Layer Upon Layer

I recently took part in a survey of what things I felt could be done to help Britain reduce its borrowing. Hold your horses - it was neither the front bar of a pub nor was it in the corridors of power. It was an online thing in one of the networks I use.

So the results are hardly likely to go anywhere. However, I have to say that some of the thoughts seem to resonate with those of others and the broad consensus of agreement is that there were many, many ways for the country to save money and reduce borrowing long before we actually impact services.

The first and most obvious way to reduce costs is simply to look at the layers of structure that exist both within public service departments and Government itself. Over 1 in 4 jobs are now in the public sector and this is warning enough. But when you start looking at the complex web of management structures and communication bridges, quangos and the like you suddenly get very depressed at the level and competence of the people that must be in there. Yet not a day goes past when some advert comes out for an overpaid interim to run some NHS Trust. We are breeding terrible grounds for long term bureaucratic money sumps.

So a starting point would be to review how many people we need in Parliament, the number of people to support these and start cascading the process. Very quickly we could home in on the number of MPs, the flunkies and mandarins, then the level of Local Councillors required, their staff and amorphous bodies around them, National Assemblies and their associated costs. Vast sums could be saved on the multiple layers of politician and the associated support infrastructure and people in pretty short order. Then we start looking at the departments around them and critically analyse who does what and why - the old time and motion study on public servants would bring into stark focus why Departments have spawned their own empires and management structures - Business Secretary alone has 9 junior ministers and umpteen staff - it's bizarre.

Don't start me on quangos and ancillary 'private' companies like the FSA or similar - vast staff who have proven they do nothing and cost loads. There are thousands of them, all stocked with the highest paid clever-clogs and never sensibly priced workers. It's all jobs for the boys and none deliver real value.

Associated with this is the whole costs associated with public service. In Wales and Scotland whole new prestige buildings were erected to house new assemblies when there were oceans of office space going begging - the costs, the salaries, the expenses so much of it unregulated. Then you start to look at the 'hangers on' - how many of these offices have associated external advisers, consultants, PR agents and the like running around on vast retainers adding little value to the everyday business process and our lives. Value for money is the key issue - it's not about making politicians or civil servants' lives easier it is about getting value for taxpayers' money. First to get the chop would be the army of investment bankers and lawyers advising on the current economic crisis - nearly £100m on them alone per year.

Then we could start looking at the layers of management in each department. Having experienced the NHS at first hand in the last few months, it is absolutely clear that money is not being focused in the right area. I have no qualms with the services provided, but when consultants have to beg for the prescription pad to administrators you know there is something wrong. The layers of management in such organisations are dreadful and unnecessary. The first thing these people would do is call in advisers to look at structures when in fact this is what private business does all the time. Management reviews are an everyday occurrence in business and if that's what the NHS is meant to be, then the managers should be capable and tough enough to do it. The amount of cash it could free up in the largest public budget is enormous.

Coupled with this is the vast wastage of money associated with budget overruns or badly implemented projects. It is not rocket science but you see £billions wasted on overly complicated IT and data projects, emergency service automation projects and the like. And so much focused in Police projects on how to balance budgets through revenue collection rather than focus on crimes. Value for money is the mantra here.

And again coupled to all this is the potential savings in salaries and costs associated with reviews. But it should go deeper. There is also recession on and wage negotiations have to be tough and tightly controlled while the whole bonanza on public sector pensions has to tackled before it cripples us completely. Why public service has such bias in terms of pay and conditions is beyond most people in the private sector who would kill for such fantastic automatic pay increments and pension schemes.

The target system is these departments is just a mess. While checking in waiting times may have gone down at the NHS, the chances of getting treatment quickly is minimal and highly trained people are focused on the simplest of tasks as they help hit targets. As we all know, hitting targets means money so more can be spent to hit the next targets which move you ever further from proper value for money. The whole service of Government is becoming a postcode lottery as incompetence seems to breed in certain areas.

Education is costing more and more and delivering less. How Ed Balls can smile is beyond me when you look at the basic deficiencies of entrants into the business world. They can text nicely on a phone but using written English defeats them while basic maths skills are beyond them. Looking at exam results, then the message is that we are producing genii. We are loggerheads with reality and what is required for future generations.

It's a simple matter but layers of management are counterproductive - we in business know this. Looking in at the whole public sector and you see layer upon layer of unnecessary levels of management whose tasks are to aggregate communication for the next layer up - in today's world of advanced communication that delivers nothing and hinders plenty.

The problem stems back to the central control issue. The idea that a Government has to control everything means that you have a cascade principle at work. Only partly in that structure do you get any kind of devolved thinking and its why we get so little value for money. Services in general are less but cost more - just take a look at local refuse collection. The amount of refuse being taken is decreasing, we have to do more of the work as individuals than ever before in sorting and if we should break the rules we get a criminal record. yet do we see a decrease in cost? It's just crazy. More and more talk comes about direct taxation for specific roads or services and it makes you ask, 'Then what have I just paid for in taxes?'

Value for money should be the credo for all taxpayers. We should be able to ask how our money is spent in wars, services, education, health, bank bailouts and other areas - we want to know why we are funding more politicians than ever, why are we supporting such generous pension requirements for the public sector and why are we paying for so many external bodies who deliver zero value?

All that happens instead is we sell off £16bn of assets no one cares about. It's a drop in the ocean in terms of what is required. Governing this country and delivering service has been an enormous sponge to cash over the last 12 years and no one knows how much we get back for the money we spend. It's time that rigorous reviews are done and savings identified fast. The IOD reckons at least £50bn per year can be saved on annual expenditure without cuts in services and I think they are undercalling it.

Waiting for the election will not help deliver the necessary savings in time. It needs to start now.

The Lost Generation

Evidence shows that in the record unemployment figures released just a week ago of approaching 2.5m and rising, that the young have been hardest hit by this recession as unemployment figures of those leaving school or University is rising faster than any other sector.

Many commentators believe this will lead to a 'Lost Generation'. As if we did not have enough problems with youth disaffection leading to what appears to be a sharp increase in crime, and violent crime at that, amongst the young, it now appear that prospects for their future are getting bleaker.

You might think that of the Government priorities that have to be juggled to be produce the kinds of savings required to decrease our budget deficits and massive borrowing requirement after the incredible sums spent on bank bailouts, it should not be the time to make life harder for young kids.

But in the world of number crunching and accounting, strategy goes out of the window. So this week we have seen two extraordinary announcements. First, Ed Balls, former Treasury Minister and now in charge of Education, has volunteered to slash £2.5bn off the budget for Education, then we get the Director General of the CBI, Richard Lambert, suggesting that students should pay increased tuition fees. In fact, it appears that the Lib Dems are going back on one of their most important Election pledges on tuition fees.

Perhaps it is because the Government now feel with record pass and top grade levels at GCSEs that the job is done - we no longer have to invest in the education of our children as they are born more intelligent in the UK, perhaps. What a banner that would read at the next Election for Labour, 'Brighter kids under Labour'.

The fact is that as we propose to de-invest in schools having invested instead in stock markets shares of companies like RBS, Lloyds, Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley instead, the prospects for our young are diminishing. And even if they want to weather the storm and go to University to apparently increase their prospects for the future, they will leave University with a millstone of debt around their necks, the likes of which non generation has seen since the introduction of the Welfare State. Oh, and their job prospects will be the worst for generations with that level of qualification as the top companies decrease or even stop their graduate intake schemes - BT has led the way on this.

Only last night, there was a program on TV which showed that some 9 million people will reach retirement age with the prospect of a pittance of a pension as we are never encouraged at the right age to set aside enough money for our future. In fact, only 4% of the population will leave their jobs with the nirvana of two thirds of their final salary income and - you guessed it - the vast majority of those will be Public Sector workers on superannuated fantastic pension schemes. My argument here is that as a nation we should be setting out from the earliest age the conditioning and discipline of saving for retirement as the young enter the job market, instead we have our brightest talent weighed down by debt. And there is to be more of it.

There will be a point when going to University will be the domain of foreign students and rich kids - how un-Labour will that be? Already back in the 80's when I was at University and Polytechnic, there was as many as 25% of my colleges' students from overseas and one class shared students from Iran and Iraq whose countries were at each others' throats. The campus was regularly picketed by students of both sides raising funds for weapons back home and at the Poly of Wales I entered the Junior Common Room where they were lobbying for a quorum on a vote to send aid to the South Moluccan terrorists.

Recession leads to all sorts of daft things but what is most stupid is that the priorities of yesterday become far less important when people start studying the bottom line. Yet, if you looked in the Appointments Section of this week's Sunday Times, you will not see a single Private Sector job advertised - just about everyone was advertising fat salaried positions at the head of some Quango, NHS Trust, Government Think Tank or other Government Department.

I can't say that the Tories are right about their cuts but starting at the top is a great idea in my book. Less layers of bureaucracy will bring into sharp focus who we want to keep in high Government positions and who we don't - plus what flunkies and mandarins are also due for the scrap heap. Personally, long before I got the knife out on education, I would sit down and look at the money being wasted in these administrative departments that have grown up in the last 12 years like The Department of the Deputy Prime Minister or the Department of The Business Secretary - things that did not exist until this Government arrived. As much as a few countrymen of mine might think a devolved Wales is a good thing, frankly we cannot afford the salaries, expense accounts and opulent new buildings of the Welsh Assembly when so few people were actually interested enough to vote for it. It is a layer of Government that is entirely superfluous.

It may not be the time to start thinking about what is important to Britain so far ahead of an election but if we do not do it, the idiot politicians who led us to financial ruin will get their knives out instead. At a time when prospects for young people have been at their worst for years, the last thing we need to do is to take money out of the system and make them pay more for their higher education. It's a double whammy that lays the seeds for another dirth of talent in Britain at a time when we need the best to come through an innovate to make us competitive again.

But, as with so much of the policy of the top echelon of people, the focus of this future is the same as the last 12 years - Britain's only real growth industry was finance and once again we see the emphasis has been to save the careers of people who nearly ruined us. For them, we could not have bunged more money down a drain without any questions as to how much was needed and why and what modifications to behaviour we would mandate. Everyone is afraid of these rich goons who think that raising £9bn of someone else's money with only a tiny amount of their own risked to buy a drugs store chain is great business acumen. It does nothing for the wealth of this nation. Having knights who take £1bn in single dividends and not pay a bean in tax and revering them as business gurus is just sick while kids cannot get a job or a decent education.

The strange fact is that I am not a Socialist and am all for free enterprise but I am not for thin wedges of society using our tax money as their bank and I am not for Governments allowing super rich people and companies to avoid paying their way in tax.

There are a ton of ways that £2.5bn could be saved or raised long before we get anywhere near the Education budget or adding on extra debt for graduating students. The lack of thought put into is pathetic - then again, Ed Balls was a finance man and he has had his education all done and paid for. So no surprises what he really thinks about the kids of today.

In the coming months, we are going to get a lot of stupid decisions made which will wipe years off our progress. In the meantime, the bankers we saved will be taking us enthusiastically forward to the next crisis thanks to our money and lack of constraints. Now is the time to enter the debate on what is important to us all - after all, it's our money they are using.

April Showers

April wasn't long ago. In it we had a budget which pledged a load of money for wind projects and preferential treatment to businesses which created 'green collar' jobs.

In the preceding months we had seen the Government pledge around £2.1bn to the ailing car industry and there has been an unseemly scramble to save the European arm of General Motors. The two things did not seem to go together but it was all part of a policy announced back in February by the Business Secretary to save key businesses on a priority basis and favouring those who had a green edge - thus laying a platform for a greener industry base for the future.

It was all very idealistic and a lot of talk. It took ages to get a 'Scrappage' scheme to help the car industry when the scheme in Germany had already led the way and then we had GM come begging. Of course, the car industry is a big employer and should it fail some 800,000 jobs in direct and related businesses are at risk.

But make no bones about it, we don't have a car industry of our own in Britain - it as all owned by foreign companies.

So saying all this, was it not a surprise to see people picketing the site of the largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world at Newport, Isle of Wight last week? They were picketing as Vesta had announced the closing of its factory in the UK due to slow orders and in favour of cheaper manpower elsewhere. When asked about this, the Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, said it was a commercial decision and nothing to do with him.

I don't get it. If so much money was pumped into wind schemes around the country AND we are favouring green collar jobs, then why are we not bailing out this business? True, the parent company may be making a commercial choice and it is still surviving but if we truly want a green based industry platform for the future then Vesta was worth 'enticing' to stay at minimum.

Are we not going to need more turbines for the future? And we will have to import them when we do, now?

It was another example of plenty of talk and no action by particularly Mandelson but the Government in general. As we bail out banks with sums that we have no idea about and then help industries which clearly help to pollute, we allow a manufacturer of green energy systems to simply up sticks and move from our islands. Vesta may be Danish but there was no attempt made to avoid this. When steel making in Sunderland is threatened, everyone starts to help the parent, Corus, which is also a foreign company.

In another move by Mandelson, he is to make a speech in which he will say that rising tuition fees should not make further education the domain of the better off. After a report was shown only a week ago that says the professions like Law are dominated by privately educated people, it seems ever more appropriate that the whole policy is reviewed. But the Labour method is to pay lip service, highlight it as something that 'needs to be looked at' and then raise the tuition fees anyway.

Time and again we get these well crafted 'soundbites' that sound as if something is being done yet produce no change and long term we will reap the effects of poorly implemented policies. Tuition fees rising does affect the levels of education of poorer people - there is no doubt. There are more foreign students who attend our universities now than ever before because they can pay the fees and our kids can't. In 12 years, our system of education has gone backwards at all levels and the standards have dropped which means Britain will be far less competitive in the future.

Couple that with the fact that valuable jobs in green based industries are leaving this country with no attempt to stop them and you have a completely incoherent policy that flies in the face of what ministers say. In this case, it is just one man - Mandelson - as in the role created for him in his rescue mission of a totally failed Government, he is responsible for high education and business.

We could not have picked a worse person.

Balls By Name.......

'Poverty is no excuse' proclaimed Ed Balls. No, that's not his nickname but it certainly could be a response.

Excuses, Excuses

This week's nonsense came about as schools were ranked for the first time by measuring standards in about 4,000 state and independent schools. The old ranking methods were based on the number of children passing 5 or more GCSEs or vocational courses in any subject. The old system, as per many ranking systems brought in under new Labour in places like the NHS, could be easily 'rigged' by focusing on courses which are easier such as computing, media studies and dance. Now pupils have to gain at least a C in core subjects like Maths and English and - surprise, surprise - the standards 'map' no longer looks the same.

• In fact 42 of the bottom 440 schools (that's just under 10% for bank executives to understand) were the Government 'elite' academies which now may be closed if they don't improve.
• A further 132 schools on the 'hit-list' of those already failing, suffered further declines - so that really worked, eh?
• Many secondary schools were still avoiding the core subjects and still focused on the softer subjects - so the message really got to them.
• Up to a quarter of pupils in tougher schools were classified truants but the only glimmer of good news was that grammar schools are out-stripping the private sector by a record margin which would make Old Labour cringe badly.

The Obvious

What it boils down to is that once again the Government were looking at schooling from the completely wrong angle and when viewed properly, we see that policy is not driving standards the right way. Naturally, in true Government and New Labour fashion, Ed Balls immediately sought to pass the buck to Head Teachers and Governors blaming an 'Excuse Culture' which was 'Unacceptable'.

I wonder where they got that from?

In my view his comments are just an excuse for a whole load of money poured down a toilet on education by this Government. Bolstered by superb but rigged GCSE results over the last 10 years they have basked in the glow of their 'achievements'. Only when you look at the practical effect of education in Britain do you start to understand that this money has been wasted and standards are actually falling. The levels of ability in basic subjects such the 3 R's in those who are entering commerce and industry is abysmal.

Still, it's always good to have someone to blame. You lot suffering in poverty - don't use it as an excuse for underachievement.