Results tagged “centralgovernment”

George Osborne's Budget sop to the public, of freezing Council Tax for a year, is politics at its very worse. It takes the public for fools, in the hope that we'll be so taken by saving £100 a year we'll not notice the ideological cuts happening elsewhere.

Beyond the dodgy politics, the Council Tax freeze has a number of serious implications, represented by these questions:

• What happens when the Council Tax freeze thaws out?
• What does central government telling local government it has to freeze Council Tax mean for for localism?
• Despite the gearing effect (Council Tax roughly makes up for only 1/4 of local government budgets), what impact will the freeze on Council Tax have on services provided by local government?
• If central government is going to make up the shortfall, what other central government funding will stop to pay for it? "Efficiencies"? "Back-office costs"? "Consultants"?

Osborne has form in headline-grabbing tax announcements, as per his inheritance tax announcement three years back. The difference this time is that the nonsense he's announcing will actually be put into effect.

What a frightening, frightening thought.

Special Advisors will not be paid for by the taxpayer[.] The government currently employs 74 Special Advisers in the central departments, an increase of more than 90% since 1995, at a cost to the taxpayer of £5.9m each year. These are political jobs, and should, therefore, be funded by political parties.

That was, erm, Nick Clegg, speaking in September 2009. It is also number 4 on my list of flips that have become flops (here are 1, 2 and 3) (via Left Foot Forward).

We've expressed something of an interest before in Andrew Lansley, the coalition government's new Health Secretary. Here I am having a go at him, and here Phil is defending him.

And here is Lansley popping up again, this time with a plan to financially penalise hospitals if patients are readmitted for emergency treatment within 30 days of discharge.

Sounds good. The only problem being that a significant Department of Health report in 2008 noted there was a 'very weak and statistically insignificant' correlation between shorter hospital stays and rising emergency readmissions. Indeed, it notes that only 25% of readmissions are typically for the same reason as the original admission - something that hasn't changed for many years.

So where Lansley says that the culture of central government targets results in hospitals sending people home early, he instead advocates, erm, financial penalties imposed by central government that are likely to encourage doctors keeping patients in hospital longer.

The Total Place initiative was a significant development in local government policy over the last term of the Labour government. Details about what Total Place is and what it's seeking to achieve are here.

I have a professional interest in Total Place because I see the Right to Control - a significant transformation project that aims to bring together several funding streams which provide choice and control for disabled people - as a kind of Total Place for disabled people. (I'm involved in the Right to Control Trailblazer in Essex, more details of which are here, and on which I'll be blogging in more detail soon.)

So it's interesting to read John Tizard's view on whether Total Place will survive under the Tories.

His view is that, though the Total Place agenda aligns with many of the coalition government's policies and intentions, there are some other changes arising from the localist agenda which may undermine Total Place. These include the evolving role of PCTs, academies and free schools, and the possibility of elected police commissioners. Thus, Total Place will need to reinvent itself and ensure these increasingly autonomous partners work together locally, based within a framework that enables/makes this happen between the centre and localities.

In many ways, Tizard's views echo Stef's post on localism yesterday. His conclusion was that:

[W]hat is appropriately local will vary from circumstance to circumstance. In most cases very strong incentives will be needed to foster the collaboration between localities and at the moment there are neither the ideas nor the funds to support this.

My interpretation (hardly unique or insightful though it is) of both Tizard and Stef's views is that the very nature of localism means it will be driven forward by effective leaders in some areas and not in others. The challenge for the centre is thus ensuring that localism benefits everyone in a given locality to some minimum level whilst enabling others to go further if they want to.

Whether this moves us into a post-bureaucratic age, or one of fairness for all - two further drivers of the coalition government - are moot points.

I noted recently the excellent machinery of government publication by the Institute for Government. The report notes the problems that senior civil servants face when changes to government departments are made, including a lack of funding to support the changes and the doubling in workload it often means for such civil servants.

It was pleasing to note that one of the proposed solutions to support machinery of government changes was for "new and radically changed departments [to] receive more support from the centre":

The Cabinet Office and Treasury need to improve their procedures and capabilities to provide more positive support for new or heavily reorganised departments. The Cabinet Office should create a capacity to provide a ‘scratch team’ to run a new department’s core responsiveness operations for a transition period. The Cabinet Office should recognise that the reorganisation of departments is a vital task that is likely to recur reasonably frequently, and should henceforth be properly documented and continuously improved over time - instead of the current situation where experience resets to zero in each new case.

Whilst being appropriately modest, we made a similar suggestion here a few months ago for a quango merger quango, or NDPBMNDPB for short, which could be:

Some form of team or body within central government that can advise or lead the process of mergers within the public sector.

There's no reason why such a team can't also help with government departments, so it could become the Non-Departmental Public Body for the Merger or Reorganisation of Non-Departmental Public Bodies and Government Departments (or NDPBMRNDPBGD for short).

This is very complicated stuff. But it always looks so simple to begin with.

And with that thought, Paul Clarke finishes a quite excellent post concerning how individuals could interact with government services and how translating what seems like common sense in theory can turn into a rabbit warren of a nightmare in practice. I'd recommend reading all of it.

I more than disagree with the analysis proffered by the Tax Payers’ Alliance on how to implement budget cuts in the public sector. Stef uses the euphemism ‘thought provoking’ to capture his thoughts on the article; I prefer to call it a load of crap, for the following reasons:

1. Mark Wallace has it precisely the wrong way around: Councillors may be elected, but (in my experience) they are generally poor quality. It’s the managers, particularly senior leadership within local authorities, who run councils. So the idea of Councillors sitting down and figuring out where they want cuts made is ridiculous.

2. The idea of the council officers, by default, opposing spending cuts. I fear this view is informed more by Wallace’s ideological persuasion than evidence. Ask practically anyone working within local government, but particularly middle and senior managers, whether or not 10% savings are possible and they’ll laugh: that could be done easily. Paradoxically, Wallace acknowledges this when he says:

Councils should introduce reward schemes to encourage staff to propose successful ways of making savings. Today’s grumbles at lunchtime about this or that pointless form, or the absurdity of having to make two trips in the van instead of one, could be transformed into tomorrow’s practical spending cuts.

3. And therein lies the third problem with Wallace’s suggestions: incentivising staff to reward their ideas for successful savings. Wallace has clearly never worked in the public sector, particularly not as a senior manager (as his profile attests), and so has no direct experience of the complexities of introducing such a scheme. Such complexities would include the question of attribution (how do you know whose idea it specifically was? what if it was a team idea? how do you then share equally any benefits accrued from the idea?) and the issue of how much management time it would take to manage and address the inevitable conflicts. Complexities would also involve the question of knowing just how much has been saved: the direct and indirect costs of identifying savings arising from one idea would be disproportionately larger than the savings themselves in the vast majority of cases.

There’s a great irony here. By rubbishing his scheme, Wallace will accuse me of being precisely the kind of manager who stands in the way of Councillors (or whoever) driving through the change he perceives is needed within local government.

What his superficial analysis won’t have noted is that it’s more likely those managers are precisely the people who recognise the change needed, and are most likely to be driven by a public duty to deliver the best services and outcomes for local residents than some ideological perversion that places less public sector spending above any other consideration.

The news came last week that the cost of setting up the Equality & Human Rights Commission was £39m. As well as criticising the cost of the creation of the EHRC from the 3 existing equality commissions (disability, gender and race), the Committee of Public Accounts also said that the organisation itself wasn't ready for business with key business areas still needing work.

According to the committee, the process for creating the EHRC was 'patently flawed'.

I worked for the Disability Rights Commission in the 18 months leading up to the merger and at the EHRC itself for around 8 weeks. Indeed, I was there on day, as this post attests. It would thus be quite wrong of me to say whether or not the Committee's findings are a fair reflection or not, since I contributed a small part to the transition process and know many of the individuals well who were heavily involved.

My experience of the merger, however, led me to an idea at the time that I still think now would be useful: some form of team or body within central government that can advise or lead the process of mergers within the public sector.

The thinking is simple: the process of merging organisations is hugely complex, but once you've been through it once, there is a huge amount of experience you could use if you had to do it again. However, you wouldn't want to negate the 'local' experience and knowledge that comes from staff within existing bodies. This is effectively the business case for using consultants in such scenarios.

Thus, instead of bringing in often expensive organisational design or merger consultants, a team could sit within the public sector - possibly, say, within the Cabinet Office - and support such transitions. Such a team could even be formalised to be a quango in itself, advising on the merging etc. of quangos.

To take the time at which the EHRC was created: at that same time, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) was also being created from merging together the Healthcare Commission, the Commision for Social Care Inspection, and the Mental Health Act Commission. I suspect many of the same issues that came up in the forming of the EHRC arose during the CQC merger, and invaluable lessons could have been applied to save both time and money, and ensure the new body was effective from day one.

Over the next spending period, it is inevitable that quangos and all sorts of public bodies will merge or have their responsibilities moved to another body. A quango merger quango (I suggest this name only half tongue-in-cheek) would be a cost-effective way of ensuring the lessons from the creation of the EHRC and other such bodies can be applied in every new such scenario.