Tory controlled borough of Barnet adopts budget airline model | Politics | The Guardian .
A leading Conservative council is using the business model of budget airlines, Ryanair and easyJet, to inspire a radical reform of public service provision which is being seen as a blueprint for Tory government.
Actually, it's no such thing. It's about cuts:
In his day job [council leader Mike] Freer, 49, is a consultant to the banking sector and he has worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountants, to draft plans to save up to £16m a year from the council's costs.
How? As the Guardian notes:
One of Freer's most controversial reforms so far has been to cut live-in wardens from sheltered housing.
The council says this level of support is too costly and it is planning to replace live-in wardens with "floating" wardens across the borough, possibly run by the private sector.
But as one resident noted:
"It is essential to see somebody and know somebody cares about you," he said. "I have suffered a lot of depression over the last few years and Janet knows if I am down or not. She comes and chats, sits in your flat and speaks to you like a mother or a sister. When she is away, the place is like a graveyard."
This does not go down well with local Tories apparently: it is the state replacing the family and that will never do.
Well maybe theire rleatives can afford to pay for this service, but I think it appropriate for all elderly people - including those with limited or no family.
As the Guardian editorial notes:
Whether or not the Tory devolutionist rhetoric goes the forgotten way of Gordon Brown's one-time "new localism", services administered locally are in line for a battering. Competing national politicians have extended protection to centralised aspects of expenditure, such as health and international aid, which only leaves town halls more exposed. Council tax has risen steeply over a dozen years, making it hard to increase it much further. As in the 1980s, there will be new "local discretion" in interpreting social obligations. As in the 1980s, there will also be much talk of choice and of charity. And as in the 1980s, it will soon ring hollow if the upshot is that there is no one around to help an old lady in need.
My prediction is simple: expect a great many old ladies in need who will face massive hardship as a result of the policies of ex-PWC bank consultants.
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A revised property tax (LVT) would move the tax burden to the wealthiest and ensure sufficient funds for local authority expenditure.
Same old hard-nosed Tories as ever. They just don’t care as long as they are all right Jack. And soon they will be running the country because Nulab get again missed the opportunity to carry out the radical reform that was needed.
Good article in the Independent last week about inefficiencies in the NHS: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/ian-birrell-the-nhs-is-flawed-heres-the-evidence-1778276.html.
The crux is that it is clear that the NHS is pissing large amounts of money up the wall, often to the detriment of patient care. Now, it doesn’t follow from that that the budget of the NHS needs to be cut: you could keep the budget the same and improve delivery significantly.
It is clear that the left believe that public services are perfectly run and can never be improved. The evidence, however, all suggests that others – almost every country in Europe, for example, manage to deliver better healthcare than the UK at about the same cost.
I’ll quote just one bit from it:
“But one of the biggest obstacles to improvement is that the low-paid middle managers, usually not from a medical background, will block any change suggested by clinicians, because they lack the clinical knowledge required to realise that the proposed change poses no, or sometimes less, litigation risk.
For example, cataract surgery is the commonest operation, with 300,000 performed per year. Throughout the country, junior doctors hand-write the risks and benefits of each of these operations on a consent form. The information is essentially identical. You would have thought we would have a pre-printed form, rather than the scrawl of a rushed doctor. The Royal College of Ophthalmologists created such a form in 2004 — but most NHS Trusts blocked its introduction. It took me 12 months lobbying to introduce a pre-printed form to my last hospital. Now I have moved to another one, and I’m handwriting identical forms again.”
Mad
We’re agreed
My wife could provide many such stories
But it doesn’t prove the NHS is a bad idea
It just says it could be improved
Name me an organisation where that is not true
And for cost the NHS is still great value
Richard
Richard,
The story has been the same with the public service for a couple of decades. More money translates as more middle management, more people drafting policies for those on the front line and requiring forms to be filled in “to measure performance”.
On a wider level, I wonder whether it is symptomatic of the shift that occurred some time in the 80s and which ended up in a disproportionate number of people doing such dismal subjects as “Business Studies”. I suspect as a nation we have far to many people – and I include myself – who couldn’t think of any job they wanted to do and so ended up studying something fairly boring that would reliably pay the bills in the expectation that jobs were never meant to be interesting anyway.
So we have a surfeit of box tickers and policy/procedure writers and a lack of people like doctors and dentists and carpenters and (until the shortage pushed their pay up, plumbers) who actually are capable of doing things. The modern world sucks, though I had good fun making elderberry wine over the weekend.
Why blame the tories? Councils are stuck between a rock (council tax) and a hard place (central government funding and central government promises). The political make up of the councillors is irrelevant.
Mad, you are wrong. “It is clear that the left believe that public services are perfectly run and can never be improved”. Totally biased opinion. “The evidence, however, all suggests that others – almost every country in Europe, for example, manage to deliver better healthcare than the UK at about the same cost.” Totally untrue. Those whom you say deliver better healthcare all spend more. I guess you believe that the French health service never receives any criticisms.
“One of Freer’s most controversial reforms so far has been to cut live-in wardens from sheltered housing.”
Storm in a teacup. Most council areas have several sheltered accommodation sites and floating wardens can provide better 24 hour cover. The fact is that most live-in wardens are only available for a fraction of the week so they need cover anyway.
Alex
Wrong
You clearly do not know what you are talking about
Richard
Sorry pal, but I do know what I am talking about, not least because I am working on a transaction involving 420 resident managers’ flats at the moment.
If you knew about recent changes in the industry you would know that the traditional way of staffing resident managers in these developments (24 hours on/24 hours off shared by 2 managers) falls foul of the Working Time Regulations which require a minimum daily consecutive rest period of 11 hours, a minimum rest break of 20 minutes when the working day exceeds six hours and a minimum rest period of 24 hours in each seven day period, all of which implies that you need at least 3 managers or 4 if they insist on working no more than the statutory maximum hours.
Also ever since MacCartney v Oversley House Management, time spent on call in the resident manager’s flat counts as working time for the purposes of minimum wage calculations, so a resident manager on call for 24 hours, 4 days a week would be paid £25,000 a year on top of their free accommodation. I am sure that the Guardian had no trouble getting a resident to talk about their cosy little chats with their manager, because the manager with tied accommodation is sitting very pretty and would put them up to it.
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/2006/0500_05_3101.rtf
All in all the old model doesn’t work, which is why nowadays when resident managers leave their positions in private sheltered accomodation and the residents are often given the choice of replace non-resident house managers providing the same level of service but with lower service charges, and more often than not, the residents vote for the non-resident manager. The council at Barnet is clearly doing nothing more than acting in the best interests of all parties.
Sorry pal, but I do know what I am talking about, not least because I am working on a transaction involving 420 resident managers’ flats at the moment.
If you knew about recent changes in the industry you would know that the traditional way of staffing resident managers in these accommodation (24 hours on/24 hours off shared by 2 managers) falls foul of the Working Time Regulations which require a minimum daily consecutive rest period of 11 hours, a minimum rest break of 20 minutes when the working day exceeds six hours and a minimum rest period of 24 hours in each seven day period, all of which implies that you need at least 3 managers or 4 if they insist on working no more than the statutory maximum hours.
Also ever since MacCartney v Oversley House Management, time spent on call in the resident manager’s flat counts as working time for the purposes of minimum wage calculations, so a resident manager on call for 24 hours, 4 days a week would be paid £25,000 a year on top of their free accommodation. I am sure that the Guardian had no trouble getting a resident to talk about their cosy little chats with their manager, because the manager with tied accommodation is sitting very pretty and would put them up to it.
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/2006/0500_05_3101.rtf
All in all the old model doesn’t work, which is why nowadays when resident managers leave their positions and the residents are often given the choice of replace non-resident house managers providing the same level of service but with lower service charges, and more often than not, the residents vote for the non-resident manager. The council at Barnet is clearly doing nothing more than acting in the best interests of all parties.
This one’s for Mad – a letter in today’s Independent:
“Alas, despite the well-founded thrust of Ian Birrell’s polemic on the National Health Service (21 August), your writer perpetuates one of the standing myths about the service’s French counterpart.
The French health service is — still — astonishingly inefficient; and, for those under-60s who have to pay for it, damned expensive. One inefficiency was abolished a year or so ago, that under which a patient could take the same set of symptoms to any and every GP until he or she got the desired answer.
Others remain. My French GP prescribes me drugs — hypertension, cholesterol controllers, that sort of thing — by the “box”. I am supposed to renew my prescription, without another GP appointment, month by month. But the boxes never contain the same number of tablets, so one is always running out before the other ones do; and in consequence, I end up with too much of one drug and not enough of another.
Another important point is one that I have never seen mentioned in the UK press. If you need to call on the French health service, never, ever have eye trouble. In mid-April, I consulted my GP about what I considered a serious and potentially urgent eye problem. He sent me to phone the ophthalmologist, who gave me an appointment for the end of November. For eye care, that is a typical wait interval.
If it gets worse, I shall catch a ferry to England.”
Alex
My experience is of 24 hour care – 3 shifts of 8 hours
I was not asking anyone to be abused
Richard
Carol,
The French system no doubt has its flaws and I understand employers often pay about 40% of a person’s salary (seriously) in payments to the health scheme. On the other hand, I have had personal experience of parents and children falling ill in France and Spain. In both cases the facilities were new, spotlessly clean, we were seen promptly, blood tests were taken and the results received within minutes and drugs were prescribed. Though in Spain getting the drugs involved ringing a bell and waking up the village pharmacist in the middle of the night.
My general view is that the British have lost the ability to administer things effectively. I can’t provide evidence for this, it is just a feeling based on wide business and travel experience around the world.
I think you also raise an important point: healthcare can be good in one area and not so good in another. The problem with the NHS is that it is so big that it is almost meaningless to talk about it in general terms. There may be parts of the NHS that are grossly underfunded and parts that are grossly overfunded, and thus huge improvements that could be achieved by rebalancing how resources are allocated, but the general debate just sinks into name calling about the headline figure. Or else one party attaks the others proposed cuts without looking at the proposed balancing increases.
The point is, Mad, that we achieve our very good health system at a significantly lower cost. What you say about employers’ contributions is amazing. The alternative to our health system is an insurance based one. That’s the basic comparison.
Which doesn’t work in most developments which are too small to have 3 resident wardens to give 24 hour cover. You actually need 4 to give 168 hour/week cover. The economics (and they are important because it is generally the elderly residents who pay the service charges) do not work if you are paying for a resident manager who is “on call” for 40 hours a week. The previous arrangements where managers were on call even though they might be sleeping, worked fine, and I don’t think there were many complaints of abuse before the working hours directive.