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September 12, 2005
How to destroy a public service
The latest piece of ill-conceived damagement from the Office of the Deputy Prime Misery, aimed at consolidating the destruction of the professional UK Fire and Rescue Services, contains some really interesting pointers on how the super intelligences that now run this country from Whitehall think. It probably also tells us a lot about the planet they live on.
Having scrapped the Appointments and Promotions Regulations which created the professional management structure that has served the service and the public extremely well, the latest "New Labour" ideology decrees that the service can be managed more efficiently and effectively by parachuting in people with no knowledge or experience of the service at all levels. The first step was to destroy the rank structure. This was too "militaristic" and "exclusive". Then came the destruction of the recruitment selection and testing criteria, and then the creation of "Role Maps" which are supposed to form the basis of the "Integrated Personal Development System" - note the use of the word "Integrated", it is a favourite in anything this shower of incompetents wish to push as "modernising", and has nothing whatever to do with actually being joined up and relevant - and for identifying what the post holder actually does. In the past, of course, this was usually covered by something called a "Job Description", but the new Role Maps are written in NVQ speak and are thus unintelligible to any but the NVQ industry cogniscenti, and so require constant re-interpretation and "specialists" to provide guidance on selection for role. Another piece of the NVQ upload is the requirement that everyone must now maintain a "portfolio" of evidence to show that, irrespective of your Doctorate in Whatever, you are "competent" to do the job you hold. Now this may sound a little cynical, but what it has produced is experts in the invention of "evidence" and the use of the photocopier!
So, now we have scrapped the selection criteria, the professional progression and the professional management, we have to re-invent something to take its place - so we have reached back into the 1930's and created a system which allows anybody who thinks they can do it better than a professionally trained fire officer to apply for and be appointed to a post at any role/rank above Firefighter. After all, or so the theory goes, any "manager" can take charge and "manage" any function, no matter how technical or complex, because to "manage" one doesn't need to know how the job is actually done. So we now have a consultation document which states; inter alia, that we are looking for a set of selection criteria which must:
(i) Assess candidates against National Personal Qualities Assessments,
(ii) Meet the Psychological Society's Best Practice Guidelines,
(iii) Be relevant to the role, be fair, be open and reflect the core values of the service (which have almsot nothing to do with actually responding to emergencies anymore according to the government document they are found in!),
(iv) require no prior knowledge of the service by candidates,
(v) provide a structure that can be organised to meet the working requirements of people on different working systems.
Now most of those, except (iv) sound reasonable, until you realise that this is all about providing jobs for people who would not have been able to leap into the rank/role they wanted without having to learn or do the jobs below the one they want first. Add to this the fact that the service now has targets for employing disabled persons, ethnic minorities and others seen as "disadvantaged" by previous recruitment and promotion criteria and you can see what this is designed to do. As more of the frontline is eroded to make way for the appointment of more and more "support" we face the sort of situation that the military have - 9 support staff (paper shufflers who never actually handle any of the hardware) to every 1 fighting man or woman.
The entire system as outlined in the new consultation paper is designed to remove all professional fire fighter types from all "roles" above the Station Manager (formerly called a Station Officer or Assistant Divisional Officer!)- particularly the "specialist" roles which are seen as choice jobs for people who don't like to fight fires but think a guide can provide all the knowledge they need - and replace them with New Labour Managers. Heaven forbid that any of these new managers or "specialists" should be paid less than the people they are replacing, but, naturally, they will have no responsibility for the actual protection of the public or any of the "nasty, dirty" technical functions. They will be "strategic" managers who will decide, based on interminable "Business Cases" prepared by the nasty Techy types, where resources, personnel and activities will be placed. They will also determine the "policies" to be followed, fulfilling this in a complete vacuum as they simply will not have, despite "consultation", any understanding of the ramifications of their policies.
The poor unsuspecting public will probably not notice the difference, unfortunately, until it is too late. They will be paying the costs in terms of rising insurance premiums, falling response and rising fire damage and losses. The mindset behind all this is the same one that seems to think that an ever shrinking number of regiments, ships and aircraft can be deployed to more and more "little" wars around the world. Watch this space, the next step will undoubtedly be to recruit the next generation of Ship's Captains, Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals from the ranks of so-called "Captains of Industry". After all, if such "managers" can run the fire service, they can surely run the Armed Forces - and be much less threatening to the Civil Servants and Politicians, because they will be as ignorant of the realities as their political masters.
Yes, if you want to destroy a professional organisation, there is no better way than to destroy it from within. Change the structure, change the criteria for the various roles, change the recruiting, change the progression for the personnel, replace the professionals with non-professionals at the top and then stand back and watch as it slowly self destructs. Remember when you get the next increase in Council Tax, or on your Insurance Premium and are waiting in vain for the fire appliance that used to be available to you locally, to come from 10 miles or more away, that you read it here first.
It will be too late to change things then, in fact, it is probably too late already!
Posted by The Gray Monk at September 12, 2005 09:51 AM
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Comments
We had the problem you describe with the head of FEMA and as you can see from New Orleans where that led us. One week for the feds to figure out what to do and then mess it up.
Posted by: skipjack at September 12, 2005 10:45 PM
Brown has resigned. And Congress is demanding that his replacement have real emergancy management experance. So all you have to happen is a incident happen that the management can't blame on someone else, then you will see so changes.
Posted by: skipjack at September 13, 2005 07:51 PM
Sadly we always seem to need to kill a lot of people to get this sort of stupidity changed. I just hope it isn't an event on the same scale that forces a rethink in our small island - no one would be around to sort it out afterwards!
Posted by: The Gray Monk at September 14, 2005 02:14 PM