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There can be no doubt that words or phrases with a clear meaning become distorted or changed through common usage. John Ransford is chief executive of the Local Government Group Probably, this is true in any language, but this tendency can be lethal when values are added – definitions which are intended as positives can immediately be given negative undertones in common parlance. For instance, as a student sociologist, I was taught that bureaucracy was essential to an ordered society. A system of administration, based on a division of labour, designed to undertake a large body of work in a routine manner, was deemed essential to advanced economics. Yet the term is now used to denote obstruction, complication and sheer bloody-mindedness to produce the opposite outcome. I guess the modern image is one of an army of pen-pushers, or more accurately, dedicated e-mailers, committed to frustrating the desired outcomes or value for money of any project. This stereotyping is very relevant to the current public service challenge of how to retain and improve quality service outcomes from diminishing resources. The common mantra, understandably, is to protect the frontline and remove all those layers of management, administration and non-jobs – bureaucracy, in short – which frustrates the service-provider. All this makes good copy, and there can be no doubt that, in times of plentiful resources, non-essential functions are funded and sometimes sustained. However, in ensuring that the taxpayer obtains best value, and people receive the services on which they depend, we must ensure that those at the frontline can carry out their tasks effectively. Doctors, teachers and social workers can be very good managers of human and physical resources, but the skill base is not universal to all of them. Just as trained and qualified managers who do not share the value base of the services they lead are likely to run into trouble, so practitioners who have no concept of the priorities and resource base in which they operate will be, at best, frustrated, and at worst, dysfunctional. We all need the right skill mix, effective teamwork and the most efficient use of defined resources to serve the public well. In that sense, strategic planning is as essential to the desired outcomes as the obvious contribution made by good service delivery. So, there is a case for bureaucracy, although it is wise to avoid that term. Demonising particular roles and functions is dangerous. It must be always the quality and quantity of product that counts.

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