Friday, December 07, 2007

Difficult Subjects Can't Be Avoided

Just had this in an email from someone who read my Telegraph piece on the benefits of smaller government

Dear Iain

You might be interested in the experience of my eldest son after he finished at Sheffield University.He had been turned down by the RAF but encouraged to
re-apply the following year. So he was stuck looking for a job in the interim. He got a job at the DWP in Sheffield. It was a temporary contract, but it was understood that it would keep on being renewed indefinitely. And so it proved. The trouble was, there was no work to do. He spent all day doing the crossword and drinking coffee. When he took 2 weeks vacation in the summer he came back to work and the entire backlog of untouched work that he found on his desk was cleared by 11 am the first day. The it was back to the normal slouching around. He WAS finally accepted by the RAF (and he's doing very well thank you) but he tells me that when he left the DWP they tried to talk him into staying, and recruited somebody else to fill his vital function.Now, this state of affairs could just be a one-off couldn't it? I wouldn't bet on it though.

Nor would I. The reaction to the article has been revealing. There are those who say we shouldn't talk about this sort of thing for fear of frightening the electoral horses. And then there are those who say that the electorate fully understands that the state has become too big and needs cutting back, and will react well to those who tell it as it is. I'm with the latter group, as you can see. There's a rich seam of votes to be harvested here.

46 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, I'm not sure how you "harvest" a seam of votes, but I agree that there is a general awareness that the state sector is bloated and tens of thousands of "jobs" need to be culled.

Also on my hobby horse, the public sector must be disenfranchised, as must the welfare sector. These people are voting to give themselves rises, pensions and ever-more benefits from funds created by the private sector. (Anyone who values their vote over an undemanding job - that could go unfilled, as in your example above - and leaves the public sector would be re-enfranchised.)

The socialists have been buying votes out of the public purse by bloating the public sector for the last 10 years.

Liam Murray said...

There's a third group - those who say talk about it but the specifics, not the generalities. That's the only way to mine that 'rich seam of votes' and other than anecdotal stories like this there's been nothing.

Chris Paul said...

Whatever you do don't forget those of us who pointed out that Gordon Brown HAD NOT increased bureacrats by 100s of 000s.

The anecdote does not tally with the general experience of civil servants, most of whom have a very tough workload. That's the trouble with "anecdotal evidence", it quite simply is not evidence at all.

Labour is cutting bureaucrat jobs but generally growing coalface jobs e.g. doctors, nurses, teachers, police etc. These are jobs that your party - in opposition - always calls for more of. Alas, in power they tend to get cut.

Johnny Norfolk said...

I am not at all suprised by that e mail. I am sure if we had a free hand in the civil service we could save millions and probably billions without effecting any reduction in sevice to its customers. labour have just made everything so complicated.Simplify everything.

Anonymous said...

I had a government job which I could do in about a day a week, and I spent most of the rest of the time in enforced idleness. I went round and round the department begging for things to do, but this did not make me popular, so I stopped. Thank God for blogs, wikipedia and crosswords.

I quit as soon as I could, but obviously they hired somebody to replace me. For obvious reasons I'm going to post this anonymously.

Man in a Shed said...

A friend of mine joined the civil service after decades in the engineering industry. He resigned on his first day - as a better job had come along - and he offered to leave that day without them having to pay him.

But that was to much trouble - instead they sent him on the introduction courses for the department he was in as he worked out his months notice.

He says if you want to see where you taxes go join the civil service.

Burning our money indeed .....

David Anthony said...

The problem is that as the public sector increases, so the likliehhod of people voting to reduce it ... reduces.

Speaking from the North-East, where public sector jobs have increased by 47,000 over the last five years and private sector jobs have decreased by 12,000, it's getting ever harder for the Tories to ever gain a foothold.

The public sector [in the North East] saw 47,000 people given jobs, taking the total employed to 338,1000 with 81,000 working in administration and 110,000 in education.

...almost 25% in administration.

The North East economy relies on the public sector for over 60% of its jobs.

Anonymous said...

Is it just me or is that chris paul an idiot?

Anonymous said...

Well, if you look at the finances of the future, as you can see, the economy is about to go into bitter recession due to the credit crunch and the end of the house price party.

We'll be having a few million unemployed people over the next 2 years (the building sector, the housing market sector and the follow on victims, such as retail, service industry etc).

In other words, the problem will solve itself, there won't be any money for anything other than slimmed down government, prisons and the police force, and even that is sorely in question.

Anonymous said...

Let's for a moment pretend that the anecdote is just that, and in reality most bureaucrats are indeed overworked to the point where they have to take six months' leave on grounds of stress.

The question still remains as to what all these busy people are doing and whether it's necessary. Work expands to fill the time available.

A busy person is not always a productive or necessary person - except in their own minds of course.

Johnny Norfolk said...

If Labour keep 'buying' votes by increasing civil servants,evetually it will just implode as their is just not enough money being generated by the workers ( the private sector).
It happened in the 60s when Labour had to beg and borrow money from the IMF as they ( labour) had bankrupted the country with their stupid ideas. The same is happening again. It just a matter of time. Probably 2008. and yes the Chris Paul must be one of them.

Guthrum said...

But which party started all of this centralising of power to Whitehall Iain ? with the resulting growth of the State and its army of 'under paid' bureaucrats.

Twig said...

vncrnqmThe missing factor in government departments is competition. Monopolies are always innefficient. If the combined intelect of your readers can work out a way to introduce competition into government departments we may have a way forward. If the socialists have their way, the public sector will eventually colapse under it's own weight. It happens to all un-reformed socialist societies eventually.

Croydonian said...

"The anecdote does not tally with the general experience of civil servants, most of whom have a very tough workload. That's the trouble with "anecdotal evidence", it quite simply is not evidence at all."

Erm, isn't your attempted rebuttal just another piece of anecdotal evidence?

Brian said...

The attitude of your correspondent's son is most disappointing. When faced with a temporary shortage of work, he should have advised his line manager of the fact and suggested other work that could be done. It is worrying that the RAF now apparently recruits idlers without any self-motivation who require constant supervision and instruction. It is a sad indictment of the value of a modern university degree that the lad lacked the imagination to research and propose improvements or avail himself of the vast DWP intranet reference resources during free time to improve his knowledge of the work of his department.
I speak from 20 years' personal experience of the Civil Service rather than reflex prejudice so I don't expect this to be published.

Anonymous said...

Johnny Norfolk:

"Simplify everything."

The 'everything' was unnecessary.

Anonymous said...

I used to work in a town in the north of England whose second-biggest employer was an agency of Maff/Defra. Some of my drinking chums were hacks from the local paper. We'd arrive in our pub of choice at a normal after-work sort of hour to find it full of pissed civil servants who'd been in there since lunchtime.

However, one of my neighbours also worked there. He often worked late, and must have worked hard, because he was promoted and sent to work at Defra head office in London.

The trouble is similar to that at the BBC (where I work, for those who don't know), and the NHS, and many other large organisations -- predominately but not exclusively public sector, I imagine.

The management who are told to make a certain percentage of cuts always look after themselves. So the most efficient bits are "salami-sliced" to the same degree as those which are least efficient. And nothing much changes, except for the effectiveness of the organisation, which comes down.

I'd love someone to rampage through White City, dishing out P45s to the roomfuls of people who do no discernible work that benefits you the licence payer, so that we didn't have to cut any jobs on Newsnight or Five Live or other really good bits of the Beeb. However, it's illegal. And, on balance, probably rightly so.

Anonymous said...

Small government please. Abolish political parties. English Parliament. Home rule for England.

Anonymous said...

I am lying in my sick bed fuming as I ponder on our bloated public sector, whose workers are paid for making the lives of the rest of us unbearble. When I am ill there is no full pay for me, likewise I have to make my own pension arrangements and have had my retirement age put back by five years just to qualify for my paltry state pension. Would I swop with them? No way I have too much self respect to loaf around at others expense.

The government is obsessed with poking it's nose into every aspect of our lives whilst cheerfully sharing our most private data with all and sundry (health records,tax records). I used to be in favour of identity cards but now I feel they are so untrustworthy that the idea should be scrapped.

I suggest that concerned members of the private sector should volunteer to be secret government shoppers, their job being to pose as tempory workers - THE REPORTS BACK WOULD MAKE VERY INTERESTING READING. If nothing else it would make them realise what it's like when big brother is watching you. Ha!

Unsworth said...

@ Anon 2:37 pm

You are not alone...

Anonymous said...

Are there any Whitehall jobs worth keeping, Iain? Could you give a couple of examples?

dizzy said...

Croydonian said...
[quotes Chris Paul]
Erm, isn't your attempted rebuttal just another piece of anecdotal evidence?


I do believe that Chris Paul just got owned.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure things are getting worse, in that there are more non-jobs, however, this isn't new.

I know someone who did a sandwich course in Computer Science about 30 years ago and his year in industry was spent in an NHS DP department. He sat in a room with ten other programmers and they had no work at all, for the entire year. They all bought a different paper and Xeroxed the crosswords. He had college project and he had to keep it under lock and key, because one of the others would have done it for him.

One day, one of his colleagues stood on his desk and did a circuit of the room, leaping from desk to desk, flapping his arms and shouting "Flying Doctor to Wallumbula base". He told me that the striking thing wasn't that the bloke did this, but that no one took any notice.

If anyone said they were leaving they had a pay rise to the extent that they couldn't easily find a better paid job. All these people were part of rival empires.

When he was leaving, they were taking on an additional permanent programmer. He advised me to steer well away from the public sector, because that sort of job may pay the mortgage, but it does you no good personally or professionally.

You certainly get waste and vanity projects in the private sector, but commercial companies can go bust and shed staff in hard times, or you have a new senior manager come along who livens things up, so there's some kind of discipline imposed.

Anonymous said...

To understand the problem we have to get into the left-wing mindset. Suspend your disbelief, but these people think that working for the state is a more noble thing to do. Why would anyone work for a nasty profit-making company? Your job's at the whim of market forces. There's no more reason for it being there than your boss having decided a few years ago that it'd be a good idea to set up in business. Working for the council, you're working for the collective good in an organisation that'll always be there and is embedded in the country's fabric.

Of course this is a sick and warped mindset, but I really believe your average Guardian reader thinks this way.

Anonymous said...

Chris Paul keeps saying there are more nurses - wish you'd convince our local Trust to stop slashing their numbers then. Ditto midwives - 50% shortage of staff in maternity unit, not anecdote, fact. Trust's admin staff are afraid they won't be paid this month, just like this summer - not anecdote, 1st hand fact. There's been no cutback of managers though, not anecdote, fact.

Tried to contact the Cleansing Dept of our local Council today at 2.55pm - they'd all clocked off, not anecdote, fact confirmed by receptionist.

Anonymous said...

David Anthony, obviously, that was my point which is why I say that people engaged in the public sector need to be disenfranchised. (That includes MPs and the PM, by the way.) As long as people are powerful and numerous enough to bloc-vote themselves a raise, they will do it.

The public sector just shouldn't have its fingers in the public till.

My one exemption to public employees being disenfranchised would be our military and emergency servics (not to include the police).

As with Maggie's ground-shaking privatisation of utilities that everyone had always assumed were run by the government at the will of God, this idea would catch on in other countries.

Anonymous said...

I was told by my father (who should know) that about half the people employed by the LEA we live in don't ever see a child at any time. The half that does includes : teachers, assistants, psychologists, EWO etc. I understand the need for some management but what do the rest do.

Also round here (West Norfolk District Council) at the time of the last poll tax increases they sacked 29 middle managers .... no-one has noticed. Why does a district council need 29 middle managers ?

It's a complete lie that Nursing figures are going up. My missus is one, and they're being run as tight as they dare get away with. Things that are not central (OT, SALT, Community Nurses) have been reduced to virtually nothing.

Anonymous said...

Chris Paul,

"The anecdote does not tally with the general experience of civil servants, most of whom have a very tough workload."

You should aspire to anecdotal evidence.

Anonymous said...

Anon 4.48 pm said ..."It's a complete lie that Nursing figures are going up. My missus is one, and they're being run as tight as they dare get away with."

Anecdotal again.


See Hansard 17 Oct 2007:

Alan Johnson - "The number of nurses working in primary and community care settings has increased by 31,500 or 40 per cent. since 1997."

Anonymous said...

Chris Paul,

"The anecdote does not tally with the general experience of civil servants, most of whom have a very tough workload."

It would be nice if you could support this. An anecdote would be nice.

Anonymous said...

Central Office has clearly done its sums and worked out there is more risk in alienating the public sector voters than there is upside from the aggrieved private sector voters in taking an aggressive stance on all this. Why else is there no plan to cap the runaway train that public sector pension funding has become under this government. It may be good politics for Mr Cameron to keep quiet on this topic, but it's a shame he has felt it necessary to take this road.

Anonymous said...

Sherlock - V good!

Ted - "Central Office has clearly done its sums and worked out there is more risk in alienating the public sector voters ...".

They're already alienated from the Conservatives anyway, because they know their bread is buttered by the socialists. So who cares? Labour is bloating the public sector to the point where bending the knee to them is becoming a habit with the Tories and there is no need. They're not going to vote Tory.

Also, they should be disenfranchised. They already enjoy enough favours and privileges as civil servants. The only weapon the rest of us have against them is the vote.

Anonymous said...

Anon @5.24 - note your Johnston quote refers to primary and community nurses, many of whom will be part-time. Secondary (hospital)nursing numbers are a different matter, and do you know, I'd be more inclined to trust what a real nurse than a member of this current govt.

1st hand experience this year at our local Trust demonstrates some senior nurses working extremely extended shifts to get patients seen to, staff in tears of exhaustion because of lack of back up and other signs of stress.

Brian said...

The sad fact is that both the private and public sectors lack management skills. This partly explains the UK's relatively lower produtivity than our competitors (partly redressed by working longer hours). Please don't confuse management with business which is the creation of profits. Management is the efficient use of scarce resources to achieve a target.
An example of poor management is the use of £40 million Nimrods to provide video to ground forces in Afghanistan when an alternative UAV or light aircraft could do the same for £1 million.
And please don't say that the public sector is easier on failure: Steve McClaren and Adam Applegarth didn't get the humiliating black binbag treatment, did they?.

Anonymous said...

The government has no motivation to improve its "management skills".

But more important, these current tossers sat around in common rooms at university, toking and discussing Marx and Trotsky, gazing admiringly at their Ché posters, and ordering the world.

They never got beyond this point. They went straight into public sector jobs. I can't be bothered to Google their biographies, but I think I am right in saying that Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, Margaret Beckett (who I realise is no longer a cabinet minister), Alastair Darling, Jacqui Smith and all the others have no experience of management in the private sector where the discipline of profit applies.

That is why they have made such a mess of the country for 10 years - inexperience plus the application of Trotsky - and why someone like Gordon Brown made such a fiddly mare's nest of the Exchequer.

All these incompetents in the British cabinet would not last more than six months in lower middle management jobs in the private sector.

Brian said...

Broadly true Verity, but the public sector is not subject to the discipline of profits: instead it is answerable to Parliament through its Ministers and Chief Executives. A strong and efficient Civil Service will be revived by a strong, independently-minded Parliament holding its actions and Government policy to account. A good analogy is the better health and fitness of wild salmon over their farmed cousins.

Anonymous said...

Gallimaufry - Unfortunately, the prospect of a "strong, independent" parliament is chimeric. The Labourites have inflicted heavy damage on Parliament, as they have on the infrastructure of the country at large.

Anonymous said...

Gallimaufry said...

"The sad fact is that both the private and public sectors lack management skills. This partly explains the UK's relatively lower produtivity than our competitors (partly redressed by working longer hours). Please don't confuse management with business which is the creation of profits. Management is the efficient use of scarce resources to achieve a target.

There is of course a difference between management and leadership.

Managers manage according to:

The culture they've been steeped in. A manager from a highly proceduralised, for
mal, slow changing background will usually cause explosions if he's set to manage a team of innovative engineers in an industry where products move from concept to obsolescence in 30 months.

Their given objectives.

These better be specific and directed towards something useful, rather than vagu
e and useless, such as diversity or outreach.

Their implied objectives.

These can be incredibly powerful. If it's obvious that the way to get on is not to worry about running an effective department but to find excuses to grow the budget and size of the department, and spend most of your time ingratiating yourself with more senior people, guess what happens. The consequences for the organisation are bloat and time and energy dissipated in unproductive ways.

The huge payoffs for failure seemed to start in the USA with the cult of the celebrity CEO who were allowed to negotiate these contracts. Rewarding failure will lead to no good end.

I don't know what was at the bottom of using Nimrod in Afghanistan - stuck in the mud thinking, squabbles between the services, someone pushing their project.

In the Falklands war, I recall that problems were caused by ships having long obsolete computers. After the problems, they quickly updated them to cheaper and faster modern ones, but you have to ask why it never dawned on anyone that this should have happened years before, as computer technology had moved on rapidly.

Anonymous said...

My partner works for a large Civil Service department checking data.

There is an office of 30+ checking this data for simple errors.

What happens when they occasionally find an error?

Do they do a simple correction?

Oh no, they have to push the paperwork on to another office of 30+ that ONLY does corrections.

My other half freely admits that this method of operation is common throughout the building.

Anonymous said...

Anon 9.51 pm ... Oh no, they have to push the paperwork on to another office of 30+ that ONLY does corrections.

My company operates the same system for good reason. A relatively low grade (i.e. cheap) employee can be trained to identify mistakes but cannot be relied upon to make the appropriate corrections (I speak from bitter experience). A higher level of expertise is required when judgement needs to be exercised.

Anonymous said...

Save money! Sack a Labour voter. (This includes most people in the public sector.)

Actually, paying people to twiddle their thumbs is not unknown in the private sector. Some executives need a good looking PA for reasons of prestige, even if she is going to spend most of her time reading Cosmopolitan and painting her toenails.

Anonymous said...

"He spent all day doing the crossword and drinking coffee."

I blame his parents - I presume they paid for his education and spoiled him rotten.

Anonymous said...

An ex girlfriend of mine was working at IND as the PA to the director. The most important part of her job consisted of talking about Cliff Richard to the middle aged women in the office. Also, she finished writing a book on IND time.

Anonymous said...

anonymous [6.58 PM] What's IND?

Brian said...

Immigration & Nationality Directorate of the Home Office.

And Cliff Richard was born in India!

Brian said...

Further, the Immigration & Nationality Directorate (IND) has been sellafieled into the Border & Immigration Agency : the nice people who want to chuck Filapina carers out who can't get a £7/hr pay rate.