Month: December 2007

Visiting local Post Offices before Christmas reminded me just what a mess this government has made of one of the few remaining nationalised industries. If anyone still thinks nationalisation is the answer, they would be well advised to study the Post office as an object lesson in how not to run a business. It is bad for the staff, for the customers and for taxpayers.

At a time when government worries about human carbon output, they switched the Post office from sending many of its letters and parcels by train to sending them by road. They were,apparently, unable to negotiate a contract that made sense for such a large users of the railways, with the railways where the track has recently been taken back into a form of public ownership!

Claiming to understand the importance of the large inherited network of small post offices, the government took away their main source of livelihood, the substantial counter business they used to transact for various government departments. Apparently, it is more efficient to transact these items through the for profit private banking sector, than through the nationalised postal counter network.

Their management style and the government business loss combined to create huge losses for the Post office. These were then reduced by a triple whammy for taxpayers customers and staff ?? a subsidy, big increases in the monopoly charges to carry a letter, and staff cuts with closures.

The atmosphere in the business is not good. Many of the staff resent the way they are expected to find the cost reductions the management say are necessary. The lower paid staff have to deal with customers, explaining to them the big increase in charges and the decline in service.

Customers resent the surging price of posting a letter, the move to single deliveries each day, and the likelihood that your delivery does not arrive before you leave for work. Middle ranking managers lack authority and responsibility to drive the business. They do not control their property and other assets, and they have little ability to try to increase the volume of business or try out new services.

If you take the case of my local main Post Office in Wokingham, you see a typical example of how local people are prevented from transforming the business. The Wokingham Crown Office and the sorting office are combined on the same premises in Broad Street, one of the principal streets in the town. The sorting accommodation is cramped and out of date, with some employees having to work in sheds beyond the main complex. The sorting office site is a very valuable site which could probably be redeveloped for office accommodation, freeing Post office capital to acquire a better located sorting site where vehicle access could be much easier and where there was enough decent accommodation for all staff.

The front of the building is a good looking early twentieth century structure, with room to add more counters which are much needed to deal with the growing numbers forced to use the main Post Office by the closure of smaller offices elsewhere. 2 more are scheduled in the latest cull which the Post office is currently consulting about. The users of these offices are very unhappy about the proposals. It is difficult to see how the main Office can deal with them at peak times without a major overhaul and expansion.

Unfortunately local management is not empowered to sort out the property mess and release the property potential. Capital spending permission comes from the centre, and that means it rarely if ever comes. Local management are not encouraged to try out new services that might work well in Post Offices in their area, and are not rewarded generously for increasing the revenue of the business.

If you think the only ways to raise profits are closures, higher prices, and cuts in staff numbers you end up with a very demotivated business. If you tell the staff that if they are more efficient getting around their delivery area they have to come back to base to do some other work, you do not motivate your postal workers readily or well.

You have a very old fashioned nationalised business. The irony is that it is government which is knocking the stuffing out of it. The double blow of the loss of government business and the introduction of competition means the Post Office is no longer capable of sustaining its traditional volume and range of services. The New Year will bring more closures, more price hikes, and more staff cuts.

We are witnessing one of those retail binges that characterise modern living.

The retailers play games with the public, deciding when to lower prices and offer knock out deals to attract people to the stores. The people play games with the retailers, playing hard to get until the deals on offer spawn exciting headlines.

More people now seem to leave buying what they really really want until after Christmas, reckoning they can buy it more cheaply.
Families that have lost the knack of self entertainment, bored by the vanilla viewing scheules for the holiday and by the endless repeats on TV, are inclined to venture out for some retail therapy, walking a little of the excess off around the shops.

It produces retail sales figures that become ever more difficult to interpret. Stores sales space has been expanded. The internet now takes a lot more shopping traffic. Individual sales days can see huge turnover and big footfall. Other weeks can seem poor. A few shops groups trade very wlel, others do badly.

The likelihood is that the retail sales will slow after the Christmas and January sales have seen a last consumer fling. People’s incomes are under pressure, as higher mortgage costs kick in for some, and higher taxes and higher petrol, heating and food bills for all. It is going to be more difficult arranging the personal loan or the bigger mortgage than it has been for decade.

The credit crunch has not gone away. The banks should be at their least helpful to customers wanting to borrow ahead of their year ends. When they relax a little it will still be at lower levels of advances that peolpe have been used to. Valuers will become much more cautious about the values of properties when assessing their worth to support loans.

This Christmas and New Year sees more people than ever taking a long break from the office. The economy may weaken over the turn of 2008, and we may find the going gets tougher in the new year.

It is traditional at this time of year for commentators to misrepseresent the Christmas story, urging more social housing to deal with the problem of homelessness.

If they read the bible story more carefully, they would see it was not a housing shortage but a hotel bedroom shortage that caused the trouble. This shortage had been brought on by a nasty government, forcing people to travel away from their homes to the large towns and cities to register and to pay a tax. It was some kind of combination of an an early forerunner of ID cards with a poll tax.

As far as we know Joseph had a home,and turned to a home in Nazareth after the stay in Egypt, where they successfully evaded the massacre of the innocents ordered by Herod.

The New testament story is interwoven with interesting questions of how Jesus should relate to the kings on earth. His advice of render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s was wise indeed. It recognised the brutal reality of Roman power, whilst reassuring people there were other values that the temporal power could not overcome in the free minds of men.

Happy Christmas to all my readers.
Politics and comment has been left aside for the day.

The message of Christmas, that love can conquer hatred and vengeance, is a powerful and attractive one to people of all creeds and of none. Fear comes of hatred and begets more hatred.

This UK government seems to be rooted in fear – fear of the reactions of people, fear of England, fear of the people they call middle Englanders, fear of terrorism, fear of being blamed, fear of the truth coming out when they make mistakes. It lashes out in a less brutal way than Herod, ordering more and more controls over the rest of us, and centralising more and more information about us in the hope they can use it to exert their will and protect themselves. It tries to terrify the rest of us into thinking we do need to surrender our freedoms because of some threat or other.

Fear leads to authoritarian responses. It leads to the wish to micromanage and control everyone and everything. The government pursues secrecy, coming to regard public information as it own bank account, to be spent only when it sees fit in ways it wishes to. Otherwise it is a miser with public information, hoarding it in case it falls into the "wrong hands". Paradoxically, its incompetence at times means the legitimately private part of this information does spill into the wrong hands on a regular but unpredictable basis.

Better government trusts people more. It lets them make more decisions for themselves. It does not constantly challenge their lifestyles and hector them to change the way they eat, look, live or think. It tries to do a sensible number of things well, sets out what it is doing, and is honest and apologetic when it makes a mistake. It leads by example and incentive, more than by additional regulation and penal tax.

It is difficult to govern well if you do not like many of the people you are governing, or think them wrong about many of the issues that matter. This government is learning the hard way, that if you take on the Briths people and try to make them something they do not want to be, you just antagonise them. Try liking them, warts and all, and you might find there is less to fear.

Today we learn that various NHS trusts have lost data concerning their patients.

We seem to be living in a surreal world, where the government spins out the stories about data loss, to try to drive the stories about house price collapses, mortgage shortages, the credit crunch, the black hole of Northern Rock, overborrowing and the balance of payments off the front pages.

Or maybe, for once, they have just lost control of the media. Harriet Harman’s attempt to get a debate going over cash for sex may have been their last counter spin ploy, to change the media weather. It is unusual – but not suprising with this government – to see a very senior member debating an issue in a "personal capacity" to avoid committing the government she is meant to represent and defend.

It is not surpising that the NHS like much of the rest of the public sector under Labour has been casual with our data. The whole government is casual or mismanaged from the top.

When we are allowed to cross examine them, Ministers are on the whole poorly briefed, and lack detailed control over their policies and their departments.

This is a government which never prepared itself to run anything properly. It was born of spin and will die from spin. In opposition they honed their skills at generating stories . They were an effective, hard hitting opposition, always willing to blame the government for anything that went wrong, and always able to put the worst construction on events.

In government they have carried on in a similar way, seeing their role as being to expose and destroy Conservative policy, ideas and party management as if they were still the opposition. They spend too much time on this, and too little time discharging the responsibilities of high office.

When I was sent by mistake a copy of a Cabinet Minister’s diary I could not help but notice when I was trying to find out whose it was and where to send it back to how little there was in it. There were the usual political and constituency meetings you would expect, but there was no morning to night bookings for meetings with officials to review and improve administration of the departments policies, and no rash of meetings with users of their services and those affected by their regulation to see if it was working properly. I remember as a Minister these dominated in my diary.

Too many of these ministers define their jobs in relation to media interviews and the opposition. They should start defining their jobs in relation to the public. It is not easy providing a good service with the large empires they have built up. All of them should spend more time with their departments getting things right. They should start by sending a clear message from the top,that the public matters and their data is important. They then have to have endless meetings to ensure that message is taken to every part of their empires, and reflected in operating procedures that will keep the data safe and lead to the public being better served.

Until they do so, the public will conclude that we do not matter to this government. We are necessary as a source of money to pay for the poor performance. We are the people they intend to regulate out of freedom. We are not valued customers of the state, so keeping our data secure is not a high priority.

The EU Constitution
ID cards
My personal subscription as a taxpayer to their badly handled Save Northern Rock campaign
The South East England Development Agency
The South East Regional Assembly
Half their consultancy contracts telling them how to do things ?? I dont mind which half
All red phased traffic lights
Next years supply of speed cameras
Next years supply of data discs for HMRC
Most of the 2008 legislative programme
The London congestion charge
?5 billion a year of regulation

Instead they will cancel

Many of the trains over the holiday period
Access to many public services

A couple of days into the new Lib Dem leadership, and the press who once thought him media savvy are nostalgic for the golden age of Vince Cable as acting Leader.

It is not surpising. The only thing he seems to believe in apart from the power of spin is the move towards a centralised EU with big government in Brussels. He will discover the hard way this is a very unpopular position with most British voters.

It is symptomatic that one of the first deeds of the Lib Dems as his leadership began was to vote against a referendum on the Constitutional treaty in the Edinburgh Parliament, at a time when the Conservatives and SNP were united in their wish for one and even Labour had the decency to abstain. That shows real determination to break promises and take the unpopular line.

It is difficult to see how Mr Clegg thinks he can break with present politics, as he says he wants to do, by beginning his leadership pledged to deny the referendum they promsied in the General Election, on the specious grounds that the Treaty is not the old Constitution rehashed.

It was also indicative of how he is not serious that his first appointment was of Mr Brian Eno as a senior adviser, before he even got round to finding a job for Mr Huhne or Mr Cable. I recommend websites and press articles about Mr Eno to anyone with curiosity about the kind of advice the new Leader may be getting from this man. Indeed, it would be a good pre Christmas game for surfers to come up with the best quotes and highlights from Mr Eno’s life that could help Mr Clegg in his current quandary.

His casual mistakes about his taste in music, and his clumsy announcement of his atheism pale into insiginificance compared to the Lib Dems flip flop over a vote on the Constitutional treaty. I could forgive them a lot if they join us in the lobbies to vote for a referendum on the Treaty, but it looks as if Clegg has no wish to do the decent and honest thing. That would mean jeopardising an important part of his credo. He is truly Euro Clegg.

The press has turned on Browns economic stewardship with a vengeance. For ten years I have tried to point out that Brown did not make the Bank of England independent, and that he had weakened it in a way which made it likely a future financial crisis would be handled badly. I lost the battle beneath the weight of Browns spin and the readiness of so many to believe him. For ten years I have pointed out that Browns preference for higher tax income and higher spending was bound to create an inefficient public sector, and weaken the overall performance of the UK economy. Many commentators turned a blind eye to this, because inflation and interest rates were low compared to the 1970s and the ERM period.

Now the press can find little good in Browns economic stewardship, seeing that the UK has suffered from higher interest rates, higher inflation and slower growth than the successful Anglosphere economies, and seeing that the UK economy is now unbalanced, with huge public sector and balance of payments deficits.

Browns period in charge of the UK economy as Chancellor and now as PM divides into three periods. In the first, 1997-2000, he carried on with Conservative spending plans, he repaid public debt, and continued the impressive recovery that started soon after we exited the ERM under the Conservatives. He was married to Prudence, and all went well.

In the second period, 2000-2006, Brown went on a huge spending spree, hurling money at the NHS, at education and many other areas of government. He and his colleagues just wanted to boast about record levels of spending. They did not seem to pause to ask what they were buying with all the money. They bloated the budgets for external advice and consultancy, they pushed up public sector pay more rapidly than private sector pay, set up many new quangoes, and recruited large numbers of extra people into the civil service. They did recruit some more nurses, teachers and doctors, just as previous governments did. They did rebuild some schools and hospitals that needed modernising, but there was overall too little to show for the vast increase in spending. Public sector efficiency fell in some areas, and performed very badly overall. Public debt started to build up, and Brown encouraged his own sub prime financing for government, creating a large number of off balance sheet ways of swelling public borrowing.

In the third period we are witnessing efforts to bring public spending growth under control. This is a very necessary task. Stupid mistakes like the meanness over the police pay settlement show a lack of political touch and a lack of understanding of the significant numbers. Worrying about ?40 million for the police is bizarre, at a time when ?25,000 million for Northern Rock threatens to upend any attempts at spending control. The UK economy will not start to perform as well as the more successful economies in the world until public spending is under proper control, and the public deficit is falling rapidly.

The UK is now paying the price of its own government excess in recent years. Too much public borrowing crowds out private sector activity. Browns lower tax rates on enterprise through his reform of capital gains tax and his movement down of the rates of income tax and corporation tax, were more than offset by huge tax rises elsewhere through the pensions tax, the congestion charge, national insurance and others. As a result the UK is now much less tax competitive than it was in 1997, and faces the threat of a worsening of parts of the capital gains tax regime.

It is most important that the UK government does get on top of its own spending and borrowing rapidly, to help stabilise a shaky economy. It is also important that the government stops digging an ever large hole on Northern Rock. I cannot believe the huge sums they are risking and committing to this venture, with still no sign that they are putting in basic banking disciplines to ensure we get our money back any time soon. These failures mean continued pressure on peoples spending power, a lower pound, and a falling growth rate.

There is something I want for Christmas.

It is a government which understands that people have seen through spin and are sick and tired of silly media games played by senior politicians.

We are fed up with consultations that are bogus, with promises that are not kept, with side stories that try to distract from the bigger issues and with Ministers who think legislation is just another press release to capture a headline.

We would like Ministers to spend more time in their offices sorting out the problems, and less time on the media telling us they are sorted, or trying to get us to look elsewhere when a disaster is all around them.

We would like Ministers to concentrate on the things where they can make a difference. We would like them to spend taxpayers money as carefully as they do their own. We would like them to find out what they can buy with extra cash before they put out a press release saying they are going to spend it.

We would like Ministers that had some commonsense. It seems stupid to penny pinch ?40 million over police pay, upsetting police officers, whilst asking Northern Rock how many noughts it needs on the latest cheque as the bill climbs higher than ?25,000 million of loans.

We would like Ministers who believe in their staff enough to ask them to do the work, rather than putting so many things out to management and other consultants so we pay twice to get it done.

We would like Ministers who wanted to tell Parliament first, rather than reaching for the spin doctor to brief things in advance. We would be grateful if when they say Parliament will decide something, Parliament holds a decent debate and has a vote before the Treaty is signed or the action taken.

We would like them to answer questions about their stewardship, instead of replying to every reasonable question about something the Conservatives said or did years ago.

We would like them sometimes to take their critics criticisms seriously, instead of trying each time to demolish the critic.

We want them to spend less on administration and spin, and more on the services on the ground. We want an end to regional government in England, an end to ID computers and cards, an end to so much extra regulation.

As we approach Christmas the country is weary of the lecturing and hectoring, the spin and the incompetence.

Could Ministers think long and hard over the holiday about why they are so unpopular? Could they come back refreshed in the New Year realising that people want more delivered for less. We want a government that likes us, not one which is always telling us we have to mend our ways, and that everything is our fault.