It's not just the economy, stupid...

Yeah...

So, not too great not to have written stuff for basically two months, is it! This posting shall therefore be a fascinating thought splurge about the first thing to occur to me about what has been going on in the world since my last post:

It's not just the economy, stupid...
It is becoming increasingly apparent that many of the recent decisions the government has made are more about ideology than anything else. While we are being told time after time after time that cutting the deficit is the main aim, there are decisions being made that actually make little sense financially. One such contradiction was rather eloquently explained in an article by Polly Toynbee last week(1), and concerns the so called 'bonfire of the quangos' which was announced only a few days after Sir Phillip Green finished his report into government waste.

Green reported that increased centralisation of government spending and procurement would be the best way to save money. How do you best centralise government procurement and spending? Either within departments or (all together) in quangos.

So there's a bit of an inconsistency with the government toasting all these quangos when they are in fact very likely to save money. For the uninitiated, they tend to exist as a way of centralising functions across a service (e.g. education, health, policing) and that these central functions tend to be more economical than individual schools, hospitals or police forces doing things individually. They also tend to help set national or professional standards, and they tend to mean that something approaching 'best practice', or 'best value' is achieved nationally.

Scrapping Becta (the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency), who procure the best computers and programmes for schools as effectively and cheaply as possible,leaves the alternative now that "all headteachers will be on their own, thumbing through brochures, subjected to marketing calls from sales reps trying to bamboozle them with gizmos and super-new electronic teaching aids that may be the best or the worst. Even if teachers succeed in choosing the best, they will get the worst prices without mass purchasing"(1).

A frequent cry from Tories is 'let teachers teach' and 'cut red tape' - getting rid of quangos like Becta means less time for teachers to teach. It moves 'red tape' into the teachers' in tray, and asks teachers in each school to make decisions they may not have been trained for, rather than leaving these decisions in the hands of other professionals who can make a decision for schools nationally.

On top of this, reports have suggested that the cost of the current round of quango cuts will equal the savings they make, and that the same agencies we have now could run for 10 years before there is a financial benefit from getting rid of them (newsflash, if you sack people, they need redundancy pay, and you'll still have leases you are obligated to pay, and... etc).

So these cuts are not about reducing the deficit, or saving money, they are part of a small state agenda that the public are far less enthusiastic about than the government (who knew what the Tories stood for before the election, they never said). So what is the result of cutting quangos like Becta? Lots of people out of work, with less money to spend to help avoid a double dip recession (and we need to be spending, according the deputy of the Bank of England (3)), and who may eventually need state benefits since the chances of getting a job in the current economy are awful...

Call me naive, but aren't we better off with people in decent jobs so they can support their families? Aren't we better off with professionals in place to help drive best practice and best value? Aren't we better off when professionals like head teachers and doctors are supported by organisations that aim to make their lives easier? Aren't we better off with headteachers spending their time running schools and teaching children, rather than deciding whether the next lot of PCs are coming from Dell or not?

That's enough from me. This has been a bit of a heavy one, eh!

Onwards!

Levin

References: (1)
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/11/sir-philip-green-quango-waste
(2) www.guardianpublic.co.uk/quangos-cuts-savings (3) www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/sep/28/spend-save-economy-bank-england-chief