We're here to serve you

Our worship of progress and the “new” leads us to imagine that “performance management” is a modern discovery – and one that will set things aright in the world. It’s therefore marvellous to read this exasperated quotation from none less than the Duke of Wellington in 1812 -

Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French Forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests, which have been sent by H.M Ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch rider to our headquarters. We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence. Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstances since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.
This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty's Government, so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with my best ability, but I cannot do both.
1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or perchance
2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.

I owe the quotation to a brilliant website set up by a senior civil servant (Martin Stanley) which contains the clearest and best analysis I have ever read of British Civil Service Reform.
Most of the stuff written about this subject is by social science academics – who lack the historical perspective and seem to have bought into the rationalistic belief system. This guy first sets the political/sociological context for the breathless British changes of the past 40 years.

It is ironic that many of the problems facing today's politicians stem from the successes of their predecessors. Indeed most of them have their roots in our ever increasing wealth and ever improving health.For a start, UK society is now vastly more wealthy than 50 years ago. A typical post-war household literally had nothing worth stealing:- No car, no TV, no phone, nothing! No wonder it was safe to leave doors open along most British streets. But GDP has risen four-fold since then. Most homes nowadays have a wide range of marketable goods, and huge amounts of money to spend on non-essentials, including on drink and drugs. The crime rate has therefore soared, as drug addicts seek to get their hands on others' wealth, and drunks cause various sorts of mayhem. Our wealth causes other problems:
• We can afford to eat much more, and travel everwhere by car, and so get fat and unhealthy, with consequences for the health service.
• There are now 10 times as many cars on the roads as in the 1950s, with obvious implications for transport and environmental policies.
• Much the same applies to the growth in cheap air travel.

Other problems are caused by the fact that the distribution of the new wealth is uneven. And many of us seek to catch up by borrowing as if there is no tomorrow. Credit card debt, for instance, increased from Ł34m in 1971 to Ł54,000m in 2005.
The other big success is our health, and not least the fact that we are all living so much longer than before. Life expectancy at birth is currently increasing at an astonishing 0.25 years per year. Healthy life expectancy is also increasing - but only at around 0.1 years per year. In 1981, the expected time that a typical man would live in poor health was 6.5 years. By 2001 this had risen to 8.7 years. Just imagine what pressure this is putting on the health and social services ... ... not to mention on pension schemes. The average age of men retiring in 1950 was 67. They had by then typically worked for 53 years and would live for another 11 years. By 2004, the average of men retiring was 64. They had by then typically worked for 48 years and would live for a further 20 years. As a result, the work/retired ratio had halved from about 5 to about 2.4. These are huge (and welcome) changes, but with equally huge - and politically unwelcome - implications for tax, pensions and benefits policies.
It is also noticeable that voters nowadays want to spend more and more money on holidays, clothes, durables, etc. whilst few seriously try to promote the benefits that result from the public provision of services. Voters therefore resent paying taxes, and the Government is under constant pressure to spend less, despite the problems summarised above.
In parallel with all this, society has become more complex and less deferential:
• Voters are much more likely to have been to university, to have travelled abroad, and to complain.
• The family is less important.
• Adult children are much more likely to live some distance from their parents
• 42% of children are now born outside marriage.
• The media are much more varied and much more influential, whilst the public are much more inclined to celebrate celebrity.
• Voters expect the quality of public services to improve and refuse to accept inadequate provision.
• They also turn more readily to litigation.
• The Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act add to these pressures.
• There have been other more subtle, but perhaps more profound, changes.
• The original welfare state was a system of mutual insurance - hence "National Insurance". It has slowly changed into a system of rights and entitlements based on need. This is morally attractive - but it is also open to abuse, which breeds resentment.
• The post-war generation believed in self-help. Much post-school education was through unions or organisations such as the Workers Educational Association. We now expect the state to provide, and 50% of our children go to university.
• Our increasing wealth and improving health - let alone the absence of major conflict - means that we really do have very little to worry about compared with our predecessors. But of course we still worry, and demand that the Government "does something about" all sorts of lesser risks, from dangerous dogs through to passive smoking.
• Another interesting change has been the introduction of choice into health and education policies. This is in part because modern voters want to be able to choose between different approaches to medicine and education. But choice is also a very effective substitute for regulation in that it forces the vested interests in those sectors to take more notice of what their customers actually want. There are, however, some unwelcome consequences arising from the introduction of choice into public services:
• The availability of choice inevitably gives a relative advantage to the sharp elbows of the middle classes. They can, for instance, move into the right catchment areas, and are better at demanding access to the right doctors.
• Choice also requires there to be spare capacity, which has to be paid for. Less popular schools and hospital have to be kept open - often at significant cost - so that they can improve and offer choice when their busy competitors become complacent and less attractive.
• Ultimately, however, persistently unpopular and/or expensive schools and hospitals have to be allowed to close, or else they have no incentive to improve. But such closures always provoke various forms of protest.

What sort of people, faced with all this, would aspire to be politicians? No wonder we get "the leaders we deserve" (title of a marvellous book in the 1980s by Alaister Mant). This extended quotation from the website is just setting the scene for the wry descriptions of the numerous initiaives taken by British Governments since 1968 to get a civil service system "fit for purpose". For more read here
Last night saw torrential rain here in Sofia - and today is like a typical dreich day in Scotland. The fig tree has become enormous - and is bending in the wind. Great after the heat of the past few days. I cycled before 09.00 to the great butcher's shop (diagonally from the Art Nouveau Agriculture Ministry building) and up a short drive which supplies pork, chicken and sausages sublimely marinated in honey and spices. There is a buzz about the place - these people know they are providing heavenly products!!!

performance management

Tudor Banus - a Romanian artist
One of the reasons I have lost my enthusiasm for my public admin reform assignments is because of the "Fordist" phase it is currently going through with an emphasis everywhere on performance management. Colin Talbot is one of the few people who writes sensibly about this and I'm sorry his book on the topic is not out until early summer (see Amazon)
The Institute for Government published recently a useful survey of the British experience of performance management and attitudes of civil servants and local government officials to the recent revamp. The document, however, makes no mention of the critique by John Seddon of the quasi-Stalinist targeting approach taken to public services by the British over the past 10-15 years - and this lacuna worries me. I must admit I still remain cynical about the excessive targeting - and a blog here on November 5th last year drew atention to 2 British reports which said so. One was a Parliamentary Select Committee Report; the other was Think-Tank pamphlet which recommended an abolition of the entire control regime which has grown up in Britain over the past 2 decades. Its title - Leading from the Front - reflects its basic argument that power should be returned to the front-line professionals - and the Stalinist measurement and control infrastructure should be dismantled.

One of my "favourite links" is Craig Murray's blog. In October he addressed the key question which is figuring in a major way as the general election in that country approaches – how UK public finances can deal with the massive support they have given the banking system.

"Smaller, leaner public services which simply go on with delivering the service direct, with minimal administration. This is the opposite of what the Tories would do. In particular, we need to cut out the whole complex administration of "internal markets" within the public services, where vast arrays of accountants and managers spend their wasted lives processing paper payments from the government to the government.
"Let me tell you a true story which is an analogy for the whole rotten system. As Ambassador in Tashkent, I had staff from a variety of government departments - FCO, MOD, DFID, BTI, Home Office etc. In addition to which, some staff sometimes did some work for other than their own department. This led to complex inter-departmental charging, including this:
"I was presented with a floor plan of the Embassy building, with floor area calculated of each office, corridor and meeting room. I then had to calculate what percentage of time each room or corridor was used by each member of staff, and what percentage of time each member of staff worked for which government department. So, for example, after doing all the calculations, I might conclude that my own office was used 42% of the time on FCO business, 13% of the time on BTI business, 11% on DFID, etc etc, whereas my secretary's office was used ....
"I then would have to multiply the percentage for each government department for each room, lobby and corridor by the square footage of that room, lobby or corridor. Then you would add up for every government department the square footages for each room, until you had totals of how many square feet of overall Embassy space were attributable to each government department. The running costs of the Embassy could then be calculated - depreciation, lighting, heating, maintenance, equipment, guarding, cleaning, gardening etc - and divided among the different departments. Then numerous internal payment transfers would be processed and made.

"The point being, of course, that all the payments were simply from the British government to the British government, but the taxpayer had the privilege of paying much more to run the Embassy to cover the staff who did the internal accounting. That is just one of the internal market procedures in one small Embassy. Imagine the madnesses of internal accounting in the NHS. The much vaunted increases in NHS spending have gone entirely to finance this kind of bureaucracy. Internal markets take huge resources for extra paperwork, full stop.

"The Private Finance Initiative is similarly crazy; a device by which the running costs of public institutions are hamstrung to make massive payments on capital to private investors. What we desperately need to do is get back to the notion that public services should be provided by the State, with the least possible administrative tail. The Tories - and New Labour, in fact - both propose on the contrary to increase internal market procedures and contracting out.
All of the Conservative vaunted savings proposals would not add up to 10% of the saving from simply scrapping Trident. Ending imperial pretentions is a must for any sensible plan to tackle the deficit"