2014 September 28 « Dr Alf's Blog

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Dr Alf’s discussion about interims, the interim market and the UK public sector presupposes that the Government and Civil Servants actually want transformation and that if they do they want the most competent and effective people to bring that about.

The evidence based on the amount of fraud, waste and mismanagement of the UK public sector over the last 100 years is that the Government is keen to preserve the status quo and to develop structures like NHS procurement and MOD procurement which allow scope for waste and the plundering of budgets year after year after year.

The MOD has not completed a single piece of procurement or major project on time or to budget since before the Crimean War and now with Prince 2 as the mandatory standard, allowing for 6% to 8% project tolerances it is still billions over budget with no clear explanation as to where all the money went.

The Home Office has been described as “not fit for purpose” at least 5 times by 5 different Home Secretaries, the police under report crime by up to 50% and in my county (Hertfordshire) it is 30%.

The NHS produces the worst cancer treatment outcomes in Western Europe and has seen a 189% increase in managers and a further 225% increase on top of that.

Everywhere one looks at infrastructure (roads, hospitals, schools, airports, bus stations, railway stations etc) one sees an obvious mismatch between levels of tax levied and the pitiful amount of infrastructure actually built).

Look at our education system and compare it at state level with others abroad and you see expensive trendy heads and young people left behind as unsocialized blockheads in a world in which we are still nowhere close to paying our way.

The public sector does not want interims or reform, or Dr Alf style “radical transformation”; it would prefer that he and people like him retired to warmer climates, did other things and that those interims with less experience remained on the bench, growing older and poorer by the day, until their final demise.

What the public sector wants is to be left unscathed, packed with useless people engaged in non jobs all pretending that things are just fine.

That requires more involvement by Big 4 consultancies to create the illusion of change and reform when in fact what is being created is a modern paradise for latter day “Captain Pugwashes”(He was the childrens television lazy pirate character) to waste money at scale.

John Gelmini

English: Day 3 of the protest Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)





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Interesting though this Blog from Dr Alf is, the problem with youth debt is that it is unnecessary.

It should not require well meaning pop stars or impresarios or anyone else to relieve youngsters of debt, which they should never have accumulated in the first place. Nor should the youngsters aspire to be pop stars to remove their debt. The politicians have their priorities backwards.

Bright young people who are being educated at university represent the intellectual seed capital and knowledge capital of a nation’s future. It should be heavily invested in and nurtured, without the need for students to incur debts.

For example, the money to pay for it in the UK needs to be found from things like EU budget contributions (£12 billion gbp a year), the Barnett Formula £35 billion gbp a year, wasted foreign aid, 12 billion gbp a year, most of which gets stolen by corrupt dictators and officials, and the continuing waste represented by too many councils, quangos, police constabularies, fire commands, BBC managers, NHS managers and overpaid Head Teachers who fail to do their job.

The Japanese and others have to look carefully at their priorities but there should be no student or young person’s debt for Japanese and other newspapers to write about.

John Gelmini