December 15, 2008 The public sector gravy train rolls ever on Daily Mail, December 15 2008 One of the wonders of the world is the way in which the public sector manages to defy the laws of financial gravity. If a private company is found to be catastrophically incompetent by producing a lousy product, it goes bust. But when the public sector is so incompetent that vulnerable infants in its care actually die as a result, it treats this as a signal for paying itself even greater sums of public money. And this even when belts are supposedly being tightened to cope with the financial crisis. In the private sector, people are facing a miserably uncertain future. But in the town halls, the party just seems to roll on and on. Last week, Sharon Shoesmith was finally sacked from her £100,000-plus post as director of children’s services for Haringey Council following the Baby P scandal, in which a toddler died from sickening ill-treatment at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend and their lodger while supposedly in her department’s care. Yet now it has been revealed that Haringey will pay almost £200,000 a year — more than the Prime Minister himself gets paid — to her successor. This would be understandable if it was thought necessary to tempt an outstanding manager from a successful company in the private sector, where such levels of remuneration are the norm. But it turns out that Ms Shoesmith’s successor, Peter Lewis, comes from exactly the same background. Currently the director of education, children’s services and leisure at Enfield Council, Mr Lewis has previously worked as a teacher and social worker. In other words, far from someone who would bring a much-needed fresh perspective to the problem, Haringey’s new children’s director has been fished out from the same municipal pool of institutionalised mediocrity and outright failure. Now, in fairness, it must be acknowledged that Mr Lewis may be an excellent and inspired official who breaks the mould. Maybe he will turn out to be precisely the transformative figure that Haringey so obviously needs. Certainly, his Enfield department has won plaudits from Ofsted. Yet can one really rely upon such an encomium, given that Ofsted gave a similarly glowing reference to Haringey’s children’s department at the very time that Baby P was being tortured to death while on its watch? Surely there is a need for Mr Lewis to prove himself worthy of such a huge increase from the public purse? What possible justification can there be for offering him such a sum before he has got his feet under his Haringey desk? After all, this is not a promotion, merely a sideways move. And with Enfield and Haringey neighbouring boroughs in North London, it’s not as if he had to be tempted to move from the other side of the world. Moreover, just look what happened when the Government did do precisely that. In 2002, it went to Australia to hire a former director-general of education and training in New South Wales, Dr Ken Boston, to take over the running of Britain’s troubled Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Now Dr Boston has fallen on his sword just two days before an inquiry is expected to blame the QCA for last summer’s administrative chaos in the school SATs which led to 18,000 scripts going missing and up to 100,000 children having to wait months for their results. As a consequence, primary school league tables — due out in November — still have not been published and are not expected until March, beyond the time when they would be helpful for parents in choosing a school. As head of the parent body responsible for overseeing the marking contract which went belly-up, Dr Boston has accepted responsibility for failing to keep a tighter watch on what was happening. For such a rare display of accountability by an official, he is to be applauded. But now we learn that on top of his basic £180,000 salary, he enjoyed a lucrative package, including a £50,000-a-year rent allowance and two business-class return flights per year to Australia for himself, his wife and daughter worth almost £30,000. His contract also included the promise of paid membership of a yacht club in Sydney - although, despite his membership of the exclusive Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, his office insists that no money was ever paid for this. It appears that the greater the degree of incompetence by the previous incumbent, the higher the salary the vacated post commands. Dr Boston was himself appointed as a safe pair of hands after a scandal over wrongly downgraded A-level results had led to the sacking of his predecessor, Sir William Stubbs — who in turn had been hailed as a hard-nosed and effective regulator when he was appointed to the job. Surely, what these huge salaries actually signify is that, while one debacle follows another with depressing regularity, the real lessons remain unlearned. The problem is always laid at the door of particular officials — Sharon Shoesmith, Ken Boston, William Stubbs. Yet while it is right that they are held to account, no one ever stops to wonder why these disasters are repeated with each successive ‘new broom’. One reason is surely that, since public-sector posts are filled by a lucrative equivalent of musical chairs with officials merely shuttling from one public sector job to another — and with any failure cushioned by generous pay-offs and pension arrangements –these problems are never exposed to outside perspectives that would identify the real causes of failure. As a result, the public sector is incapable of learning from its mistakes. The intrinsic problem with education or social work is never identified and dealt with. And part of that problem is the political culture in which these officials have to operate. For even when good people are appointed, they tend to be paralysed by the dead hand of incompetence or ideology among the politicians who control them — and for whom they so often carry the can. It is hard to avoid the feeling, for example, that Dr Boston’s real crime was to cause major political embarrassment to Children’s Secretary Ed Balls. When the SATs fiasco happened, Mr Balls’s reaction was to bluster that he’d had nothing to do with it. Yet when concerns about the SATs had surfaced three months earlier, he had assured MPs that he would ‘keep the matter closely under review’ and take ‘an active watching brief on the issue’. In fact, he simply ignored the warning signals from both Dr Boston and the director of the new school tests regulatory body, Ofqual –because he was more interested at the time in other pet projects, all of them concerned with social engineering rather than improving education standards. Now he has been interfering in Haringey Council. Having forced the removal of Ms Shoesmith, it was the Children’s Secretary who directed Haringey to appoint Peter Lewis. It is clear that Mr Balls, author of the Orwellian ‘ten-year plan’ for children, wants to turn teachers into social workers — and all of them into the servants of an agenda of increasing state control over children’s development and family life. So the real causes of both our education disaster and the collapse of parenting and family life will continue to be ignored and even exacerbated, while the public sector takes refuge in ever more grotesque edifices of bureaucratic displacement activity — and public officials are paid ever more astronomic sums to construct them. |
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