A new Government and new ideas - for some it is a time of new hope and excitement as people get to grips with their new responsibilities and start to make their mark on the country. For many, many more it is a frustrating time as we try to second guess what the new Government will do and wait for permission to carry on with the process of running the country and its key services. The rhetoric is amazing but what does it mean for the person in the office?
One of the big new ideas appears to be to remove Quangos and get rid of all that awful red tape that has been put in place in the last 12 years of Labour. Bizarrely, quangos and all that red tape was there before too, but had different names. Local enterprise boards that are being contemplated were Training and Enterprise Councils, and their Business Links. All that red tape about learners was the Individualised Student Record and the Annual Pupil Census and the TFW8 (Training for Work form 8) instead of the Individual Learner Record and something too secret to mention from DWP (Department for Work and Pensions).
The reason some of these quangos at least are out there is because the huge departments at Moorfoot and Longbenton among others have been scaled down pretty drastically, but the work remains, it is just done by an organisation with a contract and some other responsibilities thrown in like being nice to other organisations with a related remit. But as it is a separate organisation, you can gradually over time make working conditions intolerable and force people off work with stress and still feel good about Civil Service bashing. The unions are fragmented and unable to help staff to regain self-respect and a reasonable work-life balance or indeed a working day of less than 9 hours, excluding travel. Many of these individuals are therefore looking forward to the time when their last vestige of benefit in working for the public good kicks in - their frozen Civil Service pension. Let's hope they are allowed to keep it.
The bid idea of removing red tape and oversight and leaving schools, colleges and hospitals free to determine their own priorities and spending only works until one of them, or someone related but removed from them, slips up and suddenly there has to be regulation to control the use of public funds. Until the MP expenses scandal, Colleges were being encouraged to drive up quality and standards themselves and through peer review. When the scandal broke, self-regulation was consigned to the scrap heap - if MPs couldn't be trusted to behave, how could Colleges possibly cope with the responsibility of improving themselves?
So the cycle starts again, and the big ideas will be touted round. Public servants will lose their jobs, small consultancies will go through hard times (this NEVER happens to the Big Five), lots of new brochures and policies will be printed and lots of red tape repealed or banned, until the next slip up and misuse of public funds is spotted and it all builds again. In about a decade I will be able to recycle this article and sprinkle just a little more cynicism into it, having been round the loop again.
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