The TaxPayers' Alliance - Better Government

Anti-hospital infection pyjamas

Already this year we've had Kiddie Kevlar stab-proof school jumpers and manufacturers considering adding tracking devices to school uniforms.  Now, the Telegraph reports that Marks and Spencers are marketing pyjamas that they say will protect you against hospital infections.  All of these are just the more egregious examples of people having to pay to protect themselves from the incompetences of the state.

Law and order isn't effectively maintained so people hire private security and kit their kids out like a Securicor van.  Hospitals are full of infections so people go private, go abroad or - if they can't afford to pay twice - buy protective pyjamas.  School standards are shockingly poor so people send their children to private schools or hire tutors.

We have to pay for schools,  police and hospitals.  Those - politician managed - services fail to deliver and then we have to pay again to actually get the security we need, the educational standards we expect for our children and treatment without the risk of leaving hospital in worse shape than you entered.  Isn't it shockingly unfair that people are forced to pay for public services that are so bad they then need to spend more of their money to prevent or undo the damage?

England falls in international reading league table

The latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) shows that English 10-year-olds have fallen from 3rd to 19th place since 2001. The study of 45 countries and provinces showed that only the results of Morocco and Romania fell more sharply.

Predictably, but shamefully, Education Secretary Ed Balls tried to pin the blame on parents, but few will be fooled. Spending on primary and pre-primary education has increased from £16.8 billion in 2001-02 to £23.6 billion in 2006-07. By any measure, these results are an extremely poor return on that extra spending.

These results also pose serious questions for Gordon Brown's aspiration to increase state school funding per pupil to the level of private day schools. It simply isn't going to work. Rather than throwing yet more taxpayers money down the drain, the government should look to the countries that perform better than the UK - Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark have all freed their schools from political management, handing control to parents and teachers. The same approach could work wonders over here.

Putting a politician in charge of financial stability

Defending financial stability in an economy near you... soon...

Peter Franklin argues, on ConservativeHome's Platform, for a minister in charge of financial stability:

"Devoting a Cabinet minister to financial stability is no guarantee of financial stability, but it would help and, if nothing else, would send a message to the anxious savers and pension fund holders of Middle England that we take their concerns seriously."

At the moment no one has direct overall responsibility for financial stability. I think that just about the only way you could make things worse is to put a politician in charge. This isn't an area where there are many ideological issues at stake that should be decided democratically. It is, instead, an area that requires expert and experienced judgement.

Your ideal person to put in charge of financial stability is someone respected by the markets with a real knowledge of economics and how the system works. A non-politician. Make it a ministerial post and you're highly unlikely to wind up with someone qualified to oversee the financial system (of course the same can be true with the Civil Service - see Sir John Gieve). There aren't really people with those kinds of qualifications in the Commons - just a few ex-financial journalists and the odd banker.

You'll probably get someone who won't have real experience in anything but politics. Particularly given that it will be a job where people only notice the minister if things go wrong. Just like the Home Office at the moment it will be a poisoned chalice which will mean it won't even get the brightest ministers. Whoever got the job would just have to watch, fearfully, and hope things take care of themselves. If something went wrong there would probably be a carefully established media strategy but little idea of what to actually do about the problem. The stability of the British financial system would be further impaired and Middle England wouldn't be impressed.

Rewards for management failure

When Mark Rees was head of the Barking, Havering and Redbridge Trust he sacked 600 workers and cut 190 beds in order to try and bring the trust's finances under control (reported in the Daily Mail - not online).  These are similar measures to the ones Rose Gibb, who - in a strange quirk of fate - is his partner, put in place that contributed to the tragic outbreak of C. difficile that killed at least 90 people.  They have failed to restore the trust's finances and it was £30 million in debt when he stepped down "amid claims of weak leadership".

Despite this he is to get a £170,000 payoff with £127,500 for nine months pay in lieu of a notice period and £42,500 for 'loss of office'.  Taxpayers shouldn't be made to pay such extravagant rewards to managers who fail so thoroughly.  Unfortunately, the recent TaxPayers' Alliance Public Sector Rich List showed numerous cases of such rewards for failure.

The NHS and equality

One of the cardinal virtues that the NHS is supposed to possess is a high degree of equality.  The system clearly fails to deliver quality care relative to other developed country healthcare systems on a host of measures from control of infection to cancer survival to mortality amenable to healthcare.  However, it is felt to be an expression of social solidarity that, quality aside, we are all in the same boat with regard to healthcare.  This principle has been enshrined in the World Health Organisation's ranking of healthcare systems but in a very imperfect manner that was more focussed on how the system was funded and allocated resources than on the actual results for people from different socio-economic groups.

There is a debate to be had on whether equality, as opposed to generally higher standards, is the right objective for a health service.  However, the Telegraph reports a Civitas study showing that even on the measure of equality the NHS is failing to deliver.  Rates of heart bypass operations, for example, are 30 per cent lower in the poorest groups.  The middle class are proving much better able to play the system and this translates into better standards of care.  "Although the poor, the least educated and ethnic minorities visit their GP more often than more affluent, well-educated people, they are less likely to be referred to a specialist."  Even if equality is treated as all-important the NHS is still failing.

Problems with PFI

Reuters report that the Public Accounts Committee has found that many PFI deals have been very expensive, up to 14 per cent more than before the PFI deal was put in place.

Getting private companies involved in the running of public services is a very good idea.  However, the important qualities that the private sector can bring to public services - efficiency, innovation and a focus on customer priorities aren't made use of much in PFI deals.  PFI deals typically have the private sector borrow, put fixed capital (such as a hospital or a prison) in place and then leave the operation of services within the public sector.  In other cases private firms will be asked to undertake particular functions, such as cleaning, rather than the wholesale operation of a facility or service.

Borrowing is one thing that government can do more affordably than the private sector.  Getting private firms in to do the borrowing is to choose perhaps the least useful contribution they can make to the running of public services.  When particular functions are handed over to the private sector they often do not have the flexibility to improve efficiency.

Instead, government and private sector both try to get the best price, for them, that they can.  Sometimes government gets the upper hand but that risks putting the private firm out of business.  If the private firm is put out of business, as in the case of Metronet, that means yet more cost to taxpayers and delays in the provision of important improvements in services.  More often, the private sector wins out and the taxpayer faces a bigger bill than they otherwise would.

By allowing the private sector to run services instead of just contracting out small functions or building facilities we can avoid this entire, expensive, zero-sum game.

EU pushes forward a free-market in health care

Next week the EU will lay out proposals which will formalise the right of NHS users to seek safer and often superior health care abroad. Increasing numbers of UK citizens already choose to travel as far as India and Malaysia to avoid treatment in the NHS (nearly 70,000 this year alone), but these Commission proposals – if agreed upon by the European Parliament and member states – will potentially establish a genuinely open market in European health care; a market in which the weaknesses of Britain’s NHS are bound to be revealed. 

Under the Commission’s ‘2008-2013 Health Strategy’, EU citizens could choose medical care in any other member state and have the cost covered by their national health care system, providing the treatment or service is provided for free in the patient’s home state.  A series of European Court rulings over recent years has established a British citizen’s right to look elsewhere in the Union for free treatment if they are deemed to be on ‘unduly long waiting lists’, but with widespread fears over hospital acquired infections, the potential for mass ‘health tourism’ away from the UK is a serious challenge to the government’s health policy.

Health ministers have expressed concern that these EU plans would place an unworkable administrative and planning burden on the NHS, but the reality is that these proposals could potentially reveal people’s dissatisfaction with health care in this country. Hospitals in northern France already perform considerable numbers of hip and knee operations, while Spain attracts those seeking fertility treatment. Belgium offers British cardiac patients a higher chance of success and a lower rate of infection, and the Netherlands is far quicker in the provision of cancer medication. If these sensible EU plans are carried through, Calais could not only offer British citizens the chance to avoid excessive alcohol duties, it could also offer British citizens the chance to get necessary health care quicker and safer than what’s on offer back home.

HMRC Catastrophe

Once upon a time Chancellors took responsibility

Just imagine that Lloyds TSB, say, had loaded all its customer records onto an unencrypted CD and then lost it. What do you think would happen?

First off, there'd be a huge public outcry, led by the media but with our name and shame politicos tut-tutting loudly from the grandstand.

The share price would tank.

Shareholders would insist that the CEO and half the board resign (that is, if they hadn't already gone on the announcement). No way would the sacking of a departmental manager be enough.

The regulators would send in a hit squad.

Customers would queue round the block to get their money out.

Competitors would say thank you very much, while frantically checking their own procedures to make sure it couldn't happen to them.

And Lloyds TSB would get taken over by a bank with credibility.

Compare and contrast that with the catastrophe at HMRC. 25m Child Benefit records lost, including parents' and children's names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit and national insurance numbers and in some cases, bank or building society details. Two unencrypted computer CDs, downloaded by an office junior, and sent through the post unregistered. Millions of people exposed to financial fraud and possibly worse.

And yet the Chancellor- who is already presiding over one catastrophe- remains in post. He fires a departmental manager, claiming that the tax department is in fact independent and nothing to do with him. And he remains in post.

And for the next two years there's absolutely no way he can be ousted. Unlike shareholders we can't insist on it, and unlike customers, we can't take our business elsewhere.

And that's really the nub of the issue. Yes, the public clamour may sink Darling, but do we really think that would improve matters?

HMRC- Her Majesty's tax collectors and once the epitome of dependable, responsible government- is fundamentally bust.

As has been pointed out, this is the THIRD such loss of confidential personal records by this dysfunctional department in just over three months. And each time we've been assured procedures were being changed to ensure it couldn't happen again.

Just two weeks ago, we learned of a virtually identical case:

"Around 15,000 Standard Life customers could be at risk of fraud after their personal details were lost by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

The data was on a CD sent from the Revenue office in Newcastle to the company's headquarters in Edinburgh. But the disc containing names, national insurance numbers, dates of birth and pension data never arrived at its intended destination."

We've blogged the massive problems at HMRC many times before (eg see here ). To recap:

• Tax credit fraud- officially put at around 10% of total payments, or £1.25bn pa (see here)
• Missing Trader VAT fraud- last officially estimated at up to £1.9bn pa (see previous blogs, eg here and here).
• Incorrect tax assessments- 1.6m people over or undercharged income tax as a result of processing errors at HMRC. The total sum involved was £0.6bn, or around 400 quid each
• Inadequate accounts- HMRC accounts qualified by NAO for the last five years
• Hopeless IT systems- over 250 separate "major" computer systems
• Ramshackle organisation- hundreds of disparate local offices
• Wildly unrealistic Gershon staff cuts- Pacesetter programme cutting 8,500 jobs soonest
• Half-baked management- introducing "lean production" methods, originally designed for car manufacturing, and including whacky rules for positioning bananas on desks
• Rock-bottom staff morale- some offices now suffering annual sick leave averaging 23 days, or nearly five weeks pa (the private sector average is just 6 days pa); so many people have left, some offices are 25% staffed by temporary contractors

HMRC is now a complete and utter shambles.

Just like the Home Office.

Just like DEFRA.

And just like any number of other government departments.

How dare these people tell us how to order our lives. They are incompetent, irresponsible, and treat our interests with utter contempt. Why should we ever trust them with anything important, like our personal financial information?

Surely nobody will now want to go ahead with that crazy and insecure £20bn ID cards project.

And if you've been claiming Child Benefit in the last five years, our strong advice is to switch your bank account.

PS Darling tried to suggest in the Commons that he somehow isn't responsible for HMRC. According to him, HMRC is "operationally independent of government". This takes us right back to Tesco Government, and it is total rubbish. As the Treasury website records, Darling's junior Jane Kennedy, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, has "overall responsibility for HM Revenue and Customs". Maybe Darling should read it.

The Politicisation Of The Treasury

Just watch the vid. Five months may be a lifetime in politics, but you can't mistake the enthusiasm of Treasury civil servants for Gordon Brown as he leaves them for No 10.

Your correspondent was at the Treasury during the years of Healey and Howe. There is no way such scenes would have taken place then. Still less would the TV cameras have been invited in to broadcast them.

Back then we were naive: we genuinely believed we were somehow above politics. As my first Permanent Secretary (Sir William Pile, now administering upstairs) explained to us new entrants in 1973, our job was to stop the politicians doing anything too stupid.

What's my point?

Brown replaced the top Treasury civil servants with political appointees. Ed Balls was the most egregious appointment, as Chief Economic Advisor, but who can forget the way he got rid of the Treasury press office and replaced them with Charlie Whelan?

It set the tone. Brown wasn't in the market for old-style Sir Humphrey "stop them doing anything stupid" advice. He wanted "can do".

Thus we find ourselves here. Wildly complex new tax systems, HMRC and Inland Revenue banged together whatever, massive staff cuts imposed irrespective, huge new IT systems dropped down from on high at the same time, crackpot new "lean" car factory working methods dreamed up by consultants.

Nobody it seems had the motivation or nerve to point out it couldn't all be done without huge risk. And if they did, they presumably didn't last long.

This catastrophe is the inevitable result of Brown's top-down blunderbuss management style. Surrounded by yes-men, he pushed ahead whatever the consequences.

And now we're paying the price.

PS Later today, we'll do another blog on the Gershon staff cuts. Because this isn't the only case where they've been implicated in masssive and expensive problems.

Conservatives announce supply side reform in education

The Conservatives have today set out plans for a supply side "revolution" in education. Below are the proposals:

"Provide over 220,000 new school places. That would meet the demand from every parent who lost their appeal for their first choice school in our most deprived boroughs.

"Allow educational charities, philanthropists, livery companies, existing school federations, not for profit trusts, co operatives and groups of parents to set up new schools in the state sector and access equivalent public funding to existing state schools.

"Ensure funding for deprivation goes direct to the pupils most in need rather than being diverted by bureaucracies.

"Divert more resources to pupils who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, ensuring they get the earliest possible opportunity to choose the best schools and enjoy the best teaching.

"Make it easier to establish the extended schooling (from summer schools through Saturday schooling to homework clubs and breakfast clubs) which drives up achievement, especially among the poorest.

"Remove those obstacles in terms of centralised bureaucracy, local authority restrictions and planning rules – which prevent new schools being established.

"Allow smaller schools and more intimate learning environments to be established to respond to parental demands."

Interesting ideas, particulaly the one to "allow educational charities, philanthropists, livery companies, existing school federations, not for profit trusts, co operatives and groups of parents to set up new schools in the state sector and access equivalent public funding to existing state schools."

That is exactly what is needed. It has worked spectacularly in Sweden and it will work in Britain. Existing schools, in competition with the new schools for the first time, will be forced to raise standards. Parents in the most deprived areas of Britain, for the first time, will have a real chance to send their children to a better school.

There were also a number of more immediate proposals to improve standards, most of which are unlikely to make much difference as they are of the same centralised mindset that has failed so spectacularly in the past. But no matter, the best way to drive up standards in existing schools is the threat of competition, which will trump other measures.

So all in all, a good move. Fraser Nelson also has some interesting comments on Coffee House.

The HMRC loses data on 25 million child benefit recipients

It is hard to really get your head around just how complete the failure at the HMRC today is in losing the unencrypted records of 25 million recipients of child benefit.  These records include names, addresses, national insurance data and even bank account details.  There are a few things to remember about this:

1. It is a collosal failure of management for supposedly junior staff to be able to so easily extract such large quantities of highly sensitive data.  Even worse that any of the HMRC's staff were not aware of how vitally important it is to treat data on the public with real care.
2. Measures being taken by the banks to ensure that accounts are not exposed to fraud by this measure should prevent money being stolen but won't prevent the data being used for mass identity-theft if it does fall into the hands of criminals.
3. HMRC has been put under huge institutional strain by the need to implement an incredibly complex tax credits system.  This new crisis could easily be the unintended consequence of failures in other Government policies implemented by the HMRC.
4. This will further damage trust in the Government's ability to protect public data.  This should mark the end of any attempts to collect vast amounts of new data.  Plans for identity cards should be abandoned.
5. It will also further weaken people's faith in interacting with major institutions electronically.  More might feel the need to, for example, suffer the inconvenience associated with not having a bank account.  If people are scared into keeping their money in cash instead of in a bank this could even create medium term problems for the banking sector.
6. While banks will cover any money taken in fraud thanks to this incident, ordinary bank-customers will not lose out.  However, if that happens banks might well have good cause to pursue the government - whose incompetence created this problem - for compensation.  If this lost data were to be used to take money from bank accounts fraudulently the taxpayer could wind up paying the bill.

Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“It's appalling that Revenue and Customs were so careless with the personal details entrusted to them. Taxpayers should have the right to be confident that their personal details are safe and secure, especially given the growing problem of identity theft. The incompetent way in which data is handled by HMRC will horrify everyone and 25 million individuals, families and businesses have had their trust betrayed. Secretaries of State are responsible for all the actions of their Department, so Alistair Darling should be seriously considering his position tonight.”

Police complaints hit 17-year high

Yesterday the Telegraph reported that police complaints are at record highs.  That isn't much of a surprise and the police themselves saw it coming.  In May the Police Federation warned that targets and other symptoms of political management were turning people off the police force:

"A spokesman for the federation said such cases were a result of officers being "so busy chasing targets and securing ticks in boxes".

As a result, he said, officers were distancing themselves from "middle England"."

Unfortunately, the complaints aren't likely to achieve much.  When the police are forced to choose between satisfying members of the public who can, at best, force an investigation and politicians who have all the real power and want to see targets met the public's priorities go out of the window.

Complaints might even make things worst.  A famous study by Canice Prendergast, reprised here (PDF) for HM Treasury, found that a strengthened complaints system for the Los Angeles police service led to a collapse in their productivity with arrest rates for serious crime and narcotics offences falling and more gang-homicides.  Officers had little incentive to actively pursue crime and confront criminals.  They sat on their hands.

No complaints system can create proper incentives for the police to serve the public instead of politicians.  Only making the police accountable to ordinary people instead of politicians can do that.

Voting With Their Wallets

Booming independent schools

You see it's like this- when customers call the shots, suppliers have to provide what they want.

Hence the current moves by independent schools to abandon the government's increasingly whacky National Curriculum and implement one based on what parents want. For primary level pupils this would include more emphasis on spelling, multiplication tables and key historical dates, at the expense of the Commissars' preference for parenting skills, obesity, citizenship and homophobia.

Unlike Schools Commissar Balls, these people know what the customers want, and are in the business of providing it. So it's worth listening to what they say.

Michael Spinney, chairman of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, says:

“The national curriculum is in a number of respects being overwhelmed by a social agenda that has accompanied it. That social agenda is not something that we want to get sucked into.

Increasingly, we are living in an era where teaching and learning are sacrificed in favour of fashionable causes, often with disastrous effects upon standards of learning... The Government is increasingly putting a social agenda into the equation. It has an issue about multicultural society and subjects such as slavery. What we’re interested in is knowledge, rigour and fundamental skills."

Bernard Trafford, chairman of the Head Masters Conference , says:

“We should use our independence. The curriculum has lessons in citizenship, sex education. Health and safety will be next. It’s just crazy, schools are being looked upon to solve society’s ills. If they spent all their time on that then there would be complaints that we weren’t educating children properly.”

And Pat Langham, president of the Girls' Schools Association, says:

“Some national curriculum initiatives have been like a roller-coaster and state schools are trapped in the cars, hurtling towards measurement. We aren’t.”

Pat's hit the nail on the head. Whereas many state school heads also tear their hair out over the antics of the Commissars (see many previous blogs on the job from hell), they are powerless. Their money all comes from the Commissars, so they have to obey, however mad the orders (which is why so many leave, and state schools have a head teacher recruitment crisis).

In the independent schools sector, the money comes direct from customers. The Commissars find it much harder to trap anyone in their hurtling cars.

So how do we know the independent schools are actually providing what the customers want?

Ah, the genius of markets. We know for sure independent schools are doing the biz because parents are prepared to pay for it.

In fact, so great is the current demand for independent education, the price has rocketed by 40% in the last five years, and market share has increased to 7.3% of 11-15 year olds. In my own county of Surrey it's now 20% (see Telegraph graphic above).

Polls have long shown that most people would buy private schooling if they could afford it, and the Commissars routinely do so for their own children.

It's only the 93% of parents who can't afford to pay twice who are denied the opportunity to vote with their wallets. Their only recourse is tweedledum or tweedledee at the ballot box. Which gives the Commissars a free hand to try whatever whacky idea happens to pop into their tiny Chinese minds, as a previous Commissar used to say.

Bring on those vouchers.

PS Since George Osborne's great tax-cutting triumph, there are some hints that the Conservatives are edging back towards real parent empowerment. Pupil Passports are still a distant dream, but allowing parents to take over failing schools is an interesting step in the right direction.

Government policy fails to establish sustainable employment

A recent National Audit Office report into sustainable employment reveals the inadequacy of the government’s efforts to keep people off welfare. A key finding is that the the proportion of people moving repeatedly between work and the dole queue has barely changed since the early 1980’s.

More than a quarter of the people who leave benefits and enter work return to Job Seekers Allowance within thirteen weeks. Almost half are back on benefits within six months. The NAO estimates that taxpayers could save £520million a year if the time repeat claimants spent on benefit was halved.

The NAO report clearly shows the failure of the Government’s efforts to improve job retention, particularly among those in low paid jobs. Despite the complex myriad of agencies and policies (such as tax credits and the minimum wage) created to increase the incentives to stay in work, the numbers returning to benefit are a damning indictment on government strategy. Not to mention an expensive one.

Private sector role in pioneering healthcare scheme to be slashed

From the Financial Times:

"A pioneering £700m-a-year government scheme to buy surgical treatment centres and diagnostic services from the private sector is set to be more than halved by ministers.

The decision – expected later this week – will not only mark another retreat from the use of the private sector in healthcare but will also see the health department forced to pay out millions of pounds in compensation."

The waste, £20 million pounds in compensation to private sector firms to cover the cost of bidding for contracts now cancelled, is a frustrating result of an insincere flirtation with involving the private sector in healthcare.  More importantly a glimmer of hope that we might see providers from outside the lumbering NHS bureaucracy involved in providing healthcare is now pretty much gone.  With the existing contracts more than halved - from £700 million a year to as little as £200 million - there is little prospect of this small step away from a politician and bureaucrat-led NHS being turned into important healthcare reform.

Government reforms failing to deliver improvements in education?

The Telegraph reports a study by researchers at Lancaster University that claims to show that the £3 billion spent on education reforms such as specialist schools has been wasted.

"By comparing results between schools, the researchers found the Excellence in Cities and specialist schools programmes boosted grades over the period by just two percentage points each."

It seems quite likely that the timid reforms of recent years, which haven't really got politicians out of the management of public services, are failing to deliver.  However, examining this indirectly by comparing schools that have, and have not, been part of the Specialist Schools and Excellence in Cities programmes could be misleading.

One of the most interesting results of a study on Swedish school choice commissioned by Reform in 2005 is that not only the new, independent schools showed improved performance.  Faced with tougher competition and true parental choice the existing schools did better as well.  The same thing could be happening here.

Minor, tinkering reforms to services like education can often be expensive stunts.  That certainly appears to be the case with the government's literacy strategy.  However, that is not necessarily proven in the case of the Specialist Schools and the Excellence in Cities programmes by this Lancaster University study.

An Interview with Douglas Carswell MP

Q. If you were in charge of any ministry which one would it be and why?

I would like to be the last Minister for Europe. 

Q. What are the three most successful policies you can think of in the post-war era?

Privatisation and the “right to buy” council homes.  Both pushed economic power away to individual people – and got politicians and Big Government off people’s back.

The third most successful policy is the education voucher.  The tragedy for several generations of British school children is that no one has had the verve or the vision to try it here.  We need to be very careful to introduce it as a decentralising, localist measure – and not as an inadvertent centralising measure.

Q.  What are the three worst policy mistakes you can think of in the post-war era?

1. Joining the European Union.
2. Centralising control over town halls and their finances (rate capping, then debacle leading to the council tax, then nationalising business rates).
3. The 1983 decision not to proceed with the education voucher.

Q.  Who do you think has been Britain’s most successful post-war minister and why?

Margaret Thatcher.  She understood – at a profound level - her Friedman, Hayek, Popper, Smith and others.  She was a rare thing – a politicians with real, not manufactured, beliefs - and with the skill to actually implement this agenda.

Q.  Who do you think has been Britain’s least successful post-war minister and why?

Ted Heath.  He was responsible for two disasters; EU membership and undermining the structure of local government.   

Q.  What do you think of moves by Gordon Brown and David Cameron to bring more outsiders into government?

Why are more unelected and unaccountable technocrats a good thing?  They are not.  If politicians are serious about bringing in outsiders, they should try including the 99% of the people who live in Britain who are excluded from the smug and smarmy Westminster village. 

We need open politics and direct democracy – not a few celebs and technocratic mediocrities posturing with self-regarding politicians.

Q.  If you were Prime Minister who would you bring in from outside parliament to help you and why?

I would bring in the people.  I would have a Citizen’s Right of Initiative so that they, rather than the civil service, decided the legislative agenda.  I would also allow a right of referendum Swiss-style so that if I was daft enough to bring in an unpopular law, the people could strike it down.

Q.  Do you think it is important that ministers have experience in the subject area they are appointed to?

No.   Expertise often prevents someone asking the obvious questions.  Moreover, if by "expertise" you mean someone who has spent their entire life in a particular profession or field, then I would say that they should be the last person to make the key decisions in that sector.   For example, just look at how the so called "experts" at the Foreign Office have signed us up to all sorts of awful obligations.  They may be urbane experts, but they are awful at determining the national interest.    

Q.  What lessons do you think Britain can learn from other countries about the structure of government?

Decentralisation and small government is the way to success.  China and India have decentralised economic (if not yet political) decision-making to the local level – and are booming as a result.  America has done so since 1766.  Europe has since the 1950’s moved in precisely the opposite direction and centralised unaccountable power.  It is stagnating. 

It is a sobering thought that in China today a university for 40,000 students can be built by local government without any input from Bejing.  In the UK such an innovation would be unthinkable.  We are so centralised a country that the central State dictates the minutiae of higher education.  It is not only higher education that is decentralised in China.  So is its legal system, provincial tax policy and so on.   

The UK needs to reduce the size of the State by decentralising the functions of the State.         

Q.  What lessons do you think Britain can learn from other countries about how to deliver public services?

In the US, they elect their police chiefs, and have real innovation in fighting crime.  We have Sir Ian Blair.

In the US, local States run education, and they have voucher schemes.  We have the highest percentage of young people in neither education, employment or training. 

In the US, they have localised welfare and the Wisconsin and Florida approach.  We have so many millions on long-term benefits.      

Localism works. 

Q.  If you were setting up a system of government from scratch would you choose the British model or that of another country?

The US.  The tragedy of 1766 was that the Americans were really fighting for our English liberties.  The US Constitutional settlement is not perfect, but it is better at reigning back Big Government than our failing system.  We used to be a Parliamentary democracy.  We have become an unelected technocracy.

Q.  Do you think Britain can realistically move towards such a system?

Yes.  The impact of the internet will be massive.  It will take time to be felt, but like the advent of the printing press, it will lead to radical political change.  Watch this space.

Army helicopters falling to pieces

The helicopter force of Apache gunships and Chinook transports that the British Army relies upon for support and mobility is apparently falling to pieces.  Half of the Apache gunships were grounded over summer and one third of the Chinooks withdrawn from service as not "fit for purpose".

These can join the long list of failures to properly equip the armed forces serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Nimrods that crash killing their crew, Land Rovers that do not offer proper protection against roadside bombs and malfunctioning radios.  Defence procurement requires careful management to ensure costs are controlled, quality equipment is delivered and the projects do not take too long.  British defence procurement produces equipment with a decidedly mixed record, that comes in way over budget and is often years late.  Despite all this the civil servant in charge, Sir Peter Spencer, was paid £176,800 last year.  The taxpayer is being made to reward failure.

Being globally aware is bad for your health, wealth and freedom

Another day, another depressing headline.  Yet another international league that Britain is at the bottom of:

"UK children aged 11 to 16 have the lowest international awareness among their age group in 10 countries, a British Council survey says."

The British Council receives £195,352,000 per year in government funding supposedly needed to "build mutually beneficial relationships between people in the UK and other countries and to increase appreciation of the UK’s creative ideas and achievements."

In order to do this they've come up with a study that shows us falling behind in our awareness of the world around us:

"British Council chief executive Martin Davidson said: "Our school children cannot afford to fall behind the rest of the world.

"For the UK to compete in a global economy, it is vital that we encourage our young people to have an interest in and engagement with the world around them."

Doees the evidence he has produced at all back that statement up?

Take a quick look at the ranking they've produced:

1. Nigeria 5.15
2. India 4.86
3. Brazil 4.53
4. Saudi Arabia 3.74
5. Spain 3.29
6. Germany 3.24
7. China 2.97
8. Czech Republic 2.51
9. USA 2.22
10. UK 2.19

To compete we apparently need to become more like Nigeria or India and less like the USA, Germany or China.  Let's compare the British Council's index to a few key development indicators (click to expand any of these graphs, data is from the Economist World in Figures 2005):

So, more globally aware countries are poorer.

They're also less, economically, free.  The economic freedom index gives more free economies a lower score.

Finally, they perform worse on the broad measure of the Human Development Index.

How can this be?  Well, one of the questions asked gives a flavour of what the study was really getting at:

"Asked whether they saw themselves as citizens of the world or their own country, most saw themselves as global citizens - except in the UK, USA and the Czech Republic."

A genuine measure of international awareness would include measures like number of foreign holidays or ask questions about foreign customs, faiths and politics.  On that measure the UK might do a lot better.  However, this study isn't looking for that.  The closest it comes is a question about whether people think they keep themselves aware of current events.  Instead, it is looking for countries whose people do not consider themselves a distinct nation - it is looking for transnationalism.

Successful nations are built on a strong sense of national identity among their people.  Thankfully - and despite the efforts of people like the British Council - we still have that in the UK.  That national identity encourages co-operation, compromise and trust .  Those describing themselves as international citizens probably don't feel any more attached to the people of the world than we do.  They just don't feel a special attachment to each other.  In Nigeria inter-ethnic wars show the horrible extremes such a process can reach when an absent national identity is replaced by other group loyalities such as tribe and religion.

Let's hope that unnaccountable quangocrats like those at the British Council don't succeed in convincing Britons that patriotism is some kind of sin.

Educational co-operatives

The idea of allowing communities to form co-operative schools, proposed by the Conservatives yesterday in Manchester, has a lot to recommend it.  It would get politicians out of the management of education in many areas if the idea was taken-up on the same scale as in Sweden and Spain.  Those schools priorities could be better aligned to the interests of parents and children instead of the vague understanding of a civil servant or Minister in Whitehall trying to make sense of statistics and targets.

We have to hope, though, that when the details of this plan are released the Conservatives will not insist that every new school outside of the state bureaucracy has to be a co-operative.  Just as the operational management of education should not be a concern for politicians neither should their organisational structure.  A co-operative is not necessarily more responsive to the needs of the community and more efficient in providing a quality education than a charitable trust or a profit making company.

While politicians have a role in funding education and setting a policy framework, how many years are compulsory and what constitutes an education, they shouldn't be defining the organisational structure of education.  That kind of management decision belongs with professionals.

The failure of regeneration schemes

Policy Exchange have released a report (PDF) examing the effectiveness of expensive regeneration schemes designed to create a renaissance in poor inner cities.  Their research team's findings offer a fascinating insight into how the divide between successful suburb and poor inner city has actually grown over time:

"On GVA, the gap between ‘urban policy towns’ and the national average has widened from them being 9% behind in 1997 to 13% behind in 2004 (the latest year for which figures are calculable). The successful towns sample set, conversely, increased their lead over the national average.

On personal income, the ‘urban policy towns’ began 17% behind the UK average in 1997 and ended 18% behind in 2005. Again, successful towns which do not receive substantial urban regeneration funding improved on their position of a decade ago.   

Nor has there been any improvement in unemployment levels in our urban policy sample since 1997, relative either to the national average or to the sample of successful towns. Unemployment is still a stubborn 50% higher in ‘urban policy towns’ than it is nationally or in successful towns suggesting that Britain does not have an economy-wide unemployment problem, but rather quite marked pockets of unemployment in some big cities."

At £30 billion we have spent a lot of money on these schemes for them to be failing so thoroughly.  These regions have still not recovered from the decline of the old staple industries at the start of the twentieth century and outside money appears unable to help.  The truth is that rather than big new industrial projects what these regions really need is the freedom for new, private-sector, industries to develop.  An urban renaissance will have to be driven by the entrepreneurial citizens of that town itself.

David B Smith set out how big government gets in the way of such renewal earlier this year in the Economic Research Council's Britain and Overseas (PDF).  Unfortunately, national government - which sets a minimum wage too high for these areas and offers salaries that, in these areas, can outcompete the private sector - crowds out the private enterprise.  Each city's entrepreneurial talent is devoted to securing a better political deal rather than creating new enterprises and employment.

Keeping children after school

The Telegraph reports new government plans for slow readers to stay behind after school for "back-to-basics lessons in how to recognise words and extra time practising silent reading to bring them up to scratch".

It is tempting to argue for or against this as a policy in isolation.  Will the pupils take advantage of the extra time?  Do schools have the resources?  How much improvement in reading ability will it lead to?  Are there more efficient ways of improving reading standards?

However, that really misses the point.  What our education system really needs is for politicians to stop making this kind of decision.  When the question of whether to teach students literacy for an extra hour after school has nothing to do with government advisors, Education Secretaries or - particularly - Prime Ministers our education system might finally start to shine.  Getting politicians out of the management  of education will lead to better decision making for a host of reasons, here are two particularly relevant to this case:

1)  It might well be that different schools should be taking very different decisions.  Different schools, with different pupils, resources and ideas might want to try very different strategies for improving the literacy of slow readers.  There is almost certainly not one 'correct' education policy for the entire country.

2)  The best way to see if this and many other measures designed to improve educational standards work is through real experimentation.  Not the special circumstances of a pilot but different schools trying new things and offering a model to others.

The Adam Smith Institute on welfare reform

The Adam Smith Institute have published an excellent study (PDF) on the vitally important subject of welfare reform.  It shows how the US has managed to fight poverty by getting people into work. In stark contrast, Britain's over-complicated welfare system masks incentives and tries to spend the poor out of poverty.

The success in the United States is hard to overstate, the ASI study said:

"America’s reforms emphasised work, long–term support and parenting responsibility. The process began with waivers allowing for individual states to opt to try their own welfare programs. These were broadly successful and paved the way for the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996. This changed the face of American welfare provision: between 1994 and 2000, the number of people receiving welfare dropped by half dropped from 5.5 percent of the population to just 2.1 percent."

With dependency blighting so many communities and so expensive for the taxpayer welfare reform needs to be made a top priority.

State education failure: reading

A report published by the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest inquiry into primary education for decades, has found that the National Literacy Strategy has had almost no impact on children's reading skills. The research was carried out by academics at the universities of Bristol and Durham and the National Foundation for Educational Research. The Times continues:

"The Durham University study, led by Peter Tymms, concluded that the National Literacy Strategy, which includes the “literacy hour” daily English lesson, had made a “barely noticeable” impression on reading standards, which had barely improved since the 1950s.

"The report said: “£500 million was spent on the National Literacy Strategy with almost no impact on reading levels.” The apparently dramatic rise in primary school test results “exaggerated the changes in pupils’ attainment levels and were seriously misleading”.

"Professor Tymms has in the past criticised ministers for suggesting that tests do not reflect the true nature of rising standards. But the independent statistics watchdog has backed his conclusions.

"Wynne Harlen from the University of Bristol gave warning in his report that primary school national tests were too narrow. “There is considerable research evidence that high- stakes tests put teachers under pressure to increase scores, which they do by teaching to the tests, giving multiple practice tests and coaching pupils in how to answer questions,” he said. “There is firm evidence that this results in considerable stress for pupils.”

"The report calculated that pupils spend about nine school days in Year 5 and 13 school days in Year 6 practising for and taking tests. “This is time that teachers and pupils could use in other ways,” it said."

What an indictment of government educational policies. But unfortunately, reports such as this will continue to be written no matter how much money is spent on education so long as politicians continue to manage the system. The sooner they realise that they have neither the management experience nor the in-depth knowledge to manage state education, the better for all.

Meanwhile, the madness and hypocrisy continues. Philip Hunter, the Chief Schools Adjudicator, has backed lotteries to allocate places in over-subscribed schools. This move would strip further powers from parents to help their children to get a good education, something any caring family strives for. Does he not realise that the only reason that good state schools are over-subscribed is that there are not enough of them? And the reason there are not enough of them is that good schools are prevented from expanding and new schools are prevented from opening.

At the same time we read of the £20 million a year that taxpayers have to fork out to send the children of Foreign Office diplimats to top private boarding schools, including Eton and Winchester. An admission, if ever there was, that state education is failing.

Blaming the cancer victim

An excellent blog over at An Englishman's Castle (via Devils Kitchen) explains that the report that too much red meat is giving us all cancer is massively overblown:

"I have actually downloaded the report , all 537 pages of it. It is a vast data dredge. I have failed to spot any Relative Risks which approach 2 - (an increase of 100%) - In epidemiologic research, [increases in risk of less than 100 percent] are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or the effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident. [Source: National Cancer Institute, Press Release, October 26, 1994.]"

As he correctly argues if you are serious about saving people from cancer you should look to improve Britain's woeful cancer survival rates.  Michael Moore's film 'Sicko' finally opened in the UK recently.  The US system that he berates has the highest survival rate in the world, the NHS he urges us to celebrate has one of the lowest.  Instead of trying to scare people into making changes in their lifestyle those interested in improving Britain's health should look to our health service.  With political management producing one of the worst healthcare systems in the developed world the first place to look for improvements in the nation's health isn't the bacon sarnie.