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May 18, 2006
Competence and management
Yesterdays revelation by the Senior Civil Servant in charge of immigration that neither he, nor anyone else in his Department, has the faintest idea of the numbers of illegal immigrants currently living and working Britain should come as no surprise to anyone. Civil Servants simply do not have the competence to do anything like this, if it isn't in one of their "rule books" or something that requires a form to be filled in with completely meaningless information (like the one for housing benefit which requires an 80 year old woman to complete a section on whether or not she has remarried, taken a new partner or given birth during the past twelve months!). Keep a check on illegal immigrants - definitely not, even if it weren't politically incorrect to do so, the Immigration Department is now staffed almost exclusively by immigrants or ethnic minorities.
The whole farce of the comprehensive mess in the health service, in the police and justice system and in the emergency services - we'll leave the military out of this for the moment, they still manage largely as the military always have, by ignoring the civil servants and scrounging what they need when they need it - can be traced to the fact that, over the last thirty or so years (In the case of the Health Service probably the last fifty!) the filing clerks have gradually worked their way into the positions of control. It has been an assidious movement, and I confess that I may well have been one of the managers who allowed it to happen, sparked by the fact that those of us who have actually done the job and know what the service is and how it is delivered, have left the filing and the paperwork to the clerks - who have now an exclusive hold on the finance and information bank! That is how we find ourselves under the control of people who are, essentially, overpaid, over qualified filing clerks whose idea of management is to hold meetings, set targets and shuffle paper around an office.
Services are falling apart because the "management" do not understand the function they manage, do not appreciate that simply changing the seating in the office and not replacing some annoying technocrat has a cascade effect which impacts on service delivery. I recently discovered that the HSE, supposedly the sepcialist group who know everything about everything to do with safety, have had to withdraw and scrap completely their new Health and Safety Code for nuclear facilities. The reason? It was totally and completely unworkable, had anyone attempted to follow its strictures two things would have resulted, first a great deal of safety maintenance work would have become illegal and secondly, some of the recommended procedures were in the same league as those which resulted in Chernobyl. The reason for this? It was written by "expert" consultants and then converted into Civil Service speak so that it could be "all things to all occassions", that wonderful concept that pervades Whitehall, that everything can be reduced to a set of rules written down and slavishly enforced by the filling in of a million new forms.
Lets face it, if you tie everyone up in filling in endless pointless forms, they won't have time to cause any problems.
Perhaps that is the secret behind the rise and rise of the filing clerk from the backroom to the boardroom. The question now is; how the heck do we shove them all back into their boxes and files and remove their unimaginative and stifling influence from the running of commerce, industry, government and every public service in the land? That will be the next revolution!
Posted by The Gray Monk at May 18, 2006 07:46 AM
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