Government waste, it seems, even extends to libraries.
Richard Charkin, a publisher, has a blog and this is part of an entry from it about Tim Coates, the former managing director of the bookshop Waterstones:
He is currently involved in a highly personal campaign to encourage the British Government and local authorities to spend library budgets on books - a simple, obvious but difficult objective. Not everyone agrees with Tim's in-your-face approach to campaigning but at the very least he has made the topic unignorable. I asked him to write a guest blog for me and here it is:
"Half the management in this country is public sector. The rules are different: income does not depend on judgment, efficiency or perfomance; cash is available; there is no such thing as bankruptcy and nor are there the disciplines, anxieties, skills and systems which are used to avoid it. Employment is secure and very well paid. Projects thrive on persuasive plans but rarely on actual outcomes. To a private sector manager, the regime is unfamiliar.
We have become used to the idea that only a small portion of charitable donations reach their intended recipients; we should get used to the idea that the great part of the money we thought was for public service will never reach any public beneficiary. We live in an economy which is the travelling equivalent of a crowded roundabout. Huge amounts of public funds travel on a journey which goes nowhere in an unpleasant and wasteful manner.
The full entry is here.
Incidentally, publishing is dominated by people who are left-wing and therefore, implicitly, believe that government is the answer to most problems. It is refreshing to see a few publishers who are open to the idea that, in fact, governments tend to be incompetent and wasteful. It would be good to have a bit more detail of the waste that Mr Coates has come across.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Waste in public services
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James
Thank you for copying the piece from Richard Charkin's blog. I am very flattered. I can give great detail of the waste of which I speak but it falls into a number of headings which I shall list.
I have learned the notion of "efficiency" in a public sector operation is essentially different to that which operates in commercial operations and the management of them. In a commercial situation it is normally fairly clear to everyone in the organisation that efficiency means spending resource in the pursuit of sales or profit. There is always argument about the detail and people are often deflected, but fundamentally everyone readily understands why efficiency is a reason for doing things.
In a public sector operation the same levers do not operate. In fact almost by definition public enterprises are undertaken because they are not commercially viable; but that is fine, that is why we have a government. However, what is unsatisfactory is when the aim of the enterprise is too vague. For example if one says a public library should be "socially inclusive", which is a perfectly reasonable political statement, there is an obligation on the managers and the politicians to be very specific about to whom they are being inclusive and how much. If they don't do this they have created a book of signed blank cheques. The staff operating under this regime can (and will) justify anything they do under the heading of social inclusivity and they will be entitled to do so.
So the heart of the inefficiencies lie in the indiscipline in the senior management of being clear what they are about. There is from then onwards no mechanism for anyone to behave in a responsible manner. The resources can all be used and little benefit achieved: the service can (and generally does) resort to asking for more money "or else the service to the public will be cut"- which it already has been.
The public library service has behaved in this way for twenty years and is almost beyond recall. The current generation of managers haven't learned those basic disciplines because the people from whom they learned management skills didn't have them either. It is gloomy.
More specifically waste occurs in almist every single activity: operating libraries; purchasing goods; management structures; council management of those structures; property management -- and so on. There is a whole structure of problems that no one even recognises as problems: all that happens is that the public find a service that is not very useful and, gradually, reluctantly, they stop using it
Posted by: Tim Coates at April 22, 2006 04:05 PM
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James
Thank you for copying the piece from Richard Charkin's blog. I am very flattered. I can give great detail of the waste of which I speak but it falls into a number of headings which I shall list.
I have learned the notion of "efficiency" in a public sector operation is essentially different to that which operates in commercial operations and the management of them. In a commercial situation it is normally fairly clear to everyone in the organisation that efficiency means spending resource in the pursuit of sales or profit. There is always argument about the detail and people are often deflected, but fundamentally everyone readily understands why efficiency is a reason for doing things.
In a public sector operation the same levers do not operate. In fact almost by definition public enterprises are undertaken because they are not commercially viable; but that is fine, that is why we have a government. However, what is unsatisfactory is when the aim of the enterprise is too vague. For example if one says a public library should be "socially inclusive", which is a perfectly reasonable political statement, there is an obligation on the managers and the politicians to be very specific about to whom they are being inclusive and how much. If they don't do this they have created a book of signed blank cheques. The staff operating under this regime can (and will) justify anything they do under the heading of social inclusivity and they will be entitled to do so.
So the heart of the inefficiencies lie in the indiscipline in the senior management of being clear what they are about. There is from then onwards no mechanism for anyone to behave in a responsible manner. The resources can all be used and little benefit achieved: the service can (and generally does) resort to asking for more money "or else the service to the public will be cut"- which it already has been.
The public library service has behaved in this way for twenty years and is almost beyond recall. The current generation of managers haven't learned those basic disciplines because the people from whom they learned management skills didn't have them either. It is gloomy.
More specifically waste occurs in almist every single activity: operating libraries; purchasing goods; management structures; council management of those structures; property management -- and so on. There is a whole structure of problems that no one even recognises as problems: all that happens is that the public find a service that is not very useful and, gradually, reluctantly, they stop using it
Posted by: Tim Coates at April 22, 2006 04:05 PM