"AUTHORITY" EXISTS NOW FOR ITS OWN BENEFIT

I was looking through the blogs this morning and noticed that “Calling England” has a roundup of what’s in the Sunday papers. I’d only got a few lines down and was attracted to an article in the Mail (yes, the Mail on Sunday!!!), by Richard North.

It’s a long time since I felt such empathy, and for that empathy to come from an article in the hateful Mail on Sunday is, for me, quite eye opening.

Although his article is based on England, the story is the same in Scotland. He points out, that politicians, local authority “executives”, MPs, big business, indeed almost everyone and thing that crosses your path, no longer seems to have any interest in actually serving you. Their one motto in common seems to be “Let’s make money”.

We will all have stories of how we tried to deal with a big company, or with the local council, or with government, and found ourselves knocked back and stymied at every turn because no one cares. Everything seems to be done for the benefit of the management; nothing for the customer. And the more that we are described as customers (hospitals, where we used to be patients; jobcentres, where we used to be clients; councils where we used to be taxpayers), the less we are treated as such.

Once upon a time you could walk into a BT office and sort out service problems. Now it all has to be done by phone, which is, as I found out a few years ago when my phone line and internet service went down, rather difficult when you HAVE NO PHONE.

Eventually, of course, I contacted them on someone else’s phone, and when I pointed out the problems to the call centre person with, to me, an indecipherable northern English accent, she listened till I’d finished, ignored all I had said, and told me that I had to check some things myself. If they sent someone out there would be a £60 charge...

And if I cancelled my contract, there would also be a charge.

I understood that privatization was designed to provide us with competition which would lead to cheaper and better service. Wrong. It leads to people making more money and was designed to do such.

It’s the same with councils. Don’t try to get them to do anything for you. I’ve failed miserably. My emails are replied to with platitudes and no action. But people in management in the local council are scared of no one. It is difficult to sack anyone in the local authority, and once they are at management level almost nothing will budge them, and probably even then they will leave within with a hefty compensation package. They are compensated for being crap.

Try to get Dundee’s Director of Planning to do something about the fact that double parking in your street makes it impassable to fire engines and sometimes to ambulances. It’s his responsibility but does he give a damn? Does he hell? He’s got his OBE so he’s sorted.

They work on the basis that you aren’t “allowed” to see or talk to them face to face, and that after a while most people get fed up with sending emails or letters to no avail. As for Councillors...are they afraid of them? No. Councillors can’t do anything to them.

And these are but a few of the issues that we are having with "them". The postal office that introduced a new computer system in November (yes November), the bus company, based in Birmingham which cuts a complete service in the evening on one route and runs empty buses within minutes of each other on another, and tells you that you can easily take two buses to replace the one that they have cancelled.

It’s high time we made it clear to “authority” that it is US who are in authority and not them.

And if that means upturning a few egos and crushing them, so be it.

Do you have any stories like this? ... I bet you do.

LABOUR’S CENTRALISED CONTROL AND TARGET SETTING REMINISCENT OF THE USSR

Jenni Russell has an excellent article in today’s Times in which she points out the sadness and irony of the prime minister’s attempt to sell Labour as the party of optimism in his New Year message, particularly in light of Labour’s fundamental lack of optimism about human beings and what they are capable of. She points out the party’s controlling, centralising, mistrustful approach which has let down large numbers of former supporters. Particularly, I imagine those in England who are natural Tory supporters but who moved to Labour when Blair came along.

She talks of people from various walks of life disillusioned by the way that the Brown administration micromanages: a consultant who has resigned from the health service because his policy of seeing every patient in need within 24 hours broke all his targets for clinic numbers and readmission rates, and his hospital managers ordered him not to continue; an experienced teacher who gave up her job because she saw bewildered children fall behind, yet the straitjacket of the national curriculum left her no time to help them; a woman in Devon who saw the old-age home where her mother lives closee because its Grade-II listing means it can’t meet new regulations on space and access.

She points out that the disenchantment goes beyond Brown’s feeble leadership and people’s anxieties about the economy. It comes from the experience of living with Labour’s ideas about how society should be organised, and finding them mean and thin.

Mrs Thatcher tried to run the country like she ran her household, not realising that a household and a country are not the same. Russell maintains that Labour’s fundamental mistake has been to manage the country, its people and its institutions as if it were running nothing more than a collection of factories and businesses. But it has trusted no one to do the job correctly and so, to manage everything, has instituted a series of targets and checks so that nothing individualistic can ever be done. No one can fit the job to the needs of the consumer. It reminds me of reading of the USSR in days gone by. They have been obsessed with delivering efficiency and accountability measured in numbers. But there’s more to delivery of services than that.

I’ve said before here that when the target becomes the job, the customer goes by the wayside. You can see it in education where pupils who cannot deliver good results for the school are pushed aside while those who can are factory farmed to bring in a table topping place for the Head. In hospitals patients’ needs are secondary to throughput. And not only do pupils/patient/customers suffer. Those members of staff who pride themselves in giving value resign (if they can afford to) or work through miserably until they make themselves ill from stress.

Whatever the next government brings, may someone preserve us from another bunch of stupid target setters.

I borrowed the excellent cartoon for the site at :

http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/directory/t/the_labour_party.asp

which is well worth a visit.