonably good score. My colleagues and I know that we manipulated the targets and that service is pretty poor. Although using the centrally imposed targets and measures you wouldn't be able to tell.

When they came they didnt go and spend time with people working on the frontline. They didn't listen to calls. They sat in a room with the policies and procedures and asked staff questions against them. Seddon is right. They enforce the government line, and their decisions are based upon guesswork more than fact and knowledge."

Now the debate has been been lifted to another level by a fear and loathing outburst from David Walker, the Audit Commission's Director of "Communications" (left pic above). Of course, BOM readers will be familiar with Walker*. He used to be editor of the Guardian's Public magazine, and we first met him at a Labour seminar back in the halcyon days of 2005 (appearing alongside his partner, one Ms P Toynbee).

Walker's response to Seddon's arguments? Seddon has got his facts wrong, he has a commercial axe to grind, and he's incontinent. Yes, incontinent:

"Mr Seddon is incontinent in his judgement. To say ‘economy of scale is a myth’ betrays what can best be called a religious rather than an empirical mind set. For us, it’s a matter of what the evidence shows. Unit cost and volume (quality adjusted) are inversely related in some services."

A classic Damien MacBride/Grauniad style playing-the-man kick in the goolies.

Needless to say, Walker doesn't actually vouchsafe what "evidence" he's got. It's presumably some secret commissariat evidence that can't be released - because we've certainly never seen it.

Let's hope that Mr Seddon keeps up the pressure. Yes, he may have a commercial axe to grind, but so what? He's talking a lot of sense about the Audit Commission. At the very least, its abolition would save us a couple of hundred mill pa, and as the comments at LGC make clear, the broader savings across local government and the NHS could easily be the same again.

It's a no-brainer, George. And we could be talking nearly half a bill.


*PS Here's how we summarised Walker's performance at that gob-smacking Policy Exchange seminar back in 2005:

"I’d never seen him before, but he turns out to be a real live Planning Commissar - steel grey hair, thin intense face, and round wire rimmed glasses. He was very proud of all those targets and New Labour statistical reporting systems. “Targeting works! Previous governments have not set enough objectives or provided enough information! An amazingly successful government - the most successful EVER!” He spoke of ‘physical expansion of the plant’, and was about to launch into a couple of hours on production statistics for Volgograd Number 4 Tractor City, when mercifully he was stopped."

Once the AC is abolished, he'll have to go back to the Grun. That is, if they're still in business once Murdoch's finished with them over their News of the World campaign.

(Playing the man not the ball? Yes, but I'm a disreputable blogger, not a senior public employee funded by the taxpayer).

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: quangos

Rule By Amateur

Keep them well away from this

As we've blogged many times (eg here), despite more than a century of promised reform, the governance of Britain remains firmly insecurely in the hands of bumbling amateurs. For reasons that defy all logic, we continue to entrust our security and half our national income to a bunch of incompetents we certainly wouldn't trust to run the family whelk stall.

In the last couple of days we've had two further prime examples.

First, our late grate Home Secretary confessed she was never up to the job. She told us she'd "never run a major organisation" before being appointed, and that her relevant job skills were so poor she'd operated "more by luck than by any kind of development of those skills".

More broadly, she reckons the constant reshuffles make it impossible to pick up the skills and knowledge on the job, so that cabinet government is "pretty dysfunctional in the way that it works".

At least she now recognises her own shortcomings. But the big question is why anyone ever thought it was OK to put her into the job in the first place? Tesco wouldn't dream of appointing a CEO who knew nothing about running a big organisation - let alone someone who also knew nothing about the supermarket business.

The answer is staring us in the face - Jacqui's story is simply par for the course. In government it's perfectly normal for cabinet ministers to be heading large complex organisations without having a clue how to run them. Or having a clue about their business.

No other walk of life would or could operate like that.

But government does.

And then there's the case of Trevor Philips at the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

As BOM readers will know, Philips presides over a £70m pa superquango that is a complete and utter shambles (see previous blogs, eg here and here). And now, not only are his head honchos resigning in droves because they can stand no more, but the National Audit Office has refused to sign off the accounts.

The NAO says the Commission failed to follow due and proper processes in the matter of re-hiring as consultants seven senior staff members it had previously made redundant from the permanent staff. A matter that seems to have cost taxpayers around £1m.

None of this comes as a surprise to BOM. After all, Philips is clearly not someone any of us would trust with a £70m budget - even in the unlikely event we wanted to retain the EHRC (another one for George's list).

But as we pointed out when he first got the job, as a longtime Labour insider (Mandelson was his best man) he can count on support in all the right quarters. And in those quarters it doesn't matter that he is organisationally inept - he's one of them.

So what's the answer to rule by amateur?

It's certainly not what My Lord Digby-Jones proposes, which is to put Britain in the hands of highly experienced super-managers such as... well, such as his good self. If we're going to have anyone ruling us, I'd like to be able to kick them out, thank you very much.

No, the only viable long-term solution is to reduce drastically the area over which these amateurs hold domain.

Privatise.

Localise.

Downsize.

Ruthlessly.


PS His Grace Bishop Snow was in outstanding form this evening. His opening line was "C4 News has learned that the Prime Minister Gordon Brown intervened personally to secure Nissan's new battery plant for Britain!" He then proceeded to open his pulpit to My Lord Mandy so that the good Lord could "make no apology" for achieving such a miracle of deliverance for Sunderland. Here endeth the lesson. Praise be to the Lord.

PPS The 40th anniversary of the first moon landing? Nah, it can't be... why, surely it was only yesterday, wasn't it? Anyway, it's reminded Tyler of another feature of life as a junior civil servant at the old Department of Education and Science back in the early 70s. Just a few years after that historic landing, Tyler and his fellows were able to sneak off down to the basement of the DES for a game of Lunar Lander on the department's mainframe ICL computer. Nobody ever seemed to mind (or even check), though we sensed it wasn't quite what the huge and expensive contraption had been purchased for. The only problem was that you had to input all your landing moves via punched tape, which then had to be transmitted over a landline to Darlington where the beast was housed. Its mighty brain then had to crank up - draining large parts of the National Grid in the process - until eventually it calculated where your moves had placed the lander relative to the lunar surface. Then it had to dial up the phone in the London basement to activate the teleprinter, which then printed out the answer. You then had to repeat the entire process again and again as you attempted to land. Fun though it was, the game did lack a certain immediacy. And Tyler never did manage to land succesfully. Wonder if it still goes on.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: amateurs, quangos

Dave Needs A Bigger Axe

Still not big enough Dave

I'm sure Dave means well. And I've been assured by people who know far better that me, that once in power, he's really going to go for it.

But try as I might, I remain unconvinced by too many of his big set-piece pronouncements on fiscal policy. Too often, there's a gap between his high level rhetoric on downsizing government, and the delivery of clear bankable pledges.

I've just read his much trailed speech on quangos, and I had expected some serious axe-work. But what I actually found was just another round of deckchair rearrangement.

He starts well enough (and see this useful Times graphic summarising the costs of 33 large quangos):

"Official figures show that last year, the quangos we know about accounted for over £34 billion of public spending, and received a twelve percent increase in funding. To put that increase in perspective, our armed forces - fighting an ever-ferocious and resourceful enemy in Afghanistan - got a three percent increase."

Yes, shocking. And as the TaxPayers' Alliance has pointed out, once you take account of the vast and shadowy array of near-quangos, the real cost of these unelected unaccountable bodies is even higher. Dave goes on:

"Estimates suggest that when you take into account all official and unofficial unelected organisations in our country, the true cost could be more than £64 billion a year. That's more than half the NHS budget and nearly ten times the international development budget.

The truth is we'll never get control of public spending unless we get control of quangos. Their casual attitude to public money is reflected in quango pay. Last year, sixty eight quango heads paid themselves more than the Prime Minister."

Spot on, bro. But what are you going to do about it? Will you actually deliver that Bonfire of The Quangos promised by one G Brown back in the nineties?

Not quite:

"It would be far too simplistic for me to stand here and announce some kind of 'Bonfire of the Quangos.' People have heard that kind of talk many times before, and seen little to show for it. Instead, we need a more sophisticated approach.

Yes we need to reduce the number, size, scope and influence of quangos. But we also need to recognise that there are circumstances where functions of the state do need to be carried out independently of elected politicians."

"Sophisticated"... hmmm. That's a word that always makes me nervous.

And "circumstances"... like, what kind of "circumstances" exactly?

Dave cites three:

• TECHNICAL CIRCUMSTANCES - "when a precise technical operation needs to be performed to fulfil a ministerial mandate. In these circumstances the public needs to know that people with the right training, professional knowledge and specialist skills are carrying out the work".
• IMPARTIALITY CIRCUMSTANCES - "where it may be right to delegate power to an independent body when there is a need for politically impartial decisions to be made about the distribution of taxpayers' money. In areas like the arts and science, the public expects funding on merit, not favouritism."
• TRANSPARENCY CIRCUMSTANCES - "where there is likely to be a need for independent action is when facts need to be transparently determined." EG the independent Office for National Statistics.

Now, the transparency circumstances we agree with - we definitely need independent scorekeepers for things like the economy and the fiscal outlook. So a big tick on that.

But as for his other two circumstances, we don't buy them at all.

On the technical circumstances, of course government needs to employ technical experts - everyone agrees with that. But why should they be employed in an unaccountable quango rather than directly?

Dave cites the Bank of England as being an example of an expert body doing a fine job managing our interest rates because they are arms length. Except that it now turns out they didn't do such a fine job after all - they permitted the growth of a credit bubble to end all credit bubbles, and we are all now paying the price. Sure, you can argue about why they failed - like maybe they had the wrong mandate - but it's not really the strongest endorsement of rule by independent expert.

And on the impartiality circumstances, all we can say is WTF?

Why should taxpayers be happy with a bunch of "experts" dishing out their hard-earned cash to the Royal Opera House, just because these experts happen to enjoy opera? Or doling out grants to all kinds of dubious social research projects in our universities? Or indeed, deciding which particular drugs we are to be given on the NHS, and which we are to be denied?

Surely everybody understands that all of these judgements are ultimately subjective, so why should we be happy being dictated to be unelected "experts"? After all, the only sliver of control we've got over the entire bloated edifice is our ability to turn the rascals out. And with unelected experts we can't even do that.

No. To have any hope of gripping the waste and profligacy in quangoland, Dave needs to forget all about sophistication. He needs A Great Big Axe.

An Axe that says all quangos are hereby abolished, and their functions either abandoned or subsumed back into their sponsoring departments. Their budget allocations go back into the departmental spending pot, and are subject to the departmental spending cut.

The only exceptions will be the following:

1. Office for National Statistics - reporting to Parliament not Whitehall
2. Office of the Budget - ditto
3. National Audit Office - ditto

Yes. OK, there may be one or two others as well (see here for a good summary by Andrew Haldenby, the Director of Reform, and this by Ed West).

But going forward, the default position is no quangos.

No spending without representation.

UPDATE (7-7) - Last night's Newsnight covered Dave's speech, drawing extensively on input from the TPA. Not only did they quote the TPA's figures for spending on quangos, but they also had the TPA's Susie Squire in their report package, and the TPA's Mark Wallace in the studio discussion. Both managed to make the key point - Dave's on the right track, but still has to be tougher. And there was more - the TPA's Matt Sinclair trying to persuade Newsnight's Dragon's Den style politics panel to abolish the Regional Development Agencies. Sadly, he failed. But then, given that the 4 person panel includes an ex-quangocrat, an ex-Labour minister, and an ex-Labour policy advisor, that's not terribly surprising. Anyway, to have Newsnight drawing so heavily on TPA input really does show how far the wheel has turned... all the more reason for Dave to be bolder.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: cuts, quangos

News From BOM Correspondents - 19

Ford Zephyrs not good enough for them these days

It's been too long since we did a round-up, for which we apologise. Frankly, events at The Golden Trough in Westminster have been so extraordinary and so distracting that everything else has sort of paled in comparison. But that's no excuse - we have to stay on the waste case, because it sure ain't gone away.

1. NHS "Productivity" Unit

DM Andy has the story of this... er... "efficiency" unit. It costs us £350 grand pa, for which we get one highly paid quangocrat director and one part-time secretary.

That's it.

Lifelong socialist Andy works down at the sharp-end of the NHS, and he's tearing his hair out. He asks: "Why are we wasting money like this and giving the Tories and the likes of Burning Our Money such an easy target?"

An excellent question, Andy.


2. Public Sector Pensions

The S Times has been back probing this old favourite:

"ALMOST 34,000 public sector workers have retired with £1m pension pots, twice as many as previously thought...

...Almost 400 retired staff from Glasgow city council and 223 from Kent county council have pension pots worth £1m or more...

... Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has a pension now worth £5.4m, the largest in the public sector. He is among more than 20 civil servants and quango bosses who have accumulated pensions worth £2m or more.

Three BBC board directors also feature in the top five. John Smith, who heads BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm, has accumulated a £3.1m pension pot after 18 years’ service."

So let me see... 34,000 times at least £1m equals at least £34bn.

(HTP Steve B)


3. Troughing Quangocrats

Also in the S Times:

"The head of a government regeneration agency ate 112 meals at taxpayers’ expense as he visited some of the country’s finest restaurants over 20 months... John Walker, the former head of English Partnerships, sent in a bill of £1,152 for service in a Belgravia pub and restaurant, charged £843 for service at Shepherds, the Westminster restaurant, and £569 at Pomegranates in Pimlico.

He spent nearly £3,500 in one eaterie alone as he racked up costs of more than £18,000 on restaurant and food bills.

Those on Walker’s guest list from April 2007 to November 2008 included the former cabinet ministers John Prescott and Hazel Blears, civil servants from the communities and local government department, a civil servant from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, three executives from the Olympic Delivery Authority, the chief executive of the Housing Corporation and the director of policy at English Heritage...

The expenses of the most senior officials at more than 120 nondepartmental public bodies reveal how some, such as Walker, spend big sums on dining out with employees from other taxpayer-funded organisations."

Remember that as you tuck into your Great Depression beanz on toast.

(HTP mister hungry)


4. Troughing MPs

It's way beyond parody, but Michael Chapman-Pincher has produced his own singalong tribute on YouTube. Here's Part 1 of 3:




5. Cops in Jags

From a breathless MSN Cars:

"Watch out, watch out, there's a big cat about...

Jaguar is now offering police forces across the UK the chance to go hunting criminal in style.

Police-spec 3.0-litre Diesel S XFs are out being evaluated by the UK's blue light brigade right at this very moment.

We reckon the slinky 275hp Jaguar will become one of the most powerful diesel police cars to ever roam the British mean streets - unless there are any bobbies out there rocking BMW's 286hp 535d. Either way, the XF's parallel sequential turbocharging should provide all the necessary in-gear, as well as emergency, response."

Yeah.

Enraged BOM correspondent Scott W says:

"My local force seems to have a love affair with high end BMW's so I bet they will be on this gravy train. Totally unjustified when the majority of their policing is done in an urban area.

How can we allow this waste to continue? How many bobbies could we get on the beat if we prised the police out of their premium motors? Do you see the police in other countries driving around in such things? No."

And now that Morse is sadly departed, our cops have no need for Jags either.

Fun at night

Tyler needs to leave it there in order to watch the Euro results.

Just how badly will Labour do?

Will their hopeless wibbling "plotters" summon up the balls to do something? Anything.

Will the quite superb Mandy crush some more BBC pundits like he crushed his old Labour mate Andy Marr this morning?

How perfectly delicious.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: nhs, pensions, police, quangos

An Expensive Shot In The Foot

"I am pleased the Court has recognized the work of the Commission" - John Wadham, Group Legal Director at the Equality and Human Rights Commission

In case you missed it, a tax-funded quango has just succeeded in further undermining the fighting capacity of our armed forces.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has spent an undisclosed, but doubtless considerable, sum of our money pursuing the sad case of Pte Jason Smith, who died of heatstroke while serving with the Territorial Army in Iraq in 2003. Largely as a result of the Commission's efforts, the Court of Appeal has ruled that the Human Rights Act, and in particular, the "right to life", applies to British soldiers on active service.

So how's that going to work exactly? How are our army commanders going to discharge that obligation while still beating our enemies?

As we've blogged many times, it is absolutely right that our frontline troops should have the very best kit and support we can buy for them. And it is disgraceful that they are still forced to cope with death-trap kit like the so-called snatch Land Rovers* and those decrepit Nimrods.

But that is a political issue - we should make our politicos do much better than they have over the last decade.

It is not a matter for the crackpot Human Rights Law: the very last thing we want is to place yet another burden on our frontline commanders.

We blogged the superquango Equality and Human Rights Commission several times while it was being set up in 2007 (eg here and here). It costs us £70m pa, and it's headed by long-time Labour insider Trevor Phillips (on £110 grand pa). And its finances are so questionable the National Audit Office has reportedly refused to sign off its first annual accounts.

Another £70m contribution to George's spending cuts?

You bet.


Meanwhile... mid-life Mr Phillips himself is mainly focused on his new life with his new partner:

*Footnote - Tyler recently dined with another patriotic Major of his acquaintance. This one is very familiar with Land Rovers, having used them both on operations (if I told you I'd have to kill you), and to scout his considerable acreage in East Anglia. But he recently drove a Toyota Land Cruiser, and was absolutely amazed at how much better it is. Now he's switched, and even though he knows his military-family-back-to-Waterloo father will be spinning in his grave, he will never go back. Another fine old British tradition bites the dust... until, that is, you remember that the original Land Rover was actually no more than a Jeep rip-off.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: defence, humbugs, quangos