The TaxPayers' Alliance - Better Government

More trouble for NHS IT Programme

The recent termination of Fijutsu's involvement in the NHS's National Programme for IT (NPfIT) will mean yet more delays to this most ill-advised and expensive of government IT projects. Now almost three years behind schedule, and over £ 10 billion pounds over budget, delivery of the NPfIT is now likely to be pushed back further, and despite safeguards, costs are likely to rise too.

Fijutsu’s departure, following unsuccessful negotiations to resolve differences with the NHS over contractual obligations, provides further illustration - if any were needed - of the inevitable problems associated with government IT procurement. Following the disasters at the Passport agency, Magistrates courts, Rural Payments Agency and the Child Benefits agency, one would think that this government would have learnt some important lessons about the limits and complexity of massive IT programs. Some argue that lessons have been learnt from the past; the cost of Fijutsu’s departure should fall largely on the Japanese company and the decision to split the project over regions means that the project will not come to a sudden halt. But it's unlikely that even these safeguards will deliver the protection to the taxpayer that they promised, and they don't even begin to address the more fundamental problems
involved.

NPfIT is a perfect case study of how not to order IT; too many interests and people involved, leading to contradictory specifications. Suppliers complained that the governments lack of clarity about what it wanted, and unrealistic expectations about what can be delivered, led to inevitable disaster. This was matched by a notable lack of consultation with those who are set to use the system most, GP's and
front-line hospital staff. And too compound the situation further, the program is overseen by a centralizing civil service which posses little or no experience in delivering complex IT systems, and so is easily mislead by private partners and contractors. 

It is the very volatility of politics that is perhaps most damaging to government IT projects though. Government priorities change over the duration of an IT project and the project is expected to change with them. No viable product ever emerged from such an environment. If for no reason other than this, the ID card project should be quickly abandoned. If not, it could take NPfIT's place, maybe even the Dome's, as Labour's ultimate 'big-government' folly. 

Civitas report on the distortions of political targets for the police

This study by Civitas looks excellent:

"The police, in their turn complain of central control and ill thought out government policies. All interviews were characterised by a high level of bitterness and frustration. Bonuses are paid to senior officers based on how they comply with targets. As in the NHS bad targets are coercing otherwise ethical public servants into unethical behaviour. Serious crime is ignored and minor crime elevated to the serious in order to satisfy the measurement regime. One office said: 'We are bringing more and more people to justice - but they are the wrong people.' Targets and increased central control are turning what should be an independent police force into what another officer described as, 'an extension of the government.' At the same time too much paper work sees officers spend only 14% of their time on patrol. Police numbers may be historically high but they are low compared to other countries while the ratio of crimes to officers is now overwhelming.

Targets miss the point of what the public wants. The Home Office judges each police force by how many crimes they detect and clear up. The public wants something different. They do not want the crimes happening in the first place. The absence of crime and disorder is not a target. As one constable wrote, 'I remember when it was a matter of pride to come back after a night shift to find no crimes had happened. Now all we are asked is why no one was locked up.'

[...]

Unlike many other police forces, British police were not intended to be servants of the state but of the communities they serve. Their powers are personal, used at their own discretion and derived from the crown. This essential feature of British policing - policing by consent - is now in jeopardy."

Central targets are a dismally poor substitute for accountability to local communities.  The police are working for the politicians in Whitehall, rather than for ordinary people.  The politicians can't see the day-to-day impact of crime across the country, all they can see are clumsy and often misleading statistics.  Police officers chasing 'sanction detections' can easily boost their numbers by chasing trivial crimes at the expense of serious offences and, with a bonus of £10-15,000 at stake, they have a powerful incentive to do so.

The police need to be made accountable to the communities they serve and freed from political management.

Opening up the NHS?

"Death rates of patients undergoing major surgery at NHS hospitals are to be published on the internet.

[...]

Death rates are expected to be at a disproportionately high level in hospitals where fewer operations are performed and surgeons have less opportunity to improve.

The government believes publishing the figures will mean badly performing trusts will have to improve standards or halt areas of surgery where they are lagging behind."

This, from a report in the Telegraph, is great news.  If patients can make an informed choice then that should put pressure on the acute trusts to up their standards.  In fact, this is long overdue:

An inquiry into the deaths of children at Bristol Royal Infirmary a decade ago showed how poor practice persisted because mortality rates were not disclosed.

The effect will be limited though as - within the NHS - patients only have a limited amount of choice.  While the trusts could compete with each other to a certain extent they are protected from new entrants to the market, a restriction that will severely limit the ability of patients to take advantage of this new information.

Beyond that, the structure of the NHS will restrict the ability of the trusts to respond to quasi-market pressures introduced by this new source of information.  The NHS is essentially a quango of quangos.  It is made up of a combination of the primary and acute trusts, strategic health authorities and a maze of central quangos.  In our report, Wasting Lives: a statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981 (PDF), we set out how the central quangos control many of the most important NHS decisions:

"The NHS has a large number of local bodies, the Primary Care Trusts, NHS Trusts and Regional Strategic Health Authorities.  However, these are all both legally non-departmental bodies answering to the Department of Health and effectively part of one organisation.  Most have only a very limited ability to act independently:

• Their decisions over which drugs to buy are expected to conform to guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
• IT expenditure is mostly handled by Connecting for Health which runs the National Programme for IT , the largest single information technology project in the world.
• Staff pay, the largest item of expenditure,  is determined nationally by the NHS Pay Review Body.
• Amounts of funding are also set nationally according to a weighted capitation formula.   This became very controversial in 2006 when the Government were accused of manipulating the funding decision for political advantage."

This information will be a valuable resource for NHS patients.  It would be so much more valuable if our healthcare system were liberalised more broadly.

The Home Office takes more control of police forces

From the Mail on Sunday:

"A policing green paper out next month will propose centralising control over all 43 police forces.

But concerns were raised that ministers may stuff the top ranks with chief constables who share their political agenda, and local people will have no say in who runs their police force."

This measure would mean that the police would, even more than before, work for the politicians and not the people.  Police forces would be pressured into spending even more time chasing the nonsensical targets that are the only way politicians can understand the performance of police forces across the country and there would be less genuine accountability.

A £23,000 tax-free grant for MPs

The Times reports that MPs are asking for a £23,000 grant so that they do not have to submit expenses claims and receipts, and can avoid the details becoming public:

"Days after the High Court ordered the publication of every receipt submitted by MPs, a committee reviewing parliamentary expenses is proposing that they should be able to claim the full £23,000 second-home allowance automatically as an annual “block grant”.

This would end the principle whereby MPs are compensated only for “costs incurred” and give nearly 250 MPs who claim less than £23,000 a substantial tax-free income boost."

Normally this kind of thing would not be allowed by HMRC.  It is an increase in pay by any other name and would therefore be taxed.  Will the authorities allow there to be one rule for the politicians, another for the rest of us?  Or will taxpayers be asked to cover the new grant and the tax on it?

The efficiency drive that cost £80 million

"LONDON (Reuters) - Blunders in implementing a plan to make big efficiency savings at the Department of Transport through a centralised services system could end up costing it 81 million pounds instead, a report said on Friday.

The department had envisaged saving 57 million pounds by amalgamating support services such as human resources and payroll for bodies such as the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and Driving Standards Agency.

But its plans were over-optimistic, the department could not agree a common set of business practices and the IT system was not properly tested, meaning an "unstable system" was introduced, said the report by financial watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO).

"This project has been a classic case of act in haste, repent at leisure," said Edward Leigh, chairman of parliament's Public Accounts Committee to which the NAO reports."

Just another day in our politician-managed public services.  There are similarly expensive and delayed IT systems in most of the government departments.  A year ago we identified lots of them in our report (PDF) on big government projects.  What a farce.

(story from Reuters)

Boris Johnson's new right-hand man

Tim Parker, a private equity executive who has run the AA, Boots and Kwik-Fit, has been talking about his new job overseeing large parts of the Mayor of London's empire, on a salary of £1:

"Mr Parker, who will begin work on June 7, said: "Throughout my business career I have been accountable to exacting shareholders. In my new role, my shareholders will be the taxpayers of London."

That's exactly the right attitude - focussed on value for taxpayers.  Hopefully he will realise that the best way to make that happen is to return as much control over London's public services as possible back to Londoners.

Via, CentreRight.Com

The logic of collective action taken to a bizarre extreme

Recently I wrote, for ConservativeHome's Platform, about Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.  That landmark political text set out how minorities could impose their will on a majority in a democracy.  People have an incentive to free ride on the political efforts of others and minorities find it easier to organise and motivate their members.  This is one important reason why the work of the TaxPayers' Alliance is so vital.  It also explains why some truly ludicrous trade deals can get through - the small number of people in industries that benefit from the tariff can organise while the broad swathes of society who benefit will struggle to.

Still, this case from the Aplia blog, via Marginal Revolution, is exceptional:

"Advocates of trade restrictions often argue that protection will save jobs. Since we can observe price and cost increases associated with trade restrictions, we can estimate how much it costs to save each job in a protected industry. According to the NPR story, there are roughly 30,000 dry cleaners in the U.S., and on average, each pays an additional $4,000 per year due to the hanger tariff. This indicates an average annual cost of 30,000 firms x $4,000 per firm = $120 million. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission's report, U.S. employment in wire hanger manufacturing was 564 workers in 2004 and fell to 236 workers by 2006. Let's assume that employment in this sector would have fallen to zero in the absence of the tariff, and that with the tariff, employment will recover to 2004 levels. In other words, assume the tariff "saves" 564 jobs. Dividing the cost of the tariff to U.S. dry cleaners ($120 million year) by the number of jobs saved (564 jobs) indicates that each job saved costs about $212,765 per year. Keep in mind that the typical full-time worker in this sector earns about $30,000 per year. Even if we assume that industry employment doubles, the cost of the tariff is still roughly $120,000 per job."

$4,000 per dry cleaner is well above the £100 per household that I figured it would take to get people to sit up and take notice of a decision that hurt their economic position.  I can see a few possible explanations for why it happened:

1)  The dry cleaners pass the cost on to their customers - that means the $4,000 is spread across hundreds of customers few of whom even know they're paying let alone care enough to change their vote.

2)  Enough dry cleaners benefit from this measure which prevents new entrants to the market and puts some existing firms out of business - regulatory capture.

3)  This measure won't last and is just an exceptional moment of madness.

Regardless, this highlights how divorced from basic common sense political decisions can become.  It isn't just in America.  European trade policy is full of similar lunacies, the Common Agricultural Policy is the biggest example, and there is little accountability for most public spending.  We need to decentralise and hand decisions back to individuals so that powerful special interests cannot take advantage of us.

The Minister's off to the football

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is an almost unbelievably large and complex organisation.  It is has a budget of £6.8 billion, 21,380 staff and is responsible for 63 quangos.  Its head has only been in position since January so, one presumes, he is still attempting the near insane task of trying to get some kind of control over the sprawling organisation.

Blogger Croydonian alerts us to the fact that yesterday the Secretary of State, Andy Burnham, had better things to do.  He was 'representing' the Government in Moscow at the Champions League final.  He wasn't alone; Gerry Sutcliffe - Minister for Sport and Tourism - also made the trip.  Why does the Government need to be represented at the match?  How does that task take two Ministers?

We'll see the same thing happen, on a far greater scale, this Summer at the Beijing Olympics where 50 ministers and officials are off to the Games as part of their 'work'.  Some kind of representation, to see what the Chinese get right and what they get wrong, makes sense to learn lessons for 2012 and the Prime Minister might need to be dispatched for diplomatic reasons.  However, the idea that we need a coterie of senior ministers there on the taxpayer's pound is deeply spurious.

This highlights one reason, among many, that politicians struggle to manage public services.  The priority is showy publicity stunts rather than quiet, effective administration.  If Ministers don't have the time, experience or inclination to impose themselves on their department then there is no effective accountability to the public.  That lack of accountability drives a host of problems throughout the public services which are expensive and blight the lives of those who rely on them.

P.S. The image on the right at the top of this post shows Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, in a playful mood along with Ed Balls.

Energy hot air

Allan Asher, chief executive of Energy Watch, is making some rather dubious statements, reported in the Telegraph, about energy policy:

"Allan Asher, the chief executive of Energywatch, told a parliamentary select committee that competition in the energy market is a "myth", with the six major suppliers operating a "comfortable oligopoly".

[...]

Mr Asher pointed out that the difference between the cheapest and most expensive provider was just a "few pence a week", on the most popular deals."

No one with any training in economics would use relatively similar prices as evidence for collusion.  In a highly competitive market prices are likely to converge as any company that sets prices higher than its rivals will lose customers.  In a perfectly competitive market every supplier would necessarily have to match its competitors prices.

Ofgem, the energy market regulator, has set out in some detail how there is little evidence that the UK energy market lacks competition.  The international price of gas has been rising rapidly and we are heavily exposed as it is gas is most important fuel for our power stations.  Coal prices have also gone up significantly.  The UK has roughly average electricity prices and below average gas prices relative to the rest of Europe.

Politicians find it convenient to focus on the companies as it obscures their role in high energy bills.  Ofgem estimate that green measures such as the ineffective Renewables Obligation constitute up to 8% of the average household electricity bill.

Having politicians involved in the day to day management encourages the idea that if there is a problem there must be something for them to do about it.  High energy prices are a huge people for poor, often elderly people, and the assumption is that the politicians can step in and fix the issue.  They can't but, instead of being honest and telling people that, they grandstand bashing energy companies.

That grandstanding obscures the very real measures they can take if they address the right problem - the contribution that government policies make to high household energy costs.

Big Brother is watching

Government plans for a single, massive database containing records of all public internet activity, e-mails and phone calls, reported in the Times, are alarming.  This system will be massively vulnerable to abuse and would allow Government officials to snoop, far too easily, on ordinary people.  It is also likely to prove exceptionally expensive.

Holding the information in place will always make it easier for a system to be abused.  Anyone looking to gain access to people's very personal phonecalls, e-mail or internet records will only need to gain access to, and then search, one system instead of many.  The increased convenience to the unscrupulous will be of a greater magnitude than the improvement for those meant to be in the system, who don't need to crack into each database.  Government claims that it will be secure are hardly credible after endless lapses in recent years.

Beyond that, government agencies have a track record of creating powers supposedly needed to tackle serious crime and then allowing them to be used to snoop on ordinary people, for extended periods, for inadequate reasons.  Tim Aker, our grassroots co-ordinator, provided one example:

"The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act 2000 was introduced on the grounds that it would boost national security.  Poole Council, being a creative sort, went well over their remit by using the powers to snoop on families.  They monitored this unnamed family for three weeks, with intentions to stop them sending their children to a good school if they lived outside the catchment area."

You should fear the invasions of privacy this measure will facilitate even if you haven't done anything wrong and don't think that the Ed Balls is going to develop a penchant for the goose step any time soon.  After all, it's all in the database:

Finally, this is almost certain to be wildly expensive.  If you look through the projects listed in our report (PDF) on big government project overruns you'll see that many of the most troublesome, like the NHS National Programme for IT, are those that try to stitch together a lot of incompatible IT schemes.  It tends to become a very complex and lengthy process as so many different organisations need to contribute.  The Internet Service Providers and other companies involved have not created these systems with combining them in mind.  There is every possibility this will become a wildly expensive project.

This new database will be vulnerable to abuse, encourage and enable snooping by officials and is quite likely to cost us a fortune.  It should be abandoned. 

Ofsted attacks school standards

The Telegraph reports some harsh words from Ofsted today about standards in British schools:

"In a consultation document published yesterday, Ofsted said: "If education in England is going to compare favourably with the best in the world, standards need to improve. In fact they have stalled."

In our report (PDF, Chapter 1) before this year's budget we documented the extent of the Government's failure to maintain Britain's educational standing compared to the rest of the world, despite massive increases in funding.  This new report from Ofsted has to be the final nail in the coffin of the Government's attempt to convince us that we have got good value for increased education spending.  Politicians have proved unable to deliver an effective education system - parents and teachers should be given a chance with reforms creating real school choice.

Call Ofsted! Fix education!

The Government have failed to improve the education system via the unimaginative means of large dollops of taxpayer cash.  We documented the extent of their failure in the report (PDF, Chapter 1) we launched before this year's budget.  That is bad news for taxpayers, whose money has been wasted, and bad news for the children who will not get the education they deserve.

However, there is one silver lining.  The quality of the debate over where our education system needs to go next has definitely improved.  As Fraser Nelson reported, some of the most imaginative and impressive Tory policies are in the education brief.  Thoughtful left-wingers are promoting the advantages of the freedoms that schools outside the public sector enjoy.  There are two more interesting contributions today.  First, the idea of giving parents the power to call in Ofsted:

"Parents will be able to instigate an Ofsted inspection of their child’s school if they feel that teachers are coasting or failing to stretch pupils to their full potential, under an important reform of the school inspection system."

This would be a welcome move towards using the dispersed knowledge about the state of a school that Whitehall cannot possibly collect but parents can and do possess to better target inspections.  The reaction of teaching unions who want to keep parents in their current, powerless situation, highlights how valuable this could be.  Their protestations that parents might misuse this power ignore that Ofsted obviously won't go charging around the country at every complaint but will, instead, act when a pattern suggests a school is in trouble.

However, it isn't enough.  As we've known for a while, and the Public Administration Select Committee has discovered, the ability to complain and otherwise encourage public bodies to act isn't good enough to allow consumers of public services to drive and control them.  Parents shouldn't just be able to complain to Ofsted but be able to take their children elsewhere if they do not think their children's school is up to scratch.  A study for Reform found that it wasn't just the new schools that led improvements in standards but the existing ones that upped their game in the face of new competition when Swedish school vouchers were introduced.

Second, Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson's call for Britain to adopt a broader curriculum.  He echoes long standing calls to replicate the baccalaureates and diplomas found in other education systems and in many private schools with the adoption of the International Baccalaureate.  This will work best if it is not imposed by politicians but demanded by parents.  As Ferguson says:

"Once the British discovered examinations, they became addicted to them,” he said. It was comical, he added, how much the English exam system resembled the target-driven planned economy of the old Soviet Union in which every last detail was controlled from the centre and based on inadequate information and ideological preoccupations."

Beyond that, as Chris Dillow has noted, a broad education is delivered in private schools in Britain; that suggests such an education is what parents want.  New qualifications often mean dumbing down when they are put in place by politicians, parents want high standards so that their children's hard won qualifications will mean something.

A broad education, perhaps based around a baccalaureate or a diploma, and real parent power in schools are both best developed by taking the schools and qualifications out of the hands of politicians.

Quangos: The Unseen Government of the UK

The most comprehensive picture ever of the UK’s 1,162 Quangos

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) presents the full list of the UK’s vast quango industry, a detailed run-down of the staff and cost of the 1,162 bodies, boards and agencies that make up Britain’s Unseen Government. It is now five years since the Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Administration recommended that the Government publish such a list, a recommendation that the Government has failed to fulfil. In the absence of an official list, the TPA has compiled one instead, providing the public with the most comprehensive information available on the organisations that increasingly spend their money and influence their lives without democratic oversight. The report can be found here (PDF).

Key Findings:

• There are 1,162 quangos in the UK, running at a total cost to the taxpayer of £64 billion, equivalent to £2,550 per household.
• Even under the Cabinet Office’s restrictive definition of quangos, the cost of these bodies has risen 50% in the last ten years.
• UK quangos now employ an army of almost 700,000 bureaucrats.
• Even the Government itself does not know the full extent of the unaccountable quango industry, which range from the massive e.g. Job Centre Plus (Staff: 70,042, Cost: £3.5 billion) and the Courts Service (Staff: 19,986, Cost: £704.8 million); to the bizarre e.g. the British Potato Council (Staff: 49); or the West Northants Development Corporation (Staff: 34, Cost: £15.3 million)
• When the total number of quangos is added to the other government subsidiaries such as local authorities and NHS trusts, the total number of organisations controlled by the UK Government rises to 2,063, costing the taxpayer £257 billion and employing over 5.1 million people.

Ben Farrugia, author of the report and Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“Government in the UK is now so large, diverse and complex that it is impossible for anyone to manage effectively, let alone by Ministers with no prior experience of management and little in-depth understanding of the work carried out by their departments. Government today tries to do too much, and consequently fails; the structure of government needs to change if we hope to see better value and significant improvements in our public services.”

The full report provides a full list of the quangos along with individual data on staff numbers, taxpayer funding and expenditure as well as national totals and can be found here (PDF).

Some esoteric benefits of a parent-controlled education system

Chris Dillow, at his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, sets out why a left-winger such as himself should like the education provided by private schools:

"It's education in the sense of "educere" - drawing out whatever latent talents a student has. If someone doesn't have the aptitude for academe, they are given the chance to excel at something else: the military, or music (Oakham School has a thriving music department) or sport: the school's county-standard facilities has recently helped it produce some fine cricketers.

[...]

1. It's child-centred, in the sense of trying to bring out the best in the student, even if this does not lie in a narrow academic curriculum.

2. It encourages the pursuit of excellence rather than effectiveness, to use MacIntyre's distinction. Classcial music, cricket and the army are no way to make great wealth, but they are practices which encourage accomplishment as a goal in itself. By contrast, the philistinic New Labour conception of "education" as mere preparation for making a living looks no higher than money-grubbing.

3. It entrusts professionals to know best how to teach, rather than strangling them in bureaucracy."

What is crucial to note about the advantages of a private education that Chris describes is that none of them rely on a huge income from fees.  What they rely on instead is freedom from the bureaucratic hierarchy.  That frees professionals and allows for a broader range of priorities in education.

A government official or minister, in Whitehall, will always see a child, to a certain extent, as a statistic and will miss their more esoteric talents.  Parents stand a better chance than any schools policy of identifying and encouraging the talents of their children.

School choice can ensure that all schools, and all children, enjoy some of the important advantages currently only available in private education.

How much should your hospital be paid?

The BBC reports that one of the Government's proposals, in their pre-Queens Speech, is to add a measure of patient satisfaction and healthcare outcomes to the funding formula for hospitals.  The details are being kept from the great unwashed at the moment but, suffice it to say, this is a pretty poor substitute for genuine control of the health service by ordinary people:

"Professor John Appleby, chief economist at the King's Fund health think-tank, said he was sceptical over the merits of changing an "already complicated" system.

He said it would make more sense to get primary care trusts, which are responsible for buying services off hospitals, to use data already available to commission from the best-performers.

And he added: "You will end up putting primary care trusts in a situation where they have a choice of paying to give fewer patients top quality care or more patients average care. It puts them in a difficult position.""

The Government are proposing to complicate an already complicated formula and will have to decide how important health outcomes and patient satisfaction should be relative to the volume of work performed.  A simpler solution would be this: let patients choose which hospital they wish to buy treatment from and hospitals will have to compete to offer the best service at the best price.  Ordinary people are quite capable of deciding which hospitals deserve their money without any complicated formula.

The public sector discovers user involvement

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortnightly collections

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the right primary schools

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

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

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

[...]

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

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