The TaxPayers' Alliance - Better Government

The public sector discovers user involvement

Yesterday the Public Administration Select Committee put out a press release:

"The Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) today publishes the first parliamentary assessment of the idea of “user involvement” in public services, potentially a new model for public service delivery that promises improved services and greater user satisfaction."

Apparently, getting users involved at all is still an innovation in our public services.

It is important that public services be driven by users.  As David Holmes, from the charity Mind, told the committee, mere consultation isn't enough:

"In our experience the reason people have started to seek user control is that the mechanisms and involvement do not seem to have brought about the changes they would like.  They have been consulted but they seem to have been excluded from the real decision making..."

Holmes will find that nominal power within a system where politicians control all the levers of real power, particularly the funding decision, will be little more effective than the consultations they are designed to replace.  Users of public services will only have real control when they are free to choose between a range of providers, when public services are no longer monopolies.

Fortnightly collections

Fortnightly bin collections increase fly-tipping, more than doubled over the last three years, risk becoming an environmental nuisance and pose a serious inconvenience, particularly for larger families.  It has emerged, today, that the number of councils only providing fortnightly collection has been rapidly increasing:

"Almost 20 million people have their rubbish taken away only once a fortnight after nearly half of all councils withdrew weekly collections, it has emerged.

Figures released by the Government show people living in 169 council areas now have their refuse collected every other week."

There is little real justification for such draconian measures to increase recycling, which has rather marginal environmental benefits (for more on this see Chapter 5 of our report on green taxes, PDF) and benefits from taxes on landfill, but the European Union has spoken.  Its legal threats provide the main rationale for dramatic efforts to increase the amount of waste that is recycled.  When policy is set so far from ordinary people practical concerns go out of the window.  A lack of accountability means that idealistic schemes are not subjected to the kind of scrutiny that should be expected.  'Experts' prove chronically unable to get things right.

Power needs to be returned to civil society, to ordinary people who can take control of their own lives and then get the kind of services they are entirely right to expect.  The rather humble convenience of weekly bin collection is just one example.

Finding the right primary schools

The Telegraph reports that many parents are struggling to find the right primary school for their children:

"Many more have been forced to accept second, third or fourth choice schools amid unprecedented demand among parents, it is claimed.

In some areas, more than 200 four and five-year-olds have yet to secure a place for September.

[...]

In Kington-upon-Thames, south-west London, almost a quarter of children were denied their first choice school and around 200 are currently without any place at all. In nearby Merton, 258 pupils are without a place and 63 children in Richmond are also still waiting, it emerged today."

We shouldn't be surprised when services run by politicians see shortages.  So long as the best schools don't have the freedom to expand and new schools can't be freely opened - so long as the system is controlled from Whitehall - supply won't be able to respond to demand.  We'll have shortages of quality primary school places, and politicians will keep dreaming up ever more inventive ways of allocating them, until we change things and put parents and teachers back in charge.

Public Sector Strikes

Strikes are back in the news, with industrial action in the past week by oil refinery workers and school teachers. As a result, there is growing public concern at the cost of these strikes and the interruption to vital services.

New TaxPayers’ Alliance research reveals that workers in the public sector go on strike far more than their private sector counterparts:

• Over the last five years public sector workers have gone on strike for over 20 times as many days on average as workers in the private sector (see Table 2).
• Over the last twelve months public sector workers have gone on strike for 895,000 working days, more than 100 times as many days on average as workers in the private sector (see Table 1).
• This is despite public sector workers being paid more and being far more likely to enjoy benefits such as a final salary pension scheme.

Mike Denham, former Treasury economist and TaxPayers’ Alliance expert,said:

“Public sector workers have learned from past cave-ins that this government is willing to compromise taxpayers’ interests in the face of strikes. They know that politicians are far too ready to spend our money to avoid political embarrassment. And with the public sector four times more unionised than the private, strikes have increased sharply, leaving ordinary taxpayers facing untold inconvenience and expense, as well as the prospect of even higher taxes to buy off the strikes.”

Download the full report (PDF)

Too many laws

The Telegraph report that the definitive guide to British laws has doubled in size over the last twenty years:

This is a crushing burden of new regulation.  Ordinary people and businesses have an ever-expanding variety of laws that they are expected to obey.  The vast complexity of the legal system is costly to comply with and hard to predict as people are unsure which of the million pieces of legislation they could fall victim to.

The problem is inexperienced political leadership.  A lack of clear objectives leads to a mish-mash of many regulations that achieves little but complexity and inconvenience.  Beyond that, politicians with little experience of the problems regulations create for private industry do not see the problems they create coming.  Finally, they are only in office for a short period of time so are unable to really appreciate the vast amount of regulation that builds up over time with new legislation year after year.

Crime mapping

New Conservative plans, reported in the Telegraph, for detailed, public crime mapping could do great things for the relationship between ordinary people and the police.  Particularly if they are combined with the election of local police chiefs:

"The maps would have to be updated each month, while police would have to hold quarterly "beat meetings" where residents can raise their concerns with local police commanders.

Local residents could enter their postcodes and click onto the map, where the different crime types are represented by differently coloured pins.

Eleven categories of crime - ranging from burglary and vehicle theft to violent assaults - will be detailed on the maps. For sensitive crimes, like sexual assaults, then map will only detail a 300 yard street area."

With such detailed information local people would be able to hold the police to account.  The police would then have to really work for the public.  There might be resistance in the ranks to such accountability but hopefully the police will realise that, if it is a choice between working for politicians and working for the public who see the results if they do a good job, the latter is more rewarding.  The public will, rightly, have more trust in a police service that caters to their priorities than one that follows absurd government targets as it does now.

The National Programme for IT's expensive new bosses

We've already responded to the story that two new bosses for the failing National Programme for IT are going to be appointed at a cost of nearly half a million pounds a year in salaries alone, from the Telegraph report:

"Matthew Elliot, the chief executive of The TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "The direct, centralised management of the NHS is a massive task that no individual can seriously manage, and that flawed structure has undoubtedly contributed to the disastrous mismanagement of large-scale NHS projects.

"Centralisation has created a behemoth that is simply unmanageable - and patients and taxpayers are paying the price.""

The NHS is so large, centralised and full of quangoes that it is essentially unmanageable.  The unmanageable NHS has given birth to a monster of an unmanageable project; the NPfIT.  Thought to be the largest IT project in the world and coming in at a mighty £12.4 billion (up from £2.3 billion when the project was being sold, as set out in our report (PDF) on big government projects).  Despite all that money, only 9 per cent of doctors are optimistic about the programme's potential to improve the NHS and Foundation Trusts have serious concerns about its functionality.

The signs are not good that these new staff will improve things:

"One individual is responsible and accoun-table for the vision, linking with policy, and also the strategic leadership, and one is focused working in partnership with the NHS in the delivery of [IT] programmes."

A lot of the problems with the NPfIT are rooted in the fact that the structure was imposed from the top-down and didn't really address the needs of doctors.  In that context, is splitting the "vision" and "partnership" roles into different jobs really the best idea?

3.9 million pupils since 1997 have failed to reach an acceptable standard at GCSE

"Almost one million teenagers have failed to achieve even the lowest possible passing grade, G, in five GCSEs since Labour took power in 1997.

The report by the Bow Group found that the number of pupils failing to achieve five GCSEs rose last year to 90,000 - the highest figure since 1998. While a G grade is a pass, most employers view a C grade as the minimum acceptable standard of GCSE.

The report found that in England between 1997 and 2007 there were 3.9 million pupils - almost 60 per cent of the total - who failed to get five GCSEs at C or above, including the core subjects of English and maths."

The Telegraph reports a Bow Group study showing that billions of children are being let down by our education system.  Politicians have been claiming that serious improvement is just around the corner for the hundred and thirty years they've been in charge.  It is high time we thought again and put control back in the hands of teachers and parents.  That way we might not just see improved results but results that people believe in.  Schools would start to cater to parents who want to see their children earn meaningful qualifications rather than politicians that fail to meet diluted targets.

Refusing to accept the facts

Ed Balls, the Children and Schools Minister, announced yesterday that head teachers from successful grammar and faith schools will be ‘encouraged’ to take a more active role in the management of failing schools. This ‘encouragement’ will come in the form of new system of ‘rewards and incentives’, with the potential for some of these ‘super-heads’ to earn over £200,000 a year.

The logic behind many political decisions is often confounding, but this must rank as one of the most depressing examples. It also confirms the suspicions that Ed Balls is a dangerously inadequate Secretary of State.

Needless to say, the unwritten law of public sector pay dictates that once the bar is raised in this way, the pay of all will steadily rise. But what is more important, and more worrying, is that presented with the fact that grammar and faith schools do better than other state schools, Mr Balls has chosen not to consider why this really is – the fact that such schools represent the most independent part of the state education system – but to focus instead on ‘rewards and incentives’ for 500 individuals.

There is no question that successful head teachers offer a valuable resource, and their experiences and methods should be shared.  But luring them into more active involvement in the administration of failing schools is not the answer to the UK’s education problems. The reason why these head teachers are able to be successful is that they run those schools that are most free from the obsessive meddling of both central and local government – grammar and faith schools. These head teachers are the nearest thing the state sector gets to genuine ‘head-teachers’, to a chief executive of a school, rather than an embattled bureaucrat struggling to implement the endless stream of government initiatives.

The sub-text of Mr Ball’s announcement is that there is a shortage of decent head-teachers. In this he is right. But simply relying on stretching the few successful ones we do have over multiple schools side-steps the real and pressing issues that cripple the education system.  Head-teachers need more independence, not more money, and the governments’ refusal to accept this ensures a continued sub-standard education for thousands of children. 

Who is in charge?

The police today are complaining that their role is 'not recognised' as the Home Secretary didn't honour the results of their pay arbitration.  It really says something that they are looking to the politicians for validation.  The very idea of the police as public servants has been undermined by political management that means the police are actually serving the politicians - catering to their priorities.  If the police were freed from political management and made accountable to local people, the ones who really face the economic and social costs of crime in their area, then they might feel genuinely valued.

We would all get better services.  Another story today is the news that PCTs have been advising GPs to minimise their time with patients:

"Concerns over the quality of out-of-hours care were raised after doctors were told to cut down on home visits, speak less to patients and make fewer referrals to try to save money."

We all lose out because consumers have no power over a health service run by unnaccountable quangos like the PCTs.  Politicians dictate the objectives, quangos provide the detail and the views and needs of doctors and patients are largely sidelined.