Not answering the phone is a failure...

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So I'm trying to speak to someone at the hospital to find out how my Mum is - it's 250 miles away so I can't visit easily. And no-one is answering the telephone - or at least nowhere near enough to give me any reassurance. In a fit of irritation and anger I turn to Twitter and splurge out that the inability to answer the telephone is a failure on the part of the NHS (although, more specifically, on the part of one particular bit of the NHS).

The response was as predictable as Twitter always is on the subject of the NHS - a series of 'how dare you criticise the NHS'. 'the nurses are busy saving lives' and 'answering the telephone isn't a priority' tweets. And I guess they're right on one level - we don't employ nurses and doctors to answer the telephone, we employ them to look after patients. So I'm probably - in a frustrated sort of way - pleased that the nurses aren't answering my call.

However, not answering the phone is still a failure. In the main people don't idly ring up hospital wards just for a chat - when someone rings they're likely to be worried, upset and concerned about a friend or relative. And this is why the phone should be answered and why not answering it is a failure of service. I appreciate that on the scale of NHS service failures it's down the list - way below not giving a thirsty patient a drink, dishing out the wrong medicine or sending someone with throat cancer home because you think it's tonsillitis. But it is a failure - a failure that starts from a lack of humanity from the institution, that's a real, worried person on the line, and continues through failing to mitigate (having an answer phone, for example) to not considering that finding a solution makes any sense.

The point here is that I'm entitled to criticise the NHS as an institution when it fails me - and, unimportant though is may be to those steeped in NHS culture, not answering the phone is a failure.

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Good jobs and bad jobs...

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We're familiar with the 'burger flipper' argument. Jobs at places like McDonalds of KFC are 'bad' jobs - low skilled and low paid. Which, when you think about it, is rather sticking two fingers up at the kids who go and do these jobs.

But no, we must have high skilled, high paid jobs - you know the ones don't you? The ones that our education system doesn't meet demand for (which, of course, is why the jobs are higher paid). But even were the schools to miraculously transform overnight, there'd still be jobs serving fried chicken and hamburgers to people who want to eat said chicken and burgers.

This is all an example of the way in which the British have managed to turn the idea of giving service into the single most demeaning and menial of tasks. We've got this rather pathetic attachment to grand jobs in manufacturing and extractive industries - steelworkers, miners, machine operators. These are proper jobs in a way that waiting on in a diner or serving the cue at Burger King aren't.

Even in service industry, we champion the jobs in the back room - the bankers, the accountants, the code-writers - rather than front of house. The folk who serve you in the bank, the people on the other end of the phone at the insurance company and the receptionists everywhere - these are the low valued, poorly paid jobs.

It seems to me that we'd be a whole lot nicer place if this changed, if the idea of service was valued a little more highly. And, moreover, we'd have better businesses as a result.

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Competition in banking? Now that's a radical idea...

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In that irritating way of today’s politics, the newspapers are report on a speech that Ed Miliband will make tomorrow. And Ed nearly gets it right for once:

The Labour leader will call for the big five banks - Barclays, HBOS, HSBC, Lloyds TSB and RBS/NatWest - to become seven, with privately-run "challenger banks" to buy up to 1,000 existing branches. It is hoped that this will increase competition and choice for consumers as well as reduce bank charges.

I say ‘nearly’ because firstly banking isn’t driven by branches any more. For sure I have a ‘branch sort code’ but that’s pretty virtual these days and it’s a fair while since I actually visited that branch. And the future of banking lies in this virtual world not in grandly portico’ed high street branches.

Secondly, I should get to choose where I bank – if Ed’s banking reforms force me to change because they’ve forced my bank to sell its Bradford branch to a newly formed “challenger” bank, I shall be just a tad annoyed.

The problem with banking is that we have made it more and more difficult to operate as a retail bank let alone start up a new one. It didn’t use to be that way – governments passed laws that made it so:

As a result of these legislative changes, provincial limited-liability joint-stock companies started picking off private banks. After lengthy negotiations, three of the largest Quaker-run banking firms--Barclays (which had become Barclays, Tritton, Ransom, Bouverie & Company after a merger in 1888), Jonathan Backhouse & Company, and Gurneys, Birkbeck, Barclay & Buxton, along with 17 smaller Quaker-run banks, agreed to merge and form a bank large enough to resist takeover attempts. Barclays took its modern form in 1896 when the 20 private banks merged to form Barclay and Company, Ltd., a joint-stock association with deposits totalling an impressive £26 million. This marked the beginning of Barclays' tradition of service to farmers and fishermen.

And we have – for all sorts of reasons, good and bad – continued to pass laws regulating the activities of banks that acted to make it harder to start up a new bank. That made banks a special case in capitalism – because market entry was so hard, because banks could offer free banking to retail depositors, because banks had what we believed to be an essential partnership with government – for all these reasons banks had no good reason to focus on being the service businesses that they were once (and that their advertising still claims them to be).

While the big banks were careful cautious and focused on the day-to-day job of lending, holding deposits and such, this lack of competition didn’t really matter much. The public got truly awful service – banks elevated saying ‘no’ to a semi-religious status – but the banks weren’t threatening the foundation of the economy.

But then someone discovered the money tree and introduced bankers and governments to its wonders. By the wonders of this thing, banks and governments – in cahoots – could shower the economy with billions in “investment” while providing a bottomless purse of welfare, care and bacon paving. The essential partnership between banks and government was forged anew – in exchange for bankers making untold billions, politicians could bribe the voters with grand projects and freebies. The politicians would keep interest rates down (abetted as we now know by the bankers) allowing asset values to sour giving the illusion of great wealth and on the back of this higher taxes would allow for higher borrowing – more profit for the banks, more votes for the politicians.

We need more competition in the pretty straightforward job of taking my money, keeping it safe, paying it people I want it paying to and providing (at a charge) loans should I need them. It’s not a complicated business, there’s no reason why it can only be done by massive multi-national corporations. Yet that is the case.

If Ed Miliband had proposed such a real change – opening up banking licensing to the general market and allowing us to make choices about where we keep our money – that would have been interesting. Instead we get proposals to “break up” the banks and give us a choice of seven where there are now five. I guess that will suit the banks. And government still has that essential partnership with those banks. That hasn’t changed!

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One wonders why?

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...people in Bradford are using a walk-in service rather than their own GP?

Dr Damian Riley, medical director at NHS Airedale, Bradford and Leeds, said: “This change was needed to make sure the walk-in service is used to its best advantage and continues to provide real value for money.

“More patients than expected, especially those who already have a GP elsewhere in the district, have been using the service, even though their own GP has been available.

Perhaps getting an appointment with their own GP is a living nightmare? Maybe people want a "turn up when you're ill" service from their GP?

So who is the service for then, if not Bradford people? Ah, yes...

The change allows appointments at the walk-in service to be prioritised for patients who are not registered with a GP, and in particular communities such as asylum seekers, homeless people, travellers and refugees. A service will also be offered for people who are temporary residents in the district and not registered at a Bradford and Airedale practice.

So it's back to the same old lousy GP service then folks!

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Cullingworth doesn't want "modern community leadership" but a little bit of old-fashioned service would go amiss.

An assortment of the great and the good have launched something called 21st Century Councillor. This grouping - doubtless well rewarded with dollops of our taxes - suggest that tomorrow's local Councillor will be a:

"... supported, confident, talented and professional community leader."

Now I have no problem with Councillors being confident and talented and I haven't the foggiest what the bureaucrats mean by "supported" but I have my doubts about the remainder. In truth I believe the assumptions that underlie the observation to be dangerously wrong.

Being a local councillor is not a profession (there isn't yet a chartered institute of councillors although I don't doubt the LGA, LGIU, IDeA, NLGN, LACORS and assorted other well-padded London-based local government organisations have it all planned) and local councillors are not elected to provide "community leadership" we are elected to represent the residents of our ward - and I interpret that as meaning to serve their interests not to lead them.

However, as most decision-making power was removed from local councillors by Blair's local government "modernisation", the great and the good have been scrabbling around looking for some kind of role for all us pesky backbenchers. And the solution - promoted by that most New Labour of organisations the New Local Government Network under my pleasingly former MP Chris Leslie - has been the idea of councillors as Community Leaders.

The problem is that places like Cullingworth really don't want community leadership - especially from community leaders who have the role of telling them why the local council, at the behest of some bureaucrat down in London, is imposing something that isn't either needed or wanted. What villagers here desire is a little bit of response from the council, the health service, the police, the Environment Agency and, for that matter, all the myriad other bureaucratic institutions that blight the lives of ordinary folk. And because they don't get that attention most of the time, the councillor's job is to argue, insist, cajole, badger, shout and generally get up the noses of local officialdom in the hope that they will actually listen to local people and act on what they hear.

Where I come from that's not "community leadership" it's service.