Blog:Waste Not Want Not
From Bolton Interweb
del.icio.usRob Binud, Economic Correspondent, 8th June 2010
So the Government want to get the public involved in identifying where to cut public spending. They could start by setting up a waste hotline and website immediately. Little stuff all adds up and starts to change the culture.
Despite some opposition to the idea of public consultation, described by one MP as the “Axe Factor” it is refreshing to have a government that actually seeks opinions. The next step is one that listens to those opinions and really does something about it. That would be a novelty since as far back as I remember all Governments have claimed to listen to the people then ignored what they were saying. Gordon Brown’s administration was probably the ultimate at this.
Look around you and spot the waste going on. Driving on the M62 past Leeds last week there were horrendous jams as a result of some idiotic programme of replacing the central crash barriers with concrete ones. It would be a great improvement if we could afford it which we can’t, and it didn't cause massive disruption to the economy, which is does. How much money is being lost in the economy due to traffic jams caused by that and similar road “improvement” schemes that appear to have been instigated as part of Labour economic stimulus. Stimulus should not have meant chucking money away on low return projects. My bet is that most of the workforce were imported labour from Eastern Europe. So cease all road improvement projects other than those intended to repair those infernal potholes or in accident hotspots.
I have the greatest sympathy with the childless and those with gender issues but the NHS must focus on ill-health not lifestyle. So an end to all IVF and gender reassignment surgery on the NHS although no problem with providing it at a small profit. Allow, even encourage, people to part-fund their own treatment – the concept that if you pay for a proportion of your treatment you are subsequently denied NHS treatment is madness and puts people off going down a route that would relieve the NHS budgets. Think the unthinkable and charge £5 for a GP visit, and £25 a night for an overnight hospital stay where the patient can afford it. Use the hospital cash to abolish car parking charges.
Stop new public building projects where the new building is replacing something that is functional and in good repair, i.e. it is intended as an improvement rather than a cost-effective maintenance issue.
I know that public libraries provide many people with a kind of community centre as well as their obvious function. But most people buy books these days and the Internet provides most of the research function that library reference sections used to. Music is mostly downloaded and not borrowed from libraries these days. Many libraries started as philanthropic exercises rather than public services and that is what they should revert to. Charitable foundations, book exchanges, and so on, and retain a central library in each borough but the end of public branch libraries must inevitably come soon. Here in the North-West, Internet cafes virtually disappeared about 7 years ago when the libraries started providing free Internet access. The Government managed to destroy hundreds of viable businesses through allowing this unfair competition.
End foreign aid to China and other countries that can afford to help themselves were they not spending the money on nuclear arms and/or space programmes. Sorry India and Pakistan, get your priorities straight. Redistribute it to those countries that are putting the basic needs of their own people first.
The Lib Dems were right to challenge a replacement for Trident. This is not the Cold War and there needs to be radical thinking on our true defence needs. Instead of our troops in Afghanistan, why can we not subsidise forces from poorer countries to police the country? Muslim peacekeepers to keep the peace in a Muslim country.
Immediate movement to a minimum state retirement age for all at 65, including civil servants and police. Then increase it by a year every two years to 70, i.e. over 10 years.
But the Government needs to be extremely careful about focussing cuts on back room activities. It is often the back room in hospitals, police stations, in the MOD, and elsewhere that keeps the front line going. If the front line ends up doing the admin work then services will suffer badly. I want surgeons performing surgery not managing patient facilities and waiting lists.
Be honest, do we need tens of thousands of Arts and Media graduates with no practical skills or knowledge being churned out of our universities every year? Or is that hundreds of thousands? I have no idea, other than massaging youth unemployment, why the last Government sought to put so many young people through 3 expensive years of education they would never make any practical use of. It devalued the possession of a degree, has put hundreds of thousands into debt, and created a world where people believe you need a degree to sell insurance from a call centre, when clearly you need a couple of days on a course learning about telephone technique and the company products. As an employer I would pay zero attention to a degree and would give more respect to kids who get off their backsides and work for a living at 16 or 18. So lets have a long hard look at what we want out of our higher education system and how it contributes to the economy and to society. And match the number of places to the numbers of graduates required. And match the courses to the skills we need - scientists, engineers, linguists, educationalists.
The Government must be very careful about their doctrine that says that the private sector is more efficient in delivering services. I have worked for private companies that are 10 times more bureaucratic than the public sector clients they service. Many many public sector projects are hamstrung in both time and cost by commercial arrangements with private sector suppliers. Using private outsourcing to deliver public services can treble the cost and time to delivery. Yet it does not replace the civil servants who have to remain to manage the contractors. A major fault of previous Tory governments was to devalue public workers by claiming, often incorrectly and at great expense, that the private sector could deliver better value for money. They can’t, because they add a healthy profit margin for, often foreign, shareholders. Take things back in-house where it makes sense to do so. The headcount of government departments and councils has always been seen as a critical measure but reductions usually mean more people being employed on the same work but with a different name on the payslip. It is economic madness and false accounting that successive governments have used for the last 20 years. A civil servant will manage a facilities company who manages a sub-contractor to deliver the service. Why can’t the civil servant directly manage the sub-contractor, cut out the middle man and their cut, or do the actual job themselves? The original concept was that you would give the private company full responsibility but experience over the last 20 years is that those private companies cannot be trusted and have to be managed very tightly. Why is this? Because the private company’s primary objective is to maximise profit for their owners not to deliver public services of the highest quality at the most cost-effective price.
© Evrose, 2010
