You are in the
company of
Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
|
|
You are in the
company of
Roger Warren Evans |
|
| Part of www.LivePolitics.net < Back to Home Page |
NewLiving Diary Index
|
item0067B 972, 973 972 5 April 2004 Business Plans Wrong rule, wrong conclusion
Beverley Hughes should have been protected, not by beleaguered senior Ministers (Blunkett, Blair) but by her own civil servants, her own Sir Humphreys. But the Civil Service is not what it was. In designing an administrative procedure which relied on the preparation, by Romanian and Bulgarian craftsmen, of self-employment "business plans", the Home Office was sowing the seeds of its Ministers' own destruction. Because business plans are an entirely inappropriate base, for any rational scheme of administration. The Government has got into hot water, yet again, merely because of the incompetence of its own Civil Service. Let me try to sort out the wheat from the chaff. The complaint against the Government related, not to craftsmen from "the accession countries" due to join the European Union on 1 May (when the Fabians will be in Berlin), but craftsmen from Romania and Bulgaria. Those countries are in a similar position to (for example) Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, but they simply have not got onto the EU accession list, this time 'round. And for Romania (popltn 22.3m) and Bulgaria (popltn 7.5m) it was planned to admit only self-employed people, who would not have any claim to receive State benefits in this country. That was sensible, and unexceptionable in my view.
It is not easy to spot illogicalities and inconsistencies in a three-year business plan. When I worked as Economic Development Officer for the City of Swansea, it was part of my duties to appraise local business plans. And even though I knew all the local circumstances to which they related (rent-levels, wages, communications, supply-bottlenecks), and also the advantage of a Class I Cambridge degree in Economics, I still found the task extremely difficult. How much more difficult to assess the reality of a plan drawn up in Bulgarian by a Bulgarian plumber planning to work in Sheffield! As it happened, the gap was bridged an army of UK business consultants who worked around the clock selling off-the-shelf business-plans to Bulgarian plumbers who just wanted to get through the visa process. That was the scam. And I am not at all surprised that it was successful. But the fault lay in the design of the system. Good administration required that the skills of each applicant should be subject to a practical test of competence, coupled with a test of knowledge of the UK Building Regulations. Forget business plans! They are among the most dangerous and misleading documents of modern civilisation. Far worse is the thought of a Bulgarian electrician roaming the country without a proper understanding of the current circuit-wiring requirements of the Building Regulations. This was a Sir Humphrey cock-up. It was unfair that Beverley Hughes had to go. But Ministers can no longer rely on their Sir Humphreys to "get it right". Politicians are now salaried managers - and they must learn more about the skills of practical management. Do you feel sorry for Beverley? Or did the Government get what it deserved? Drop me a line
973 5 April 2004 For Tony Blair
"choice" is
I want to say a word in defence of Tony Blair. Because I believe him to be - contrary to his own assertions - shallower that he seems. And that is to his credit. I can understand the shallow Blair: he just does not "do" profundity very well. Martin Kettle, writing in The Guardian, took Blair to task for his commitment to the promotion of "choice" in public services - but I think Martin Kettle has misread Blair's position.
Margaret Thatcher did, I think, believe in choice. Her image was of the totally competent, educated, well-equipped and well-heeled citizen, making informed choices about the disposition of adequate personal resources. She was genuinely bourgeois, status-conscious (no bus-travel for her!) charitable, but short-sighted and patronising towards her fellow men and women. That is not Tony Blair. I do believe that he is a would-be egalitarian - but that he lacks the intellect to work out how to achieve it. I do not have a high opinion of his intellectual ability - although his quick-wittedness, and undoubted fluency, have served him remarkably well. And I do believe him to be genuinely frustrated at the strength of vested interests in the public service, both professions and trade unions, and their purblind refusal to accept radical "reform". Civil servants, teachers and doctors, surgeons, headmasters and dentists, constitute a phalanx of entrenched vested interests which all rely - for their position in society - upon an eroding status base.
This is the wrong approach. The conceptual model of choice, of turbulent market challenge and counter-challenge, is entirely wrong for the primary public service sectors. Opinion surveys demonstrate this clearly, and that is bound to undermine Blair's choice of tool: citizens do not want "choice" - they want reliable quality of delivery, within a committed, unitary service. And they are right. Blair will pay the price for his limited intellectual grasp, for he will fail. The challenge of reform in health, education, and the general Civil Service, is to devise professional means of reforming a deeply professional system and ethos. Big sticks, brought in from the commercial world, will never be enough.
What do you think? Drop me a line
|
|
|
| Created by GMID Design & Communication COPYRIGHT
NOTICE
|
