Outsourced by god! No, by Suffolk county council actually...

This is going to be fun to watch—and it's going to heartily piss off the unions, which will make it even more of a giggle.

Now Suffolk county council is taking an even more radical approach to public sector reform by proposing a "virtual" authority that outsources all but a handful of its services.

The Tory-controlled county's "new strategic direction", set for approval tomorrow, could see virtually every service outsourced to social enterprises or companies. The aim is to turn the authority from one which provides public services itself, to an "enabling" council, which only commissions them. The council hopes offloading services could shave 30% off its £1.1bn budget, as part of the government's drive to reduce the fiscal deficit.

Although councils have outsourced chunks of their services before, these proposals are regarded by experts as the first time a local authority has considered not directly providing any services at all.

Services would be offloaded in stages. While some "early adopter" services could be outsourced as early as this autumn, the rest would be divested in three phases from April 2011. Libraries, youth clubs, highway services, independent living centres, careers advice, children's centres, registrars, country parks and a records office are among the first services that could be divested.

Ultimately only a few hundred people could remain directly employed by the council, primarily in contract management. At present, the council employs around 27,000 people, 15,000 of whom work in education, which is set to be taken away from local authority control as the government converts schools to academies and free schools. Many of the remaining 12,000 could face either redundancy or be transferred to a social enterprise or the private sector.

As Timmy says, if we can save taxpayers 30% of £1.1 billion and provide services that are as good (or, hopefully, better) then this productivity leap is an excellent thing.

A 30% increase in efficiency, in productivity? Who wouldn’t want that?

Well, OK, maybe the people being made 30% more efficient aren’t going to be all that happy about it but then just as we don’t and shouldn’t run the market side of the economy for the benefit of companies but for consumers so we shouldn’t be running the public services for the providers but for the consumers.

And for the consumers the same or better at 30% off is a wondrous deal.

Naturally, the unions are up in arms—no doubt the leader of the local Unison branch is basically watching her revenue-target bonus melt away into the aether. But I would imagine that not having to deal with the unions—which are not only a pain in the ring but artificially inflate wages—was a definite positive factor in Suffolk county council's calculations.

The move also raises fears about the quality and extent of services in poorer areas. "There are areas in Ipswich and Lowestoft that are among the 10% most deprived areas of the country. In these areas things like libraries and children's centres will fall by the wayside because there won't be the ability to attract the voluntary help," said Martin [, a Labour councillor].

That might, of course, be an indication that libraries and children's centres are not particularly important to the people of Ipswitch and Lowestoft, although I would imagine that the colossal amounts of paperwork, administration, CRB checks, etc. that voluntary workers would require will also not help.

Anyway, as Timmy also says, we don't know if this plan is actually workable.

I don’t know whether this is going to work, you don’t, the council doesn’t and nor do the unions.

True. But we can look at roughly similar plans and see how they panned out. And, in the case of Maywood, in the US, it has gone pretty well.

Despite the public money it saved, the outsourcing project was highly controversial. When it was announced, residents feared anarchy would follow; old people thought they would be mugged in the streets; local storekeepers wondered if anyone who would stop them from being robbed; families presumed parks and libraries would close. "You have single-handedly destroyed this city," the about-to-be-sacked city treasurer told council members, during the acrimonious meeting where the outsourcing scheme was unveiled.

One month on, however, the naysayers have gone quiet. Maywood's parks are still open and greener than ever. The leisure centre is overflowing with excited children. City Hall appears to be running smoothly. And almost everyone you meet says that since the city outsourced everything, services have improved and petty crime and gang violence have – on the surface, at least – virtually disappeared.

"I don't see gangsters on the streets any more," said Maria Garciaparra, bringing her children to the library. "I don't see new graffiti. I still have a park for them to play in and this place to get books, so who cares whether the city employs anyone or not? If this works, then down the line, I'm sure plenty of other places will copy it."

Indeed.

There is another option

Apparently councils are being told that they aren't going to get so much money from central government.

Now, when funding is being cut, there are two routes that organisations could take:

1. raise more money
2. stop spending so much money

Which route do you think that our local councils are going to take...?

That's right: they are going for the raise more money route. And one of the ideas that they have come up with is that private businesses should pay for any free parking that they supply to their employees.

Initially, the parking levy was seen as a way to tackle congestion and cut carbon emissions. Now, there is growing evidence it is also being seen as a source of extra cash. Nottingham City Council will be the first council to impose a £250 levy on local employers, from 2012. Within two years, the bill will rise to £350 and will target all companies with 11 or more parking spaces.

A Daily Telegraph investigation found many other councils are now preparing to follow suit.
Bristol City Council, for example, in its draft strategy, describes the levy as a "revenue stream" to help fund other transport initiatives.

Under proposals being considered by York City Council, the charge would be paid "by the employer or charged to the employee".

I absolutely cannot see how York City Council could possibly charge employees for parking on their employers' private land; sure, they could charge the employers, and the employers could pass that charge onto their employees, but that's not quite the same. But again, I don't really see how any council can be allowed to dictate the uses to which anyone puts their own, private land.

Hampshire County Council, meanwhile, is considering a "modest"—but unspecified—charge for the south of the region, including Southampton and Portsmouth, to, says a consultation document, "redress the imbalance between free commuter parking for some staff at office complexes" and "parking for other staff in public spaces where payment is required".

Yeah, well, the public spaces can be charged for by the council because the council owns the public spaces. It does not own private land.

Further, if Hampshire County Council really wanted to "redress the imbalance between free commuter parking for some staff at office complexes" and "parking for other staff in public spaces where payment is required", then it could simply stop charging for the public spaces, couldn't they?

But no, that wouldn't work, would it? For how else would councils be able to employ people to sit around on their arses all day, or go off sick for six months at a time?

Here, one employee for a large inner London authority lifts the lid on the culture of inertia and incompetence at his workplace. The Mail knows the true identity of the man - a graduate who has been a planning officer for eight years. But to protect his job, he is writing under an assumed name.

Monday morning, it's 10am and I'm late for work - but there's no point hurrying because even though I should have been at my desk 30 minutes ago, I know I'll be the first to arrive at the office.
...

Our department has 60 employees and—until last Tuesday—a budget of £22million.

I've been there for two years and in that period the only time I've ever seen every employee present and correct was at the Christmas party.

At least ten people will be off sick on any one day. The departmental record holder is Doreen - she has worked a grand total of eight days in 14 months.

Doreen must be the unluckiest woman in the country.

In the past year and a half she claims she has: fallen victim to frostbite; been hit by a car; and accidentally set herself on fire.
But she's really pulled out all the stops with her latest excuse: witchcraft. That's right, Doreen believes somebody in Nigeria has cast a spell on her and that it would be unprofessional of her to attempt to do the job she is paid £56k a year for while under the influence of the spell.

She has already been off for four months on full pay. I've no idea how long this spell lasts, but my guessing would be six months to the day - the exact amount of time council employees can take off on full pay before their money is reduced.
But having just eight weeks of full pay left won't be a problem for Doreen and the rest of the council's sickly staff - they'll simply return to work when the six months is up, put in a day or two's work and then go off sick for another six months on full pay again. Easy.
...

All credit to the bright-eyed young HR manager who, last year, wanted to dismiss a senior employee who had been off sick for three months.

The employee had still been using his company mobile phone, from Marbella.

However, the employee was able (with a little help from the mighty Unison union) to argue that there's no reason why 'sick' people can't rent villas in the Costa Del Sol.
...

Back to the day's business. Jerry is the next to arrive at 10.25am - before he takes his jacket off he performs his morning ritual of taking both his phones off the hook.

God forbid that any resident and council tax payer should be able to speak to him and get some of the advice he's paid £64k a year to dispense.

Jerry is 63 and two years from retirement. He is what is known in the civil service and local government as an 'untouchable' - he's been at the council for more than 40 years, does no work, but would cost an absolute fortune to get rid of.

So he's left alone to play online poker, Skype his daughter in Florida and take his two-hour daily snooze at his desk, no doubt dreaming of the day when his gold-plated public sector pension will kick in.

If you think Jerry's pay is generous, consider this: the head of my department is on an annual salary of £170k plus bonuses, his deputy nets £99k and even the office PAs are on a very respectable £38k - just two thousand less than I get.
...

Although it's two years since I started working for this authority I've also worked for two other London boroughs in various capacities over a period of 12 years. In that time I've never known anybody be sacked, no matter how inept and unprofessional they may be.
...

Next week there is a two-day course on 'letter writing skills' - I dearly hope that Jackie, our departmental PA, will attend this one. I've given up using her and now type my own correspondence and reports.

The last time she typed a letter for me (to an architect) she misspelt 'accommodation' and 'environment' throughout.

I gently pointed this out to her and asked her to redo the document. But she went sick for two weeks with stress, complaining that she was being bullied.

When my boss called me in to discuss this I, jokingly, said: 'Well I'll just let her misspell everything in future, shall I?' To which he replied: 'Yes, I think that's best for now.'
...

The cuts and pay freezes are desperately needed, but the one thing Mr Osborne will never be able to control is the culture of inertia and inefficiency that is rife throughout the public sector.

Of course, when I tell my friends in the private sector about my working conditions, they can scarcely believe it. As the recession bites, they consider themselves lucky to be holding on to their jobs, and are willing to work extra hours or take a pay freeze to ensure their firm's survival.

In the public sector, though, there is no competitive edge; no incentive to cuts costs or improve efficiency. Few genuinely fear for their job security, protected as they are by threats of union action every time the axe looks likely to fall.
...

In my authority's borough, the average householder pays £1,330 a year in council tax. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to know that they're funding Jerry's internet gambling and Doreen's never-ending sick pay.

Indeed. And now anyone who parks at work will be paying extra for council workers to sit about and do fuck all.

I defy anyone to read the above-linked article (of which I have only quoted the highlights) and declare that councils have no room to cut budgets; they do and they could do so, if the people at the top were not just as corrupt, venal, lazy and stupid as their overpaid, ignorant, work-shy underlings.

And supporting all of this waste and venality, of course, are the trade unions—most especially Unison. Who are, it seems, are continuing to be paid millions of pounds in "re-structuring" funds. This is, in itself, a very bad move for the Coalition: you don't make pacts with crooks, or try to buy off these devils—their power needs to be strangled and their funds destroyed.

Then, if anyone has the will, we can start going through these public bodies and sack 90% of the staff and whittle their responsibilities down to the bare essentials and nothing more.

Something, as they say, has got to be done. And that something does not involve levying yet more taxes on an already over-burdened population in order to piss it away on useless, feckless wastes of space.

Setting the regions free

Following on from my last post—in which your humble Devil advocated splitting the UK into federal "states"—Wat Tyler has evidently been thinking along the same lines. He notes, as I did, the disparity in the voting trends, but also provides some figures for just how much the Greater South East (GSE) actually contributes to the rest of the UK. And please note that these figures are after that public spending on that infrastructure which is meant to give this region such an unfair advantage.

We haven't got time right now to crunch the very latest numbers, but in 2006-07, Oxford Economics estimated [PDF] that the GSE contributed nearly £40bn to the rest of the country (ie tax payments less public spending received by the GSE). Or getting on for £2000 per capita.

Here's their picture (the GSE comprises Eastern, Greater London, and South East regions, and note that in this analysis all North Sea taxes have been attributed to Scotland):



Bottom line?

If we're going to open the issue of electoral reform, we need a proper look at the entire shooting match. As well as PR, we need to look at the structure of government. A separately elected English Parliament is clearly on the agenda, but we also need to return fiscal power to local communities.

The people round our way are sick of getting outvoted by the beneficiaries of socialist fantasies elsewhere in the country. It just ain't fair.

Of course, life, as they say, isn't fair. But the trouble is (lest you think that I'm entirely motivated by spite) that it isn't only the South East that suffers—it is the enterprising people in those other regions that also suffer. As the state spends more and more on various services and pet projects, they crowd out the businesses that would have been able to generate some real growth through providing said services.

Without a strong culture of enterprise, there can be no growth. Big businesses do not, in general, create jobs—the number of people that they employ remains fairly static (although the type of people that they employ may change over time). It is small businesses that provide around 80% of new jobs in the economy.

The state hand-outs are not actually helping the rest of the UK to prosper: they are simply postponing that day of reckoning that will come when the money runs out—a day that is coming rather sooner than most people hoped.

In the end, we return to the problem that those in receipt of state largesse tend to vote for whichever party is going to increase the supply of "free" money, and that is entirely unfair. Because, as I have noted innumerable times, that money isn't free: someone had to work bloody hard for it, and then have it extorted from them under threat of violence—so that the government can hand it out to one of their favoured supplicants.

Various solutions to the problem of certain people voting themselves more of other people's money have been proposed: perhaps we should disbar anyone who is in nett receipt of state money from voting—that would wipe out anyone who lives on benefits and anyone who works for the state. It's certainly an option, but people tend to be sensitive about restricting the voting franchise.

Ideally, of course, the government simply wouldn't pay out any benefits at all, and the number of people that it would employ would be so tiny as to make no difference. But that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

So, I propose a federal system instead: a system that fits in with the Tories' localism plans, and which brings power—in the form of raising taxes—far closer to the people.

Something needs to be done.