JOHN REDWOOD'S FREEDOM TODAY ARTICLE
Posted by John Redwood, MP for Wokingham, at 12:53, Wed 13 December 2006:
Do you ever wonder why everything the state provides costs so much? When the Council Tax bill comes in it makes you sit up and take note. Yet that is small beer compared to all the extra VAT, fuel duty and income tax many are now forced to pay.
One of the reasons is that we seem to have pay twice for everything. The public sector has gone consultancy mad. When I was a County Councillor, if a road needed improvement the County Highways Engineers designed the new scheme and supervised the contract for the works. Today the Highways Department will probably go out to consultants to model the traffic to see whether a scheme is necessary, to more consultants to get a scheme designed, maybe to further consultants to check out the original consultants and make sure they have complied with government guidelines, and possibly even more consultants to help supervise the contract. The national government has caricatured this method of working with its millions of pounds of spending on consultancies to discuss how to run a railway or why not to build a road .
Why should this be necessary? It’s because the government has created a defensive bureaucratic culture. There are so many rules, guidelines and requirements from Whitehall governing everything a local authority may do, and there is such a climate of fear amongst officers that they may have failed to observe all the requests and demands. The easy way out is to give the risky jobs to other people to , so if something goes wrong the Officer can say “Don’t blame me, I went to an expert”. Labour ministers love kicking difficult decisions into the long consultancy grass, or into continuous review.
The clever public officials have privatised themselves. You can become an expert overnight, by moving from being a cautious officer on a Council, hiring consultants to do the work, to being someone with great experience of the public sector working for a private consultancy. The transformed officer will sport a charge out rate several times what he or she was paid an hour working for the Council
The consultants are often very good. They are also good at protecting their business interests. There will be plenty of small print in the contract to limit their risk. It’s the Councillors who end up taking the blame if anything does go wrong.
If we have reached the point where Highways officers do not feel they can design schemes, why then do we need highways officers at all? Why not go direct to the consultants? Or why not try to hire officers who are strong minded enough to do it themselves, and professionally competent to find their way through the advice and rules?
Highways is but one example amongst many where the taxpayer ends up paying twice – or more than twice – for the work that needs doing. In the sphere of social care Councils, the NHS, Housing quangos and many others now believe in partnership working. They understand that someone’s problems may run beyond the powers of any individual part of local or national administration, so many things have to be handled by case conference and multi agency working.
It is good if these bodies respond quickly and well to each other’s requests, and if someone emerges to take responsibility and to help the person in need. In some cases partnership working means laying the blame off on a committee. It means very expensive meetings between many public sector professionals, all sitting round agreeing that a particular case is difficult. They conclude there is no obvious answer or service that will meet the person’s needs, or no service that can be afforded after all the salaries paid to the professionals in the case conferences .
Government at all levels under Labour has developed a passion for asking the audience all the time about what they should be doing and how well we think they are performing. Quangos, Councils and government departments are survey junkies, sending out reams of paper to ask us what we think the main issues are and what we would like them to do next. Of course it is good that public bodies want to stay in touch, but isn’t that why we have so many elected Councillors and MPs, to give voice to the public’s demands and criticisms of these services?
There is also a difference between the type of market research a good consumer company undertakes and the research many public bodies undertake. Tesco or Marks and Spencers like to keep in touch to know what their customers and potential customers want to buy. They do not survey customers to find out if they should contract out parts of their operations, or to ask how they should run their stockrooms or how many buyers they might need. That is their business, their expertise. The public sector increasingly asks us how they should run things, as well as asking us what service we would like.
The public sector in the age of Blair seems to regard handling the media as more important than handling the day to day requirements of users of public services. For them a crisis is a set of bad headlines in national newspapers, or bad pictures on TV. So often their response is to intensify efforts to manage the media, when they should be sorting out the underlying problem, the poor service to the users.
This model of running the public sector is breaking under the strains of its own contradictions. It is creating an overcentralised public sector, as the government desperately tries to hold the reins and control the output to the media from every hospital, surgery and school. It is based on a top heavy system, where there are far too many politicians and officials crawling over the central directives and the central messages. It is diverting far too much money into consultancies, surveys and message crafting. It diverts attention away from the more humdrum but much more important business of running a good school or a good clinic in every locality.
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