The TaxPayers' Alliance - Better Government

Government manslaughter

The Express today (not online) reports that the Government has been accussed of corporate manslaughter over its failure to provide the armed forces with properly armoured vehicles for patrolling in Afghanistan.  The number of deaths through negligence in the public sector is truly staggering, our high hospital infection rates alone kill thousands.  If companies are to be legally expected to take good care of their employees and customers shouldn't we be holding our politicians to the same standard?  Why should people trust politicians if they won't hold themselves to the same standards as everyone else?

Unions are getting ready to take advantage of the public sector again

There are certainly problems in the prison system, a lack of space for a start, which prison officers have good reason to be displeased about.  However, the prison officers' illegal wildcat strike, in response to them getting a pay rise near the top of the 'limit' set by Gordon Brown, raises the spectre of a return to 70s militant unionism.

The Times reports today that Gordon Brown is set to clash with unions at the TUC conference.  Nurses are also considering strike action.  Unions managed to force the government to back down over vital reforms to public sector pensions with the Warwick Agreement.  They're confident that they can do it again.

Having personal services provided by the public sector strengthens unions in two ways.  First, the unions know that government are spending other people's money so are less careful about efficiency.  Second, there isn't the threat of putting the company out of business or hurting its ability to create new jobs to force the unions to show restraint.  That is one more reason why privatised services can do more to align rewards with performance, keep pay under control and generally deliver better value for money.

Three Rs sink to 7-year low

National test results have revealed that standards of reading, writing and maths among seven-year-olds have fallen to their 2000 level, despite huge state spending on early education schemes, the Mail reports:

"Almost half of boys - nearly 140,000 - will start the next phase of primary school next week without the writing skills needed to be sure of coping with the courses....

The figures emerged days after research from Durham University found that spending of £21billion over the past decade on nursery education and childcare has failed to improve children's ability to learn....

The assessments cover English, maths and science and are converted into a "points" measure by the Government based on the targets that are met.

The results show the average pupil scored 15.6 points in reading this summer, no improvement on last year and the same level as in 2000.

In writing, average scores fell for the third year running to 14.2 points. In 2000 the figure was 14.1.

In maths, pupils scored 15.8 points, the lowest level since 2000, when the figure was 16.0.

Overall, 84 per cent of pupils met the expected standard for their age in reading and 87 per cent in speaking and listening - no change on last year but down on 2005.

Point scores are unavailable in speaking and listening.

In writing, 80 per cent reached the required standard, known as "level 2", against 81 per cent last year and 82 per cent in 2005.

Only 59 per cent of pupils - and just 51 per cent of boys - met the tougher "level 2b".

In maths and science, 90 per cent and 89 per cent respectively reached a basic level 2 - no change on last year and a drop since 2005."

But these disappointing figures, despite huge amounts of extra spending, really aren't surprising. A system run by politicians who lack management experience and subject knowledge will never deliver a good education to all children.

The Conservative strategy on the NHS

Louise Bagshawe, a Conservative candidate, argues on ConservativeHome in favour of the current Conservative strategy on the NHS.  Essentially, she argues that the "Stop Brown's NHS Cuts" campaign has been a political success and is highlighting an important issue.

The problem is that, whatever the short-term results of the "Stop Brown’s NHS Cuts" campaign in the long-term it could hurt the Conservative Party’s credibility.  With colossal increases in healthcare budgets over the last decade it will be hard, and very unwise, to claim that the Conservatives will spend more than Brown.  Reform has been set serious limits thanks to the leadership conflating it with institutional instability – where the reality is that this is only true, in the medium term at least, with too many superficial reforms.  Promises to cut waste without structural reform may hold water in the short-term but will not be sufficient during an election campaign when more concrete proposals for improvement will be expected.

This campaign may do the Conservatives good in the short-term by kicking Labour where they are vulnerable but in the long-term if they cannot propose substantial reforms they will be left looking shallow and opportunistic.

Corporation Tax Too Complex For HMRC

The long view- lower tax rates have not cut revenue

Yesterday's FT story on Corporation Tax got a deal of coverage. As you will recall, it said that one-third of Britain's 700 biggest companies pay no CT.

On the face of it, that's surprising because almost all of those companies will be making profits in the normal sense of the term.

Company taxation in the age of the multinational is fiendishly complex, and major governments are constantly battling to close down loopholes (eg stricter rules on transfer pricing and controlled foreign corporations).

But the principal reason profitable British companies pay no CT is that they can set off a multitude of tax allowances against earnings.

To start with, successive governments have established a raft of capital allowances, supposedly to boost investment in things they consider desirable. Closely related is Gordon Brown's R&D tax credit, which reduces the CT take by £0.6bn pa. And in that case, we know that at least half of it is pure bunce to the recipients- ie a windfall gain requiring no action on their part other than filling in the claim form (see here).

Then there is the issue of debt interest, which is an allowable expense. That means companies can reduce their CT liability by switching from equity to debt finance, as many have been doing. The Law of Unintended-But-Entirely-Predictable-Consequences highlights Brown's notorious abolition of ACT relief (the Great Pensions Grab) because that introduced the asymmetry in the first place (see this blog).

Thus have the Commissars ensured that complexity and unintended consequences are built into the very core of the system. No wonder that the true tax liability is often a "grey area" .

One curious aspect of all this is that the FT was reporting a National Audit Office report published six weeks ago. Quite why it resurfaced yesterday is unclear: presumably it got overlooked in the rush of reports issued at the end of "last term".

In any case, the report was essentially probing HMRC's capability in taxing big companies. And it did not paint a happy picture. In the face of rapidly mounting complexity and burgeoning multinationals who get the very best advice going:

• "The Department does not have a coordinated long-term strategy for staff continuity and recruitment of tax specialists into its large business work other than through internal transfer." (para 4.4). In contrast, faced with similar challenges, the US IRS has a programme to recruit 900 external specialists over the next 12 months
• "Large businesses considered that HMRC client relationship managers and tax specialists did not always possess sufficient knowledge of the industry." (para 4.7)
• "...they considered that the Department often failed to appreciate the practical issues and uncertainties surrounding international factors such as controlled foreign companies’ legislation, double taxation reliefs, transfer pricing and cross border-financing arrangements" (4.8)

The overall impression is of an organisation increasingly out of its depth- "staff ‘remain in their comfort zones, carrying out familiar tasks in familiar ways’ (2.38). They are bamboozled by the new challenges facing them.

So how much tax do they fail to collect? Amazingly, they have no idea. Whereas for other taxes, such as VAT, they estimate a "gap" against which they're shooting (16% in the case of VAT), they reckon it's too hard to do that for CT.

Others have been less reticent. The Tax Justice Network reckons it could be as much as 28%, or around £15bn this year.

So what to do?

It's pointless pining for a simpler world where companies stay still while governments help themselves to the till. Globalisation blows all that away.

It's also pretty pointless hoping we can somehow attract and retain enough one-step-ahead tax whizzos to work for HMRC: if they're that good, they'll follow the money down to the City, where they'll also escape working for the Commissars.

As we've argued before, the best and only realistic way forward is massive pruning of allowances and lower CT rates (see here for the Taxpayers' Alliance position).

PS The chart above is taken from WHY HAS THE UK CORPORATION TAX RAISED SO MUCH REVENUE? by Devereux, Griffith, and Klemm (IFS 2004). It shows that reductions in the statutory CT rate have not cut CT revenue as a percentage of GDP. Part of the explanation is that allowances have also been reduced (ie the tax base has been expanded), but another driver is that overall profitability has also improved, supported of course by the cut in CT rates.

Direct evidence that science exams are being made easier

The Times has uncovered clear evidence that exams are not just becoming easier but that there is a conscious effort going on to make them easier:

"Examiners will have to set easier questions in some GCSE science papers, under new rules seen by The Times. A document prepared by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents awarding bodies across Britain, says that, from next year, exam papers should consist of 70 per cent “low-demand questions”, requiring simpler or multiple-choice answers. These currently make up just 55 per cent of the paper."

With GCSEs getting so much easier and pupils being taught to the test the academic content of a GCSE students' education has to be on the decline.  In a politician run system students are taught what they need to know to pass the test, that's what matters to politicians who use targets to understand school performance.  If those tests become less rigorous this feeds directly into lower educational standards.

This story also confirms that government claims of rising educational standards, made on the basis of rising exam results, should not be trusted.  Instead, we need to look to proxies like the number of low-skilled young people; Britain has the second highest level of low-skilled 25-34 year olds in the OECD - twice the level in Germany or the US.

Privatisation of school management is effective

The Financial Times covers a new report from the CBI, which argues that the private sector has proved itself to be a powerful stimulus for raising standards in schools:

"The government forced nine underperforming local authorities to outsource the management of their schools five years ago. The CBI says their success in raising standards proves the value the private sector can bring.

"For example Islington, run by Cambridge Education, has the most improved performance in the country, with the percentage of pupils gaining five or more GCSEs or equivalent at A*-C grade rising from 27 per cent in 2000 to 47 per cent in 2006."

This shows that even small privatisations are able to improve performance. Imagine how genuine empowerment for poorer parents to choose a better school for their children would revolutionise education in Britain...

UK worst in western Europe for stroke treatment

Fresh from a report showing how cancer survival rates in Britain compare poorly with other European countries, a new report in the British Medical Journal covered in the media today warns that the UK has the worst outcome for strokes in western Europe despite spending the same amount or more on care as other countries. The report also found that at present less than 1 per cent of patients are eligible for clot-busting drugs get them in the UK, against 20 to 30 per cent in many European countries and North America and Australia.

A National Audit Office report in 2005 calculated that 550 deaths could be avoided a year, and 1,700 patients would recover fully rather than being disabled, if stroke services were better organised.

This is yet another example of how the NHS, run by politicians who lack the management experience and subject knowledge, is failing the nation.

Cancer Survival Rates

Apparently the United Kingdom has some of the worst rates of cancer survival in Europe, significantly worse than others spending a similar amount.  For ovarian cancer 30% survive in the UK whereas 43% survive in countries like Austria.  This difference has not been overcome by the NHS cancer plan, launched in 2000.  Listen to the study being discussed on the Today programme this morning (Real Audio).  The reasons given are shortfalls in radiotherapy and scanning capacity.

By contrast, in the United States - so often held up as a nightmare by those opposed to more private sector involvement in healthcare - rates are better than in Europe.

"Europe’s survival rates are lower than in the US, where 66.3 per cent of men and 62.9 per cent of women survive for five years, compared with 47.3 per cent of European men and 55.8 per cent of women. These figures may represent earlier diagnosis."

There is a more comprehensive table of relative rates of survival in this Telegraph article.  Yet more evidence of the continued failure of political management of the British healthcare system.

Firms having to teach their workers the three Rs

Despite a chorus of "rising standards" from politicians firms are having to teach teenage workers basic numeracy and literacy.  From the Telegraph: "Half of employers said some teenagers were "unable to function in the workplace" claiming they cannot make simple calculations in their heads, speak in an articulate manner or understand written instructions."  The only skills that young people appear to have in abundance are information technology skills developed at home with iPods and Myspace.

If, after 11 years of full-time education, students have not taken away even the most basic of skills our education system has become almost a complete waste of time.  The case for serious reform becomes stronger by the day.

Police Community Support Officers

Today the Daily Express reports that Police Community Support Officers solve one crime every six years and hand out fines at a rate of one every four months.  The justification provided by the Home Office for their continued existence and, indeed, the expansion of the programme is illuminating:

"Their primary role is to provide high-visibility reassurance, build confidence in communities and support police officers."

Whether they provide a greater support to police officers than increasing the number of full officers who can share the burden of detecting crime is debatable.  It seems more likely that the real reasons for the expansion in the number of PCSOs are "reassurance" and "building confidence".  This is politician-speak for "we don't really think that having police officers on the beat is worthwhile but the public like it so let's fob them off with the cheapest officers we can find".  The politicians have bought their own spin about falling rates of crime, based upon suspect data.  The public know better so giving them proper democratic control is the way to ensure proper priorities within our police forces.

Is There Anyone Out There Who Doesn't Have 3 As?

Hurrah! A's all round

BBC R5 are doing their annual phone-in on the A Level results. And the jock has just asked desperately if someone could phone who hasn't got three A grades- she's just talked to one girl who has five. A quarter of all grades are now A, and the overall pass rate has reached a staggering 96.9% (see this blog for a comparison with the pass rate in a traditional exam).

As we blogged here, it is now incontrovertible that A Levels have got easier- the best independent estimate is that over the last two decades on average they've got two whole grades easier (some, like Maths, have been devalued even more).

The evidence is now so compelling that even Jim Knight- the schools minister- sounded a little embarrassed this morning as he attempted to deny it.

Earlier in the week, the ever excellent Reform published a paper on the crisis in state schools by Dr Martin Stephen, the High Master of St Paul's School in London. It's well worth reading (see here).

On exam standards he highlights the deeply corrosive role of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority quango (QCA). It's worth quoting at length:

"QCA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Government. In effect this means that a branch of government decides the qualifications and the curriculum available to the majority of young people in England. It has a dangerous capacity to work the system in the best interests of government rather than in the best interests of employers or universities: the two interests can be very different."

You can say that again.

"The two interests can be very different...

[The QCA] is increasingly staffed by civil servants and career examiners, rather than by those with extensive experience of teaching or lecturing."

Eg its head, left leaning Aussie bureaucrat Dr Ken Boston (see this blog).

"The combination of QCA and the examination boards acts similarly as a block between consumer and end-user. The old examination boards (University of London, Oxford, Cambridge, Oxford and Cambridge), both by their name and by their employees, used to be far more linked to and with the university structure in the UK . One is hard pressed to find a university lecturer setting or marking secondary examinations, and universities seem to have little or no say in the content and difficulty of the qualifications that decide who comes to their institution."

Yet again, government intermediates itself between consumer and producer, imposes its own priorities, and ends up not meeting anyone's needs. Except its own.

As we've blogged many times, the only way of cutting through this nonsense is to put the spending power directly in the hands of the consumers. Just as it is in the independent sector where Dr Stephen and his colleagues are accountable to the paying parents, not to government.

David Green makes a persuasive case on alcohol, policing and lawlessness

David Green writes for the Telegraph today making a very strong case that failures of policing, rather than too much alcohol, are at the root of yob lawlessness:

"The accepted tactic is to maintain a permanent police presence - not an occasional drive-through by a police car, but regular foot patrols by officers whose job is to get to know the gang members.

It usually turns out that there are a few ringleaders and a lot of hangers-on. Effective policing can easily break the power of gang leaders. They are usually committing crimes every day of the week, providing ample grounds for arrest and conviction.

But Mr Fahy also made another claim. "We cannot have a society," he said, "where adults feel scared to go out and challenge youngsters up to no good."

Fair point. But is fear of retaliation by unruly youths the only thing holding people back? In recent years, the police have increasingly arrested and charged victims of crime for "taking the law into their own hands".

One infamous case occurred in Penzance in June, when the owner of a hardware shop tried to stop three youths from stealing cans of spray paint. One kicked him in the groin, which provoked him to punch and kick the youth in self-defence.

The police arrived, gave the youths fixed penalty notices for shoplifting, then charged the shopkeeper with assault. He was conned into pleading guilty by police officers, who told him he could face six months in jail if he didn't."

Alcohol can, of course, cause people to lose their inhibitions and forget the consequences of their actions.  However, statistics from the Better Government paper show how unlikely it is that criminals will face serious consequences:

"Where 100% represents the total number of offences committed:
    - 45.2% are reported,
    - 24.3% are recorded by the police,
    - 5.5% are cleared up by the police,
    - 3.0% lead to a caution or a conviction,
    - 2.2% are convicted by the courts, and
    - 0.3% are given a custodial sentence."

There just aren't that many consequences for a drunken lout to forget about.  Even in a sober state of mind they're likely to have little fear of the criminal justice system, they don't have much to fear.

Green also hints are the root cause of the problem in this section:

"If Mr Fahy truly thinks that adults should not be frightened to challenge youths, he should take a glance at the "nine principles of policing" framed by Sir Robert Peel in 1829.  One says that the police should "maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen".  In other words, the police should remember whose side they are on."

The problem is that at the moment the police just aren't on the side of the citizen.  They're on the side of politicians who want to see targets met.  These targets aren't a good proxy for an effective police force or the priorities of the citizens that the police are supposed to support.  Only making the police accountable to those citizens again can put them back in the right corner.

Kiddy Kevlar - a sign of the times...

                                 

                            A model student, safe for one more day...

It had to happen. A firm in Essex is filling the gap in the market for worried parents of inner-city school kids who face the daily threat of being stabbed to death between lunch in the playground and afternoon geography lessons. As the Sun reports, the company is marketing school uniform jumpers with built-in Kevlar stab protection.

We knew that crime was bad, but this just seems excessive. But as we’ve said before, crime figures may lie, but market demand doesn’t. Stabbings in schools have increased and it is well documented that more young people are carrying knives. This is all in the context of violence in classrooms, a pitiful police presence in most schools, and declining trust in the authorities to impose sanctions and enfore discipline.

Back in December (on the TPA's old website), we blogged about a major Home Office study that confirmed all the worst fears of parents (the full text is copied below). The main graph from the report - which asked young people to document their experience of, and participation in, crime - is striking:

                         

                        

As we said at the time, these percentages translate to a worryingly high number of tooled-up young adolescents committing serious crime on a routine basis:

"...That means that the total number of young boys and men carrying knives (5 per cent of half the total population - 5,865,025) is 293,251; the total number of "Frequent Offenders" (7 per cent of 11.73 million) is 821,103, and even worse, the total number of what the Home Office categorises as “Frequent Serious Offenders” – 1 per cent of 11.73 million - is equal to 117,300."

With these figures showing the extent of the problem, is it any wonder that a market response has occurred? With roughly 3,000 secondary schools in England and Wales, that puts a generous spattering of knife-wielding, kiddy criminals in most playgrounds across the country. No wonder parents are scared.

One practical reason why knives are such a problem is because they are so easy to conceal, require no instruction to use, and they don’t allow the victim to put distance between themselves and the knife-wielding yob. Unfortunately, police officers know that stab-vests provide only limited protection to the main strike zones of the body, and even then with enough force Kevlar can yield to a sharpened butter knife. It is meant to prevent deep puncture wounds from knives wielded in clumsy scraps when the attacker is going to be slashing about. Exactly the sort of altercation that happens between 14-year-olds at a bus stop.

The moment we learn (and it will happen...) that just one of these stab vests has saved a student’s life, you can be guaranteed that sales will soar. Until then, what will be the response to this market innovation? Lots of mums going to kit their sons out with stab vests in a bizarre arms race until all kids in comprehensives have them? (and then will we have to pay to subsidise stab vests for poor families who can’t afford them?). Will the gangs then go one better and arm themselves (more routinely) with shooters to trump the stab vests at six yards? Are knives now such a fact of life in our cities that the only choice is whether you arm yourself to fight back (deterrence doctrine), or get kitted out to survive an inevitable assault (defence theory)? And what of these parents as humble taxpayers? Can mums who choose to fork out for a bit of Kiddy Kevlar, expect a refund on their council tax for a share of their police precept?

This sort of development means we really aren’t that far from syndicates of worried parents forming their own security groups with hired protection to keep their kids safe on the way home from school. We know private security is booming, and that sort of opt-out from the failing public service of our criminal justice system would be the next logical development. And it would of course be condemned by all “reasonable” people and Sir Ian Blair.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

P.S. Worried young mums who have to wait outside the school gates shouldn’t feel neglected – the same company is offering a trendy ladies hoodie top in tasteful baby blue, also with built in Kevlar. A bargain at £49.99…

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TaxPayers' Alliance Blog

December 20, 2006

The reality of crime in Britain...

A new Home Office survey of crime among young people, released yesterday, received too little attention in the press (with the exception of the Telegraph) especially given what it revealed about the sheer scale of criminality among adolescents in Britain today. Reports of the survey carried the headline figure that one in four youths aged 10-25 admitted to committing a crime in the previous 12 months.

However, there were even more shocking figures behind some of the other survey results and even before looking at what these other figures mean, it is also worth noting that, as the report itself states: "It focuses on levels and trends in youth offending, anti-social behaviour and victimisation among young people aged from 10 to 25 living in the general household population in England and Wales. The survey does not cover young people living in institutions, including prisons, or the homeless, and thus omits some high offending groups.”

So, it is a general population survey and can be taken as indicative of all young people in the UK. On page 8 in the Executive Summary, it provides the following information on the “Extent of Offending”…

• Three-quarters (75 per cent) of young people had not offended in the last 12 months. Of the 25 per cent that committed at least one of the offences in the last 12 months, many had offended only occasionally or committed relatively trivial offences.
• The most commonly reported offence categories were assault (committed by 16 per cent) and other thefts (11 per cent). Criminal damage, drug selling offences and vehicle-related thefts were less common and burglary and robbery were relatively rare at one per cent or less.
• Males were more likely to have offended in the last 12 months than females (30 per cent compared to 21 per cent respectively).
• For males the prevalence of offending peaked among 16- to 19-year-olds, whilst for females the prevalence peaked earlier at age 14 to 15. Seven per cent of all young people were classified as frequent offenders, i.e. they had committed an offence six or more times in the last 12 months. This group was responsible for the vast majority (83 per cent) of all offences measured in the survey. Thirteen per cent of all 10- to 25-year-olds had committed at least one of the serious offences measured.
• The majority (71 per cent) of serious offenders had committed an assault resulting in injury and no other serious offence. One per cent of all 10- to 25-year-olds had frequently committed serious offences (i.e. committed serious offences six or more time in the last 12 months) and were classified as frequent serious offenders.
• Overall, four per cent of young people had carried a knife in the last 12 months. Males were significantly more likely than females to have carried a knife (5 versus 2 per cent).

Now, if you want to know how many people these percentages relate to (quite an obvious extrapolation you would think but the Home Office report doesn't manage it), firstly, we know that the total number of young people in the UK is 11,730,050 (taken from Eurostat - the statistics agency - which gives a 2005 breakdown of the UK population by the age groups referred to. That means that the total number of young boys and men carrying knives (5 per cent of half the total population - 5,865,025) is 293,251; the total number of "Frequent Offenders" (7 per cent of 11.73 million) is 821,103, and even worse, the total number of what the Home Office categorises as “Frequent Serious Offenders” – 1 per cent of 11.73 million - is equal to 117,300.

This is utterly damning. A quarter of a million kids carrying knives regularly in public. More than three quarters of a million frequently committing crime - at least once every 8 weeks. And most disturbing - the truth about how many serious criminals are out menacing our streets everyday: almost 120,000 young criminals guilty of several or all of the following "serious offences" on a regular basis: car crime, burglary, robbery, theft, assault resulting in injury and selling Class A drugs.

When you see figures like these, it is more proof of what is becoming increasingly clear to a majority of people: law and order is on the verge of completely breaking down in Britain. In some of the poorest inner-city areas of London, Nottingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester it has already happened.

Violent crime is out of control because young criminals know the law can't or won’t touch them, and despite the enormous amount we spend on it each year, we taxpayers have long suspected that the criminal justice system is broken and can't keep us safe. A system overwhelmed by the volume of crime and handicapped almost to the point of uselessness by ineffective policing, weak sentencing laws, liberal magistrates, corrupt probation practices, an aggressive penal reform lobby and above all, zero accountability to the millions of crime victims each year who deserve so much better. And to think our criminal justice system - courts, prisons, police and probation - cost each household in the UK more than £1,000 per year. Not so much wasteful spending, as downright ineffective.

We have to get real about the problem of crime in Britain and start punishing minor offences seriously, applying sanctions to young criminals instead of excusing their actions, and recognising the vital importance of deterrence in any system of justice (especially when it comes to diverting young people from crime). And we have to do this before huge numbers of young people grow up to become the violent, lawless thugs who destroy so many of our communities.

A quarter of pupils 'make no progress from 11 to 14'

The Telegraph reports today that in many subjects one in four pupils makes no progress or falls back between 11 and 14.  This suggests that either secondary school standards are truly dire or primary schools are failing to equip their pupils for the jump to secondary school.  Either way for three years of full-time work to yield little or no result is a massive failure in our education system.  It can be added to a litany of other failures; those key statistics on education from the TaxPayers' Alliance Better Government paper again:

• 11 year-olds: 25% leave primary school without sufficient ability in reading and writing to tackle the secondary school curriculum.
• 14 year-olds: almost 30% do not reach the expected levels in English, Maths and Science to tackle GCSEs.
• 16 year-olds: almost 60% do not achieve a GCSE grade C or better in all the three core subjects of English, Maths and Science.
• After 11 years of state education at a cost of over £75,000 per child, pupils are leaving school functionally illiterate, innumerate and unskilled:
  • 40% do not achieve at least a C grade in GCSE English.
  • Some seven million adults in England cannot locate the page number for plumbers in an alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages.
  • 47% would be unable to achieve a grade G at GCSE maths.
  • The OECD finds that Britain has the second highest level of low-skilled 25-34 year olds in the 30 countries of the OECD – twice the level of Germany or the USA.

In fact it will be increasingly hard for the country to operate effectively,
when at present:

• The average attainment of prospective teachers entering a B.Ed course is less than three grade Cs at GCE A-level.
• 52% of would-be prison officers failed a simple literacy and numeracy test.
• 33% of nurses completing their training failed to achieve the 60% pass rate in basic English and Maths tests, despite having GCSEs in these subjects.

Typical questions for the nurses included:

How many minutes are there in half an hour?
a 15 b 20 c 30 d 45
Which of the following times is the same as 8pm?
a 1800hrs b 1900hrs c 2000hrs d 2100hrs
What is the correct decimal nomination for six hundred and fifty pence?
a 605p b £6.50 c £65.0 d £6.05

The expensive NHS

It used to be that low NHS standards, still just about the worst in the world according to EU and British Medical Journal studies, were somewhat compensated for by the fact that it was at least relatively cheap.  These days we spend over the OECD average on healthcare while still getting poor results.  The NHS has gone from cheap and nasty to just nasty.

This year the NHS budget is £104 billion, over £4,000 per household.  Despite that massive subsidy from taxpayers the NHS often charges more for basic dental treatment than many private providers.  People who buy private healthcare pay twice for provision - taxes to pay for the NHS and private insurance premiums or fees to pay for their own coverage.  Only the incompetence of political management could make paying both taxes to pay for the NHS and private treatment costs cheaper than using the services NHS spending is supposed to provide.

ID card programme launched: another government fisaco in the making

Today's Financial Times reports:

"A £2bn procurement programme to build and run the contentious identity card scheme was launched by the government on Thursday.

Five suppliers will be chosen to compete for contracts worth up to £500m each, officials said....

The contracts would be worth between £50m and £500m, officials said. The two largest tenders, each for about £500m, will cover the identity database and the handling of applications and enrolment.

A bidding conference will be held in September, with the first contracts awarded next spring."

To say nothing of the follies of organising an intrusive identity card system, awarding an individual IT contract worth £500 million is surely a recipe for disaster. Yet another government IT project fiasco looks likely. It seems as though politicians will never learn from their mistakes and never recognise that they lack the management experience and subject knowledge to ensure that contracts run smoothly.

The Conservatives have rightly promised to scrap the ID card project if they get into power. But if the record of past government IT projects, such as the Child Support Agency, is anything to go by, there will be nothing left to scrap.

Pass Or Fail?

Qualification A- pass rate 96%

Qualification B- pass rate 44%

The charts above show the history of pass rates for two qualifications.

One is a highly respected, highly prized qualification that opens career doors all over the world.

The other isn't.

Can you guess which is which?

Here are some clues. Qualification B where the pass rate has plummeted from 95% to 44% is clearly in Big Trouble. What's more, the people who run it are apparently so complacent that they blame the failure on their candidates! Just listen to the way they talk:

"The pass rates have dropped rather dramatically over time. [And] if we were to include the approximately 25 percent of enrolled candidates who do not sit for the examination each year (no-shows), pass rates would be dramatically lower still... Falling pass rates reflect... the expansion of the candidate pool and deteriorating preparation habits."

Can you believe that? Talk about negativity!

Now, just compare that to the Can-Do Attitude of the man behind the high success Qualification A. He says:

"My gut instinct is that those who take the position that standards have changed would really like to see us go back to the old system when only certain proportions of students could achieve a grade A, B, C or whatever, which meant that, say, only the top 5 per cent in any year could get an A grade and therefore go on to university. To have kept that system would have been absurd."

Absurd indeed.

Which is why the 96.4% pass rate A Level is in terminal decline, scarcely worth the multiple choice paper it's written on. Whereas the 44% pass rate Chartered Financial Analyst qualification is one of the most sought after bits of paper in the world.

The CFA shows what happens when soaring candidate numbers meet a real determination to maintain standards: far from simply limiting the proportion of passes, the CFA has been so focused on standards it has allowed the proportion to fall. The fact that the A Level examiners haven't even kept their old fixed proportions underlines just how far their standards have slumped.

(See this blog for more from Dr Ken Boston, the educational administrator currently in charge of A Level standards).

PS For those interested in the A Level standards debate, it's well worth taking a look at Y Safle, which describes itself as "pretentious waffle from Wales", but is in fact a great source of analysis of A Level results and grade inflation. Not to mention some terrific charts (one of which is reproduced above). And thanks too to pommygranate who drew our attention to the falling CFA pass rate.

Our Not Fit For Purpose Government

League table of incompetence: scores out of ten

The table above is taken from a shocking report just published by the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee- Skills for Government (para 27). They say:

"No department seems to be exactly “fit for purpose”, although the Home Office is unique in being "well placed" in none of the [performance] categories measured."

The PASC examined the Cabinet Office departmental Capability Reviews (see previous blogs eg here), and concluded that most of Britain's government departments are pretty well useless.

Before continuing, just take a couple of moments to digest that table. Only one department even scores above half marks. The average is a dismal 3.5 (or put another way, an overall Civil Service score of 35%).

This of course will come as no surprise to regular readers of BOM. But some of the Report's accompanying detail is well worth highlighting:

1. The Professionalism Fantasy

As we've blogged many times, the cult of the amateur is alive and well in the Civil Service (eg see this blog). The government reckons it can sort the whole problem through something called Professional Skills for Government:

"Launched in October 2004, PSG is a major, long-term change programme designed to ensure that civil servants, wherever they work, have the right mix of skills and expertise to enable their departments or agencies to deliver effective services.

To this end, its goal is to move away from the concepts of “generalist” and “specialist”, and create a Civil Service where all staff are specialists of one form or another... The aim is to professionalise the business of government." (Report para 39).

There's only one problem: it's all been tried before. About 300 times. Indeed, as the Committee points out, the 1968 Fulton Report spawned virtually identical ideas and plans. They say: "The great mystery remains: if so many of Fulton’s recommendations were (eventually) implemented, why are the same criticisms still valid?"

The reality is that government's dysfunctionality goes much deeper than not enough "professional training" for top civil servants.

2. The Management Fantasy

Big Government reckons it can manage things much better than we taxpaying citizens can. How else can it justifiy its huge and overbearing presence in our lives? Yet as the Report underlines, management within government departments is known to be dire:

• Item- less than half of senior civil servants believe "their department’s “top team” provide effective leadership" (para 29)
• Item- only 19% of senior civil servants believe poor performance is dealt with effectively- and they're the ones supposed to be doing the dealing! (para 35)
• Item- only 2.5% of civil service leavers are dismissals due to poor performance: the average across all UK employers is 9% (para 36)

The government simply does not have the excellent management its micro-managing policies demand.

3. The Delivery Fantasy

This government is very keen on Delivery. Well, it's very keen on talking about it anyway. But the Cabinet Office Capability Reviews show that actual delivery is Very Poor Indeed (the overall Civil Service score is just 24%).

Why? As we've blogged many times (eg here), bright people join the civil service because they want to get their hands on the levers of power. And that means policy work- advising ministers in time honoured Sir Humphrey style.

What bright people do not join for is delivery work- ie running some dreary concrete hanger full of demotivated temps on an industrial estate miles from the ministerial corridor. It's simply not how they want to spend their lives.

Fulton was supposed to change all that, but as the Committee discovered, policy work is still the fast track to the top: "the majority of Fast Stream posts remain in policy delivery, despite the relatively small number of civil servants who work on policy; and that the institutional bias towards policy is reflected in the grading of posts all the way up to the Senior Civil Service." (para 94)

It's the nature of the beast- those who want to run dreary concrete hangers etc go to work for Tescos and get a load more money, a load more prospects, and a load more esteem.

4. The Commitment Fantasy

Governments are forever telling us they are fully committed.Fully committed to programme X or programme Y, and determined to see things through.

In reality, staff turnover at the top- where commitment really shows up- is horrific. The Committee reports that "the average tenure of a ministerial post under the current Government has been 1.7 years, and that for Cabinet posts 2.2 years... the Senior Civil Service median is 2.7 years" (para 136). In government, whether as a politico or Civil Servant, the only way to get on is to move on.

Which is devastating in terms of the actual job.

As we've pointed out many times, in the last two decades Tesco has had just two Chief Execs, both of whom spent their entire careers with the company, working their way up from the dreary concrete and the baked bean stacks. In the process, they became world experts on retailing and were ideally qualified to lead Tescos to its current dominance (see also this blog).

Clearly government will never come close to Tesco, but even in terms of other governments, we get a shocking deal. Lord Raynsford put his finger on it for the Committee:

"I was very struck in international meetings how many ministers from other countries are appointed on the basis of their technical expertise in the area in which they have responsibility rather than simply because of political background. We have a culture which rightly emphasises the importance of political accountability to Parliament, and that means the overwhelming majority of ministers come into the job without any technical expertise in the area that they are responsible for." (para 148)

Let's understand that. We can't have experts in charge of things because of political accountability to Parliament. That's so valuable, it's worth suffering in a way that other countries don't. Even though in reality we have an elected dictatorship with vitually no meaningful parliamentary accountability whatsoever.

So now we know.

Soft A-Levels

"But critics say that there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that examinations are now easier than they were in the 70s and 80s.

It comes as the Government prepares to publish the results of tests taken by children aged 11 tomorrow. 

Dr Coe analysed the standards achieved by students at A-level and GCSE.

He then compared them with the outcome of aptitude tests - which measure pupils' skills in a range of subjects without testing curriculum knowledge – over the last two decades.

This provides a consistent measure of ability from year to year against which grades can be compared, it is claimed. 

At GCSE, Dr Coe found there was an increase of about a third of a grade between 1996 and 1998 for pupils of the same ability.

Since 2004 a rise of a further fifth of a grade. 

At A-level a candidate given an F in maths 1998 would, on average, get a C in 2005."

As the education system appears to be failing by every statistic other than exam results we should be suspicious about how reliable those exam results are.  This research for the Office for National Statistics suggests that exam results cannot be trusted as a measure of educational performance.

However, it isn't just aptitude tests which show failure in the education system.  From the TaxPayers' Alliance Better Government paper:

• 11 year-olds: 25% leave primary school without sufficient ability in reading and writing to tackle the secondary school curriculum.
• 14 year-olds: almost 30% do not reach the expected levels in English, Maths and Science to tackle GCSEs.
• 16 year-olds: almost 60% do not achieve a GCSE grade C or better in all the three core subjects of English, Maths and Science.
• After 11 years of state education at a cost of over £75,000 per child, pupils are leaving school functionally illiterate, innumerate and unskilled:
  • 40% do not achieve at least a C grade in GCSE English.
  • Some seven million adults in England cannot locate the page number for plumbers in an alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages.
  • 47% would be unable to achieve a grade G at GCSE maths.
  • The OECD finds that Britain has the second highest level of low-skilled 25-34 year olds in the 30 countries of the OECD – twice the level of Germany or the USA.

In fact it will be increasingly hard for the country to operate effectively,
when at present:

• The average attainment of prospective teachers entering a B.Ed course is less than three grade Cs at GCE A-level.
• 52% of would-be prison officers failed a simple literacy and numeracy test.
• 33% of nurses completing their training failed to achieve the 60% pass rate in basic English and Maths tests, despite having GCSEs in these subjects.

Typical questions for the nurses included:

How many minutes are there in half an hour?
a 15 b 20 c 30 d 45
Which of the following times is the same as 8pm?
a 1800hrs b 1900hrs c 2000hrs d 2100hrs
What is the correct decimal nomination for six hundred and fifty pence?
a 605p b £6.50 c £65.0 d £6.05