Town & Country Planning, July/August 2010
I have mentioned the system thinker John Seddon’s wonderfully angry newsletters before in this column. But the latest edition sees a sudden and rather surprising change of tone.
He still enjoys goading the Audit Commission, and certainly hasn’t let up in his furious critique of the ‘regime’ of targets, standards, specifications and audit and the vast waste of resources that they involve. No, it is because, as he puts it: the Regime is dead.
It is dead because a whole phalanx of government ministers have said so. There certainly seems to have been a trade-off between spending cuts and loosening control, so perhaps he is right.
But nonetheless, my feeling is that Seddon is celebrating prematurely. Because when a highly centralised government sets about slashing public spending, they do it in a highly centralised way – and therefore hideously inefficient one.
As I write, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles is speaking glowingly about the idea of local authorities sharing chief executives, plus a whole range of other shared back office functions.
The Sunday newspapers last weekend were full of plans to merge police forces, despite a whole army of reports which confirm that big police forces are less effective than small police forces – and that inevitably means higher costs elsewhere.
I fear that, without a big idea at the heart of the spending cuts, we are heading for a new generation of ineffective and hugely wasteful shared back office services – and we will wonder again why so little works, and where the money all went.
But there are local models for cutting spending, and Al Gore’s National Performance Review during the Clinton years is a good example.
The NPR emerged after the scandal of wasteful Pentagon spending, because the cost of simple items ballooned when they went through armed forces bureaucracy.
The $7,622 coffee percolator bought by the air force was the most spectacular, but the one that really caught the public imagination was the $436 hammer bought for the navy, or – as the Pentagon called it – a ‘uni-directional impact generator’.
One of the first schemes the Review launched was an annual Hammer Award for public sector employees who had made huge efforts to work more effectively.
That was the point. The Review set out a series of principles for saving money by scrapping rules and bureaucracy and giving power back to staff. Then they urged them to get on with it and told stories about their progress.
Regular newsletters were packed with suggestions. Abandon sign-in sheets and clocking-in machines. Buy equipment locally if you think you can get a good price. Waive the need for travel expense receipts for sums under $75.
The Federal Reports Elimination and Sunset Act 1995 ended hundreds of reporting requirements, and ended the rest after five years unless they were specifically renewed. The 10,000 page Federal Personnel Manual was junked. Public organisations were allowed to recruit people however they wanted.
One of their key stories was about the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) office in Maine, the equivalent of the UK’s Health and Safety Executive. It consistently came top of the league for how much they were doing, for the most citations and fines, yet the workplace safety in the state was still the worst anywhere.
When they realised this, the Maine office created a small revolution. They tackled the most difficult factories first, and created employee teams there to solve the problems. If the companies agreed to support them, they would suspend their inspections and punishments.
The result was that the accident injury rate went down by two thirds. It wouldn’t have been possible without inspiring staff to seek out new ways of doing things – and without a big idea that pointed them in the right direction.
You need that element at least of top-down instruction. It is too early to judge the cuts regime in the UK, but the fear is that it may combine the worst of both worlds – no big idea at the top about how things might be done differently, yet all the controls that suppress local imagination still in place.
So here’s the point, and this applies to planning as well as every other public service function at local level. Cutting spending is going to be less imaginative and less effective if the process of deciding what to cut is little more than a uni-directional impact generator.
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. His new book The Wizard: A new kind of Oz for our times (The Real Press) was published last month. www.david-boyle.co.uk
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