Two things caught me eye recently one is Margaret Hodge and the PAC producing a report that the Civil Service fiddles savings targets (apparently they will be looking into the question of what religion the Pope is next). The other was an Irish paper on how to sort out the mess they are in with their civil service.The embattled ruling party in the Irish Republic, Fine Gale, this week produced a document called "Reinventing Government" (no, not the book, that spawned "Best Value", this is something entirely different, oh dear me yes ), which had in it their plans for shrinking the state. The background is that, in September 2010 the hole in the balance sheets of their big banks who lent to property developers became apparent and they had to bail them out by going cap in hand to the European Central Bank who lent the money on the proviso that they cleaned up their regulatory act with the consequence that public spending has to be massivly cut to pay the ECB back. For UK local government the FG plan is interesting for lots of reasons; but, especially because of the amount of times that we the UK are cited as paragons of good practice. I have noticed this before, in fact even in the original "Reinventing Government" by Osborne and Gaebler, they used UK Executive Agencies as examples of good practice. So, maybe we are a lot better at this bureaucracy thing than others or maybe we talk a good fight when researchers Ryan Air it over the Irish Sea to find out what we are up to. Either way, I commend the Irish Reinventing Government to you as a kind of "ghost of Christmases to come" unless we get our own acts together.Now, turning to "4th report - Progress with VFM savings and lessons for cost reduction programmes" which among other things suggests that "Accounting Officers should be, as the title indicates, personally accountable for delivering the full amount of savings committed to..." what, like s151 officers have been in Local Government since 1982? They then go on to say "The value for money savings target for CSR07 was not based on robust evidence about what departments could realistically achieve, and it is not surprising therefore that performance has fallen well short of ambitions." No, it is not suprising that a blanket target regime, taking no account of the capability of the organisation, should fail. The rest of their recommendations follow the same lead and none of them tackle the real issue which the Irish, God Bless 'em, have at least mentioned. The real issue, as you know, is that governments have been seduced by the idea of a "front line" and "back office". Gershon has created the concept that there is loads of waste to be squeezed out of inefficiencies and waste in administration some of which can be fed back to the front line. He are right up to a point. But, the real improvements come from rethinking the role of the state in, to use the FG opening statement "... enriching the lives of citizens in a way that cannot be encapsulated in the profit and loss approach of the market." The problem with ideas like leaning the back office is that it is really just "make work" unless it is accompanied by a proper rethink of the whole system. The irony is that the PAC's members all want to make government better. But their reports all make a big splash in the news and propagate the myth that if we only sorted out the admin, those plucky staff on the front line could get on with their job.
