Paying less, caring more

Do a rough mental calculation. Take half your annual Council tax and multiply it by four. The result is roughly what you're paying in tax each year to 'protect' other people's children. As Christopher Booker has catalogued in his Telegraph columns, the child 'protection' racket has grown into a national industry, fully sanctioned by populist horror at baby Peter, Victoria Climbie and all the other tragic victims of adult abuse. Your local council will close every library, see each street lamp doused and let rubbish pile-up in windrows on the streets before they will willingly cut a single pound from their child 'protection' budgets.

And yes, of course 'protection' is in quotes. Most children taken from their parents into the care of the State are at infinitely greater risk under the State's 'protection' than without it. Edward Timpson MP writes in the Telegraph this morning on the recent abuse of young girls by Moslem men in Rochdale, girls without exception in the 'care' of the State. Other enquiries are examining allegations that powerful Tory figures grazed à la carte on young boys being held in a State 'home'. Suicide and self-harm figures for children held by the State are abnormal. So yes, under the State's 'protection' is the very last place you'd want a child to be.

Timpson is acting the Muppet in calling for even more investment and greater spending to prevent another Rochdale. We need a radical alternative. We need to make major cuts to State spending, and child 'protection' is a massive one; we really have to face it. Cityunslicker writes on the C@W blog

However, there are no votes in this approach from a populace used to the Nanny state; so what to do? I can see the default position being minor cuts, more tax rises and a slow Japan style death with the national debt slowly climbing towards Italian and then Japanese levels whilst politicians hand out the treats to harvest votes.

When 'up or out' breaks down

Some years ago my firm employed an ex-Lt Colonel who had been made redundant as part of the 'options for change' restructuring of the 1990s. He didn't want to leave, he confided; he rather hoped to make Brigadier at least. This was a time when the army was applying a version of 'up or out' - that if an officer, after so much time in a certain rank, failed to gain promotion they had to pack it in. It was designed to stop the blocking of a career progression and experience for the most capable coming up through the ranks. After a while it became apparent why my Colonel had been returned to civilian life; whilst hugely capable in any number of ways, and a thoroughly decent and sociable chap, he lacked a certain key strategic insight and as a consequence set off in directions that were not quite in the firm's long-term interests. He found his niche, I'm happy to say, successfully heading a small and long-established charity. 


I rather strongly support 'up or out'. No-one wants to see a forty year-old Captain or a fifty year-old Major. But if the 'Telegraph's' report today is both truthful and accurate, something has gone seriously wrong. A downsizing exercise that leaves the army with the less capable whilst losing those of greater potential is not in the nation's interest. It may be that the report is flawed and part of the war of info-attrition being waged against service cuts. Or it may be that the army's severance package is just too generous. I think we need to know which - if the latter, we need to restrict the benefits. Remember that it's already cost us many hundreds of thousands of pounds to train a Lt Colonel up to that level of experience; making it too attractive to leave is a failure to protect our investment as well as disadvantaging our national interest. 

Libraries or dead children?

As the Indie reports this morning, public anger is growing at the 'bloodbath' facing public libraries, with some 375 having been identified to date for closure by councils making savings. However, this is an entirely rational and self-interested move by council bosses; no-one will put them in the dock, or summarily dismiss them, for depriving their populations of access to books. If they have a child die on their watch, they face personal disgrace, even imprisonment. In fact, they will first cut not just libraries but every single traditional non-statutory function of local authorities before they reduce by one pound the budgets for children and child protection.


Sharon Shoesmith's fate sent shockwaves of fear through council bosses after the death of Baby Peter. Council social services structures have since been padded with layer upon layer of sacrificial managers all designed to protect the Chief Officers at the top from the consequences of having a child death on their patch. There is no more profligate spender of tax funds than a council boss building a wall of deniability around themself. The welfare of 'at risk' children, of course, has not improved by a single jot or tittle - as Booker has been reporting, if anything the State has responded by seizing more and more of them, sometimes for perfectly trivial reasons.  


Take a look at this year's budget breakdown for England's councils (spreadsheet). In addition to some £48bn for education, they are spending around £7bn overall on children's 'social protection'. This exceeds the  national bill for libraries (£1bn), parks (£1bn), refuse collection and disposal (£2.8bn), street lighting (£0.5bn), road maintenance (£1.1bn) and trading standards, food safety and environmental health (£0.4bn) together. 


It would be a brave politician who suggested that we're paying too much for child protection, but of course we are. It's a consequence of a Rousseau-esque State that's worked hard for decades to destroy the horizontal ties of family and community and replace them with a direct vertical link between every individual and the State. And this is the cost - and it isn't cheap. 

Making middle class life less comfortable

There is a well-sorted couple up the road who are not happy bunnies at the moment. Both in their thirties, he works on well rewarded contract appointments with much foreign travel but significant gaps between contracts and she works in education; she may bring the bread to the table, but he puts the butter and jam on it, in the shape of expensive foreign holidays, the Audi in the parking bay and nursery and daycare for their two sprogs (named Adam and Jocasta for all I know). Although I'm on nodding terms with them, my closest neighbour shares a nursery with them - hence the information above. In income terms I think I'm on safe ground in guessing they each earn more than £35k but less than £55k; in other words, they're squarely in the sights of the Coalition's spending cuts. 


As Simon Jenkins points out in the Guardian this morning, they have been the true beneficiaries of State Welfarism; whilst this blog amongst many others railed against the waste of Welfare, the iniquity of Welfare slavery and the assaults on our wallets, it wasn't people like our neighbours we had in mind. When the recession hit, it was something that happened to others, those who lived outside of London and the south-east, not those we nodded to in the street. Government savings didn't affect our blogreaders or our relatives. 


But for once, Cameron couldn't have been clearer in the run up to the election that this would be the case. He warned we would all have to share the pain, that the measures would hit across Britain, and  many nodded and voted Conservative still not believing he meant it. He's emerging as that rarest of creatures, a true one-nation Tory, with a deep inbuilt conviction in fair play and equity, and I have to support him wholly in this, even though the pain is close to home. 


For long periods in our recent history, Britain has managed to be a highly socially stratified society without extraordinary differences in the financial worth of each strata, unlike other Western nations, and this has been partly the reason for our political stability. The growth of the middle class from Tudor times as a distinct class has been accompanied by a host of distinguishing characteristics other than wealth. A member of the middle class had an income of £12,000 a year whilst a worker had a wage of £230.77 a week - although their incomes were exactly the same, they were not. A whole caucus of English literature and drama explored the struggle to maintain status and respectability amongst the former whilst the latter could get drunk, have fun and fornicate. Or the struggle of the latter to absorb the mores of the former as they dined in a college hall for the first time. Grammar Schools were not a perk of the wealthy that maintained exclusivity as many Tories wish they were today, but a truly equitable and democratic bridge. 


No. The middle class have become too wealthy; the differentials are too great, for a healthy society and a congruent nation, and they have done so at the taxpayer's expense. Unlike Labour, Cameron promises something far more valuable than bribes - a fairer and more equitable Britain, one nation. That's a prize worth winning. 

An opportunity to put Crapita and Crapco to the test

One of the most significant problems associated with outsourcing is that too often the contracts are drafted by the chums of the firms set to benefit, rather than by the recipients of the outsourced service. Thus hospital cleaning contracts drafted by PWC and KPMG are tendered for by Crapita and Crapco, producing a bonanza of fees and earnings all round but leaving the wards filthy and patients dying from buildings and staff rotten with pathogens.

A few years ago a school governor friend asked me to look at a Standard Model Contract for cleaning their primary school. The budgets had been devolved, but quite rightly the school had to demonstrate that its procurement of services was competitive. The school was then cleaned by two sisters, both of whom had kids there, and a friend of theirs. They were being asked to complete a contract folio two inches thick, and submit a boxful of supporting information including their training policy, equalities policies, quality systems and a host of minor requirements. They would be bidding against two nationally known facilities management companies.

The answer of course was to draft a replacement service specification that reflected exactly what was done and what the Head wanted to be done by the school's cleaners. This included providing replacement clothing for 'accidents' and laundering and returning the soiled items, acting as set dressers and stage managers for the nativity play and most importantly taking the school's goldfish and Syrian Hamsters home for the school holidays. The bulk of the onerous supporting information, so easy for large firms to churn out but a real market barrier for micro-enterprises, was to be provided only on winning the contract. The result was that the big boys declined to tender and the school kept its cleaners.

If Cameron's empowerment means anything it's this. It's allowing Ward Sisters to dictate service standards and specifications, not some KPMG blow-in in Regional HQ. It's allowing park users to determine their priorities, not the strategic planning authority. And it's allowing me and my neighbours to set, and pay for, the services we want, not some bloke in a silk suit in PWC Towers.

The Grauniad expects a tsunami of profits for the private providers from the cuts. I think they're being pessimistic. I think this could be a real chance for users to take control of the services they consume, discard the central Statist model that the big players are so inextricably entwined with and let's see how Crapita and Crapco respond to 20,000 micro contracts each with an empowered client holding the budget.

Councils get their retaliation in first

As far as local councils are concerned, there is a deeply held belief that a Whitehall charged with realising 25% savings will seek to cut 24.9% directly from council budgets whilst trumpeting the 0.1% cut from its own.

So not content with waiting for the October spending review, the Local Government Association has published its own list of proposed cuts, including;

• £400m from 'reductions in data burdens'
• £250m from 'reducing the costs of regulating local government'
• £1.5bn from reducing departmental costs within the 7 Whitehall departments concerned with councils
• £1bn saving in Whitehall departmental resource budgets by reducing regulation
• £50m saving from reduced Whitehall-compliant administration for specific grants
• £900m savings by giving councils greater spending flexibility
• £430m from reducing Quango admin costs
• £860m from reducing Quango budgets by 2%

Um, and the savings to be made by councils themselves are where, exactly?

The Treasury, of course, is laughing up its sleeve; it will take both the Whitehall savings identified by councils, and all the council savings identified by Whitehall.

The tragedy of it all is the sheer waste under Labour - that we've been paying for all this dross for years without either the LGA or Whitehall suggesting a single cent in savings.

Should council leisure facilities survive?

Councils are under no legal obligation to provide leisure facilities; they are a 'discretionary' service. There is also a rule of thumb that public sector intervention in the economy is only justified to do something necessary that the private sector isn't doing.

In the case of council leisure facilities - municipal golf courses, fitness centres, gyms and swimming pools - we need to look at whether these meet the test above.

The private sector is very good at providing golf courses, fitness centres and gyms, and charges and barriers to entry are set at a level that provides various degrees of exclusivity. The only justification for paying for these out of our taxes is a social distributionist one; that poorer people can't afford David Lloyd club membership fees, but should have the right to use the same exercise bicycles or tee-off for the same hole at the taxpayer's expense.

Swimming pools are a little different. There's no money in running a commercial swimming pool, and the private sector simply doesn't do it. All private sector swimming pools are part of a larger commercial fitness / health 'offer' and cross-subsidised from profitable activities. 'Dry' leisure makes money, 'wet' leisure doesn't.

It comes down to whether you think teaching children to swim and allowing adults to practice the skill is worth paying tax for. Personally, I do. But I'd make a bonfire of the municipal golf courses and our cringe-making local 'leisure and lifestyle centres'.

Plenty to cut still ...

Yesterday's little tickler was a decent start, but there's plenty of room for further cuts. Just a couple of comments for today;

Audit Commission £209m

Half the Audit Commission's work is fine. This is the bit that sends auditors into public-funded bodies to ensure probity and good stewardship of public funds, and that no-one has their fingers in the till.

The other half of the AC's work is to impose a centralist, Statist and homogenous system of Whitehall command and control across what are essentially local services; their self-invented system of scoring and marking enables them to coerce non-conforming and independent bodies into following central diktat. This bit must go.

Savings? An easy £100m p.a. here.

Homes and Communities Agency £4,505m

Social housing and regeneration. This is the body that funds all those Housing Associations currently buying-up your closed neighbourhood pubs and turning them into bedsits for Albanians. Also pumps money into the old Labour heartlands to retrain redundant tin-bashers in windmill maintenance. Some good work in bringing forward polluted sites for development (where de-polluting costs otherwise make sites uneconomic to develop).

Since immigration levels drive the need for new social housing, effective action on immigration will substantially reduce demand. And tax-breaks for investors is an equally if not more effective way of securing regeneration.

Savings? An easy £2.5bn a year here.

That's enough for today.