It seems it's now policy not to make arrests (or a clip round the ear)

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!

Arrests have fallen in the UK by nearly a half. The police, unsurprisingly, blame this on reduced "resources" but it is worth noting that there are not 50% fewer coppers - not even the more deranged parts of the Labour Party are making that claim - so you can't lay fewer arrests at the door of so-called "austerity".

I guess this is a better reason:

“Officers are also encouraged to deal with offending behaviour proportionately and effectively, maximising public involvement, keeping people out of the criminal justice system and supporting reduced re-offending behaviour through positive intervention.”

It is now policy not to arrest people and for the police to behave a bit like a cross between a social worker and Judge Dredd - dealing with "offending behaviour" rather than catching criminals as used to be the case. This might be seen as a welcome return to the old-fashioned "clip round the ear" approach to policing where the coppers visited low level summary justice on badly behaved youth rather than arresting them. I've a fear, however, that the process of arrest, charge and the criminal justice process is such a nightmare of paperwork and mind-numbing bureaucracy that not arresting bad 'uns just makes the coppers' lives easier. What I do know is that, for all the "gee, Officer Krupke" banter, there's precious little evidence of this sort of policing "reducing reoffending behaviour".

I've always taken a care to listen to the explanations I get from the police and I also appreciate that the burglars aren't things of their creation but this mealy-mouthed, bureaucrat speak about how the police work seems to cover up an almost abject failure to do what the public wants - robust, hard, policing that targets the vicious, greedy young men who commit the crimes and upset the lives of decent, law-abiding people. It certainly doesn't appear to the majority of folk that the police are either present in their community or responsive to the needs of that place. Today's police seem to be stuck in cars, draped with ever more bits of kit and, when you get to speak with them, talking in an almost impenetrable language quite unlike how regular folk speak about criminals and crime.

The police have the time and resource to get filmed dancing at pride marches but not to respond promptly to a burglary at a frightened elderly couple's house, put more publicity behind getting people to report bad language on social media, and police "senior leaders" hide behind bureaucracy to excuse their failures. Blaming a 50% drop in arrests on resourcing is, quite simply, a lie but nobody is looking chief constables and crime commissioners in the eye and saying "pull the other one, mate". Yes more money for policing might be a good idea but only if that money gets spent on actual policing not a bureaucratic, politically correct pastiche of policing.

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More truth - governments are bureacracies first and democracies (a distant) second

From Paul Marks at Samizdata:

To most governments and the witchdoctors in universities and media – and the establishment generally, rights are goods and services from government – not limits on the size and scope of government. They may or may not believe that there should be 13 Departments of State seeking to produce “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” like Bentham – they may believe they should be 11 Departments of State controlling society or 14 or some other number, but they agree that there should be a permanent bureaucracy which is neither elected or appointed by people who are elected (thus making elections to some extent a sham) dedicated to the Progressive agenda of spending ever more money and imposing ever more regulations.

We spend a great deal of time, effort and money fretting ourselves into a funk over how we are to influence this bureaucracy. This may be "Holding Them To Account", usually by writing letters, waving banners or signing petitions. Or it's undertaken via a process of electing representatives who, we believe, have the job to do that "Holding To Account" for us. These representatives spend a lot of time looking like they're doing that, certainly this is what they tell us (using our money to do so) but the evidence - at least to me - suggest that it goes more like this:

"One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error."

So the Chairman told K. And I fear this is what government is like for most people when they encounter its foibles. Bear in mind that, most of the time (this may come as a surprise to some of those witchdoctors in the media) most of the people are not remotely interested in, or engaged with, politics. You might think this terrible - in that pompous Eleanor Roosevelt "great minds discuss ideas" manner - but I think it is brilliant that we should have a society where many people really don't have to fuss themselves with what the government is doing right now. And, since you ask, I'd like even more of this - we should aspire to being able to live our whole lives free from petty regulation, clip-board waving officials, machine-minded bureaucrats with chewed pens, from the whole ghastly panoply of modern government.

Maybe a revolution would work...except, as Kafka again reminds us:

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

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Is the problem technocracy not postmodernism?

The idea of a university as a circle of professorial peers, each with apprentices and each practicing a craft, tends to be replaced by the idea of a university as a set of research bureaucracies, each containing an elaborate division of labor, and hence of intellectual technicians. For the efficient use of these technicians, if for no other reason, the need increases to codify procedures in order that they may be readily learned.

I was struck by this observation - from C. Wright Mills, "The Sociological Imagination". It feels an essential truth, a description of the university's journey from a collegiate environment where knowledge is explored to a complex bureaucracy dedicated to the production of research. There are a lot of people culpable in this journey - Mills points to what others called the 'military-industrial complex' (with a side swipe at research-driven advertising agencies) and to 'human engineers' in bureaucracy:

To say that ‘the real and final aim of human engineering’ or of ‘social science’ is ‘to predict’ is to substitute a technocratic slogan for what ought to be a reasoned moral choice. That too is to assume the bureaucratic perspective within which—once it is fully adopted—there is much less moral choice available.

We hear from Jordan Peterson and others that the problem is postmodernism and relativism. I've a little inkling that empiricism, an obsession with uncontextualised data, is perhaps more of a problem. Technocracy is far more the core ideology of the 'liberal elite' than is postmodernism - it is the idea that bureaucracy can discover a solution through the collection and analysis of data without reference to any moral foundation that sits at the heart of our disconnection with government.

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What's wrong with the NHS? Bureaucracy - that's what's wrong

Let me introduce you to the Bradford and Craven Integrated Workforce Programme's workforce strategy (this will be referred to as the IWP so often you'll forget what it stands for at some future point). The IWP - Integrated Workforce Programme - reports to the Bradford and Craven Integration and Change Board (ICB) and "aims to work collaboratively to address the commonly identified system wide workforce challenges..."

OK so far? The ICB and the IWP that reports to it works in the context of the Five Year Forward View and the Five Year Forward View Next Steps for Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) and the work of these STPs will be delivered through new Accountable Care Systems across the Bradford District and Craven. Part of this delivery cross institutional boundaries and there is an Integration and Better Care Fund Narrative Plan 2017-19 for the Bradford District.

In amongst all this there are "a number of national, regional and local drivers and associated service strategies and plans..."

Five Year Forward View sub-strategies (GP Forward View, Mental Health Forward View etc. etc.)
West Yorkshire and Harrogate STP (WY&HSTP)
Better Health Better Lives (part of Bradford Council - BMDC - plans)
Bradford District and Craven Health and Wellbeing Plan
Bradford District Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy
North Yorkshire County Council's Health and Wellbeing Plan
Home First Plan
Children, Young People and Families Plan
CCG Primary Care Strategies

This list is preceded by the word "including" which implies that there are perhaps some other plans and strategies not referenced.

In order to "support the delivery of the transformation agenda" there are a "number of collaboratives" which include:

Local Workforce Action Board (LWAB, WY&H)
West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT)
WY&H Mental Health Partnership
'Team Bradford' Employers Conference
Bradford Health and Care Education, Employment and Skills Partnership (BEESP)

Apparently the IWP will "ensure alignment with these enablers" and will "work on the footprint deemed most appropriate in facilitating realisation" of the plans. (Takes a deep breath).

There are some workstreams including plans for a West Yorkshire National Skills Academy Centre of Excellence for Support Staff Development and plans for a new medical school in Bradford (apparently the University has to have permission from the NHS or the government to train doctors something that further underlines how stupid this whole system has become).

Somewhere in all this soup of bureaucracy and management mumbo-jumbo there's perhaps some good work going on. The difficulty, however, is that reading the reports reveals little but an enormous and costly bureaucracy directed, in this case, to answering the relatively simple question "how do we improve the quality of our workforce, reduce turnover and meet future needs." Multiply this 'collaboration' across all the UK's myriad health bodies and the result is uncounted millions in taxpayer cash splurged on a pyramid of acronyms, plans, strategies and (new one to me this) narratives.

The NHS doesn't work. And it's only the persistence and creativity of front-line staff (most of the time) that stops the bureaucracy completely preventing anything happening at all. This isn't about funding - most cash will likely, as we've seen with Better Care Fund, result in more new bureaucracy. Indeed what is clear from any encounter with the management of the NHS is that the organisation is at its most creative when it comes to inventing new and ever more complicated systems of bureaucracy.

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In which Professor Mazzucato discovers government is useless

Various people had a bit of a laugh about a tweet from economist Mariana Mazzucato moaning about the officious nature of the UK Home Office.



The humour came, of course, in that Professor Mazzucato is a popular advocate of the argument that it's the state that drives innovation with the private sector toddling along behind making profits from all those clever things government has done (I oversimplify but not by much). The Professor's entire opus is about how government is brilliant.

I am, however, a little more interested in what this Tweet tells us about government. Mostly it tells us that, when it comes to administrative functions, government is rubbish. This doesn't matter when all it represents is some inconvenience and annoyance to an economics professor but it does matter when the issue in question is whether a family has any money at all. The other day, I was told that a housing association was giving out food parcels to some of its tenants because of the delay between getting an assessment under the new universal credit (or indeed, on occasions, other benefits) and actually getting any money. This isn't because the benefit isn't enough but simply a case of government being unable to process simple administrative tasks efficiently (and yes I know the system is complicated but that's about getting the right boxes filled).

We encounter example after example of this administrative uselessness, most of it annoying and delaying rather than life threatening and all of it reminding us that huge bureaucracies operating without either adequate scrutiny or any competition are, in truth, the very antithesis of innovation. Government, the acme of monopolistic bureaucracy, has always operated this way - in 'The Castle', Franz Kafka summed how this governmental incompetence is married with arrogance and a lack of self-awareness to great the impenetrable barrier of bureaucracy:

“Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.”

What Professor Mazzucato, a highly regarded denizen of Britain's Castle and an advocate of its greatness, has discovered is that the system will do what the system does, will do that slowly and badly, and regardless of your job title will treat you with the same impersonal disdain you thought was reserved to common sorts on benefits. Your form will sit in a pile, will be processed in due course and will be returned if it is incorrect or incomplete. And there is no option to expedite matters by buying the mayor an expensive cup of coffee.

In the end government is useless. Then we revolt. And, as Kafka said about revolution:

"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."

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"We need safe spaces..." - how the NHS ducks the big questions

I can't remember the precise moment or why the subject came up but some point in 2016, in a meeting with NHS folk, something along these lines was said: "we need safe spaces to discuss the real challenges facing the health and care system". What they really meant was that some subjects are just to difficult to discuss other than in a carefully protected space - protected, that is, from the public. This answer is a reminder that our populist, planned health system is facing something of a crisis.

Before we go on to talk about the challenges we can't discuss in public we have first to talk about money. I had a Twitter exchange with someone recently where I asked what she meant by 'adequately resourced' in the context of the NHS. The answer, as these things often are, was something of a cop out but was at least better than the more usual response to such questions - a response typified by this piece of populist cant from Tim Farron:

Farron said voters had reached the stage of not believing the NHS’s problems could be solved through efficiency savings and might be willing to pay more if they were convinced it would go to the health service.

He said he did not want to pre-empt the conclusions of an independent panel formed by the Lib Dems, which will look at possible taxes to help the NHS.

In varying forms this is the default response to concerns about our health system - more taxes, more resources. The problem is that, for all that sticking a ring-fenced penny on income tax sounds good, it goes nowhere to making the NHS more sustainable. Bear in mind that, despite the claims of its founders, the NHS has required above inflation increases in funding throughout its existence meaning that it now spends approaching £120 billion out of those taxes.

In one respect our health system needs that extra cash - as Jonathan Portes pointed out recently the proportion of GDP spent on health has fallen and we do spend less per capita than other places (significantly so than the USA). But when you open the NHS up, every single element within the system will tell you that with a little extra cash they can solve this or that problem. Indeed most of those individual bits of healthcare systems - the non-clinical as well as clinical - will tell you that right now they are starved of cash meaning that people might die.

So maybe we do need more cash. But first we need to huddle in that safe space and discuss some more fundamental things about the NHS. By way of example, West Yorkshire has eight or nine general hospitals (I forget the precise number but it doesn't matter for this discussion). All of them are seen by their local community as "their" hospital and the popular expectation is that the general means they do everything that community needs. The question we need to ask in that safe space isn't how do we get more cash for those hospitals or what services do we cut to stop them overspending. No the questions are more fundamental - does West Yorkshire need all those hospitals, are they in the right places, do the facilities meet modern needs or public expectations?

We might ask, for example, why Leeds has two huge general hospitals with real access issues right bang in the city centre? Should we be finding a greenfield site somewhere more convenient and building a new large hospital? And do all those hospitals need to have high support accident units, heart care centres and cancer wards or would it be a better service to have specialised units?

I don't know the answer to these questions - or indeed to thousands of other questions about health and care provision - but I do know (because I've been given a privileged peep inside the system) that the NHS simply isn't discussing these issues at all. Mostly for fear of adverse public reaction but also because the planners within the health system are driven by issues of sustaining what's already there rather than by more fundamental questions about structure and organisation.

There's a further problem, one stemming from the very top of the NHS (indeed from the World Health Organisation), which is the belief that the drivers of rising costs are lifestyle factors especially smoking and obesity. Even when the health systems own statisticians point out that longevity is the problem, we still get strategies founded on the idea that being fat and liking a fag is the problem. This is where the proposals for limiting access to surgery come from (like this one from York) - they don't really address the problem, they're usually overturned and they make it look like the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is doing something.

It seems to me that the NHS, for all the "Our NHS" and "Save the NHS" rhetoric, isn't really all that good. OK, I'll grant that it's better than a system such as that in the USA which manages to be both very expensive and to leave out great chunks of the population from effective care, but there are other approaches - Sweden, France, Holland, Singapore - that might offer some ideas about how we might improve our health outcomes. The UK has a very centralised system that is painted to look like a dispersed and localised system. As the recent round of reorganisation - called Sustainability and Transformation Plans in that jargonistic NHS way - has shown, the idea of local control or direction is anathema to the system's bureaucracy.

The Tim Farron solution - whack up a few taxes - sticks a slightly bigger plaster over the wound but doesn't address the fundamental problems (just as allowing councils to stick up council tax a bit more does solve the care crisis) in the health system. We have a health estate that was mostly designed by Victorians (to which we've added a lot of prefabs) and a structure that would do the Soviet Union proud - right down to the endlessly revisited five-year plans. Until we actually use that safe space we mentioned to discuss the real problems of the health system the NHS will carry on lurching from self-generated crisis to self-generated crisis. And worse, populist politicians like Tim Farron will go on waving the NHS's problems about as a cheap source of votes.

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An idiot's guide to why we should leave the EU (Pt 1)

The EU at work

On Thursday someone who, for all that their politics is very different to mine, I have some regard for told me I am an idiot for wanting to leave the EU. "I didn't have you down as an idiot" were mor eor less his words. It seems this dismissive attitude dominates the case for remaining a member of the European Union. The idea that anyone who believes in exiting from the EU is somehow stupid is central to the campaign strategy for 'remain'. The 'leaving is stupid' message is presented by a parade of the world's great and good explaining why it's so important that we stay inside the warm embrace of that union.

The 'remain' campaign has roped in every leader in David Cameron's address book - from the US president and prime minister of Japan to warmed over trade union bosses and assorted (often French) international bankers. And the message is consistent - these great and good people believe, usually for entirely unspecified reasons, that the UK's interests are to stay in the EU. Such a strategy, founded on the good old logical fallacy - Appeal to Authority, is an easy one for campaigners to use. Just look at those posters and infographics showing the mugshots of all those great leaders - 'all these clever people say we should stay, how can you possibly vote to leave'.

As a result people, such as the local politician whose comment I quote, feel able to dismiss the advocates of Brexit as 'Little Englanders', as isolationists, and above all to tell them they're stupid. The hope is, of course, that people will be embarrassed by the suggestion of their stupidity and line up like good little sheep to vote remain. To stress this we're regaled with the less appealing parts of the leave argument - the crypto-racism, the islamophobia, the protectionism - and, slightly appalled by the unpleasantness of all this, people turn away from the idea of leaving the EU even if their instincts tell them it's the right thing to do.

Well I'm not stupid and I'm going to vote to leave the EU. And I'm going to do this for the very opposite of the argument from all those grandees. These people, the international elite, like things distant and obscure. They prefer government to be complicated and dominated by regulation. And they hate the idea that most of us, most of the time want to be left to muddle along with our ordinary lives free from their lectures, strictures and fussing interference. Leaving aside the foreign heads of state (who're doing a favour to another state boss - presumably in expectation of reciprocation), the people telling you you're stupid if you want to leave are the beneficiaries of the EU. Of course they want to stay in, it's their source of power, influence and money.

Assuming you're not employed by some 'European-funded' organisation (in which case your pro-EU argument is entirely down to selfish interest), you are not a beneficiary of the EU. Oh yes they pretend that millions of jobs (hint, hint, this might include your job) 'depend on the EU' but they can never actually point to all those jobs and explain how they are the result of a union run by a distant, unaccountable bureaucratic entity. They'll tell you we're at peace because of the EU - by which they mean that France and Germany haven't been at war since 1945. But what makes them think that that Kafka-esque castle of bureaucracy in Brussels is somehow responsible for that peace or that it couldn't be managed with a simple treaty?

To hear those great and good - let's call them The Beneficiaries - talk, you'd think that there is no other possible arrangement of Britain's relationship with its European neighbours that would encourage trade, promote economic growth and help protect the environment. This is just nonsense - I don't have to go into the slightly occult discussion of alternatives to know that there are perfectly practical alternatives. I can look around the world and see very successful places that have entirely different ways of co-operating with neighbouring countries. And I can go back to 1970 and see a Britain with every opportunity to succeed without joining the EEC.

So whatever choice is made about the process following a Brexit vote, it will be our choice made by our elected representatives in our interests. That doesn't mean that I'll agree with that choice or that it will all go smoothly but it does mean you and I get to sack them for getting it wrong, it means that Britain's economic destiny is once again in the hands of Britons. Right now, if we are angry enough to vote out a government that we think is failing us, there's very little that the new broom we install can do to make the changes we want. Ask the Greeks - they thought they could vote for change. Look at Italy where the EU sacked the government and imposed an unelected technocracy.

No-one is saying the Brexit is risk free. No-one is suggesting that leaving the EU is a solid gold, nailed on route to greater prosperity. No, us idiots are saying that it won't be worse than staying in but it will be our worse not a worse created by an institution we didn't elect and can't sack. Plus staying in the bureaucratic monster means travelling further down the route it has planned with more determined at meals bought by lobbyists in expensive Brussels restaurants than by the people we supposedly elect to make decisions on our behalf.

Plenty of The Beneficiaries are implying that staying in the EU is risk free, that everything will be just fine, no problems. Yet there's no discussion of what happens if (when) the Euro crashes again. There's no examination of how increasing EU legal 'competence' undermines our legal system by imposing Napoleonic systems onto English common law. And no-one mentions that the EU's sclerotic economy is a drag on Britain's more dynamic and flexible business environment.

For me this isn't about borders or migration or whether we're about to be swamped by rapey Muslims (these arguments are not only wrong and offensive but almost guaranteed to deliver a vote to remain in the EU). Nor is it about governmental sovereignty or voting systems or the dimensions of bananas. It is rather about whether or not you and I can, if we're angry enough, get up from our armchairs, turn the telly off, go down to the village hall, and vote the bastards out. It's not our country we want back, it's our rights. Or rather the most important right of all - the right to overthrow the government and stick in a new one.

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Freedom of Information requests are a pain. That is the whole point of them.

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My colleagues at the Local Government Association have decided they want something done about Freedom of Information requests:

Freedom of information requests are a ‘burden’ on local authorities, and their use should be subject to tighter controls according to council leaders. The Local Government Association (LGA) has suggested fees for requests should be introduced and the time councils have to spend responding to them lowered from 18 hours to eight

No. Just no. The whole point about the Freedom of Information Act is that it provides the means for the public to hold the bureaucrats, technocrats and politicians to account. And this is because that information held by local councils is public information - meaning that the public should have access to said information. As a matter of right not as some big favour granted them by some stuck-up bureaucrat.

If Councils are bothered about Freedom of Information requests being a burden, then the proper response isn't to dream up some cod 'public interest' test but the make a whole lot more information publicly available, accessible and searchable. If you do that then the public doesn't have to go to the trouble of crafting requests that the Council responds to - instead they can go directly to the data they need.
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On the futility of strategic town planning

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Stanley Wardley presenting his Bradford masterplan

In our profession, a plan that everyone dislikes for different reasons is a success. A plan everyone dislikes for the same reason is a failure. And a plan that everyone likes for the same reason is an act of God. (Richard Carson, Planner)

In 'Parliament of Whores' P J O'Rourke wrote about (amongst other things) the US agricultural subsidy business. The great humorist wasn't impressed and concluded:

"I spent two and a half years examining the American political process. All that time I was looking for a straightforward issue. But everything I investigated - election campaigns, the budget, lawmaking, the court system, bureaucracy, social policy - turned out to be more complicated than I had thought. There were always angles I hadn't considered, aspects I hadn't weighed, complexities I'd never dreamed of. Until I got to agriculture. Here at last is a simple problem with a simple solution. Drag the omnibus farm bill behind the barn, and kill it with an ax."

I feel more-or-less the same about the UK's planning system. This system, spawned by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, has grown ever more burdensome and complicated as new features are added with each iteration of planning legislation. Anyone who has tried to engage with our process of plan making will quickly realise that it is almost entirely impossible to square the circle of housing need, environmental protection, sustainable communities and provision for transport or employment.

The system satisfies nobody. Local and national campaign groups complain about the presumption in favour of 'sustainable development' arguing that this is a licence for the developers to concrete over the last vestiges of England's green and pleasant land. Housing developers moan that the requirement for 'planning gain' is simply a tax on development meaning that fewer houses get built and some marginal places remain undeveloped even though everyone says they need developing. And local councils point out that the system is so prescriptive that they have very little room to make policy decisions on the basis of local need and expectation. I'm sure also that the planning inspectorate and Whitehall planning eggheads are equally frustrated that their sleek machine now has so many knobs, bells and whistles tacked onto it - it has become a veritable Heath Robinson of a system.

Even within development control (or development management as Council planning departments like to say these days) there are peculiar quirks and foibles of policy:

In contrast to the rendering plant – a stinking, noisy intrusion into the ‘green belt’ – this modest proposal (again despite my eloquence) was refused. One Councillor described the half complete building as an “abortion” while others clambered up onto high horses proclaiming the sanctity of the Council’s ‘green belt’ policies. A complete contrast to the discussion about the extension to the rendering plant where members – the same members – had fallen over each other to explain “more in sorrow than anger” how necessary a huge store for trucks was and that this justified a massive development in the ‘green belt’.

The modest proposal was to build a hay store for horses.  I've seen applications refused for noise reasons only to see an almost identical application granted permission. And decisions taken to protect the landscape or the environment in one location while allowing the very same development elsewhere in an equally protected locality.

I understand why people see the need for a planning system. Concerns about a development free-for-all are genuine and, given the nature of mainstream development, it's hard to question that concern. But we never ask why it is that we have a system that means the only housebuilding possible is that delivered either by mass housebuilders or by the government. Our system assumes that the best way to meet housing need is through 'strategic land releases', carefully designed 'urban extensions' and centrally-planned 'garden cities'. Yet when we look elsewhere this isn't the case - across much of Europe over half of housing is either self-build or built by small builders. This rises to over 80% in Austria.

Our system - as currently designed - simply doesn't allow for such an approach. Indeed, in places where the Community Infrastructure Levy (essentially a development tax) is high, a developer who sought to adopt the European model of parcelling up land for self-build would be seen as seeking to avoid that charge. The assumption in the UK is that large scale development allows for funding to development local infrastructure such as schools, health centres, railway stations and playgrounds. Indeed, we seem to believe that this is the only way in which such infrastructure will be provided. No mass housebuilding means no new schools.

The real picture is that using planning gain or a development tax to fund infrastructure is a very inefficient (and largely ineffective) way to provide those schools, roads and parks. The theory is that this 'community infrastructure' is contingent on that development - the new housing results in the need for new facilities. Yet at the same time, we are saying that the provision and distribution of new housing isn't based on where people want to live but on an 'objective assessed need' for that housing. This isn't housing for new people, it's housing for people we already have - or that's what the housing numbers folk are telling us.

Five years ago the current government set out to have a proper big tidy up of the planning system. This recognised that the accumulation of regulations, legal case history, legislation and guidance had reached the point where no person could begin to comprehend the system and how it worked. In its officious way the previous Labour government had passed its Planning & Compulsory Purchase Act in 2004 requiring that we have a 'regional spatial strategy' and that, based on this strategy, local councils develop a new 'local development framework'. These requirements were simply piled onto the top of existing development control practice making for an entirely unwieldy, sclerotic and ineffective system.

It sounded good to throw all this stuff out and start again with a simple, easy-read 'national planning policy framework'. Something that every informed layman could read and understand, a newly clear and effective planning framework. And this was (after a great deal of huffing and chuntering) delivered - you can read it:

The National Planning Policy Framework sets out the Government’s planning policies for England and how these are expected to be applied. It sets out the Government’s requirements for the planning system only to the extent that it is relevant, proportionate and necessary to do so. It provides a framework within which local people and their accountable councils can produce their own distinctive local and neighbourhood plans, which reflect the needs and priorities of their communities. 

All you needed was the NPPF - everything else is down to local councils and local communities. Except, as anyone attending an 'examination in public' (no more of those nasty public enquiries) for a 'local plan' will know, it's not that simple. Indeed the requirement for the local plan and the associated process wasn't provided for in the Localism Act 2011 but is essentially the system in the 2004 Act without the 'regional spatial strategy' and with things given different names. Moreover, those planning eggheads in Whitehall weren't content to leave it up to the judgement of local planners (let alone local councillors) and have produced a thing called 'Planning Practice Guidance' - thousands of pages of 'guidance' to local planners on making their plans and thereafter applying the policies in the plan to the management of development.

And as you all know, 'guidance' in Whitehall-speak doesn't mean 'here's some hints and tips on the best way to do this stuff'. It means 'unless you've a very good reason not to, this is the way you will do things, and in case you've forgotten every planning lawyer will be waving it at inspectors and judges as if Moses had brought it down from Mount Sinai'. Planning is a rules-based system and that guidance provides the rules.

The result of such a complicated system with such a big rule book is that there are glitches and loopholes. By way of illustration go and look at the rules for a classic board game like Cluedo (four pages) and contrast them with the rulebook for a big strategy wargame like War in the Pacific (56 pages plus a 12 page scenarios booklet and a 16 page book of charts and tables). There are almost no loopholes or glitches in Cluedo but War in the Pacific contains any number of said holes that the assiduous gamer with a love of reading the rule book can discover.

The more I look at the English planning system, the more I feel the need to fetch that axe and to put the overgrown thing out of its misery. Or rather to relieve the poor folk - builders, local residents, councillors - that the system forces to jump though hoops.  As I've observed before, every planning authority has a huge planning policy document few have read that is backed up by literally dozens of other studies, comments, papers and guidance notes. All so we can decide whether you can build on the paddock, if the family over the road can put in a dormer bedroom, and where the pub on the corner can put its extractor fan.

As I commented about habitat regulations, most of the constraints can and should be dealt with at the level of the individual application. You don't need a new set of policies merely describing the requirements set out in other legislation. If EU rules tell you that development isn't allowed somewhere that's it. And if those rules say the impact of development on wildlife must be mitigated there's no need to go through a long process to decide on the wording of a policy that, more-or-less, says that the impact of development on wildlife must be mitigated because those rules say so.

And the same goes for flooding and drainage, the protection of historic buildings and the preservation of landscapes. All of these things have specific protections and regulations pertaining to those protections - there's no need for a plan that simply repeats (sort of) what those other policies say. Yet hours of argument and discussion is undertaken and hundreds of pages of justification penned just to comply with a silly rule that says the plan has to reword policies written for another purpose in another place.

There is much wrong with planning - hence the system's need for mercy killing - but little that can be resolved by the preferred approach of tinkering around. We can change the spatial focus up and down from national to regional to sub-regional to local but still miss the point - it's not the grand plan but the detail that matters. And setting rules for the detail is hard, it verges on the impossible. To return to War in the Pacific - the bit of the game that slowed things up was the logistics rules so these were scrapped:

The rules have undergone significant change with greatly increased emphasis on detail in combat while removing the detailed logistics system that was the focus of the old game and replacing it with a command point system modeled after Victory Games' "Pacific War."

Playability trumps the desire for authenticity - conducting a war across millions of square miles of ocean was always about logistics rather than merely the crunch on actual battle.  But logistics are dull, complicated and hard to model. So it is with planning - the bit of the game planners like is the bit with big maps and coloured pencils, the making of sweeping decisions about new towns, new roads and new parks. But the bit of the game that matters is the detail, the regulations, the guidance, the policies. The 'national planning policy framework' was a valiant attempt to do to England's planning system what games designers did to War in the Pacific - make it playable.

The problem is that it's those details, the bureaucracy of planning, that are the planning system. Without them planning is pointless. But then maybe it is...

In complex situations, we may rely too heavily on planning and forecasting and underestimate the importance of random factors in the environment. That reliance can also lead to delusions of control. (Hillel Eindhorn, Behavioural Scientist)

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Taking schools policy out of political control means bureaucracy not better education

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We hear it all the time.

A former permanent secretary at the Department for Education, Sir David says there should be no more major changes to the curriculum, qualifications or structural changes to schools during the course of the next Parliament.

He wants an independent body to set long-term policy, separated from the shifting demands of party politics.

This could create a qualifications system that would support a changing economy, he says, arguing that this would include replacing A-levels with a broader, baccalaureate-style exam system.

OK it's schools on this occasion but it could be health, policing, criminal justice or even the economy. In every case the argument for removing politics from the management or administration of a given public service is made by someone who will gain from such a decision. It is the former bureaucrat running a teacher training operation, the former police inspector, a body made up of health professionals and experts, and the assorted grandees of the City along with their house magazine, the Financial Times.

And because we hate politicians (with some justification on occasion) it's easy to nod and agree with the sages, with the experts who tell us that taking the politics out will remove all the bad stuff and will mean that they can create a wonderful system that will do the job just fine.

Except they won't. Trust me on this folks, they won't. It is disingenuous for Sir David Bell, who used to run the Department for Education, to suggest that bureaucrats like him have a fantastic, ready-to-roll system of education just waiting for the politicians to get out of the way. What Sir David wants - and I understand that Labour's excuse for an education spokesman likes this idea - is for an independent body run by him and his mates to replace the current system where we the public have a tiny bit of a say in how the system is run.

Indeed the independent schools body - doubtless called something like Education England - will have a board crammed with Sir David's pals (all pulling down a handy little stipend to top up their pensions) and a Chief Executive on £250,000 a year who will set policy for the long-term. There will be expensive offices in London, a lobbying team and a pleasing round of international trips, conferences and dinners for all those involved. Unfortunately it won't make the slightest iota of difference to schools and, worse, will mean that any semblance of democratic accountability for one of our critical public services is lost. Replaced by know-all folk most of whom are, as is Sir David Bell, responsible for the current mess in the first place.

So long as education is funded through direct taxation we have no real option but for the direction of policy to be in the hands of those people we choose to set policy. We call these people politicians. And politicians sound off about education, about bad schools, lousy teachers and bad management because the people who elect us care quite alot about what happens in schools. So when a school in our patch does well we shout about it and when a school does badly we worry.

If you remove politics from education policy (except do note that you don't actually do this), the result isn't a dramatic change or improvement but stasis.  In reality the moans from Sir David are more about a personal (self-interested) dislike for policy rather than any real conviction that a mystical, politics-free independent body would be any better. Believe me, we in Bradford know about taking politics out of education - it doesn't work.

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The curse of bureaucracy...

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And a reminder that large parts of the USA are far removed from being that traditional descriptor, "land of the free". This is New York City|:

Mr. Brotter, 55, is an expediter, an imprecise term that is used to describe the men and women whose workdays are spent queuing up at the Manhattan branch of the New York City Department of Buildings to file the documents and pull the permits that allow construction projects — your kitchen renovation and the high-rise next door — to go forward. 

There are over 8,300 people who do the same job as Mr Brotter - getting paid to stand in a queue to see a bureaucrat so you can build your extension, install a new kitchen or get a new block of flats built. And this just adds to the cost of getting stuff done in  New York. As, Aaron Renn observed in citing this example:

Particularly when you are trying to build lower rent buildings, all of the fixed costs you have to incur to built anything (land, permits, expediters, etc.) have to be recovered and amortized across the units. When you have a hyper-complex development environment, these fixed costs raise the minimum viable rent threshold and thus push the cost of construction towards the higher end of the market that is already being served.

Put simply, the more hoops you make developers jump through, the more expensive the rents - and this is bad news if you want to meet housing demand in a magnet city like New York of London. And no the solution isn't to use taxpayers cash to subsidise a chosen few developers, the solution is to have fewer rules and fewer charges.

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Why the default political action should be to do nothing...

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“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”

Dostoevsky (from The Idiot)

One of my very earliest pieces on this blog was to write in praise of idiots, to explain and celebrate the growth of apathy:

Above all we should listen quietly to what this “apathy” calls for – it is less bothersome, less interfering, less hectoring and more effective government. Such people want government to be conducted at their level not to be the province of pompous politicians with overblown and lying rhetoric. And they want the language of common sense, freedom, liberty and choice to push away the elitist exclusivity of modern bureaucratic government.

The point I was trying to make was that these people were quietly getting on with their lives and the actions of politicians and bureaucrats served mostly to impede that quietly getting along. And that it is wrong to tell such folk that somehow they are bad citizens for not bothering to attend the village hall on voting day.

The thing with politics today - or rather our dominant political ideology - is that it believes there are always things that government can do to "fix" the problems of society. There is a belief - bordering on hubris - that if only the right levers are pulled, the right taxes levied, the proper regulations in place and the appropriate leadership employed, if only these things are done then everything will suddenly be better.

The problem is that we really haven't the first idea what we're doing. I listened today to a public health person telling us that inequality creates inequality - it took him longer to say it but this was the gist of his philosophising. There was no logic to this man's argument (although it contained enough buzzwords to get the audience nodding and making little grunts of assent) but it referenced the greatest societal sin of modern thinking - inequality.

The problem is that there isn't any consistent or robust evidence saying that inequality is the problem let alone ways of solving the "problem" of inequality that don't involve throwing the baby out with the bath water. To help us understand this, here's Michael Huemer from the University of Colorado:

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies – almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.

Except, of course, that every day one or other (often self-interested or self-serving) agitator pops up on the radio, TV or in the newspapers explaining, usually with carefully selected facts and figures, that this is terrible and that something must be done. The relevant minister, QUANGO boss or council leader is dragged blinking into the studio to explain just why they hadn't done something and when they plan on doing that particular something.

The problem is that - as Huemer describes - the experts prescribing the 'somethings' that must be done really aren't very good:

Unfortunately, when it comes to descriptive social theory, even the experts’ knowledge is unimpressive, as demonstrated recently by the social psychologist Phillip Tetlock. Tetlock conducted a fifteen-year study in which he collected tens of thousands of predictions from hundreds of political experts concerning matters within their areas of expertise (for example, would the economy slide into recession, would the Soviet Union survive, who would win the next Presidential election, and so on). Tetlock’s finding, in brief, was that the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes. When asked to assign probabilities to their predictions, experts proved systematically overconfident; for example, events predicted with 100% confidence happened less than 80% of the time.

So when the latest policy wonk (from right, left or centre, it doesn't matter) sounds off on the Today programme or pontificates on Newsnight bear this failure in mind, head for your kitchen cupboard and take an appropriate (not too much because those 'experts' say it's bad for you) amount of salt with the wonk's opinion.

So what should we be doing if there isn't some sort of social scientific unified theory of everything? The answer is perhaps two-fold:

1. A great deal less than we do at present - as my idiots know, people just getting on with their lives and not interfering too much in the lives of others is as good a solution as any other.

2. Simpler, more understandable things done locally - those same idiots also want to understand things and the best way to do this is for those things to be discussed in a manner they understand and at a scale they appreciate.

This approach may be a little bit untidy. It may lead to folk popping up on radio, telly and in the papers talking about "postcode lotteries" or "place inequalities" but it has the merit of allowing nearly everyone the chance to be involved. Just as importantly that essential principle - "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" - applies. And most of society's problems are more a consequence of us trying to fix things than of things needing to be fixed.

In the end our default political action should be to do nothing. Sadly the imperative of today's politics demands that this default political action is something. The result is failure and misery not a better society.

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Life in the castle: Politicians, bureaucracy and accountability

“You’re very severe,” said the chairman, “but multiply your severity by a thousand and it will still be as nothing compared with the severity that the authorities show toward themselves. Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.”  From Franz Kafka, "The Castle"

People really don't like politicians. We've known this for years, it should come as no surprise to any observer. And maybe it's a problem:

The research, which explores the reasons behind the precipitous drop in voter turnout – particularly among under-30s – finds that it is anger with the political class and broken promises made by high-profile figures that most rile voters, rather than boredom with Westminster.

But for as long as I can remember people have said that politicians don't keep promises. The problem is that, in the political game the making of promises is part of the currency. This is because the nature of democracy - the election thing especially - is for that currency to be votes rather than money.

For some the issue is fundamental:

This is no recent trend but is, in my view, the outcome of many centuries of shift away from deference to collective authority towards the free choice of the individual. At one stage, parliamentary democracy was a major consequence of this shift as feudal elites in charge by virtue of force and divinity made way for democratic elites chosen by free voting individuals. Now this historic shift is swamping parliamentary democracy itself.

The strange thing is that, while we get more detached from politics (perhaps because of the "shift away from deference to collective authority"),  that 'collective authority' gets more and more powerful and less and less accountable. We do not have 'feudal elites' but we do live in a world where government and its agents dominate large parts of life and interfere in the rest, mostly for some supposed 'common purpose'. The collective persists but it does so in a manner where any control or influence we have as individuals happens more by accident or good fortune rather than by design.

In the simplest of terms the management of our public services is largely unaccountable. And the reasons for this lack are many - from my near twenty year experience in local government here are a few:

• The sheer size of government - look at the NHS, at higher education or at planning and ask how it could be possible for a few ministers (mostly buried in paperwork) and an inefficient select committee of parliament to hold these departments to account?
• Resistance to change - for all that political leadership demands (and legislates for) change, the response of the bureaucracy, unions and academia is to organise the reform so as to secure the minimum possible actual change
• Professionalisation - everything must be 'professional', which means that those who aren't professionals in the given area are probably unqualified to comment and certainly unqualified to hold those professionals to account. As a result boards of professionals are used resulting in an inevitable closing of ranks.
• Secrecy and cover up - we hear every now and then about terrible things that happen in public agencies but only ever thanks to leaks and whistleblowers never through the usual processes of scrutiny or appraisal. The default position for government, for its agents and for the courts is always secrecy, always the gag.
• Centralisation, command and control - Anne Widdecombe observed how this was inevitable so long as the Minister has to go on the Today programme in response to things that go wrong. But this merely reinforces the chimera of ministerial control and prevents other forms of scrutiny working

I've resisted talking about more politically contested areas such as the role of trade unions, the impact of contracting and outsourcing and the role of the media in sustaining the myth of government's accountability. These few examples are not addressed by well-meaning attempts to improve public accountability, for example the apple pie and motherhood that is "the Nolan Principles", the creation of statutory officer positions in local government or the new Health & Wellbeing Boards (with a completely damaged and dysfunctional governance system imposed by an ignorant central government bureaucracy).

Public services in the UK are only accountable by happy and occasional accident - the conscientious local manager, the especially honest council leader or the whistle-blowing doctor - but in the main the way in which essential services are planned and managed is not accountable to the public who pay the bills.

Far too often as citizens we find ourselves waiting on the often arbitrary, certainly value-judged decisions of bureaucratic managers. The planning decision so we can open our cafe, a choice as to what care or treatment grandma will receive or some or other seemingly random ban, restriction or injunction imposed with no chance for challenge by some public official - we are powerless to stop this, we might through the efforts of a local councillor or the anger of a lawyer get the system bent enough to allow us to do our innocent business, but mostly we just bow our heads and mutter "jobsworth" before moving on.

And we blame the politicians. We blame them for promising accountability where there is none (nor hope of any) and then failing to deliver. We blame them for the breaking public systems, the uncaring public officials and the lousy results at our children's schools.

And the politicians promise to fix it all. The problem is that we can't, we're not allowed to.

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May I have permission to care, my lord?

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I attended a day's presentation and workshop for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's "Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness". Mostly I went because one of the study areas was the village of Denholme, part of Bingley Rural ward.

The work is interesting and useful. I can commend it's basic idea - that communities can be helped (assuming this is needed at all) to respond to the problems of loneliness. And loneliness, as much as any other so-called public health challenge, is a killer:

Loneliness is a bigger problem than simply an emotional experience.  Research shows that loneliness and social isolation are harmful to our health: lacking social connections is a comparable risk factor for early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and is worse for us than well-known risk factors such as obesity and physical inactivity.

Put simply, meeting our need for social interaction can help us live longer, healthier lives regardless of the other choices we make about our lifestyles.

Much of the work is about what might be done - not at the grand level of national policy but at the level of the neighbourhood. And in presenting these findings two observations stood out to me: one depressing but not surprised and the other chilling.

The first was:

Regulation kills kindness

People who want to help are put off helping because of the regulations - the safeguarding checks, the insurances, the mandatory training, the forms, the licences, the sheer bureaucracy of trying to do a good deed. This is depressing - and my depression was worsened by advocates of regulation defending the use of regulation. Pleasingly the project head amended her statement to say that regulation and bureaucracy kills kindness.

The second, the chilling one that went almost without notice, was:

We need to give people permission to care

That's right - permission to care. That professionals in the employ of the Council, the NHS or their satellite agencies needed to allow people to look out for their neighbour. In this I saw a dead culture - one murdered by the good intentions of public agencies. That we might not be allowed to pop in on Mr & Mrs Jones to make sure they're OK, maybe make them a cuppa and have a chat for half and hour. Unless we've undertaken the official "befriending" course, got the required clearances from the state and been attached to an organisation that "delivers" looking out for the neighbours.

So tell me you caring professionals, what kind of world are you creating where someone needs your permission to be a good neighbour? Chilling indeed.

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How the police waste resources...and then blame the public

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Shock, horror, scandal! One drunk takes 17 - yes, folks one seven, seventeen - coppers to respond. Now leaving aside that I don't believe a word of it, what a waste of resources. This is today's instalment of Chief Constable Adrian Lee's tinpot fascist campaign against people having a good time.

Four policemen to arrest one drunk - two in a patrol car! Aren't the police patrolling the town centre anyway? What this report tells us is that policing in England is a bureaucratic mess and that, under the leadership of men like Mr Lee, the service couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag.

Apparently police resources would be better deployed elsewhere:

And those resources would be put to much better use in local communities rather than being called into town centres every weekend to deal with people who wouldn't cause problems if they hadn't consumed so much alcohol

I've really no idea what those "resources" would be doing in "local communities" at midnight on a Friday other that sitting about drinking tea or pointlessly patrolling empty streets. I guess they could use the time to keep up with the paperwork that people like Mr Lee create for them?

Drunken assault is anti-social. But then so is much of the rest of the things police deal with - burglary to feed a drug habit is anti-social, shoplifting is anti-social. In truth all crime is anti-social, the police spend most of their time dealing with people who, for whatever reason, cause problems. It's why we have them, it's what we pay Mr Lee and others to do.

It seems however that, in Mr Lee's world, the problem is with the public not the incompetence of police systems.

Oh and while we're about this - there is no such thing as "24 hour drinking" but since the liberalising of licensing laws alcohol consumption has fallen. Every single year and the biggest fall is amongst the young - the very people Mr Lee blames for the police's bureaucratic uselessness.

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A frightening comment on the ghastly waste that is HS2 - who runs the country?

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Here's Jackie Sadek from UK Regeneration:

The government seems to be going out on the offensive to promote HS2 today. About time really. I am a staunch supporter (of course, isn’t everyone in regeneration?) and, having visited the HS2 office within CLG in Eland House a few days ago, I can bear witness to the vast operation already under way.

Gantt charts, like you’ve never seen, plastering the walls.  And row upon row of peeps working hard at computers. An air of quiet industry and permanence abounds. Now I don’t know who really runs this country, but whoever it is, believe me, trust me, they have decided we are HAVING HS2. 

There you have it folks. Forget about votes in parliament. Never mind the role of ministers. We are having HS2! Millions are being spent planning it, developing it and make it happen.

I am inclined on these occasions to scream.

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On the capture of government by special interests...

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If we assume that the airline companies will try to capture the Civil Aeronautics Board, it makes sense to assume that professors will try to capture the National Science Foundation, teachers to capture the Department of Education, environmentalists to capture the Council on Environmental Quality, and civil rights activists to capture the Office for Civil Rights.  The plausibility of this assumption is sometimes obscured by calling agency-interest relations of which we approve “citizen participation” and agency-interest relations of which we disapprove “capture,” but the issue is very much the same whatever rhetorical label we choose to employ.

Absolutely - and public health lobbies will capture the Department of Health!And, of course, bankers the treasury.

We need to remember this at all times. Government and bureaucracy is never neutral, seldom innocent and is inevitably corrupted by the people and organisations it regulates. The solution isn't more government. The solution isn't some weird thing called 'better regulation'. The solution isn't more so-called democratic oversight (as if the people the democracy puts there are innocent, uncorrupted paladins).

The solution is less government, less bureaucracy and less regulation.

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So much for localism...

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Councils can have localism just so long as they do as they're told by the unelected:

The research shows more than half of the 55 non-London local plans submitted to the Planning Inspectorate under the new system proposed a reduction in housing targets.

However, of the 18 plans passed by inspectors, eight were forced to increase their housing targets. Just two plans have been passed with lower housing numbers than set by the old regional planning targets and government household projections.

Not releasing land for housing may be wrong. It may be right. But if we really believe in giving local communities power it's for them to make those right and wrong decisions not an unelected inspector.

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Permission to dump, Sir? Some rubbish bureaucracy from Bradford Council

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In this year's budget Bradford's Labour leadership - supported as they are by the watermelons from Shipley - forced through a decision to introduce a permit for residents wanting to make use of 'household waste recycling sites' (or 'tips' as most folk call them). Officers have been trying to introduce this tidy little scheme for some long while but it's only this year that they've found - in Labour Cllr Andrew Thornton - someone stupid enough to agree to the idea.

We're told - without any evidence other than the opinion of officers - that Bradford is a net importer of waste. People from Leeds, Kirklees, Halifax and Skipton are driving into Bradford to deposit their broken furniture, bags of coat hangers and knackered white goods. Oddly enough, all those other councils believe the same and are introducing similar schemes - presumably the extra rubbish is freighted in from Maastricht or perhaps even deposited by visiting Martians.

So far, so bad. A problem that isn't a problem is identified and a solution - introducing a permit - is proposed and accepted by an idiot politician (Cllr Thornton in this case who was told that it would save loads of money). But it gets worse.

To introduce the scheme the Council has sent every resident a form that they are asked to take to their nearest tip along with their Council Tax bill and their driving licence. Information - address, driving license number and the tip the resident uses - is collected. The instructions say that the operatives at the tip will issue the license and off we go.

Sadly, the Council had forgotten to tell the folk at the tip - who didn't know about the forms and didn't have any permits to issue. So the forms were gathered, placed in a box and, one assumes, the Council will post out the permits. Asked about why all this personal information is needed, the Strategic Director in charge said this:

It is not, all we need is proof of adress (sic) that is the same as the Council tax bill. More often than not people show their driving license (sic) for this purpose but any other appropriate formal document traditionally accepted will do

The intention is for proof to be shown and the permit can be issued. There was no need for a form, no need to collect the data and no need to gather thousands of pieces of paper containing sensitive personal information (address and driving licence number - what could Mr Huhne have done with that, I wonder?).

Truth is that there's no need for the scheme at all - the bureaucracy alone negates much of the saving. And that's before all the aggro from people who lose their licence, leave it on the side in the kitchen or generally do what we all do from time to time. And what about the bloke from Pudsey who takes some stuff from his elderly mum's house to the tip? I guess he'll have to go to Leeds?

So we have here a typical council initiative - not really necessary, disorganised, unclear and unsafe. All in the name of some savings that they'll never be able to prove came about because of the scheme!

Well done Cllr Thornton. You win Numpty of the Month for March!

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Process or people?

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Surrey County Council let an old lady starve to death:

Officers from Surrey Police have begun an inquiry following the death of 81-year-old widow Gloria Foster.

She passed away at Epsom Hospital on Monday (February 4) after being found abandoned, starving and dehydrated at her home in Banstead.

Mrs Foster was left alone at the property in Chipstead Road after the Sutton-based firm that cared for her, Carefirst24, was shut down following a raid by the UK Border Agency and Metropolitan Police in January.

I don't know the details of the case so can't say whether anything criminal was done. But I have a question - was Mrs Foster killed by the process or the people?  And it's an important question because it impinges on the failings in our National Health Service as shown by the enquiries into various hospitals and hospital departments, most recently Mid Staffs NHS Trust.

If it's the process - or the system or the "culture" - then we must ask how it is that repeated reorganisations and restructures have affected our care provision. Has each revolution in NHS or Council organisation merely, in Kafka's words, resulted in "...the slime of a new bureaucracy"?

Or is it the people - should we really be asking how someone - or worse still several people - can leave an old lady without the care she needed to live for nine days? That's nine days turning up to work with the request sitting on the desk, nine days to make a phone call and arrange some care, nine days to do something so Mrs Foster can live.

Is it the people? Those altruistic nurses passing by a bed where an poorly woman lies in her own urine and faeces - was it the process, the system, the culture that made them neglect her needs? Time and time again, not just in Stafford but across the NHS and in Council care provision, we read of this neglect, this failure to do basic, civilised acts of caring.

Can we ask again - is it the process or the people?

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