We need fewer public sector jobs and fewer councils in Wales
Bubble — By Gwilym Morris on January 21, 2010 7:00 am
It isn't going to be ok: get your head out of the sand and embrace three hard changes
LET’S be clear, this column isn’t about privatizing public services or outsourcing them; and it isn’t talking about just cutting middle managers or back office staff. Culling cancer doctors, children’s nurses, head teachers and physiotherapists as well as human resource managers and communication directors may seem a bit radical for someone who wants to save public services. But if they both weren’t dead, Nye Bevan and my grandmother might at least consider a radical shift in the way we provide public services in Wales. Cutting the number of public servants in Wales by a fifth is critical if we are to move forward.
Obviously this couldn’t happen overnight. Ripping out 80,000 well-paid wages from the heart of the Welsh economy requires some significant forethought. To put it into context, this is four times the number of coal miners who lost their jobs after the miners’ strike. A transformation of this kind takes time, effort and compassion. But now is the time to reshape how we provide services to make them fairer and more responsive to the people that matter – the people of Wales.
This is no Thatcherite argument. This comes from a progressive left wing view point. The UK public sector does a great job and public sector workers have historically delivered amazing value (and usually high quality public services). There is no pleasure in suggesting that people will have to lose their jobs but, to coin Nye Bevan’s phrase, the language of priorities is the religion of socialism.
Recently, Alastair Darling has been splashing the cash and the UK is in debt to around £829,700,000,000. Budgets are going to be squeezed at a time where people interested in progressive politics have to face up to the immense challenge of an ageing population and an ever increasing gulf of inequality. According to the Welsh Government, one third of adults in Wales (an estimated 800,000 people) have at least one chronic condition and this is set to rise. The potential scale of this social and health care need is staggering especially when you consider that these figures are far higher in Wales than the rest of the UK. This time bomb is ticking and for us in Wales it is about to go off.
No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means. My grandmother was one of the many who built Nye Bevin’s welfare state. Her experiences before 1948 still shock, particularly the tale of a doctor who walked out of the house of a seriously ill girl because the father didn’t want to pay. The girl died of a ruptured appendix soon afterwards. The problem in this case was not wealth – the father had the money – but an inefficient and morally corrupt system. Two years later, the girl would have lived because a more efficient and effective system of healthcare was in place. Ironically, the same children who survived before the introduction of the welfare state are being asked to navigate a social care system that too often forces the elderly to choose between care and spending the limited resources they have available.
In the 60-plus years since the invention of the welfare state and the NHS, much has changed. We are now a nation that generally values publicly funded services, with even the Conservatives prioritising healthcare. But sadly public services in Wales often do not meet the standards demanded of them by the people. Compared to the rest of Europe and the UK, Welsh people have less successful outcomes on a range of measures than people living in similar circumstances. There is effort but there must be more. The new team in charge of Wales must press ahead with a radical agenda of change to ensure Welsh public services are as efficient as they can be.
There are three things they can do. First, put people and not professionals at the heart of all strategic decisions. Public servants are crucial but not as important as the people of Wales. The trade union movement is obviously an key partner, but it can’t put a gun to the head of people who make decisions and say no change. Same goes for the professional bodies who rant less but can be more committed to protecting privilege than the UNISON, PCS or the GMB. There will obviously be losers and people, especially those on lower wages, need to be supported in to new employment and opportunities.
Reorganising public service delivery into more appropriate blocks is the second key challenge. Everyone knows the majority of councils in Wales are too small. Anglesey is a basket case, and even relatively well-run councils like Merthyr Tydfil are too small and inefficient to provide the high quality public services of the 21st Century. To be honest, does it matter if local authority democratic structures remain? How we deliver important services like social services, education and even community health care needs to be amalgamated into departments with sensible staff sizes and management structures. Other functions like human resources or IT should be centralised in hubs that cut across public sector organisation. This needs to be radical and not just involve the usual agencies. For example, the DVLA, Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University NHS Trust, Swansea University and Swansea County Council are public sector organisations based in the same city that could and should share resources, expertise, technology and even staff. When this happens, a significant number public sector jobs will be lost. It is pointless pretending it won’t happen.
The third remedy is equally powerful: innovation. The public sector must be rewarded for innovation. Simply reorganising the build blocks of the public sector will not yield the results that are needed. The challenges are too big and the cuts to deep. This innovation must be aligned to best practice globally and take full advantage of technology. For this to work fully, public sector workers should be empowered to think about how they provide services more efficiently. Often this will be about joining up services more efficiently at a macro level, but it will also challenge the services and ensure that they are being delivered. For this to be successful, top-down centralised approaches won’t work. Citizens and public sector workers will have to work hand-in-hand to change the way services are delivered. If the people of Wales are going to get the 21st Century services they deserve, the people who deliver them are going to have to reshape how they deliver those services, and in doing so they are going to – often – do themselves out of a job. This will produce a very different public service landscape but, given the resources available, is there a choice?
Wouldn’t you rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one? In 1948 the innovation was all about big hospitals and the all-embracing protection of the welfare state. Now the innovation is different. It is about new ways of putting the individual at the heart of service delivery. Often this will involve technology. For example, remote triage systems for conditions like MS are now being processed via email in parts of London, which save time and effort for patients who find it difficult to travel to specialist units. This also means highly trained staff can do more with time they have available. Technology is, however, only part of the answer. Increasingly self-directed care and self service interactions will become the norm. Cold as they may be, maybe they are what Bevan would have embraced, because this is arguably the biggest single experiment in social service that the world has ever seen undertaken.
Those of us on the left don’t have a choice. If we care about public services we must change them. We must accept that we need to do more with less and that as a consequence of this the number of people working in the Welsh public sector will reduce. The only other option is to disinherit of the people of Wales.
Tags: cuts, health, local government, public debate, public services, public spending, social care, trade unions
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21 Comments
Isn’t it still the case that the UK, including Wales, spends less than most other countries in Europe? An analysis that pretty much ignores that fact doesn’t seem very progressive at all.
And you insinuate that Alistair Darling “splashing the cash” (I.e high public spending) is what has caused mammoth debt, when in reality it was the bailout of the banks to prevent a complete economic collapse that caused most of that debt. Not so much as the trade unions holding a gun to anyone’s head, but the financial institutions. For all their faults the trade unions have never asked for a bailout of industry or manufacturing of that scale, though maybe they should have!
This isn’t a left-wing agenda at all in fact, though more importantly it isn’t a legitimate one, as it completely skirts around the issue of why we are in this position. I would support a robust approach to doing things better with smaller budgets, but implementing that without explaining the specific reasons why that has to happen would be downright criminal. Until the specific sector of society that is responsible for these cuts being necessary is made to pay a fair contribution towards getting us out of it (the Obama administration is achieving this) then it is disproprtionately unfair to talk about cutting the public sector.
This is article seems to me to take the usual conservative position of using the capitalist financial crisis as a cover to try and reduce the state’s influence in society and economics.
I don’t know that Gwilym’s argument is conservative. But it certainly seems dismissive of the democratic structures we have established in Wales.
Gwilym argues that we should put people and not professionals at the heart of strategic decisions. But he fails to acknowledge that strategic decisions in Wales are primarily taken by the Welsh Assembly Government, which is accountable to the National Assembly for Wales, and through the Assembly, to the Welsh electorate. Is he arguing that our AMs and ministers care more about the views of the professionals than those of the voters?
Then he asks if it matters whether local authority democratic structures remain. Well, yes it does! Notwithstanding relatively low turnouts in local elections, councillors – whether serving on 22 authorities or larger, merged councils – are democratically accountable to local residents for their management and delivery of local essential services. Is he arguing that the professionals or technocrats (like him?) know best?
And he decries public sector unions – which are democratically controlled by their members – and which are playing a significant role in current tripartite (WAG/employer/unions) initiatives to respond to the economic recession’s impact.
Gwilym seems to be unaware that WAG is ALREADY co-ordinating joint working across the public sector in Wales; and that UK government departments are ALREADY developing ‘shared service’ initiatives along the lines he advocates (an example is the HM Prison Service shared services site in Newport).
We’re all aware of the disproportionate level of public sector employment in Wales. But it’s not going to help the Welsh economy to turf thousands of Welsh public sector workers onto the dole queues.
I’d be interested to hear Gwilym’s ideas for attracting more high-skill private sector jobs into Wales?
Nice One Gwyl – of course the bloated public sector needs trimming, but how and where are the big issues. Presumably if Wales is to get best value from any of its budgets then we should be looking at those areas for which we have influence, so the DVLA is off the radar straight away.
I’ve never understood why we need 22 Local Authorities and all the health boards, care trusts, and lord knows what else we have in order to deliver services to a small country of only 3 million people.
Let us not pretend that we have a National Health Service, we’ve got a service of local health fiefdoms each making decisions with little common interest, often not focused on the patient.
Let me site an example: I recently had a hip replacement operation and whilst in hospital was being tended to by 2 nurses. One was telling the older one how “things were done round here”. I made a joke that the older one should have started as a nurse earlier: her response was that she had been in nursing in a different hospital for over 20 years, “but everything is different here”. Of course both hospitals are in Wales.
Now, to me, a patient, health is health. But for those in the business it appears to be about doing it their way. National processes and procedures do not appear to exist, except of course in the bloated administration.
If that is so, then there is definitely a sound opportunity to re-frame our public sector structures, accountabilities and responsibilities. Trim, amalgamate, focus, get rid of a lot of management (who seem to add so little value) and then focus on the medical services (who so often are simply bloody marvellous).
Gez makes a point about attracting business to Wales – for goodness sake when are we going to stop focusing on getting someone from outside Wales to ride to our rescue. We really must change our attitudes to create wealth ourselves, locally and with indigenous entrepreneurs and keep the wealth in Wales for ever and a day. No more German/Japanese/Korean inward investment opportunities that fail after a short period of time, having soaked up some local grant aide, leaving hundreds out of work.
It is really time to wake up and smell the coffee
Gez – Since you asked a direct question about how i think we generate high-skill private sector jobs I thought I better answer it.
As I mentioned in my blog post we have to be realistic about timescales and obviously not just throw people on the dole. That would be disastrous for them and for Wales. But we do have to do something or we are going to run off a cliff.
I am assuming the thrust of your question is where do 80,000 highly skilled workers go. I’m a big fan of social enterprises, cooperatives or joint ventures with between public, private and thirds sectors – so hopefully they don’t just have to go into purely profit making companies.
One answer could be as we innovate with new methods of public service delivery we should try to spin these out across the UK and globally. Wales could become a world leader in supporting governments improve public services by making them more responsive to the citizen.
This may seem very theoretical but I spent yesterday in Sandwell Birmingham with at a GP practice finding out about the social enterprise they had set up to deliver primary healthcare in on of the most deprived communities in the English midlands. They are doing some amazing work putting communities in charge of how healthcare is delivered by focusing on the needs of people rather than doctors. They are now trying to export the expertise that they have built up into some of the poorest communities in urban India. They are doing this commercially but ethically in a way that also transfers Indian expertise back into the UK. Wales should be leading the way in this kind of work. After Wales was not just the cradle of the industrial revolution we developed the cooperative movement and provided the vision to develop and then refine the welfare state.
We need to think big but keep true to our values and our heritage.
It’s not a question of whether public sector jobs should be cut, I do not think they should; should be a paradigm in place to save jobs.
Middle and higher wage packets should be cut significantly, not simply ‘frozen’ but decreased by 20% which may be in line with the money earned by private sector small business. It does not make sense that public sector wages should be only frozen while private sector businesspeople are gong bust.
It would be a good test as many civil servants would not like this (as privte business people do not like business go down the drain) and they may leave councils which will enable new people and ideas and regeneration.
After all it is in the private sector where wealth generation occurs and this sector should dictate to the sector who are the recipients and spenders of this wealth generation, not the other way around.
‘Ripping out 80,000 well-paid wages from the heart of the Welsh economy requires some significant forethought.’
Yes it does, and you haven’t done that. These are people’s jobs and livelihoods, and any decision of this kind would have a huge effect on the delivery of public services.
Can the author furnish us with specific statistics to support the claim that cutting these jobs and services would improve public services in Wales?
Can the author please advise specifically where he would recommend making these cutbacks and the consequences of said cutbacks?
Can the author please advise what his plan is with regards to the subsequent unemployment of the individuals he is casually suggesting should lose their jobs. Innovating and developing new methods of delivering public services in order to employ the people who have lost their jobs is bizarre – wouldn’t this be more expensive?
Am I right in thinking that the author has a vested interest in developing alternative public service delivery models?
Can the author please substantiate his claim that public services in Wales are bloated and not cost-effective. Any statistics would do, anything at all.
When positing such a narrow pseudo-radical agenda it is still necessary to provide some supporting facts, surely, otherwise it’s hard to take such contrary reasoning seriously.
One place where I disagree with both Gwil and Illtyd Luke is in the suggestion that the current economic situation should be the primary driver, or not, of public service reform. Citizen centred services should be the aim because that is how those who receive the services will best benefit, not because we can’t afford to carry on as we are or because to argue for such an approach means you are automatically branded right wing or favouring bankers.
Gez Kirby makes a point that shared services are already being developed. That is undoubtedly true in some places. But the pace of change is not uniform. The last decade has been one of both carrots and stickes in incentivising such change. But the sticks have often been the size of twigs, while the carrots have been big enough to please Bugs Bunny.
‘Brave stuff’ to quote a Yes Minister aphorism.
However, it is a total non-starter and denigrating to the good people of Wales who work in the public sector and yes, I include the managers and administrators of the health or other services. The economic chaos is not their fault – it is the fault of the collapse of the financial and economic system. Similarly, the staff of high street banks (like LloydsTSB) are not to blame, they are good people on the whole and essentially victims as well. They don’t receive outrageous bonuses.
The solution must be to regenerate the Welsh economy, and in particular the financial structures that underpins business. There has been much talk about public private partnerships, cooperatives, social business and so on and there are some very worthy examples of this being attempted. However, the bottom line is that we now need to earn more money by making things, selling things and doing business. In addition, the money flow needs to be adjusted so that indigenous businesses can grow and function and invest in tooling/technology. It will be impossible to avoid ‘inward’ investment type invasions by the global companies looking for grants and cheap labour but this should be turned to our advantage/benefit in more imaginative ways – eg. the WAG could take board representation and shareholding in companies that want to come to Wales in return for the incentives that are usually touted. If these companies, like Bosch, want to bugger off then they can but it would be more difficult if a major shareholder and board member objected. Similarly,more imaginative payback schemes should be attached to any inward investment. eg. if you go you leave the equipment, buildings, tooling, IP and so on. Only a tiny minority of businesses in Wales are Welsh owned and none of the the big employing companies or corporations so it would be suicidal to make Wales a less attractive place to do business for this type of company . We need more of them and we need to work with these businesses in a much more sophisticated and savvy manner whilst encouraging indigenous businesses to flourish. We need better small businesses and better employees.
The ludicrous entrepreneurial mythos should be stamped out. It is imperative that proper US style Credit Unions are introduced to ensure locality focus and proper business finance. These should be funded by money flow and managed by professional bank staff.
We need to build a new railway to link North and South, East and West even if it means tunnelling by hand under Cader Idris and Snowdon. We need an airport and an airline that takes international flights and also services to Glasgow, Dublin and Manchester. These are big infrastucture New Deal type projects that can have an energising and unifying effect – how do we pay for them? Well we shall probably have to borrow.
We need to get people to work assembling green tech stuff, wave power , solar panels and hydro schemes and insist that the power generated is delivered first to local areas at nominal prices before being sold on to the national grids.
Our politicians need to study history and they need to be trained in economics. They need to ‘get it’ with internet and modern communications. They are not bad people they are just badly educated, often ignorant and need to evolve out of the public sector mindset in which they are moulded.
It would help if a visionary political figure could emerge from these embattled times, it’s happened in the past and will happen again I’m sure. I see one of the roles of the blogger is to spot these figures and help to support them.
In short, it’s not a case of the Public Sector being too large, its that the Private Sector is way too small.
Develop business, not cut public service jobs.
Simples!
It wouldnt be Gwilym Morris if he didnt offer a challenging, paradigm shifting argument for us to consider and, true to form, he’s done it again.
The fundamental transformation of public services is THE critical debate for Wales over the coming decade. He is absolutely right that we need a fundamental rethink of where priorities lie. Its disappointing that some of the criticisms of Mr Morris seem to retain that head-in-the-sand, quasi theological objection to anything that hasnt been through countless “democratic” committees. Likewise, its disappointing to hear the same old “public sector: good; private sector: bad” cliches of the early 1990s.
Lets deal with reality. The public sector budgets in Wales are about to go off the edge of a cliff and anyone who does not acknowledge this is either deluded or ignorant. Or both. Alan Davies is absolutely right that we need to get a grip on things and start bringing greater consistency and transparency (either through economies of scale or shared services).
Lets deal with some facts.The National Assembly for Wales employs approximately 600 people, who provide support to the Assembly Members and communicate the work of the Assembly to citizens. The Welsh Assembly Government comprises approximately 6,200 staff responsible for managing the day to day activity of government in Wales. The annual budget for WAG is approximately £13.4bn. This budget is further delegated to public sector service deliver organisations. The majority of spend is via 22 local authorities, 7 Local Health Boards and 3 National Health Trusts. WAG also works with central government in jointly funding the 4 Welsh Police forces.
If you dont think that this is just ever so slightly excessive then I don’t know what is.
But this isnt about trimming things back. We also need to be planning for what services are going to be needed and the way they will be delivered if we are to truly make a meaningful change and to avoid the 80,000 job losses that Mr Morris refers to. Actually, I dont think that Gwilym is in favour of mass redundancies at all- rather, it seems to me, he was making a point as part of a clarion call to start addressing issues now before it is too late.
We have significant challenges: an aging population that, understandably, requires greater and more enduring levels of public services- either in adult social care or mobility support or, indeed, right through to library services and the like.
Let us not forget either the amount of council tax revenue that goes to supporting public sector pensions- this is another potential time bomb waiting to explode.
Fundamental rethinks around how services are delivered and by who (yes this does include the private sector and we should not be embarrassed by this); sharing of data and information, shared services for blue light services like police, fire and ambulance; better coordination of health provision, council property portfilio rationalisation, community broadband, economic regeneration are all critical areas. Yes I know are being looked at but they arent being looked at with the urgency thats required.
I dont always agree with Gwilym but he’s hit the nail on the head. Change is going to come- we either do it ourselves and manage it or it gets done unto us. I shudder at what the consequences of the latter might be.
Mat: This article is interesting I grant you – but how exactly is it ‘paradigm shifting?’
Every time there is a crisis in the Government finances a range of entrepreneurs, hacks and politicians call for a radical scalping of the public sector. There is absolutely nothing new about this. There is also nothing new about calls for ‘radical’ changes in the way we deliver public services, I for one, have heard it all before.
Fortunately the general public have as well, and this is why they consistently oppose cuts in public services. You do not fix the government finances by sacking thousands of workers. This is a short-sighted argument driven often (I’m not saying it is in this instance) by the self interest of those looking to cash in on public money.
You complain about ‘the same old public sector: good; private sector: bad cliches of the early 1990s’. Well the cliche that most upsets me is the “sack public service workers to improve public services” one.
I’m not sure the budget’s excessive, Mat. There’s a lot of cost that goes into delivering the most basic and taken-for-granted public services – remember that memorable advert that showed the cost to the NHS of someone tumbling down a set of stone steps? Multiple that across three million people – and that’s just one service.
However, what is excessive, and what we should not countenance, particularly now, is waste. Before Christmas, it was announced that one fifth, or £1bn, of the NHS budget goes to waste. That is nothing short of an absolute national scandal, so why have we forgotten it so quickly? There should be protests outside the Senedd over matters like this.
CP – excellent summary of what is wrong and what should happen. I know it’s fairly broad brushstrokes, but it occurs to me that a bit of vision, as outlined in CP’s post, is just what the (ahem) doctor ordered. A paucity of imagination is, I think, the greatest political crime of these times.
I went to an excellent Bevan Foundation event last year about cuts, and how we should prepare for them. Speaker after speaker after speaker emphasised the importance of bottom-up rationalisation, of using front-line forces to find ways of joining together overlapping services and reducing costs. I couldn’t agree more, just as I couldn’t agree more that this economic crisis is not the fault of the public sector. Waste comes from bad management, but it seems that our focus is on public services that have had it “so good” for all these years. No, the only people that have had it so good are the bankers, and they continue on as if nothing has happened. Time they footed the bill for public services – properly.
Thanks Rob: agree with the sentiment but not the solution. we need to be creating other jobs for public sector workers to do not just defending them because they are in the public sector. That’s just myopia. I do think Gwil’s remarks are a paradigm shift in the sense that he is actively looking for progressive transformation not just cost cutting. Your argument appears to be “no” and to defend the status quo with no idea about how either you fund this or address the changing needs of the citizen. Gwil’s argument is about reality and managing this: he’s not about sacking workers but unless we do something we will have no option other than sacking people. That’s no answer either but pretending we can go on as we are is laughable.
Duncan: sorry, I didn’t articulate myself well enough. I have no issue with the budget. I do have an issue with how many additional structures we have to deliver it and I do have an issue with associated waste. You made the same point better than I. Apologies for any confusion
Speaking as someone who would be affected by the proposals of this article, the inability of the Welsh public sector to get away from the silo mentality and work closer together, is the main problem. Time after time, work and jobs are duplicated, for no other reason that egos and/or politicians not getting on. Local councils have had years to get their act together but there is little evidence of progress.
The NHS reorganisation of 10 years ago was a disaster and at least Edwina is trying to repair some of the damage done, even if senior managers do bizarrely appear to have permanent protection-with no role. The WLGA is keeping very quiet about how close several councils are to the financial and organisational abyss. They are just too small to carry out some of the more difficult and expensive roles of local government and the time is approaching (after the next Assembly elections) when several council roles will be grouped, probably along the new health body boundaries. I suspect that this will not lead to a cull of councils, but instead of council departments. The new Education Minister is currently considering this very option, as part of his plans to squeeze cash out of admin and into classrooms.
What I also find mystifying is why there is not more service/staff sharing between the NHS, councils and the civil service. In terms of best practice, so much could be learnt but again, egos are blocking progress here. The opportunities to retrain and re-deploy are enormous, as so many are on similar terms and conditions. This would allow a re-prioritisation of staffing without mass redundancy.
Things will change in the next three years because of the impending cuts, but it will take some strong ministers in Cardiff Bay to force councils to change. Without change, thousands will lose their jobs due to incompetent councils sacking staff to balance budgets. I wish that the WLGA would be a bit more honest about the critical situation some councils are in.
Wales has deep rooted economic problems that go back to the 1930s. The response of the public sector in terms of economic strategy & support has only, in my view, exacerbated the problem by supporting homogenous mediocrity and rewarding need – this is sustaining a cancer in our economy, an economy that now is now almost unable to sustain itself. Instead, we should support and encourage enterprise, excellence, value creation, etc and let the private sector and the market lead. The public sector cannot lead on this! There are too many examples of public money being wasted on programmes, buildings and policies that have no tangible output (Entrepreneurship Action plan, Innovation Action plan, any number of empty business parks where companies do not wish to base themselves or re-locate, the post code based support policy which only distorts the market, a vast array public sector funded/delivered & well meaning, but ill qualified business support “experts”, etc, etc)
To save tax payers money governments (and esp. WAG) should focus on
- Educating its people
- Making us well when we are ill
- Facilitating and helping the movement of people, ideas and capital – within Wales but more importantly internationally and esp. to/from London
Ie – Education, Health and Transport…..
Unless there are good reason, the public sector should not lead or engage in other activities unless there is strong private sector involvement
Also, no matter what arguments one uses to defend it, 22 local authorities is crazy in a country of 3M people. Half that is more than sufficient; at the same time create strong city regions around Swansea and esp. Cardiff with pops 0.5~1M that can compete with the emerging city regions of Europe
Time for some tough love and recognise that the issues that affect Wales go back over many years and have not been addressed by any government of any colour in any meaningful way (Lets not pretend, the GVA/head of Wales is and continues to fall behind the UK average). Hard times mean hard decisions and a recognition that it will take a generation before we can turn it around – and only if we are tough now.
Well, of course, it would be easy to agree with Mark on this but I question the ability or desire of the private sector to lead any kind of regeneration. Give us an example Mark!
If I am in business (which I am), I am not interested in ‘regenerating the economy’, I am only interested in where the next order is coming from, how much profit I can make and how to avoid paying so much to my workforce and the government in taxes. If I am a bigger company my main responsibility is to the shareholders and keeping the business competitive whether that competition is here in Wales or elsewhere.
It is all very well to blame the public sector as a ‘cancer’ but business itself and the banks have been infinitely more debilitating and rapacious of Welsh society throughout our history. The public sector has actually defended us from most ills of an industrialised nation with healthcare, policing, infrastructure, government and so on.
However, I can agree that in Wales it should not be the role of county councils or the WAG to get so involved with enterprise and business support but if they didn’t do it (even if ineptly) you can be damned sure that the private sector wouldn’t or at least not in a way that would benefit the less qualified or less educated or with disabilities.
As I said in an earlier post it is not really helpful to keep on bashing the public sector whether it is bloated or not, the ills of our economy are due to ‘business inactivity’ and, in my view, this is due to the way our financial systems are structured.
Just a word on entrepreneurship – this should be banned. I have yet to meet an HR department, manager or business owner who would be pleased to give a job to some ‘jumped up’ kid with declared aspirations to ‘be an enterpreneur’ and start their own business. If someone comes to me with these ideas I tell them to shut up and get on with the job in hand or you’re out! Entrepreneurs we can do without, better cleverer businesses and more skilled employees is what we need supported by locality focused credit union type business finance.
Cambria Politico, as an example of regeneration I would look at Cardiff! The private sector has invested >£Bns in Cardiff over the last 25 years and transformed the city ( a regeneration job still in progress) – most recently with the £750M of private money tied up in St Davids II. The public money spent in bay area over some of that period was able to pull in good multiples of private funding. More of this please.
I am setting up my second business in the technology sector in Cardiff and consider myself an entrepreneur trying to create high value, well paid jobs. Access to skills, capital and experience is key and I’ll try and find it where ever it is. To make this easier I believe we need strong, large, diverse, tolerant and multicultural city regions with high quality urban environments able to attract skilled, ambitious, creative and, yes, “entrepreneurial” people from all over the world. We need more people starting more businesses. We have seen signs of this. For example Cardiff and SE Wales has a growing financial service sector led by the likes of Admiral, there have been some notable success in biotech, media, etc. This re-generation results from the collective efforts of enterprising companies and people and not as a result of a direct government programmes. Five year plans don’t work!
I am not bashing front end public servants in health, education, etc. I will though, bash those policy makers and senior managers in the public sector who have overseen the waste of £MMs over the years on ill conceived schemes, bad management, inefficiency, etc. Those who are resistant to change and making tough decisions (and prevent more enlightened colleagues from doing so), those who are more interested in their pension than delivering value to the tax payer, etc. Let’s not pretend – we can do better.
I want my business to be a success – I also want the Welsh economy to be a success. More people starting businesses like mine will help. However WAG needs to understand what it can do to help and what it can’t. Clearly it is not equipped to help in any direct way numerous high value business start ups. However, it can direct funds and support activities which improve the backdrop of our economic stage. So for example, I would suggest:
- Invest far more in supporting leading edge research (Science and Engineering) in Cardiff University – Wales’ only Russell Group University which, in the last Research rankings, fell from 7th to 20th! We need to see Cardiff back in the top ten
- Lobbying hard for more and faster links to London and Heathrow(eg High Speed Rail) – London is a global city with people and capital and Heathrow is a gateway to the world. We need to exploit both more
- Support and assist Cardiff. Cities will be key drivers in the 21st Century. We need a larger Cardiff City region
Cambria – whilst I accept some of your points I still believe we need to make a real break with the past and embrace a more hard edged and value driven philosophy in public service delivery. This will mean some things the government will have to do less of ( and perhaps stop all together – eg business support) whilst in other areas it can do more (eg transport?)
I am finding the differing perspectives engaging. I respect the views of Cambria and Mark, and I agree with Mark’s priorities (education, health and transport). Furthermore, Cambria has a point regarding the motives of businesses.
With regards to Mark’s statement that “22 local authorities is crazy”, I couldn’t agree more. This topic is what we are currently discussing on Betsan Powys’ blog “Extraordinary times” (I am ‘Drachenfire’ there). I believe that the five counties Cledwyn Hughes recommended in his 1967 White Paper makes the most sense. I think the 1994 Act creating 22 authorities was more or less a step backwards.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/betsanpowys/2010/01/extraordinary_times.html?s_sync=1#comments
I’d like to thank everyone for responding to my blog post and for comments off line. There have been some interesting contributions and I’ll try to answer some of the questions about the ‘how’ at some point in the future.
It might surprise some that I believe in an expansion of the public sector footprint in Wales. The state should do a lot more to support those who we owe a duty of care. The eagle eyed among you will have spotted I liberally quoted Bevan in my article. His tenacious enthusiasm for the possible and a relentless drive is what is needed.
I hope that this post is the beginning not the end of a debate about how those of us on the progressive left can build a coalition of ideas and enthusiasm. There is a storm coming and we better be ready.
David,
It is inevitable that Local Government will have to re-structure and I speak as someoen who has worked there for 20 years. However, I do not agree that all services should be centralised to the larger regions. Some work better on the smaller model, while others could probably be managed on an all Wales model.
It may not be the cleanest of solutions, but such an apporach would save funding and at the same time, value regional variations, both in terms of politcs, culture and social needs.