Andrew Grimson, writing in the Telegraph, is dismissive of Ed Balls’ first speech in his new position:

"The banality of Mr Balls’s opening observation is
such that we can hardly bear to repeat it, for we fear it may echo in
the heads of our more impressionable readers like some infuriating tune.

Stop
reading now if you are sensitive, for here is what he said: "I start
this statement with a proposition on which I believe every member of
this House and every parent and grandparent in our country can agree:
every child matters."

Those three words are the
same cloth-eared piety that Ruth Kelly used to inflict on us when she
was education secretary. It is supposed to show how humane and
egalitarian the speaker is, but actually suggests a fathomless
hypocrisy.

Every child matters to whom? And does
any child matter anything like as much to Mr Balls as his own three
children? Of course not, but here he is, pretending to himself and
everyone else that his abstract love of children is somehow comparable
to his real and profound love of his own children.

Mr
Balls’s newly coined title – Secretary of State for Children, Schools
and Families – is totalitarian in its presumption. The state cares for
you: this is what it seems to say. At least the most recent education
secretary, Alan Johnson, had the honesty to admit that the children the
state keeps "in care" are actually among the most atrociously neglected
children in the country. But with Mr Balls we have descended again to
the language of Miss Kelly."

In our guide to the new cabinet we saw this coming.  His main political experience is a long period as Brown’s aide in forming economic policy.  Hardly sufficient preparation for effecting a turnaround in large institutions like the school system.

Download  The TaxPayers’ Alliance Guide to the New Cabinet (PDF)

Entering a senior position without the necessary experience Ed Balls is resorting to platitude.  He can establish his good intentions and come across as a ‘nice guy’ without risking the minefield of policy where his inexperience and lack of subject knowledge might be exposed through some mistake.  For too many politicians this is the route to promotion.

The need for a turnaround could not be more acute.  Some facts from the TaxPayers’ Alliance Better Government paper demonstrate just how thoroughly political management of education has failed:

"• 11 year-olds: 25% leave primary school without sufficient ability in reading and writing to tackle the secondary school curriculum.
• 14 year-olds: almost 30% do not reach the expected levels in English, Maths and Science to tackle GCSEs.
• 16 year-olds: almost 60% do not achieve a GCSE grade C or better in all the three core subjects of English, Maths and Science.
• After 11 years of state education at a cost of over £75,000 per child, pupils are leaving school functionally illiterate, innumerate and unskilled:
- 40% do not achieve at least a C grade in GCSE English.7 Some seven million adults in England cannot locate the page number for plumbers in an alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages.
- 47% would be unable to achieve a grade G at GCSE maths.
- The OECD finds that Britain has the second highest level of low-skilled 25-34 year olds in the 30 countries of the OECD – twice the level of Germany or the USA.

In fact it will be increasingly hard for the country to operate effectively, when at present:
• The average attainment of prospective teachers entering a B.Ed course is less than three grade Cs at GCE A-level.
• 52% of would-be prison officers failed a simple literacy and numeracy test.
• 33% of nurses completing their training failed to achieve the 60% pass rate in basic English and Maths tests, despite having GCSEs in these subjects.

Typical questions for the nurses included:
- How many minutes are there in half an hour?
a 15 b 20 c 30 d 45
- Which of the following times is the same as 8pm?
a 1800hrs b 1900hrs c 2000hrs d 2100hrs
- What is the correct decimal nomination for six hundred and fifty pence?
a 605p b £6.50 c £65.0 d £6.05"

We take a brief look at the new Cabinet, and show that its members either have a long history of failures or lack the qualifications for their new positions.

Download the TaxPayers’ Alliance Guide to the New Cabinet (PDF)

Today there have been two stories suggesting that managerial problems in the National Health Service are costing us money, getting people seriously ill and even causing a frightening number of deaths.

First, hospitals are facing a massive compensation bill.  As Blair Gibbs, TPA Campaigns Director told the Daily Mail:

"Too often some law firms see public services as an easy target for compensation because they can more readily afford big payouts – because the buck stops with taxpayers, not the individuals responsible."

The Daily Mail article suggests that the main factor driving the number of claims is serious surgical errors.  Total payouts have risen from £345 million to £426 million, 23% from 2002.  While there are other factors involved in this rise it does suggest an increase in the frequency of errors.

Second, the Times reports that the first hospital has been warned over its failure to improve cleanliness and tackle the ‘superbugs’.  The Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, North London is the guilty hospital.  In a six month period last year it reported more than 600 infections yet the Healthcare Commission reports that there has been "no evidence" of Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS trust, the body responsible, learning from its mistakes.  Problems include:

"— A failure to provide and maintain a clean and appropriate environment for healthcare.

— A failure to provide adequate isolation facilities for patients already suffering from infections.

— A lack of appropriate management systems for infection prevention and control.

— A failure to assess risks of acquiring healthcare-associated infection and to take action to reduce or control them.

In addition, only one microbiologist, working four hours a week, was employed to monitor infections at the trust, which serves a catchment of 500,000 people. There was also no identified budget for training of staff in infection-control and attendance at such training was not monitored.

Clinical staff were found to be “confused” about isolation policies, “indicating that they are not always adhered to”."

Political management, generalist politicians without management experience attempting to run monopolistic public service conglomerates, reduces accountability for junior staff.  In departments where the secretary of state changes every couple of years they are never around long enough to hold junior staff properly accountable.  The organisation becomes unresponsive and essential change takes too long.

The Public Accounts Committee today reported on the disastrous history of the Child Support Agency.  By October 2006, one in four applications for maintenance received by the Agency in 2003 were still waiting to be cleared, there was a backlog of a quarter of a million cases and around 36,000 cases were simply stuck in the system.

The agency’s failure has been close to complete and has had serious consequences.  Children and parents are being left in dire straights without proper financial support.  The kind of thing the CSA is supposed to be doing, debt collection, is done regularly and routinely by the private sector.  Only political management could make such a mess of such a simple task at such expense.  The IT system alone is behind schedule and its costs have risen to £1.1 billion.  As the report says the "the Department did not maintain the capability to be an intelligent customer".  An IT project on the scale of the CSA’s system needs to be managed by "a cadre of high calibre IT professionals" instead it was managed by politicians and generalist civil servants.

The Telegraph is not impressed by the review of the NHS that the new Health Secretary Alan Johnson has launched:

"The "once-in-a-generation review" he launched yesterday, to be undertaken by the distinguished surgeon Sir Ara Darzi, now a health minister, appears to be aimed at soothing the ruffled feathers of health professionals. It carries an unmistakable hint of surrender.

Mr Johnson said there would be no more structural change while Sir Ara’s review, a leisurely affair that is not expected to conclude until some time next year, attempts to formulate a "vision" for a 21st century NHS. Has the Labour Government spent the past decade lavishing billions on healthcare without having a "vision" of what it was trying to achieve? Apparently so.

The Darzi review’s focus on producers rather than consumers of healthcare does not augur well for patients who are rightly aggrieved at the modest scale of improvement in health provision under Labour. The last prime minister had, we believe, grasped the essential truth that the NHS should be run for the convenience of patients, not the medical professionals. This review seems to mark a lurch back to the bad old days."

• The British Medical Journal ranked the NHS one from bottom on the quality of healthcare provided;
• The British Medical Journal ranked the NHS bottom on mortality amenable to healthcare;
• The National Audit Office in 2000 ranked the NHS worst on hospital acquired infections.  It estimated that at least 100,000 patients are affected resulting in at least 5,000 deaths a year;
• A recent EU study found that NHS patients are up to 40 times more likely than other Europeans to contract infections in hospital.

When Ken Clarke’s Democracy Taskforce reported recently the TaxPayers’ Alliance wrote for ConservativeHome:

"Unmanageable departments combined with inexperienced and short term
leadership produces dismally bad performance. This is what erodes
people’s trust in politics. People are right not to trust the modern
British state to fulfil all of the functions it has assigned to itself
and right to distrust every politician who tells them that it can. If
they really want to rebuild trust in politics the Conservatives will
need to start being honest about the need for genuine decentralisation
and handing real authority back to civil society.

This will mean challenging a few sacred cows. Fundamental reform of
the NHS. Genuine choice in education. Politicians need to get out of
management. They need to accept that their role should be to set high
level policy but leave detailed control of services to experienced
professionals managing decentralised services and responding, as far as
possible, to the priorities of the people."

Gordon Brown’s proposals are open to much the same criticisms.  Moving the right to declare war from the Prime Minister (who can be fired by Parliament) to Parliament is to tinker at the edges of a system in need of far deeper change.  Politicians need to stop telling people they can be trusted to administer government departments that no one, let alone someone with as little management experience as the average politician, could run effectively.  Then the public might start to trust them.

The Telegraph today:

"The report declares: "The impact of continuous
downsizing, pressures and overstretch is affecting the [defence]
department’s ability to retain and provide a satisfactory life for
Armed Forces personnel."

It stresses that in the
past six years, the Services have been operating above the most
demanding level of operations envisaged by defence planners at the turn
of the century. But the Ministry of Defence has not adjusted manning
levels.

Edward Leigh, the committee’s Conservative
chairman, said: "The staffing situation has reached the point where
there are simply not enough service people to meet levels of military
activity planned some years ago – let alone the heightened demands now
being placed on them by commitments such as the Iraq and Afghanistan
operations."

The
report says that at present the Armed Forces are 5,850 personnel, or
3.2 per cent, below strength and the MoD has failed to achieve its
targets for manning levels."

These commitments are not a surprise that has sprung upon us in the last few years.  Political management breeds short-termism as ministers move from post to post too quickly to be properly held accountable in their job or understand the nature of the challenge facing a department.  That means proper planning isn’t carried out and the armed forces are left without sufficient equipment or manpower.

In the Telegraph today we learn that there are fears for the new vocational diplomas that the government is looking to introduce.  Apparently the requirement that students emerge functionally literature and numerate is asking a little too much.

Alan Johnson, the last education secretary, warned earlier this year that the vocational diploma could go wrong and be seen as the "secondary modern" of the exam world.  What he apparently hadn’t seen coming is that the education system we have now is so bad that comprehensives can’t replicate even a secondary modern standard, deemed unnacceptable in the sixties.  The failure to deliver an effective education system is perhaps the most destructive legacy of political management of public services.

When governments look to fight hyper-inflation a common strategy has been to issue a new currency.
The idea is that the new currency will restore credibility and signal a break from the past.  Today it has been announced that the government is trying to do something similar in an attempt to stop grade inflation.  A new A* grade is being announced which will require a 90% score without resits.

However, just issuing a new currency or creating a new grade isn’t enough.  The underlying cause of the inflation needs to be tackled.  To create stability in the value of a currency the government needs to stop printing money.  There will often need to be some external force compelling them to stop such as a body of international creditors insisting upon restraints on money supply.

To put an end to grade inflation we need to free schools from political management.  In the independent sector schools have to respond to the priorities of parents in order to attract fee-paying students.  Parents want their children to have respected qualifications.  That’s why the number of independent schools using the International Baccalaureate instead of the discredited A-Level is steadily rising.  Those that haven’t made the switch will focus on the more challenging subjects.  In the state sector there is a constant search for subject choices that might boost results such as the GNVQ in information and communications technology which counts for four high-grade GCSE passes.  This is chosen because it boosts a school’s league table results, which pleases politicians.

Only real reform placing education spending at the disposal of parents will lead to an end to grade inflation.  New grades will be, at best, a temporary fix.

Today the Telegraph reports that the number of students passing five good GCSEs in English, maths, science, a modern language and history or geography has fallen from nearly 44 per cent to 28.6 per cent.

This is symptomatic of an education system that responds to government targets and league tables instead of the interests of students. While students would take more benefit from studying more challenging subjects that are better respected by universities and employers the education system focuses far too much on its single metric of ‘number of students getting five A*-C grades’. While students choose their subjects, schools facing an urgent need to improve their league table performance can persuade or pressure them into choosing the easier but ultimately less rewarding route.

A Healthcare Commission report shows that 99 out of 394 trusts are failing to take basic steps such as safely decontaminating reusable medical equipment and keeping facilities clean. This can be added to the news last November that 84% of staff did not wash their hands before and after contact with an MRSA patient as they are supposed to and 25% failed to wash their hands even after contact with faeces. This has all contributed to Britain having the worst record of developed countries in hospital infection rates.

The NHS is killing thousands of patients every year thanks to poor management and low standards. Any company with such a record of killing people purely through incompetence would long ago have gone out of business. Only the monopoly status of the NHS allows it to get away with these mistakes. A similar lack of accountability applies in the probation service when released prisoners who were meant to be monitored are allowed to go on and kill innocent people without the probationers receiving any meaningful sanction. When are we going to have a level playing field and start treating public and private sector managers equally?