Christie Eleison IV

Posted on July 2, 2011 by davidsberry

In earlier segments of this huge topic I highlighted approaching problems in public services and suggested how the NHS half of expenditure might start addressing them. But pivotal across all public services are staff, whose engagement and motivation will be crucial. In section 3.10, the Christie Report states: “Our evidence demonstrates the need for public services to become outcome-focussed, integrated and collaborative. They must become transparent, community-driven and  designed around users’ needs. They should focus on prevention and early intervention.” Unfortunately, few staff think in such terms at present.

In fact, many are absorbed by issues like pension reform and typically see their final salary pension as a basic right. This view is shared across sectors and unions, so that an industrial showdown looks likely. What exacerbates this is the union principle of insisting that existing pay and conditions cannot worsen, even if this means colleagues losing jobs because shrinking money can stretch only to fewer numbers.

Heavyweight commentators are condemning this approach as short-sighted. “The unions have chosen very weak ground. They scarcely have the support of their own members, let alone the rest of the public.” (Fraser Nelson, The Spectator, 30.6.11). “Just as Margaret Thatcher took on the miners on her own terrain, so Cameron and Osborne have chosen the ground on which they hope to defeat the likes of Bob Crow and Dave Prentis: pensions. The unions are striking in defence of incredibly expensive final salary pensions that are unavailable to the vast majority of Britain’s 28 million workers.” (Iain MacWhirter, The Herald, 30.6.11).

Unions cite that most public service pensions are only a few hundred a month (£7.800 p.a., according to Hutton) and that many public service workers are low-paid. This is true; such people have not been well served by the system. But the bulk of workers employed through the noughties public service boom have yet to retire, especially senior staff, where Chief Executives over £100,000 and Directors over £80,000 are the norm (over 250 such people in councils alone). Elsewhere, bank-scale bonuses compound the problem (five Scottish Water executives shared a one-off £450,000 bonus this week).

Marchers on Thursday argued for their pensions as their right. A decade ago when the private sector was booming, public sector pay certainly lagged. Job security and a modest pension were seen as compensation for that. However, average earnings in the public sector are now higher than in the private. Add in the devastating effect of the recent recession, add in that one million private sector workers have been forced to swap secure full-time jobs for part-time work with no tenure and no prospects, add in that half of them have no pension beyond the paltry state provision…and the idea that teachers or anyone can retire aged 60, and be paid for by people who have to work until they’re 66 starts to look foolish, if not outright selfish.

The days when nursing or any other public service was seen as a calling, rather than a career, are long gone. But Christie’s advocacy for more symbiotic working (“public service organisations must engage with people and communities directly, acknowledging their ultimate authority in the interests of fairness and legitimacy”) is completely oot the windae, unless the hardship now facing most in the private sector is partly shared by the public. To say they’ll consider no cuts that will fund banker’s bonuses (vile though they are) is like throwing the crew out of lifeboats on the Titanic because they worked for the officers on the bridge who got everyone into this mess.

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I Say! How Soup-ah!

Posted on July 1, 2011 by davidsberry

With my iffy background as a prefab schemie, it never ceases to amaze me how the other half lives, still more that I seem to be on circulation lists that consider me one of them. The one that regularly has me falling about is Debrett’s missive, with its etiquette tips and gushing sales jobs for Fortnum & Masons, Justin le Blank, et al:

“From apricots and artichokes to watercress and wood pigeon, July is a gourmet month, and our list of seasonal foods will inspire you to indulge in some midsummer entertaining. July is also a great month for fish-lovers, with cod, crab, haddock, halibut, herring, John Dory, lemon sole, lobster, mackerel, plaice, salmon, sardines, sea bass, and sea trout all in season. So now is the ideal time to indulge in some chilled white wine. Remember to serve white wine in a narrow glass, which should always be held by the stem to avoid warming the wine. 

“Always try and eat a canapé in one mouthful, without overfilling your mouth or having to chew extensively mid-conversation. If a delicacy looks challenging or messy, politely decline and wait for something more manageable to come round. Watch your timing. Only tuck in when you aren’t about to be introduced to someone, or are mid-conversation and you’re going to have to speak.

“Never put something you’ve eaten off (spoon, skewer, etc)  back on a tray that is still circulating. Equally, never double dip a half-eaten canapé in a communal sauce dish.”

I don’t know how I managed to survive the twin threats of social ostracism and starvation before now. And, of course, ladies: never lick any spillage off a gentleman’s cravat, unless only footmen are about…and then only if they can be relied on to be discreet.

“And there are still so many summer highlights to come, from Henley Royal Regatta and Glorious Goodwood to Glyndbourne Opera Festival and open air theatre in Regent’s Park!”

Until then, toodle pip!

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Christie Eleison III

Posted on July 1, 2011 by davidsberry

Given that the NHS forms half of the £20bn-plus public sector in Scotland, it is disappointing that the Christie report makes only tangential reference to it, and then mostly to plead for better integration with social services. But, however much of a political shibboleth it is, however well loved and groundbreaking, the NHS is a monster by anyone’s standards. Taken as a UK whole, if it were a country, it would come in at No.67 in the world—behind Hungary, but ahead of Morocco and Vietnam.

Dealing with even the Scottish 10% of it is daunting. Quite apart from powerful interests like the BMA, the NHS here is divided into a dozen or so Primary Health Trusts and a myriad of supporting orgainsations like the Scottish Ambulance Service, none of which have so much as a sniff of democratic control, other than by ministers.

NHS "Structure"—There Will Be a Quiz at the End of this Article

Leaving aside NHS24 and actual patient information, finding anything out is hard as you’re bamboozled by a myriad of websites, such as the so-called ‘information’ site:

http://www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/publications-calendar

This site is UK wide and might serve as a lesson in information overload all by itself. They have so many TLAs (three-letter acronyms) that they have an entire section of alphabet soup called ‘jargon-busting’. Of the 168,000 who work for the NHS in Scotland, a reassuring 67,000 (around 40%) are nurses and midwives. But a further 30,500 (18.2%) are in ‘administration’, plus a further 20,000 (11.8%) in ‘support’. So, for every worker directly involved with patients there is another who is not.

All modern organisations need some logistical ‘tail’ and cooks, cleaners and porters are obviously necessary in any hospital. But 30,500 administrators? What are they doing? In another life, I had some experience of NHS Trust backroom operations. They had all the trappings of modern management—KPIs (‘key performance indicators’ to those who don’t speak TLA) meetings, supervisors, budgets, the works.

But, lift any rock and some ugly beasties emerged. They counted meals as satisfactory if they had been touched (reminded me of a joke sign outside a hamburger stand: “17 billion served; 14 billion eaten; 9 billion digested”). They thought their porters were efficiently used because their logging system showed they were over 75% active—turned out they were only measuring 45 general porters, not those in X-ray or sorting mail or delivering pharmaceuticals, etc, etc (a total of almost 100 not being logged). Best of all was the utility bill for their main hospital paid from a single pot. No department had any incentive to save energy. When Ward 2 got too warm, they opened the windows while their electricity bill went through the roof.

Having a quarter century of management experience here and abroad, it was not rocket science to see where the NHS could make real savings and keep frontline services. But in their rush to hire administrators in the nineties, the NHS was naive and hired third-rate ones who could not hack it in the private sector boom at the time. Whether we have the political stomach to hack away such waste while the NHS is held as a shibboleth remains to be seen. But no tightening of public sector belts can be effective without starting with the half of public money that goes here.

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Christie Eleison II

Posted on June 30, 2011 by davidsberry

Having had the chance to read and digest yesterday’s release of the Christie Commission report, it seems a useful contribution the scale of the future demand for public services but shies badly away from positing real solutions. Statistics quoted for the next 5 (& 15) years make for alarming reading:

  • additional demands on health, social care and justice of more than £9 bn (£27 bn) (National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts)
  • the care budget of approximately £4.5 billion will need to increase by £1.1 bn (£3.5 bn) (Scottish Government)
  • if local government services remain as currently configured, a gap of over £3 bn (£9 bn) will arise between demand and available resources Over half of this gap is driven by demand growth. (Strategic Funding Review Group)

Social, as well as financial statistics also make for uncomfortable reading. In the 12 years since devolution, the Scottish Budget has doubled from £16 bn to over £32 bn. Yet many shameful inequality gaps have widened:

  • income of the 30% of our population with the highest incomes, has increased while the 30% with the lowest has been static.
  • In education, the gap between the bottom 20% and the average in  learning outcomes has not changed at all
  • the gap in healthy life expectancy between the 20% most deprived and the 20% least deprived areas has increased from 8 to 13.5 years
  • percentage of life lived with poor health has increased from 12 to 15%.
  • link between deprivation and being a victim of crime is stronger.

The report sensibly states “Until now we have funded that ‘failure demand’ with annually increasing budgets. That is no longer an option.” However, it falls back into pious rectitude in seeking action: “So tackling fundamental inequalities has to be a key objective of public service reform.“

In the next two decades, the number of people aged 60 and over will increase by 50%; numbers aged 75 and over by 84%. These trends affect public expenditure demand, not least because many universal entitlements (e.g. public sector pensions and concessionary travel) are triggered by age criteria alone, irrespective of income or health status.

Their responses to these challenges show the familiar social concerns of the Scottish public sector, couched in language echoed in virtually any statement from Holyrood concerning social policy from any period over the last 12 years:

  • “taking demand out of the system through preventative actions and early intervention to tackle the root causes of inequality and negative outcomes
  • “working more closely with individuals and communities to understand their needs and mobilise a wider range of Scotland’s talents and assets in response to these needs, and to support self- reliance and community resilience
  • “tackling fragmentation and complexity in the design and delivery of public services by improving coherence and collaboration between agencies and sectors
  • “improving transparency, challenge and accountability to bring a stronger focus on value for money and achieving positive outcomes for individuals and communities”

Wow—more motherhood than Mother’s Day and apple pie with cream on top. Laudable though all that is, we didn’t need a commission to tell us that. What is actually needed are some concrete proposals how we reconfigure the smug £20+bn-guzzling monolith that is our public sector. It’s like the joke of the balloonist who lands in a tree and asks a passing walker where he is. “You’re in a tree” comes the answer. To which the balloonist observes “ you must be a public service analyst; the information your gave me is absolutely true, yet totally useless”.

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Christie Eleison I

Posted on June 29, 2011 by davidsberry

Like it or not, the debate on Public Services is being shaken up today by the publication of the Christie Commission on Future Delivery of Public Services. Having been wrestling with this particular Hydra for the last four years, I feel it’s not before time to take a serious look at what is the biggest single segment of the Scottish economy. The ‘steer‘ we already had was that public service is “in urgent need of sustained reform”, an assertion with which I would agree. However, significant numbers (a majority?) of public services workers and (most especially) their unions emphatically do not.

This, in itself, gets us off on the wrong foot. That is compounded by public service supporting  fundamental, sensitive areas of life, like health, social service, welfare and education, as well as ‘luxuries’  like hanging baskets and flower beds. Add in that those fundamentals serve as pitches upon which political football is played and the idea of a rational, objective debate on it all might appear to be wishful thinking.

One thing for which we can be grateful to the recession is in forcing radical rethinking across the whole segment in a way the smug, cash-rich noughties never contemplated. This is no longer just about efficiencies, it’s about dismantling Victorian machinery of government and making it fit for 21st century purpose. The fact that the Scottish Government promised to protect the health budget should not obscure that it is first in line. It is reprehensible that the NHS employs so many third-rate administrators while front-line nurse and midwife numbers are contracting as consultant numbers rise.

But the Commission’s plan to “break-up of the bureaucratic empires governing health and social care” begs a number of questions. Social Work is handled by individual councils and there is certainly an argument for merging such departments for economy of scale, as was once the case with Scotland’s regions. But the councils we have are notorious for being neither local, nor responsive and Health Boards are rightly cited as especially remote; they are large and have no accountability but to ministers. To take GCC Social Work and simply glue it onto Greater Glasgow Health Board would be a huge mistake, akin to cross-breeding a camel with a polar bear in the hope of producing a Snowcat.

There are really three issues that must be resolved. The first is that any public service must have real public accountability. The NHS, Enterprise and Water have none; Police and Fire might as well have none. Elected, city-scale bodies make the most sense in such cases, as they do for transport, strategic planning, social work and education. We have no such bodies. What we do have are are a rabble of little quango empires like SESTRANS that get little attention, not least because they achieve little.

But before we go resurrecting Strathclyde, the second vital element required is a huge cultural shift in the workforce. There are front-line workers across all public service who are unsung heroes. But too many, especially in distant offices, are petty despots of the “aye been” school of thinking. Even those with no malice show poor understanding of what the public needs—even less the relatively new (at least to Scotland) concept of customer service.

The third and final element is the elected representative. Councils and their equivalents have been riddled with patronage and dead wood that make bureaucrats seem dynamic by comparison. If we are to have publicly accountable, efficient public services, that must start with strategic direction, provided by elected members. So far, despite a positive shift since 2007, that is not yet uniformly the case.

Over the next week look here for further details on Christie and how things might evolve.

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Some Canna Thole It

Posted on June 28, 2011 by davidsberry

The 49 in 50 of Scots who don’t live on an island give the other 1 little thought, as they seldom visit, preferring Lanzarote sun or Ibiza fun, and finding the long journey and inevitable ferry crossing off-putting. Of the 100,000 or so islanders, 90% are on Orkney, Shetland, Bute, Skye or Lewis, leaving barely 10,000 to cover Scotland’s other 95 inhabited islands. Which means some of them are pretty small and even marginal when it comes to keeping a community together. One that has recently seemed marginal is Canna, the furthest out of the Small Isles and, until recently, populated by 30 people.

That is changing, as the school teacher is leaving, taking the only four pupils, as is the family that run the only B&B. The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) was given the island by the celebrated Gaelic folklorist John Lorne Campbell in 1981. They also own Rum, whose population is stuck around 20, despite a new pier and plenty of deer in its vast bracken wastes. In contrast, the third Small Isle, Eigg, was the subject of a community buy-out barely a decade ago and seems to be thriving.

Romantic though it may sound, island life is not for everyone, especially when November gales threaten to take the roof off and turning your hand to anything is not everyone’s gift. But, given a shop, a school and two-days-a-week sailings, most people seem to pitch in, reciprocate the warmth and generosity such fiercely self-sufficient places generate and make it a real home. At least, that’s Eigg—or the Uists or Gigha or Westray. Only far St Kilda in the thirties and Stroma in the fifties have been abandoned. So, what’s not working on Canna?

It would seem that the culprit is the landowner—NTS. To boost the population,  in 2005
they instigated a world-wide search to find two families to move there; both those families are among those leaving. In part, it appears to be about ownership—residents can only lease and so feel poorly rewarded for work and investment they put into houses or small-holdings. It is similar to Rum, where virtually everyone works for NTS. No vehicles can be brought ashore without NTS permission on either island and the local managers, while highly motivated and principled, dictate what is permissible in too many aspects of life. The net result is a reactive, NTS-dominated culture on each island, in stark contract to the much more shambolic but dynamically expanding culture on Eigg and Gigha.

Having been there myself (a week of John Muir Trust fence clearing, staying at Kinloch Castle), I was struck by the similarity with how SNH runs the (uninhabited) Isle of May along such lines: they appear affable and welcoming but you soon learn that they have a wheen of rules and tolerate your presence mainly because of the income you bring. They seem to secretly wish that you were not there fouling up their concept of paradise. I hope NTS sees the light on this before the last dozen inhabitants Canna thole it any more.

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Atkins Diet for Trams?

Posted on June 24, 2011 by davidsberry

I was going to try to content myself with a quick tweet at the emperor’s-clothes insanity about to be laid before Edinburgh City Council next week, anent a writhing can of pythons (possibly Monty but this has gone far beyond mere worms) called Edinburgh Trams, but rage got the better of me. The heart of it is an appendix, the Edinburgh Trams Business Case Audit from consultants Atkins. My own take on the whole history to date can be found at  http://politics.caledonianmercury.com/2010/10/18/commen-a-slow-motion-tram-wreck/

For twelve years I’ve been proud to represent people as a councillor—but never have I
been so glad not to be one in Edinburgh because, in this Atkins diet, there are no palatable options. Besides scrapping the lot (cost £750m), Atkins considers stopping the line at St Andrew Square, Foot of the Walk and Newhaven (the revised Line 1a plan) and concludes that the first carries the best cost benefits from their analysis. This is heavily predicated on the fact that over £450m has already been spent. It is also points the way to the likely decision of the council next week.

Given the circumstances (i.e. between a superheated rock and a hard place with knobs on), any choice will attract criticism. But for Lesley Hinds and other Labour rentaquotes to get on their high horse about mismanagement by the present ECC administration stinks of hypocrisy. Ms Hinds and her Labour colleagues were running ECC when disastrous decisions were made, whether to hire a bunch of incompetents to run TIE in the first place, to shirk due diligence in ensuring TIE was kept on a tight rein in the second, or to allow their own egos to trump business acumen in the third.

The original “Trinity Loop” line (Princes St – Leith – Newhaven – Granton – Craigleith – Murrayfield – Princes St) was well conceived and the only element of the first plan. It fed fast public transport to an area that had none. The whole waterfront development evolving from Leith to Granton needed more than buses to serve it properly.

When Iain Gray awarded £375m to fund the project in March 2003, that was for the Trinity loop alone. Begg’s disciples Cllrs Hinds, Anderson, Aitken et al—with no extra funds and no business plan—decided they could risk adding a second line because so much ECC investment was riding on Edinburgh Park, they had a mile-long white elephant
guided busway there to justify and they wanted the ‘status’ of serving the airport.

The penalty for their hubris did not hit until February 2005. Rejection of congestion charging blocked funds to pay for shortfalls. Not only did Line 3 (Newington – Cameron Toll -Craigmillar – Musselburgh) get the heave but, instead of the same being done to Line 2, the original Line 1 was pared back again and again, until all that was left of the ‘network’ planned was the added ‘ego’ line to the airport—stopping at Haymarket.

Forget that TIE was a poorly managed black hole for money; forget that city businesses lost untold millions from building disruption; forget that profitable Lothian Buses are in line to have this financial albatross strapped round their neck. Labour leadership of ECC created this mess circa 2003. The eight years since have been wasted blaming others.

Scrapping the lot today would cost £700m, with £460m already spent. Although a clean option, this can’t be sensible. But what, other than the writhing pythons on ECC’s desk?We need bold vision: the Scottish Government must take this (currently laughable) key project out of TIE’s grubbily incompetent hands and completes it—the whole thing, Line 1 (not 1a) Trinity Loop entire, as well as the Line 2 airport link—with or without private involvement. This might cost £200m more than scrapping the mess we have now, but it will give the capital city a full, viable tram network that could pay its way—and even justify extending it. That is, once the sharp stink of incompetence has faded from everyone’s nostrils.

And, lest we forget, Edinburgh used to run an fine tram system (see below). It remained essentially intact until ‘modernisation’ replaced the entire system with buses in 1956.

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Stock Car Racing with an Elise

Posted on June 22, 2011 by davidsberry

“I want to send a clear message across Defence: reckless spending stops here.” Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox MP, June 14th 2011. Shows you how little he knows of his brief.

The MoD announced today (June 22nd) that it has now spent £250m on the conflict in Libya. If this keeps up, by the end of the year, it will have cost the same as the total reduction in the Scottish Government’s budget—£1.3m. This set me to thinking about such costs.

I like Ming Campbell—not just because I can wave at his constituency out of my bedroom window but because he asks some pretty shrewd questions. In December last year and on the back of the decision to scrap both HMS Ark Royal and its Harrier jump-jets, he asked the Defence Minister for cost comparisons for running Tornado and Harrier RAF bases. The answer was around £250m each year for Lossiemouth and Marham (Tornado) and £175m for Cottesmore & Wittering (Harrier). By concentrating each wing at the latter base in each case and closing the other, these costs could have become £140m and £82m.

This is interesting. This net saving of £200m could have funded the annual cost of running Ark Royal (£25m) and still leave a £175m saving each year. More importantly, the severe loss of operational flexibility by having to fly Tornados (£55m each) or the new Typhoon (£120m each) instead of the Harrier (under £20m each when new and now amortised down to sweeties) results in combat inefficiency = waste. This is highlighted by the ongoing Libyan conflict, in which 20 RAF Tornados and Typhoons now operate out of the Italian Gioia del Colle airbase but need in-air refuelling (out of RAF Akrotiri) to carry significant munitions to Libyan targets. On top of a per-sortie cost of £22,000, the substantial base support costs operating from Italy make this no cheap operation.

Had the MoD kept the Harrier and Ark Royal (see above), they could be flying a flurry of missions (at under £3,000 per sortie) from the Ark Royal, which would need none of the additional basing and refuelling costs hampering present operations. If the UK is indeed strapped for cash, why is it using such a costly, fragile and inefficient delivery system as the latest Eurofighter? The single-seat, single-engine, sturdy subsonic Harrier is carrier-capable and just the job for loitering off the Libyan coast and smothering selected targets with squadron-scale strikes for less than the single aircraft pinpricks we do manage—if there were any left. But there aren’t.

Using the Eurofighter for ground attack against third-rate opponents is like taking a Lotus Elise to the stock car races—it’s so inappropriate that it is crass stupidity. A year ago we had both the Harriers and carriers to fly them off. If Liam Fox had a shred of humility and/or insight into his job, he would have overridden whichever Whitehall pencil-neck originally decided to scrap them and we would have dished out three times the damage to Ghaddafi’s military at a third of the £250m cost—to date.

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Let Them Eat Baklava

Posted on June 21, 2011 by davidsberry

While I make no pretence of being an international financier, much less someone able to predict the actions of foreign governments that operate in another alphabet, my gut now says George Papandreou’s jaikit is on a shoogly nail. Despite cramming bitter fiscal austerity down the throats of his country(wo)men so that the country can repay emergency transfusions of £45bn from France, £30bn from Germany & £9bn from us, the patient is now resisting treatment, especially by more bitter medicine now being mixed in the lab,

What’s the down side of their being bolshy? Why agree to the terms of any rescue package if terms can be improved by keeping the streets alive with protest? Greek default would destabilise EU economies and possibly the global ones too. The IMF is therefore likely to keep funding Greece’s ballooning public debt.

Opposition leader, Antonis Samaras, stands foursquare against the bailout. Crowds protesting in the center of Athens have followed suit, calling the EU/IMF plans acts of “evil foreigners” to “subjugate the proud Greek people.” Dissent carries little cost as foreign creditors have little choice but to fund the country.  Papandreou has hardly led by example, avoiding any clash with public unions, which are strongly opposed to any idea of privatisation or modernisation. As a result, the private sector has taken much of the austerity pain and not one Greek public servant has been laid off.

EU leaders could have put conditions on the first bailout or stated that this new one was the very last. But they didn’t. They evaded the tough questions and tried to cover for the French and German banks that took bad bets on Greece. And what have they wound up propping up? One of the world’s sickest economy, whose heart for the last 40 years has been dedicated to providing benefits to public-sector clientele.

As long as a second bailout is still a possibility, the Euro will stay propped up. But with a Greek default looking more likely (and from the perspective  of a Greek worker, even desirable) by the day, the Euro’s year long bull run could backpedal fast. And, if Greece does fail, all bets are off. It will have to invent a mechanism to leave the Euro, which will fall through the floor as a result. The Greeks will revive the drachma, promptly devalue it and thereby slash their debt at a stroke. Spending  the next decade in purdah will be eased by boosts in tourism as prices become competitive.

This will be somewhat offset by the fact that the Euro will have fallen too. But ince that will have made German exports even more competitive, their boom will accelerate, taking much of the eurozone with it. So, impoverished but recovering Greeks, damaged but booming EU and the remaining world economies suddenly finding themselves uncompetitive against both.

Why wouldn’t both Papandreou and Merkel want to take it over the brink? Dig out your old drachmas!

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Youth Employment Advice

Posted on June 21, 2011 by davidsberry

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