12 Big Lies and the Prairies of Heaven by Tony Brauer

Author:Tony Brauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448210701
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

A more liberal approach: anything not compulsory or forbidden is allowed. Call this alternative 1.

Alternative 2. Anything not compulsory or forbidden must be evaluated against complex criteria. You structure it like this when evasion is unacceptable; when, whatever it is, someone’s got to deal with it.

Within alternative 1 comes the commercial contract. Unless something is forbidden or compulsory, it’s optional: which means that you can externalise costs.

Within alternative 2 comes the professional contract, including the profession of the civil servant. If something is neither forbidden nor compulsory, but clearly relates to your responsibilities, you have to deal with it. You can’t shuck it off. It’s your baby.

Externalisation takes a number of forms in public services. Obviously, you seek to exclude any client who is not profitable, simply by claiming that they don’t meet your client profile. This also shifts the burden of proof onto the client, while the civil servant is expected to prove why you should be excluded. Seeking redress is expensive and hard work, particularly against a big corporation, so justice has become an externalised cost. So has transparency, because civil servants are subject to freedom of information, and commercial contracts are confidential. Public service employers are supposed to be model employers: decent terms and conditions, pensions, health and safety, and so on. Commercial contractors do the minimum demanded by law and the labour market, often shifting costs onto the hidden subsidy of, for example, housing benefits.

A favourite story, illustrative of another crucial issue. An elderly woman in the Norfolk countryside phones the police. There’s someone lurking in the garden. The police say they have no cars available. She rings off. Ten minutes later she phones again.

“Don’t bother to send a car, I’ve shot him.”

Within quarter of an hour there are two helicopters overhead and sirens approaching from all directions. The woman is in the moonlit garden.

“Where’s the body?”

“Oh, I made that up.”

“So why did you tell us you shot him?”

“Why did you tell me there were no cars available?”

Public services have to deal with peaks and troughs. The fire brigade can’t say they’ll come and put out a fire next week. There is redundancy built into the system to deal with peaks. This is expensive, so unless an outsourcing contract can avoid all ambiguity, contractors defer work at the peak times and externalise the inconvenience to the client. This also acts as a rationing device. Let’s say I have a contract to deal with enquiries from those who feel they’ve suffered racial abuse. If I have a 60p a minute help-line, with six layers of “Please select from the following options….”, followed by “We are experiencing exceptionally high demand…..”, then I should be able to respond in full to anyone who has the patience and income to get through. From the point of view of policy makers, this rationing is bliss, because the incidence of notified racial abuse will decline, proving that government policy is working; or, from my point of view, proving that rationing is a self-fulfilling technique for cutting ostensible demand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.