English: brief diagram comparing the role of civil servants in the UK and US constitutions. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Dr Alf is right! It’s time to outsource the majority of the public sector. This will focus attention on effective public service and value-for-money.
The UK public sector that we now have, especially post-austerity, is not fit for purpose; it’s unaffordable and is beyond any hope of meaningful reform, and certainly not by Big 4 consultants and people like McKinsey’s who have a vested interest in creating no meaningful change at all. Top consultants are charged to the public sector at GBP5,000+ per day, plus expenses.
The UK public sector has become self-serving, arrogant and incompetently run, by a series of people who are happy to institutionalize waste. There is a complete lack of accountability when things go wrong, and when malfeasance, fraud, or bad procurement practice are plain for all to see.
By a process of osmosis over time, it has become a job creation scheme for a wide assortment of risk-averse people, who often seem devoid of common-sense, business knowledge or any concept of what a country has to do to create real jobs, exports and prosperity.
At the top of the food chain, we have Civil Service “Mandarins”, who were originally taught Latin and Greek, as a result of a “Classical Education” . This, it would appear, gives them the ability to confuse Ministers, generally less knowledgeable than themselves, and to come up with reasons why nothing should be done to solve a particular problem. “Yes Minister” is alive and well! {Here is a link to extracts published on youtube)
In 1885, at the height of British Imperial power, there were just 15,000 civil servants – now the NHS alone is Europe’s largest employer and produces the worst cancer survival rates and treatment outcomes in Western Europe.
Civil servants often treat the public more like sheep than customers. Some of them believe, and are on the record as saying, that they see their task as managing the UK’s decline as “gracefully as possible”. I would suggest that perhaps what they really mean by this is: that they have no strategies for reversing the decline; they have given up on the public; and they seek to accelerate the decline, without too many people noticing.
Currently the “Big 4” run up a bill of £15.5 million gbp a year for public sector and local authority transformation, yet the UK is 17th in the world for value per taxpayer pound and is delivering £1 gbp of value as compared to Singapore’s £3 gbp across all services. What about payment by results? That would shake up the political leaders, the bureaucrats, the Mandarins and their chums in supporting services, like technology, outsourcing, recruitment, consulting etc.
The Singapore Government now has a program of selling its governance model to other countries so that these more enlightened countries can emulate the stunning success of that island state. The UK should look at how that country is run and apply the remorseless logic of Lee Quan Yew to the UK public sector, to overseas investment, defense, procurement, productivity, inward investment, education, immigration, crime, and punishment etc.
Over and above that, most of the UK’s institutions need to have a value-for-money test applied to them and those beyond their “sell by date” must be cut down to size, stripped of power or abolished.
Policing, the judiciary and the prison service should remain in public hands but most other things, as proposed by Dr Alf, should be outsourced. It’s the best way to focus attention on effective public service and value-for-money.
Dr Alf's Blog 