We seem to have daily reports of things going wrong in the provision of our public services, the latest examples being the bad mistake made by the BBC in its edition of a Panorama programme detailing the track record of Donald Trump, to the failure in our prisons service and just a day ago abuse in a residential home for young offenders. However, I learnt that in the case of the Panorama programme, the editing error actually occurred in a small company to which the making of the documentary about Trump had been outsourced and the Panorama chiefs themselves were unaware of the edit mistake. But this got me thinking about some of the wider issues involved and it has occurred to me that when errors do occur they are often (but not always) in the outsourced part of the service which had been insufficiently regulated. I wish to revisit the intellectual climate of the early 1990’s in this country where all governments were faced with a growing demand and call for services in all areas of our lives and government itself was finding it difficult, if not impossible, to be the provider of such services. The intellectual climate of the day was dominated by very much by what was called the ‘New Public Management’. New Public Management (NPM) is a managerial approach that uses private sector business techniques to improve the efficiency and accountability of public service organisations. Key features include performance measurement, competition, market mechanisms like contracting out, and treating citizens as customers. Critics argue that NPM can compromise public ethics and accountability, and erode public servants’ sense of duty, though it has also led to some innovations. One particular book captured the spirit of this new approach and it was Osborne and Gaebler: Reinventing Government published in 1992. The whole thesis of this book can be summed up in 4 words which is that the role of government in its provisions of services to the citizenry should be ‘steering rather than rowing’ this approach indicated that governments should not provide services themselves but outsource much of the day-to-operations of services to the companies in the private sector whilst the role of government was to commission and then to monitor companies or other agencies to be the actual provider of the services. I very much witnessed this in the care provided for Meg in the final year or so of her life when, in theory, the county council social services department was responsible for providing care for Meg but in practice the actual care service was provided by a private agency. Social services paid for the service but if there were shortcomings in the service (e.g. a worker phoning in sick at a few minutes notice so that I myself was often called in to physically assist the one care worker who actually turned up to care for Meg even through handling was a ‘two person’ job) then social services would not necessarily be aware of shortcomings in the service, unless they were extreme. So the wider point here is that government in both its national and local departments should spend a lot of its time in effort in commissioning and regulating but not actually providing. But the absence of sufficient resources which has led to the outsourcing in the first place has often led to a lack of regulation because government cannot regulate everything that is done in its name – if the regulation were to become too onerous and comprehensive, then the costs associated with this would be greater than the ‘savings’ associated with the outsourcing and the government should provide these services more directly. We find an extremely good example of this in the Probation service which was effectively outsourced a few years ago but the private sector agency made such a poor job of it all that the government was forced to bring it back ‘in house’ and to make the probation service a sort of extension to the prison service.
In the morning, I went along to my Tai Chi class and I found it quite enervating. But towards the end of the session my knees and hips are starting to complain a little but nothing that is unbearable. As soon as our class is over, I get together with mu ex-Bank manager friend and we always have a good wander down memory lane. Today, for example, we were having reminiscences about some of the films seen in our youth such as Cliff Richards: ‘Summer Holiday’ and a film called ‘A Summer Place’ Actually, the theme tune from this is still played with some regularity on ClassicFM radio station and the web tells me that the theme tune won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1961, the film being made in 1959. I think I saw it three times altogether although a modern audience would no doubt regard it as Americanised over-sentimentalised mush. But for the theme music to survive and still be played some 65 years later tells us something about the memorability of the tune. After our coffee, I hit the road to do my normal weekend shopping which was at Aldi which is reasonably quiet at this time in the morning. I bought a few extra things for our weekend meals and finally called in in to collect my daily newspaper and a TV programme guide I have started to buy on a weekly basis. Later in the afternoon, I received a text from my University of Winchester friend whose wife has now been admitted to a hospital with a lung infection where she will be treated with antibiotics and a whiff of oxygen. I am naturally more than a little upset and concerned on my friend’s behalf but I have despatched a text to offer whatever support and comfort I can muster over such a distance.
The Trump/Epstein affair is unfolding inch by inch – of course, if a’smoking gun’ is found, this could cause the end of the Trump presidency, Despite resisting a vote on the Epstein files for some time, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has defended his approach as being in favour of maximum transparency. The speaker, who is in charge of tabling votes in the lower chamber, said he was really opposed to the ‘reckless disregard’ for victims in the Democrats’ approach. A vote has now been forced via a discharge petition by House Democrats, which bypasses Johnson’s authority. He said ‘more is to come’ on Epstein, with the vote set for next week on releasing all unclassified files.