Week 29.10

Tendring Topics………on line

Dispensing with the Bureaucrats?

Under the new coalition government the NHS, so they say, is to experience the biggest shake-up of its history. Power, and the cash that goes with it, is to be taken from the Primary Care Trusts and handed over to the Medical Practices in their areas. They will decide which consultants we may need to see, and when. They will organise minor operations and through them, patients will be able to say which hospitals they wish to go to and who will operate upon them. Thousands of NHS managers will be sacked. It is envisaged that two or more practices may get together in some cases, to ensure that they give the most efficient and comprehensive service possible.

Wonderful! But who, in each medical practice will make the thousands of decisions that have to be made, and who will make sure that the actions that result from those decisions actually take place.

The doctors? Well, there are of course lots of decisions that individual doctors have to make and some that will probably have to be made by general agreement among the doctors of the practice. They can’t spend too much time in discussion and debate though – at least I hope they can’t. We need them in their consulting rooms and by our bedsides, diagnosing our ailments and trying to cure or alleviate them!

Most up-to-date practices, employing several medical practitioners and nurses, will already have a practice manager. There will also be a number of clerical and administrative staff to make appointments, man the telephones and the reception desk, type letters, keep accounts and undertake the multifarious tasks that exist in any busy enterprise. With more responsibilities, more of these will be needed. There will need to be a deputy and perhaps one or more assistant managers. They’ll require professional accountants to supervise the practice’s finances. More clerical and junior administrative staff will be required to service the professionals.

There is, I fear, a real danger that we shall be sacking dozens of managers and chief executives of Primary Care Trusts and getting rid of their bureaucratic retinues only to replace them with hundreds of rather-less-well-paid managers and chief executives of independent medical practices and combined practices. They’ll need their own, admittedly smaller, retinues. In the twenty-first century not even the smallest organisation can hope to survive without the skills of at least some of those often denigrated bureaucrats!

I wonder if the new streamlined Health Service will really prove to be more efficient, more cost effective and more customer-friendly than its predecessor?

‘More than the Prime Minister!’

It is strange how the Prime Minister is used as a sort of benchmark of annual income. Any public servant with an income in excess of £200,000 is described in terms of shock and horror, to be, ‘earning more than the Prime Minister!’

I may have done it myself. If so I apologise, because it isn’t really a fair comparison. The Prime Minister’s salary, although enormous by the standards of most of us, is quite modest compared with those of quite a few of our fellow countrymen and women. The Prime Minister’s job does carry a few pretty valuable perks though. There are, for instance, two fully staffed palatial homes, one in central London and the other in its own grounds in the lovely English countryside. On retirement, or on being evicted by the electorate, he or she, as well as enjoying a comfortable pension, can reckon on earning many thousands of pounds from writing memoirs and from lecturing and after-dinner speaking. Company directorates and consultancies are theirs for the asking and they might even get a part-time job as a special envoy for NATO or the UN!

The latest subject of press ‘more than the Prime Minister’ outrage, is the head of an inner city (London) school, whose total income last year was described in some newspapers as over £200,000 and in at least one other as £270,000.
A class of eight year olds at an Ipswich primary school in 1930. I am the
anxious little boy with glasses by the headmaster’s right knee! What an easy
and rewarding job teaching must have been when kids were obedient and
attentive, parents were respectful and co-operative – and there was always
the cane to reinforce the headmaster’s authority!

It appears that the Head Teacher’s actual salary from his Education Authority was £80,000 a year; a lot of money by my standards but, I understand, not at all unreasonable for a hard-working educationalist who has successfully ‘turned round’ an inner city school full of tough inner-city pupils! Most of the rest of his income was derived as awards for that or similar achievements from educational trusts. That said, it does seem that he was rewarded from at least two separate sources for the same, admittedly valuable, work and £200,000 is surely an absurdly high sum.

Nevertheless I felt some sympathy with an email correspondent to BBC tv’s ‘Breakfast’ programme who said, ‘Why pick on the salary of a hard-working and successful head teacher to compare with that of the Prime Minister. What about the incomes of top footballers?’

What indeed? And what about the salaries and continuing bonuses of the bankers whose irresponsibility and incompetence triggered the current financial crisis? What about the wealthy stock holders who use their resources to buy football teams and players, and own luxury yachts in which to entertain compliant members of the Government and the Opposition. It is they who should be targeted by the national dailies; but then, of course, they probably own most of them!

A properly graded income tax, clawing back more than fifty percent of income in excess of, say, £200,000; coupled with measures to curb income tax avoidance, would surely relieve all these people, including the affluent head teacher, of some of their superfluous wealth. It would also do just a little to ease the burden of debt repayment, and help to persuade us that the government is determined that the weight of that burden is shared fairly among us all.

Poverty Kills

I don’t think that anyone in this country, probably not anyone in Europe, need these days die of malnutrition. There’s little doubt though that poverty can undermine our health and impoverish and shorten our lives. Affluence on the other hand, can enrich and lengthen them.

This has been demonstrated by a government study called Health Profiles that provided a study of the quality of life of residents in Colchester and in the Tendring District. Colchester’s St. Andrew’s, St.Anne’s and New Town wards include some of the poorest people in the UK. As a result life expectancy in Colchester generally is 73 years for men and 81 for women. Move a few miles out though to rather-more-affluent Lexden, Wivenhoe, Dedham and Langham and men can expect to live to 80 and women to 84.

Similar results were shown in the Tendring District. In Jaywick and in Clacton’s Pier Ward male life expectancy is below 74 years compared with 81 years in posh Frinton-on-Sea.

Other visible results of the effects of deprivation on our lives are the fact that in both Tendring and Colchester there are more-than-average numbers of pregnant smokers, the number of cases of diabetes diagnosed is among the highest in England, ever more children are found to be obese when starting school, and educational achievement of Tendring pupils is among the lowest in the country.

I don’t live in one of Clacton’s more favoured areas. I once heard Dudley Road referred to by a Planning Official as ‘working class residential’, which I am happy enough to accept. Goodness knows my wife and I did have a struggle when, with two young children and a mortgage, we moved here fifty-four years ago! I don’t think that we ever considered ourselves to be ‘deprived’ though.

Our two sons both did very well at both primary and secondary school and our elder son progressed to Cambridge where he obtained a good degree. Both have professional qualifications and have held responsible and satisfying jobs throughout their working lives; hardly low achievers!

My wife had more than her share of ill-health, partly, I think, as a result of deprivation during World War II when she lived and worked in London through the Blitz. Nevertheless she lived till the age of 82 and, as regular blog readers will know, I am 89. I could perhaps hardly be described as ‘still going strong’ but I am quite definitely ‘still going’ and hope to keep going for a little while yet.

I am not the most observant of persons but my neighbours all appear to be pretty healthy and showing little sign of deprivation. It appears that our ‘working class residential’ road may offer as beneficial an environment as Colchester’s posh suburbs and Frinton’s tree-lined and leafy avenues.

Minimum Wage-Earners?

A couple of weeks ago I referred in this blog to the £91,000 a year that husband and wife team Neil Stock and his wife Sarah Candy were managing to earn from their spare-time voluntary work in Local Government and with the NHS. Ms Candy is a cabinet member of both the Essex County Council and the Tendring District Council, and Mr Stock is leader of Tendring District Council. Ms Candy is also a non-executive member of the Northe East Essex Primary Care Trust.

From their Great Bromley home, the husband and wife team also run a very successful mail order fashion and haberdashery enterprise.

Mr Stock, in explanation, told a Gazette reporter that he and his wife worked incredibly hard for long hours. The £91,000, he said, ‘might not equate to the minimum wage, the number of hours we put in’.

A blog reader, who is better at sums than I am, tells me that worrying about that possibility should not keep them awake at night. She has calculated that if both of them were on the minimum wage and worked a 20 hour day each, they would between them earn rather less than half that £91,000 in a year. They wouldn’t, of course have much time for socialising, running the business that is their ‘day job,’ or indeed for eating and sleeping, but they would make something in the region of £40,000.

The fact that Mr Stock could have imagined, even for a moment, that £91,000 might not equate to the minimum wage, demonstrates how very little well-heeled members of the District and County Councils understand about the problems of the low-paid electors whom they claim to represent.

Week 22.10

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Beyond belief! ……..well, almost.

Britain is in the midst of a financial crisis. The one thing that can be predicted with absolute certainty is that there will be savage cuts in the public services. There is to be a total pay freeze in the public sector, and an investigation into the mammoth salaries and bonuses paid to those at the top in both the Civil Service and the Local Government Service. The Government itself has set a good example by cutting (not just freezing) the salaries of its own members and urging them to use public transport instead of official chauffeur-driven cars. Quite right too!

Staff of Essex County Council are bracing themselves for cuts in their numbers and changes in their conditions of service. Their trade union UNISON claims to have seen a document that suggests the axing of 85 jobs, a two year pay freeze, reduction in working hours by one or two hours a week, and stopping sick pay for the first three days of absence from work.

Surely, you will probably have been thinking, County Council members must be planning to introduce a similar regime of austerity for themselves. Their subsidised canteen, for example, has been criticised by at least one of their own members, and they have become well known for sending their members and top officials on expensive jaunts abroad. Their former Leader is alleged to have fiddled his expenses as a member of the House of Lords. He is, of course, presumed innocent until proved guilty. It will be to everyone’s advantage when the matter is settled in court. It might though have been expected that his colleagues would have wished to demonstrate their own integrity and devotion to the public service by reducing their cash allowances.

Essex Councillors Cut Own Pay before Cutting Services! would have made a refreshing and inspiring headline in the local press. In your dreams! What actually appeared (Daily Gazette 21.5.10) was Councillors vote to increase their own allowances.

The allowances of ordinary County Councillors, with no special extra responsibilities, are to rise by 6.1 percent to £11,500 a year. The County Council Leader gets £53,500 and his eight ‘County Cabinet’ members around £27,000 each. County Councillors also get the use of a Blackberry mobile phone and are paid generous allowances for meals and overnight accommodation when travelling on Council business.

There are, I am sure, still a great many public-spirited councillors at every level of local government whose motivation is a genuine desire to serve the communities in which they live.

However, generous ‘allowances’, and rule by a well-paid Leader and his ‘Cabinet’, open the door to a new breed of professional local politician. Soon ‘seeking a career in local government’ won’t necessarily mean getting a humble job at the Town Hall and laboriously working your way up. It could mean being a political activist and getting elected to a (preferably large) local council. That route to the top won’t demand the possession of any particular qualifications, skills or experience. It would help though to have sharp elbows and a thick skin.

It would also mean that you could keep your day job, and you wouldn’t have to get your hands dirty – at least, not in a literal sense.

Who suffers from the cuts?

There is to be a seven percent cut in local government spending. A good job too, you may think, if it’s going to cut some of those top executive salaries and curb the ‘allowances and expenses’ of self-serving councillors.

I’d be wholeheartedly in support if I really though that those would be the main victims of the cuts. I fear that they won’t be. During the Thatcher/Blair years (I now find it difficult to tell them apart!) local authorities were compelled to disband their ‘direct labour teams’ and put most of their front-line public services out to competitive tender. Thus, there’s really no such thing these days as a ‘council dustman’, ‘a council street sweeper’, or a ‘council gardener’. These services, together with office cleaning, catering, building maintenance and, in some areas social care, are contracted out to private firms that naturally enough, expect to make a profit from them.

Also, of course, there are the really big local authority contracts with private firms for – for instance – building or renovating schools, road construction and maintenance, old people’s homes, municipal swimming pools, car parks, adult education facilities, sports and recreation centres, and other public buildings. Essex County Council recently congratulated itself on cutting down its own staff by completing a multi-million pound contract with an international IT firm. Local authorities provide most of the services that make the difference between civilisation and barbarism, and they employ scores of private firms to carry out these responsibilities.

I have recently heard economic ‘experts’ on tv, discussing whether or not the ‘private sector’ would be able to find employment for the many people likely to lose their public sector jobs because of enforced economies. Cuts in local government spending, as well as reducing or eliminating vital services to the general public and, in particular, to the old, the poor and the otherwise disadvantaged, will probably result in many more job losses in ‘the private sector’ than among actual council staff.

Some Depressing Headlines

Quite apart from the political and economic situation (in which I hope I can see a few glimmers of light), two news stories of the past week have made particularly depressing reading. The first was the revelation by the News of the World, that for a substantial fee, the Duchess of York had been prepared to ‘open doors’ to give someone she believed was a businessman, access to her estranged husband the Duke, who holds an influential post in the field of exports. What’s more, she was revealed as a pretty ruthless businesswoman herself, driving a hard bargain and demanding a sum of money that, to most of us, seemed astronomical.

I’m not sure which aspect of this sorry affair is the more distasteful; the behaviour of the Duchess, or the duplicity of the ‘investigative journalist’ who trapped her into revealing this behaviour, and secretly filmed her as she did so. It is surely outrageous that an employee of a newspaper should act as an agent provocateur, encouraging anyone (duchess or dish-washer) into folly and indiscretion, and recording it for all the world to see and hear.

A visitor from another planet, learning about this incident, would draw two conclusions. Firstly that all humans, even those apparently wealthy and with exalted titles, can be bought if they’re offered enough money. Secondly, that no human, however plausible, should ever be trusted.

The other story that I found extremely depressing was that of the two little boys, ten years old at the time of the incident, who were convicted of the attempted rape of an eight-year-old girl. If the three children involved had not already been robbed of their childhood innocence by the pressures of the world around them, the process will certainly have been completed by their verbal examination and cross-examination in the Old Bailey of all places.

Children can be guilty of acts of extreme cruelty and wickedness, but it is absurd to suggest that this case is comparable with the horrific murder of James Bulger or the dreadful torture of two boys near Doncaster in April last year. There has been no report of the victim in this case having suffered severe physical injury or of her running home to her mother in pain and distress. We don’t yet know what punishment will be inflicted on the two boys. Surely though they should not be stigmatised for life as ‘sex offenders’ for what may have been little more than a precocious experiment.

In my childhood and youth in the 1930s, society was much more determined to dampen the sexual precocity of the young than it is today. Most children went to ‘all girls’ or ‘all boys’ schools from the age of seven onwards. The idea of distributing contraceptives to teenagers and advising on their use would have been regarded with horror. I think though that the thought of dragging pre-adolescent children through the adult criminal courts for sexual experimentation would have been regarded with almost equal horror. Had such incidents occurred (and I suppose that they must have), those involved would have been given a good smacking by their parents and a closer eye would have been kept on their future activities. However medieval and inadequate that remedy may sound to third millennial ears I’m sure that it would have done far less long-term damage than our ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century solution.

The Changing Clacton Scene

Clacton had appeared to come fairly lightly out of the economic recession. The empty space created by the closure of Woolworth was filled by the ‘99p Store’. The closed Co-op Departmental Store in Station Road was replaced by Vergo, selling much the same range of clothing and household goods as the Co-op, and taking on the entire Co-op Staff. Our town centre was mercifully free of the gaps and the boarded-up shop premises that we saw on tv news programmes from elsewhere. Clacton had a good 2009 Holiday Season. The weather, while not the barbecue summer promised, was better than that of the previous two summers. The rising Euro and falling Pound encouraged stay-at-home holidays. Holiday camps, hotels and boarding houses were well booked and the tills of town centre retailers rang merrily throughout the summer.

It came as a blow to many disabled and elderly people when Shopmobility, a local charity that had provided electric mobility scooters to those who needed them for their shopping expeditions, closed down on 31st December. Five months later the premises are still unused. Now Vergo is closing down and the Clacton Branch of Rayner Dispensing Opticians, at the junction of Beach Road and High Street has also closed. Their nearest branch is now in Harwich. This affected me as Rayner had supported my failing eyesight for many years! Rayner and Vergo – two new unsightly gaps in Clacton’s town centre, both adding to the number of local unemployed.

There are a few more cheering signs. The service Shopmobility provided has been replaced to some extent by Marks Mobility of Holland-on-Sea opening a branch in the landward end of Pier Avenue, near to the Wellesley Road junction. Marks Mobility sells and services new and used mobility scooters and stocks a wide range of other equipment (wheelchairs, walking frames, scooter accessories, specialised footwear and so on) for the sickroom and for elderly and disabled people. A mobility scooter user myself, with increasing disability, I have found its services invaluable.

Then again, The Black Bull, a relatively recently built pub in St Osyth Road, which has stood empty and abandoned for many months is being converted into a Tesco Express store. This may not be good news for other convenience stores in the area but I have no doubt that it will sometimes prove useful for nearby residents (like myself!) Yet another new service will be a new coffee-shop, one of a nation-wide chain, that is to open shortly near the new Travelodge Hotel in Jackson Road.

Work in progress on converting the former 'Black Bull' into a Tesco Express Store.

Perhaps the positive signs are beginning to catch up with the negative ones. I certainly hope so.