Change it, keep on changing...

One damn fine read of a morning is The Law West of Ealing Broadway which is written by an erstwhile anonymous magistrate and which, every now and again slips in a moan about Government cost cutting and interference in the court system and the criminal justice system as a whole - and long live his right to moan about Government fook-ups.

I have a couple of friends who are life-long civil servants in the court system, nice lads, old friends, I've known them for forty years, I've room shared with them both even accidently slept with one of them once but we'll gloss over that bit...

...the point is that they both hold senior civil service positions in the courts and whenever we gather in a pub somewhere then they both inevitably huddle together and speak of cost cutting, reorganisation, missives from on high, and horror of horrors - threats to the one thing that is held dear to the hearts of all civil servants, their final salary pension scheme - "its the only reason we do the job" they argue, unconvincingly.

I myself have seen this desire for the Civil Service to morph itself into something different, although not necessarily something better, every two or three years.

Around ten years ago we negotiated a deal with the Employment Service to provide some of our equipment to all of the job centres in Yorkshire, and there were a lot of them, word of this spread to other areas of the country and we ended up with a decent sized contract supplying up to two hundred of the job centres, a very nice little earner as we like to say.

At the time the job centres and benefits offices were two completely seperate domains and HM Government carried the double-bubble overheads of having two offices in each town, one for unemployment benefit dispersal, one for employment seekers, who just happened to be the same people.

It made sense to amalgamate the two and a couple of years later they did just that, not actually saving any civil service expense on the way as they didn't actually make anyone redundant or lose office space overhead, they just moved two offices into another one that was double the size in each town, but it meant even more work for us so why did we care, it was only our money that they were spending after all.

Eventually they stopped using our equipment when some bright spark in their IT department suggested that they could do exactly the same function from each persons desktop pc, there were glaring security issues for not doing that at all, but it was a percieved cost saving so they dropped us, we now handle just a handfull of the job centres, the ones with the enlightened managers who realise that they can't rely on the glorified spreadsheet that alll the other offices use mainly because anyone can enter anything on screen and make it look like they are entitled to overtime and or flexi-leave (usually both).

And because we still deal with them and because we have dealt with them for over ten years we are well used to the annual merry-go-round of their accounts office being re-organised - they used to pay all of their suppliers via their local office, then it moved to a regional office in Leeds, then it moved to another regional office in Sheffield, then it moved to a national office in Cardiff, then it moved back to another regional office not in Leeds or Sheffield, this year its back to the local office, but sometimes its also Cardiff - its confusing for us, it must be a right ball-ache for them.

And thats the crux of all of this rant - Government expenditure on administration and their constant quest to do it differnetly depending on which crazy methodology this years consultants have come up with, methodology which often reverts back to the way they did things five years ago.

It must "do your head in" if you have to work inside the system.

Don't worry though, its only our money you're spending.

At the Post Office...

The traditional British Post Office has been taking some stick in recent years, its a staple of British town and village life that is fast disappearing in a tsunami of cost cuting and downsizing as HM Government tries its hardest to bring its spending down to nothing on the postal service.

In theory its a private service, the Post Office has its own budgets and expenditure, but it has grants and its tightly controlled by civil servants so that the Postmaster General has to crawl up Downing Street on his knees over white hot broken shards of glass with cap in hand before asking Tony B if he can put the cost of a first class stamp up by one penny, and even then he'll get told "no".

The Post Offices that we all know in our locales are certainly privately owned, but maintained by central Post Office funding for doing jobs like stamping parcels very hard with those hard rubber stamping things, right where it says "Fragile, do not stamp here", then asking if you want to buy insurance for that.

And we all have this vision of what a Post Office is like and how vital a Post Office is to our local communities, how all the old people gather at the Post Office every day for tea and a chat and how we'd miss them terribly if they all disapeared and we'd have to take the parcelled up stuff we'd just flogged on eBay to a couriers depot for delivery instead, no that would never do we all cry and we bemoan the demise of the local Post Offices and beseach Government to grant them some more grants so that they may survive just a tad longer.


So today I went to my local Post Office.
Its been there as long as I can remember and my local knowledge of this area goes back nearly 50 years now (I don't remember the bits before I started to talk).

For the first ten years that I remember it was owned by someone ferocious looking with a huge grey handlebar moustache called "Squire" - and that was just his wife.

Recently I haven't a clue who owns it because until today I had been in our local Post Office almost exactly nil times.

Today I went in there to hand in a form that requests the Post Office to redirect our mail from our old address to our new address - a simple enough task, fill the form in correctly where it says "name" and again where it says "old address" and then finally and most importantly the bit where it says "new address". I managed all of this without too much assistance from the four pages of notes that they kindly supplied with the single sided form and taking two forms of identity with me (presumably I might forge one document but would never stoop to forge two), and £15 with which to bribe the Post Office people into performing this onerous redirecting task, I entered our local Post Office.

Random old people stood around, writing things on forms at various shelves around the perifery of the public area, one holding a Bic pen to the light to see if there was any ink left in it or whether it was his cataracts that were playing up again, one old lady was re-arranging the contents of her old-lady-tartan-bag-on-wheels, two old ladies stood muttering to each other whilst using extravagant hand gestures to illuminate their gossip, and one of the two counters was occupied by yet another geriatric who was leaning almost right through the glass plate in order to hear what the miserable cow serving on the other side was saying to her.

With no-one seemingly interested in taking up the empty counter position I volunteered myself, to be greeted by a lady of breeding in a high frilly collared shirt buttoned with a brooch in the style made famous by Laura Ashley who made her millions thirty years ago by selling to such ladies whilst not bothering to spend any of her fortune on a good, reliable stair carpet fitter.

The sour-faced old hag in the Laura Ashley blouse and brooch stared her sour-puss face through the inch-thick bullet proof glass, stared into my very soul and demanded, "Yes ?"

"I have earlier filled out this here form" I presented the form in front of the glass but did not yet push it through the slot for her attention, "this form which was collected by my wife from this very counter just three days ago" I further explained, "and I think I've filled everything in, and I have brought two forms of identity as requested, and I would be most grateful if perchance you would look it over and accept fifteen pounds in payment for your excellent and reknown redirecting service", I explained.

She said nothing but one hand pointed to the slot in the bullet proof glass, indicating that I push the form through there, which started me thinking - why bother with bullet proof glass if you then cut a slot through it at what is stomach height to the counter staff, surely the robbers with the guns and bullets will just shove their pistols through the slot too ?

Anyhoo, the old bag took my form with a look of distain as if she would catch some filthy disease from it, which indeed she may as I have had a terrible man-flu these past few days of removals and for all I know the old bag could well be a man, she has the whiskers for it.

"I think I filled it in correctly", I offered.

"Yes you did" she replied, "but its the wrong colour" she added with just a hint of delight in her voice that did not go un-noticed by the other hags on my side of the counter who shuffled forwards to gaze and nod and confirm that yes, it was the wrong colour.

"The wrong colour" I queried for I knew nought of what she informed.

"The wrong colour" she responded, pointing at something at the top of the form.

She leaned backwards into a drawer behind her and without taking her miserable face away from mine plucked another redirection form from its depths and thrust it back through the glass at me.

"Its got to be filled in black ink" and she sighed as she finally gave away the answer to me.

"Black ink ?" I still wasn't taking this in.

"You used blue ink" her patience was fading fast by now, "you used blue ink" and she stabbed at my completed form with a long pointy finger as if I were the worlds most stupid Post Office customer and with the same amount of exasperation as if I came into her post Office every single day with the same form filled in with blue ink instead of black.

And that was it, no post redirection for me then.
I use the wrong ink for my forms.
I'll be buggered if I'm buying a black Bic just to please the old bag.
I'll walk around the corner to the old house and collect my mail until people stop sending it there.

But at least I now have no need to hold any sympathy for Post Office staff when they close them all down.

Transport, its not working...

The Department for Transport (DfT) is the Government department in the UK for, well, erm, transport.

And just a few months after Home Secretary (he's in charge of The Home Office), declared that said Home Office was "unfit for purpose", it would appear that the DfT may also be failing in its responsibilities.

Yesterday the House of Commons Transport Committee (oh how they love their committee's in the House of Commons), was told that the DfT has failed to reach five out of seven of its own targets for improvements in public transport, pollution and congestion.

The cynics out here are not suprised of course that a government department, who set their own targets, cannot then meet their own targets, but the chairperson of the Transport Committee went further than that to state that given the state of the department at the moment it is unlikely that they will meet any of the targets that they have set for the next five years.

This is the same DfT and the same Commons Transport Committee that earlier this week were declaring that road tolls were the way forward for this country, a highly complex hi-tech satellite tracking network which would record every movement of your vehicle on every road in the UK then send you a bill at the end of the month depending on when and where you had driven your car - it sounded just a little too hi-tech for a government department to think up all on its own and just a little too complicated for a civil servant to administrate, and now we are reminded, from their very own mouths, that the DfT cannot cope with the volume of work that they set for themselves.

Having blogged for over a year on the debacle that was the proposed Leeds Supertram Scheme, a scheme designed to cure Leeds of traffic congestion, a scheme that was scrapped at the very last hopur (literally) because HM Government failed to meet their own side of the bargain that was the Private Funding Initiative that was to pay for it, we (the royal we) are not at all suprised that transport in the UK is a mish-mash of non-cohesive systems and routes, plans and ideas that are doomed to failure, and completely fictional projects that could never be budgeted for even if we discovered the worlds largest oilfield (again) within our sovereign seas.

For once Gwyneth Dunwoody, chair of the Transport Committee seems to be speaking some sense (for a Minister) when she states "road pricing would not solve all the problems of the road network, and public transport had to be improved and made more affordable as well" or could it just be that she has taken note of the huge level of protest in the last seven days over her departments road charging proposals and is making the first attempt at a retreat from the kite-flying that happens when Government makes its proposals known by surreptitious "leaks" of information to the press ?

An impossible task ?

Good Guy minister John Reid is still under pressure today, and will be for some considerable time as he continues in his quest to make The Home Office "fit for purpose".

He has likened the job to renovating an old house, you never know what problems are waiting for you until you start stripping off the old wallpaper, at the moment he hasn't even been into some of the rooms yet, let alone started removing wallcoverings - he is warning of more disasters in waiting.

His "Good Guy" image in the media comes from the fact that he is always ready for a quote and an interview and always tells it like it is, there is no hidden opinion, no problem wallpapered over with him, he's good for a soundbite, the press love him.

And so how hard is his problem, how difficult will it be for him to kick arse and get a massive government department "fit for purpose" ?

Well, it will be very difficult, if not impossible.

The problem with a government department is that they achieve nothing that is tangible.

Compare with the renovating an old building quote again - my background was in the building trade - when you start on a project you have something very tangible in front of you, a building, and something else very tangible is your quotation and order to do the job for a set price in a defined time and nowhere are timescales more imperative than in the building trade where one subcontractors half day delay can put the whole contract back by weeks.

If John Reid were in charge of a house renovation then he would be able to assess his progress on a daily basis and at the end of the contract he would know whether or not he had achieved his objective (ie is the house still standing) and he'd know whether he achieved it within the budget and whether or not he made a profit on the job - he would have a tangible way of measuring his own performance and all the sub-contractors under him in a tangible way.

Go back to a government office that has been run in a particularly wastefull and careless way for many years, maybe decades - you have your sub-contractors as different departments within that huge building, each of whom are run by civil servants who only know one way to run the department and do not take too kindly to a media friendly Scot coming in and telling them they are wrong, especially when he is so keen to tell the worlds press that they are wrong.

Out here in the real world employees jobs are rarely for life any more, most people will work for several employers during their life, only in the civil service do you regard your position in the office as set in stone, you're virtually unsackable if your job cannot be measured in any way and even if it can you tend to have an employer who would rather move you to somewhere else in the organisation than dismiss you - the most common cry in any civil service department is "think of the pension".

I have a friend who is a time served civil servant, 32 years at the desk, ten years ago he was offered a redundancy package that was far in excess of anything that he'd get out here in the real world, he was tempted and spoke to me of investing some of his money in my company and coming to work here as a partner, he was very keen on the idea in fact - but he changed his maind after a week or so of conversations with me when the realisation set in that out here in the real world you cannot depend on a salary every month, nor a pension scheme at the end of it all - you are totally responsible for bringing in the work, doing the work, completing the work to your clients satisfaction, and then most importantly getting paid for the work - only then can you pay yourself, your employees, the invoices for your vehicles, petrol, goods purchased, your tax bills, the office overheads, and maybe something for a pension scheme that is not guaranteed to pay you anything like a normal salary at some undefined point in the future.

How much easier is it to sit behind a desk, deal with work that someone else brings to you, draw your salary at the end of the month and have a guaranteed pension at the end of it all ?

Thats the attitude that is endemic in the system, that is what John Reid has to work with.

He has my sympathy, he has an impossible task.