The report basically says no one gets fired for screwing up in the civil service and that there is no price for failure. It recommends some reforms that will not work because inherently governments have a coercive monopoly. Whereas in the private sector the profit motive works as an incentive because customers will stop buying crap services from businesses, hurting their profits. In the public sector if you stop paying your taxes the government will try and jail you. A mandarin hits it on the head in the report when he admits “Why is Whitehall poor at delivery? Because they’re aren’t any rewards or sanctions in place for civil service delivery.” Where is the incentive for better government?
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How much did it cost to report the bleeding obvious?
The answer is obvious. Open the civil service up for competitive tendering, diplomatic corps and all.
On the subj. of the “diplomatic”, had a middle-ranking (squadron leader) RAF officer staying with us a couple of months back and a more useless oxygen thief I have yet to meet. This insult to the memory of Guy Gibson was (I am not not kidding) unable to function without direct commands from his (civilian)partner – without her barking at him constantly he just stood on my terrace, his jaw slack, chin resting on his chest, staring into space, quite bizarre. It got worse. About halfway through his stay here he revealed that he had been…wait for it..”promoted” to the diplomatic corps and was going to go to the UK embassy in Ottowa. More interestingly, this partially-functional cretin then announced to all and sundry that the job he had obtained was “advertised internally”, i.e. non-civil servants need not apply. I asked my life partner why her old schoolfriend had married this waste of space – and what his 5 best points were – answer came there none. Even his own father (a very decent chap) seemed to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid speaking to him.
I found it impossible to imagine him holding down any work in civvy street, with the exception of perhaps a lollipop man or firewatcher. What a crock of s**t.
You know, it was just the other day that I took one single glance at a person I’d never seen before and said to myself, “I’ll be damned… that guy is a federal jobholder!”
It was instantly and then constantly obvious.
This happened aboard an Amtrak train here in the U.S.
Open the civil service up for competitive tendering, diplomatic corps and all.
Sounds like a recipe for even more bureaucracy to me. The way competitive tendering actually works is this: (1) bureaucrats redefine the problem; (2) bureaucrats spin from thin air and faerydust a model solution involving centralised recording and reporting and decision-making; (3) bureaucrats sketch all processes to be done in minute detail to achieve all that reporting and recording, and the sort of people they’d like doing them; (4) beauty contest in contractors produce lots of documents endorsing what the bureaucrats just said, including plans to set up from scratch organisational appendices to do all the things that a commercial attempt to tackle the original problem would just never a have bothered with, and various compliance models to show how irrelevant government fetishes, such as racial quotas, are to be catered to; (5) bureaucrats without any understanding of accounting or business choose whichever seems the cheapest; (6) very expensive lawyers on bothe sides write enormous contracts, which provide for contractors to be paid anyway if things go wrong, and to be paid more to alter the processes designed in abstract by the officials when they fail to work; (7) the taxpayer pays for everything, including the risk premium inserted by the contractors in case all the money they spent at (4)-(6) was wasted by not getting the deal, and the cost of financing all the new companies spawned.
The process just got a whole lot more complicated too.
What should be done with government departments is to reduce them to the size where they can be properly watched, hold them responsible for what they do – so on the contrary allow them to contract nothing out unless they want it lopped off – and to fully politicise the upper ranks, removing the fiction of a neutral civil service and destroying the permanent governement cadre.
As posted on http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/2006/08/ippr-blames-own-progeny.html :
For my sins, I joined the Lord Chancellors Office on a fast track graduate entrant scheme in the early 70’s.
This was the first time it had been tried.
After 13 weeks extremely inadequate training, I found myself at Bristol County Court, in charge of a division of 20 people.
I barely knew what they did all day, let alone get them to do it better. Why people think that having a degree automatically imbues someone with management skills, is beyond me.
I dont like telling people what to do, or bollocking them for petty stuff like lateness, or spending all my time and intellect on writing annual reports that were basically a complete load of bollocks and a waste of time.
Well I stuck it out for a decade or so then left out of frustration, boredom and disgust.
My poor wife works for the MOD still. She was up for promotion last year. She applied for a post that had 19 other applicants. Each and every one of the candidates were equally qualified, consistent box 1 and 2 markings, you could have put all the names in a hat, pulled one out and given them the job.
Ah but the Civil Service doesn’t like simplicity.
My wife spent 3 weekends of her own time, filling out her application. Then her boss had to fill out a report on her, then his boss had to write a report too. So that is, remember there are 20 people going for the job, 60 people involved in the filling of one middle ranking executive post. The man hours that involved was ridiculous.
Then you have to go before a board of people who know nothing about you, other than what is in the reports.
That all took about three months. She didn’t get the job. The person that did get the job, left after 6 months because they didn’t like it. And so the whole fucking process had to begin again.
When any organisation spends most of it’s time on it’s internal organisational proceedures, instead of doing the job they were formed to do, well you are in deep DO DO .
Ladies and Gentlemen! guess what!….
Not sure if this is related so delete if required, but I am an accountant for my sins. Once for about six weeks between proper private sector posts I worked as a management accountant within a local hospital trust.
A team of 10 consisting of 4/5 qualified acountants and part qualifieds were employed – our task, to move imaginary numbers from one budget to another so that each sector didn’t break their budget. Not a budget given to spend at each start of year but they just spent as and when needed and we played with the figures to make it look like we had budgeted for all expenditure.
This was deemed a success, no looking to see if the money needed to be spent, could be spent better either in situ or on other services. No finding out what the cost were for just simply moving large numbers about on a spreadsheet or two
“I didn’t take this job to work.”
–RETIRED POSTAL WORKER (we had to let him go.)
There is a feedback system: it’s called a ballot.
But just as dissatisfied customers to as store often keep their opinions to themselves, so voters will also often ignore such failings. But while consumers can take their money votes elsewhere, voters can’t, and quite often their choices all stink equally.
I would also rephrase it somewhat differently. Instead of the incentive for better government, it’s often the incentive to have a government that’s not worse.
Some Americans assume politicians have control over unionized federal bureaucrats. That rarely is the case. Bureaucrats with guaranteed lifetime employment ignore all but the most persistent and aggressive politicians. And persistent politicians are very rare.
It is worse than that. Because the government union donations are so important to Democrats, the bureaucrats control almost half of our politicians.
Thus poor performance is built into our federal bureaucracy and there are no correcting mechanisms.
This report, and many such complaints, are based on the mistaken belief that states actually intend to do those tasks they were originally intended to perform.
In fact, all organizations tend to develop internal agenda that have no relation to their purported mission statement. This problem affects, and infects, both public and private entities, but public entities are the only ones which can raise money to fund their excesses by fiat.
If you realize that the entire purpose of the state in this age is to grow as much as possible, extend its reach as far and wide as possible, coopt as many people and functions as possible, absorb as much money as possible, develop as byzantine a system of interlocking elements as possible, obscure responsibility for any practical outcome as much as possible, and secure pay and benefits for its membership as bountiful as possible, then it is no longer so mysterious in either its workings or its effects.
The state, and those who enable it and toil on its behalf, has been supremely successful across the globe in doing those things which it is, in the final analysis, actually trying to do. That these successes have little or no correlation with its intended, rhetorical purposes as defined in various charters and statutes is immaterial.
Obviously, the incentives for government to function just as it has are enormously powerful, consisting of power, righteous self image, and lucrative rewards.
There are few, if any, incentives to eschew the above attractive possibilities under the current accepted system of social and ethical values which celebrate power, unearned wealth, and institutional “compassion” for an unspecified catalogue of needs and wants which most closely resemble an astronomical black hole in their capacity for resources without positive, or even visible, outcomes.
While I appreciate the frustrated indignation behind this, and so many other, reports on this subject, I would submit that the correct question is:
“How did our system of social values become so degraded that an organization like this is universally acceptable, and any opposition to its machinations is immediately written off as a fringe, extremist position, unworthy of serious consideration?”