In the light of Ivan Horrocks article this morning this report from the FT is interesting:
The attempt by Francis Maude, cabinet secretary, to inject commercial acumen into Whitehall by putting leading business figures on departmental boards is failing to live up to its billing, with some departments rarely consulting their external non-executive directors.
The Treasury department's supervisory board met only once in the year to April 2012, according to a report by Insight Public Affairs, a consultancy. The energy department's board met twice, compared to 15 meetings in the transport department, reflecting the inconsistent involvement of non-executive directors.
Let's be candid though, the Treasury board doesn't need to meet. Big business already runs HMRC and seconds most Treasury policy staff. And what can energy do without imploring big business? When capture has happened whether you turn up or not to a non-exec meeting makes little difference; you've already got the executive on side.
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Here’s a taste of the kind of ‘commercial acumen’ Maude refers to; he recently gave £520m of contracts to provide public information advertising to a company where he was non-exec chairman. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/advertising/ad-agency-fury-as-francis-maudes-old-firm-goes-on-government-list-8525425.html. This is an example of what I call ‘free market creep’ (I know there are myriad puns in that phrase but let’s leave them aside.) Put simply, the Civil Service and public sector was never designed to provide a private profit. Yet unfettered income in the ‘private’ sector has crept into a ‘public’ sector that is ever increasingly working at the behest of the ‘private’ sector, with the subsequent tensions between ‘public’ service and corporate interests leading to a string of fiascos, overspends and waste in order to boost corporate profits. Many ‘private’ companies have been haemorrhaging money before leaching off the taxpayer; so much for the self-reliant, self supporting ‘free’ market. More importantly, this has led to increasing unaccountability to the public majority in the running of public services and in the actions of private corporations. Increasing ‘top public’ sector pay at the same time as pay for the extraordinary majority of public servants, who are given the increasingly compromised task of actually delivering those services in practice, is frozen and cut gives a pretty good picture of where the morals and outlook of people in corporate beholden government lie at the moment. Interesting that in the wake of the West Coast franchise cock-up, free-marketeers and advocates of private companies profiteering from public money said that publicly unaccountable corporations such as Centrica & PWC should now hold ever decreasingly publicly accountable civil service departments to account. Because publicly unaccountable corporations don’t like the decisions that ever decreasingly publicly accountable civil service departments make about them…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/damianreece/9585356/West-Coast-fiasco-shows-our-civil-service-falls-at-the-first-hurdle.html#