Can I first say that I bow to no man in my admiration of the achievements of the Audit Commission, having once co-authored the splendid “Counting Down To Competition” ISBN 0118864092, which is strangely no longer available on Amazon.To turn to last week’s news. The letter from the chairman of the Audit Commission in response to Eric Pickles decision to close it starts:‘The Audit Commission was set up by a Conservative Secretary of State in 1983, and I believe we have more than fulfilled Michael Heseltine's ambitions when he set it up.’Good point, well put. It acknowledges the rationalists’ view that public sector organisations exist to achieve specific public purposes. In fact, as we all know, there is a tendency for public sector organisations, like all complex systems, to take on a life of there own and to define their own purposes, in other words to become self-organising. In this model, the original public purpose becomes a starting point for the actual public purpose which is relevant to a specific time period. Partly this is because the environment in which organisations operate change and interact with the them. For instance, the Alkali Inspectorate of the 19th Century after 150 years of redefining its purpose in the face of change in industry and legislation is still with us as the Health and Safety Executive and a jolly good think too.Another factor must be that the legislators setting up public sector organisations cannot possibly predict exactly what is needed in the future. I recall Heseltine was quite busy in the early 80’s sorting out the Liverpool 8 riots (Toxteth to foreigners) and setting up garden festivals in an attempt to regenerate poor areas. He could not have known what local government would need by way of inspection and audit in 2010. So the Audit Commission’s public purpose had enough scope to make sure that it delivered what was roughly its actual public purpose, that of keeping local government on the strait and narrow.If the self-organising ability of the organisation fails to identify a relevant actual public purpose or fails to deliver on a relevant actual public purpose, then the organisation really has, er, no purpose. Since a purpose is a prerequisite for a system to be defined as a system a lack of purpose is fatal. The trouble is that when you are making, for instance, chocolate bars that no one wants to buy, your are purposeless and you go out of business pretty quick. When you are a complex, self-organising system like a public organisation, it may take a while for anyone to notice and the mechanism for closing you down is not quite as easy as just not buying your wares.So, it strikes me that we ought to make more use of sunset clauses in legislation. I see that the SNP this month offered to create a sunset clause in their alcohol bill. I wonder what would have happened if Lord Heseltine had inserted a sunset clause into the Act establishing the Audit Commission? And I also wonder if we ought to be making better use of mandatory sunset clauses in local authorities rather than relying officers informing members, on an ad hoc basis, that their schemes are not doing what they are supposed to do and are using more resources than planned.
