The Mirror’s Jason Beattie has been having some off-the-record conversations with civil servants. His piece in the Local Government Chronicle describes how Whitehall is preparing for a Tory victory next year.

Despite the talk of public spending cuts, the general tone of the mandarins’ comments is positive. There seems to be a weariness with the Brown government and a feeling that change is needed.

“There will be no tears shed if we get a more coherent centre of government. Brown has a dysfunctional way of working and for much of the Labour government there has been clear conflict between No 10 and the Treasury,” says one Whitehall insider.

There is a crumb of comfort for the Liberal Democrats, as the possibility of a hung parliament is being considered.

For the first time since 1983 serious attention is being paid to the Liberal Democrats, particularly the views of shadow chancellor Vince Cable and leader Nick Clegg, the two most likely to be found cabinet positions should a coalition arise.

But they also identify the sheer lack of inexperience both of incoming ministers and of civil servants in managing severe budget cuts, a subject I discussed a couple of weeks ago.

One of the problems is that for the past dozen years the culture of the government and its civil service, from the permanent secretary of the Treasury to directors at any district council, has been one of largesse.

Put simply, they are unaccustomed to trimming budgets. “There are not many people in very senior roles who have done recession budgeting,” one mandarin tells me.

This is a particular problem in central government; more so than in local government and the NHS.

After the Thatcher government’s initial spending cuts in the early 80s, the focus shifted first to councils and then to the NHS. Local authorities were subjected to compulsory competitive tendering and internal markets were created in the NHS. The strategy of exposing these services to market forces was, for the most part, continued by the Major and Blair administrations.

As a result, councils and NHS trusts tend to be leaner and more focused than the central government departments and agencies, which were left largely untouched by the disciplines forced on other parts of the public sector.

Because it is so long since it last happened, very few senior civil servants will have any experience of managing a large-scale reduction in spending and staffing levels. Apparently, George Osborne’s proposed solution goes something like this:

Perhaps alert to this inexperience, shadow chancellor George Osborne has pledged to rewrite civil service contracts to include a legally binding ‘fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers’. Those judged to have failed to spend money prudently will be disciplined or dismissed, Mr Osborne promises.

Only someone who has never worked with civil servants could believe that such a measure would make a scrap of difference. Most senior civil servants are very clever people. They are extremely skilled at presenting arguments and advocating their cases. That is why so many ‘vanity projects’ get approved in central government. People decide what they want to do then construct a thorough and convincing business case for it. The ambiguity and lack of clear direction that pervades much of central government means that you can usually bend the meaning of your department’s nebulous vision statement to justify whatever it is you want to do.

The first civil servant who is sacked under Osborne’s new law will go straight to an employment tribunal. He will present the court with a bundle of documents which will ’prove’ that he was acting in the taxpayers’ interests and a set of meeting minutes showing that everyone agreed with him at the time.

This may sound cynical but it’s going to take more than laws to push through efficiency and spending cuts in the public sector. Ministers will have to get into the detail of what their departments do and simply tell people to stop doing a lot of it. Unfortunately, business leadership and management experience is in short supply among today’s professional MPs.

Encouragingly, there are signs that the Tories realise this.

The Conservatives have also sought advice from the Institute for Government, a nonpartisan organisation which seeks to rectify the lack of training for would-be ministers.

And the grandees have been wheeled out to instruct the infant Conservatives on grown-up government. Michael Heseltine told a recent gathering of the dangers of being bossed around by the Sir Humphreys.

“On day one,” he was reported have said, “make sure you present your new permanent secretary with your agenda, otherwise he will present you with his”.

A ghost from a bygone era when MPs had actually run businesses before going into politics, Heseltine understands that new leaders have about 90 days to make their mark or they are sunk. As soon as they take up their posts, the new Tory ministers will need to get out of their offices and tour their departments, asking awkward questions about everything. If they fail to get a grip in those early days, the likelihood of making any change will diminish, week by week. Inertia will reassert itself and new laws about ‘fiduciary responsibility’ or whatever else, won’t dig the floundering new ministers out of the mess.

The next government will have to do things that make it very unpopular, especially with the some in the civil service. As any CEO will tell you, if you’re going to come in and be Mr Nasty, it’s best to get it over with.

An honest debate about public spending came a step closer yesterday when Gordon Brown sort of admitted that he might have to make some cuts. He’s still saying that front-line services won’t be affected, though, which is almost certainly rubbish. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are pretending that they can ring-fence health and education from any cuts. This suddenly seems to have become the new orthodoxy as both main parties move towards a position where everything else can be slashed and burned while these two sacred cows are protected.

As I said a couple of weeks ago, this doesn’t make sense. There is still a lot of fat in the NHS and in local authority education departments. Protecting nearly a third of public spending from hard scrutiny would miss an opportunity to save a lot of money. No less a person than the chief executive of the Audit Commission agrees. Speaking at the Local Government Association’s conference, Steve Bundred said:

Both political parties have pledged that whatever happens they will protect health and education. I think that’s a big mistake.

Health and education are the two services that have been most generously funded over the past decade but they are among the most inefficient services

It would seem perverse to assume that there is no scope for greater efficiencies in those services or that any scope would be limited to the back office.

We have seen that there are huge variations in unit costs between comparable bodies at the front line and those services should not be exempt from the demand for greater savings.

He’s right. While, as a general rule, local authorities and NHS trusts are nowhere near as fat and happy as central government departments, that doesn’t mean that there are not more savings to be made. Some councils and NHS trusts are models of efficiency. Others are, frankly, crap. Those parts of the NHS which sit outside the trusts, such as the Strategic Health Authorities and the various arms of the Department of Health, are also prime candidates for scrutiny.

If we’re going to have a review of public spending, which we clearly need, then everything must go into the pot. The moment you allow this kind of shroud-waving to close down the argument, you protect inefficiency in some places and are therefore forced to cut well-run services in others.

Both major parties are now saying they want an honest review of public spending priorities. Ring-fencing thirty percent of the public sector from such a review is not honest at all. The politicians are still too scared to say what must be said and do what must be done.

Eventually there will be a tough spending review and it will have to include health and education. Pretending otherwise is not just, as Steve Bundred says, a mistake. It’s downright dishonest too.

At last a government minister has admitted that spending cuts are inevitable after the next election, even as Gordon Brown still tries to pretend otherwise.

Despite the talk in the media of green shoots, last week’s OECD report gave the grimmest assessment yet of Britain’s economy and its public finances. There was a lot of fuss in the press about the prediction of a 14% deficit next year but the really worrying figure is the long-term projection. By 2017, the OECD predicts that the UK’s debt will stand at 125% of GDP, higher than that of the USA , Italy and even Iceland. Of the OECD countries, only Ireland and Japan are predicted to have debt levels higher than that of the UK. (See page 250 of the OECD report for the full details.)

But wait, there’s more. The 125% debt level is based on the assumption that from April 2010, nine months from now, the government cuts spending by one percent of GDP for the next seven years. A quick back-of-the-fag-packet calculation, based on Christopher Chantrill’s figures, makes that somewhere between 2% and 2.25% of public spending.

So let’s just summarise. The OECD reckons the UK needs to start cutting public spending by at least 2% in nine months time, just to get debt down to 125% of GDP by 2017. Bloody Hell!

Despite all this, Gordon Brown still claims that he can reduce debt without cutting public services.

A recent YouGov poll suggests that most people understand the position. 77% agreed that there is a need for cutting public spending by as much as 10%. Of course, there is a world of difference between approving in principle of unspecified spending cuts and approving of cuts in specific services, but this poll shows that there is no longer an electoral advantage in pretending it’s not going to happen.

It is probable that the government is going to lose the next election but it will certainly do so if it doesn’t come clean about the public finances. By pretending everything is OK, Gordon Brown is allowing the Tories to attack him on public spending without needing to say specifically what they would cut. By being honest, Labour might be able to put some pressure on David Cameron who, up until now, has come up with no clear strategy either.

As it is, both main parties are letting us down. The public services we have been used to won’t be the same in five year’s time. We need to start talking about that now.

Andrew Rawnsley has a piece in today’s Observer covering similar themes to my post last week; that whoever wins the next election will have to make savage spending cuts, that it makes no sense to ring-fence the NHS from these cuts and that politicians are terrified of telling the voters these self-evident truths.

He also points out that few MPs in any party have experience of such drastic cuts. Most of today’s leaders have risen to power during the good times. Only Ken Clarke, says Rawnsley,  knows what it is really like to take a hatchet to public services.

The former chancellor knows of what he speaks when he warns his colleagues to steel themselves for a grisly experience. Ken Clarke was a member of the Thatcher government when it came to office in 1979 and simultaneously slashed spending and put up taxes to try to get control over the deficit. The shadow business secretary tells colleagues that Tory ministers had to put up the collars on their coats in the hope that it would make them less recognisable in the street.

The deficit is now soaring towards £1 trillion. Everyone, except, apparently, Gordon Brown, understands that a squeeze on public spending is coming, the like of which has not been seen since Thatcher’s first term. No one now active in the front rank of British politics, with the exception of Ken Clarke, has any concept of the excruciating levels of pain that will be inflicted on spending departments.

But it’s even worse than that. Nowadays many MPs are career politicians. Few of them have worked in business so they have no idea what re-structures and downsizing programmes look like. Most MPs will never have fired anyone in their lives. They have no experience of handling large-scale job cuts, or of the resulting impact on morale and employee relations.

The same is true of the civil servants. As Andrew Rawnsley continues:

Senior Treasury officials whisper that their current Labour masters, their anticipated Tory ones and Whitehall as a whole are all in denial. In fact, even those Treasury officials have yet to get their heads round it. There is no institutional memory within the Treasury about what it is like to have to conduct spending negotiations which impose real cuts on departments. The civil servants are all too young. None of them has ever done it. Nor is there any experience in the rest of Whitehall of how to shrink a budget. They only know how to preside over growth.

He’s bang on there. With a few exceptions, there is no sense of urgency in the public sector about the looming budget deficit. In central government, especially, public spending cuts are discussed in the abstract under Any Other Business. It’s as if people know a spending squeeze will happen but they assume the axe will fall somewhere else. Maybe I have been looking in the wrong places but I have yet to see any public sector organisation actively preparing itself to deliver services with drastically reduced staffing levels. It feels like the phoney war.

If done properly, it is possible to cut costs in an organisation while minimising the impact on the operational functions. If done badly, a cost reduction exercise cuts into muscle, often before it has cut out all the fat. I have a nasty feeling that today’s denial and lack of planning will lead to tomorrow’s spending-cuts fiasco.

I heard on the radio this morning that the BMA wants to eliminate the private sector from the NHS.

Blimey, I thought, does that mean that all doctors are going to become direct employees of the NHS and stop doing private work using NHS facilities?

Don’t be silly, Rick. They don’t mean that private sector. They’re talking about the other private sector; that of managers, private companies, targets and other horrid things.

In certain respects the BMA has a point. When the PFI chickens come home to roost, the taxpayers of tomorrow may well find that they have been left to pick up the tab for today’s profligate spending.

But has the introduction of market reforms and private sector suppliers really been so bad for the NHS? As I noted last month, the comparison between the NHS in Wales and Scotland, where there is no purchaser-provider split, and their localised and more market-driven English counterpart, doesn’t support the BMA’s stance.

The performance of the NHS has improved at a faster rate in England than in Scotland and Wales. While some of this this might be due to what Imperial College’s Carol Propper calls “the terror of targets”, it makes it hard to hold up those parts of the NHS with no private provision as models of success. As the FT said:

The English NHS is hitting a maximum 18-week wait for treatment that Scotland will not achieve until 2011.

Waits are worse in Wales, and a few years ago a Welsh Audit Office report noted that the poorer overall health of the Welsh population did not explain the performance. Northern parts of England, it noted, had similar health status “but have consistently delivered more healthcare at lower cost”.

When challenged on Radio 4 by the CBI’s Susan Anderson, Hamish Meldrum, Chairman of the BMA, could not offer much evidence against private sector involvement in the NHS, apart from PFI and the usual target; “all those management consultants”.

I was reminded of something I read earlier this week, in a completely different context, on Penny Red’s blog:

[I]t is a great horror to discover that you yourself are part of the overclass and yet to feel that you are not enjoying any special privileges because of it. The nature of privilege, of course, is that it is taken for granted….

I wonder if the BMA’s demand to kick the private sector out of the NHS could roughly be translated as something like this:

Back in the good old days, we doctors ran the hospitals. Quite rightly, no-one questioned what we did and we were treated with the courtesy and respect due to us. Now, we are being told what to do by these jumped up managers with their vulgar business-speak. It’s just not bloody fair!

The cries of once unassailable elites as they feel their power being usurped by upstart challengers is a recurring theme throughout history. History also tells us that such elites never give up their power without a fight. And it looks very much as though a big fight is coming sometime in the next few years.

Sorry for the lack of posts here this week. As I explained a while ago, I’m involved in a big corporate re-organisation at the moment and, as those of you with experience of such things will know, when you’re not in meetings you’re sitting in a room bashing stuff out on a secure PC. Hence, no blogging. I didn’t expect this project to take up so much of my time but you know how these things go.

Anyway, as a result I have been itching to sound off about all sorts of things so here goes.

First up is the sacking of 647 workers at Lindsey Oil Refinery (down from 900 in the earlier reports). When this dispute first made the news in January I surmised that we might see a lot more disputes like this. Now, it appears, things are going to get nasty, with mass dismissals and sympathy strikes.

It is twenty years since Britain has seen large scale disputes and employer counter-action on this scale. The newspaper reports reflect this. Few of them contain the critical facts. For example, many of the reports describe the workers as “contract workers”, which implies that they are self-employed or working through agencies. Were that the case, they would not have had employment contracts and could therefore have been laid off at will.

However, as far as I can tell, and this still isn’t totally clear from the reports, the workers were actually employees of the contractor companies working on the site. This is important because, if it is true, it means that the workers have more rights. It also seems, though, that these actions are not ‘protected disputes’ under the law

Few managers much under the age of 40 will have had reason to know the law on dismissal for industrial action. Even the old farts like me that used to understand it have forgotten most of it. Like all things, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

Most of the big disputes involving large scale strikes, sympathy action, lock-outs and mass dismissals were over by 1990. Stories like those in the papers this morning evoke memories of Maggie Thatcher, Miami Vice and Wham blaring out of open-topped Golf GTis

But for those too young to remember all that, Freshfields (which sounds like a supermarket but is actually a law firm) has provided this handy guide to the law on industrial action.

All strikes are effectively a breach of contract but employees and unions are protected from legal action and dismissal provided that the industrialaction falls within certain rules. The strike at Lindsey and the sympathy action by other groups of workers around the country does not fall within these rules. Unofficial action and sympathy strikes do not count as ‘protected industrial action’. That’s why the employers will probably get away, at least legally, with dismissing the workers.

Managers, HR professionals  and trade union activists would do well to read up on the difference between protected and unprotected industrial action because we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing. Earlier this week the CIPD’s Chief Economist John Phillpot warned of 350,000 public sector jobs being cut and of an ongoing ‘workplace guerrilla war’ as the employee relations climate deteriorates and industrial unrest increases. At one time the thought of the government playing hardball with striking civil servants in the way that Total’s contractors have with their employees would have been unthinkable. But with the public sector deficit as it is, who can say what might happen in the next few years? Both sides might start fighting dirty.

Up until recently,many people said that large-scale strikes, like boom-and-bust, had been consigned to history. It looks as though they spoke too soon. If you are likely to be anywhere near an industrial dispute, I suggest you take some time to read up on some long forgotten law.

For a moment last week it looked as though Andrew Lansley was in deep trouble. He did something that, in David Cameron’s Tory party, counts as a cardinal sin. He came dangerously close to making a policy announcement.

However, the Tory spin machine, which is now even more effective than Labour’s in the early Blair years, swung into action and recast the whole incident as a carefully laid trap in which the government would hang itself with its own public spending figures. This argument seems, by and large, to have been accepted and it is the government that is once again on the defensive over its spending plans.

This is hardly surprising . Anyone who looked at Alistair Darling’s budget statement could see that, however you dress it up, in real terms public spending would be cut from 2011. The only question is by how much and whether it will be enough.

The Tories’ policy, or at least what seems to be emerging as their line, is that the NHS and education will be ring-fenced from any spending cuts. Is this wise or, for that matter, honest?

A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers calculated that, to get public debt back to somewhere between 40-50% of GDP within the next 20 years, would require spending cuts of 9.3% between now and 2018. Together, education and the NHS account for around 30% of government spending. Cutting everything else by 10% but leaving health and education alone isn’t going to do it.

But, regardless of the maths, if politicians of whatever colour are really serious about regaining control of the public finances it doesn’t make sense to ring-fence anything. When the suggestion was made that health and education would be protected you could almost hear the sighs of relief in the NHS and in the now quasi-autonomous town hall education departments.

While it is true that, as a general rule, local authorities and NHS trusts look lean and mean when compared to central government departments, that doesn’t mean that there is no fat to cut. As I’ve said before, ad nauseam, there is plenty to be saved on support functions in local government and NHS trusts. Even more could be cut if a long, hard look were taken at what Strategic Health Authorities do.

Whoever wins the next election will not be able to rule out spending cuts in any part of government. To do the job properly everything will have to be up for grabs. The Tories’ suggestion that they would protect health and education is both cowardly and downright dishonest. Even as they say it they know that they won’t be able to do it.

Of course, the reason the Tories are pretending that they can save health and education from cuts is because they are scared that the public will take fright and, at the eleventh hour, vote Labour back into power next year. This assumption is insulting to the voters. In pubs, around dinner tables, in shops, offices and factories across Britain, people are discussing the huge levels of public debt. Most people grudgingly accept that, five years from now, there are some things that the state does now which it won’t be doing then. They know that some things that are free now will soon have to be paid for. Sure, no-one is clear specifically what will be cut but that is because politicians have been so reluctant to open up the discussion.

This lack of candour helps no-one. Politicians prepared to tell the truth might find that, far from running away, the public loves them for it. The Independent’s editorial hinted yesterday that this might be an opportunity for the Liberal Democrats to steal a march on the other two parties. 

Of course, it is not hard to see why both the Government and the Conservatives have chosen obfuscation over openness. The Tories fear that the public still associates them with painful cuts of the past and could punish them again at the ballot box if this debate moves up the political agenda. Meanwhile, ministers are loath to admit that their historic investments in the public sector since 2000 now need to be thrown into reverse. The Liberal Democrats have been admirably open about their belief that the role of the state needs to be reconsidered, but there is only so much the third party can accomplish on its own.

Yet this debate cannot be evaded forever; these questions are simply too important to all our futures to remain unanswered.

True enough. Not only can this debate not be evaded for ever, it cannot even be evaded for much more than three years. By June 2012, thanks to what in real terms will be a gradual erosion of public spending, the unreformed and, by then, under-funded public services will start to collapse of their own accord.

Those of us who know from experience how hard it is to make efficiency savings in organisations can see that, if intelligent cuts are to be made in time, the planning needs to start now. By the next election each party needs to have a clear view on how it will reduce the cost of public services. If it hasn’t got one it should not be voted into power.

This is all starting to get a bit silly.

We have Cabinet members resigning and calling for the Prime Minister to go, a group of Labour MPs doing the same and now the Guardian, Labour’s staunchest ally in the press, is having a hysterical fit of the vapours too.

Just what do these Labour supporters think is going to happen? They couldn’t elect another leader without calling a general election which they would almost certainly lose. To boot Gordon Brown out, then, would be to remove Labour from power almost instantly.

At least if they stay the course they have some chance of limiting the damage. They might even have time to enact the electoral reform which everyone is suddenly so keen on and which might limit a Tory victory at the next election. At the very least, it looks as though an election a year from now will be held during a more favourable economic climate.

And therein lies the real tragedy. Just as everything is going to pot politically, it looks as though Brown and Darling’s recession strategy might actually be starting to work. There are signs that the economies of Britain and the US are starting to return to normal, by which I don’t mean that the recession is over, just that people are starting to invest again, rather than keeping their money in dollars or gold. Some data indicate an increase in business activity which bears out my anecdotal evidence from the past few weeks. Things are slowly but surely starting to move again.

How much of this can Gordon and Alistair take credit for? Probably quite a lot. When the history books come to be written by dispassionate academics, many years from now, Gordon Brown may well be remembered as the man who stopped the world recession becoming a depression. His model for bailing out banks, taking equity in return for the cash, was copied around the world and almost certainly prevented a number of banks from going bust. Without the bailout schemes. The banks  were roped together like climbers on a mountain and, if a few had failed, many others would have been dragged down too taking the world economy with them.

And where were Brown and Darling’s rivals during the dark days of last autumn? Cameron and Osborne were left looking like a couple of  graduate trainees, quoting theory from textbooks they’d half read and with no idea what to do next.

Which is pretty much where they still are. Brown and Darling made a huge error when they planned increases in public spending which they now can’t pay for. Neither is able to say much about how we are going to rein that spending back now that we won’t be able to afford it. But Cameron and Osborne, once again, don’t seem to have any ideas either. As the FT pointed out a fortnight ago, the IMF, the ratings agencies and others are not just worried because the government has no clear plan for curbing public spending; they are worried that nobody, including David Cameron, has any clear plan for curbing public spending.

I have no political axe to grind here. I don’t give a monkey’s about Brownites and Blairites or, for that matter, whether the government is Conservative or Labour. Like many people running businesses, I have found the last nine months or so very alarming and I would rather the weakly recovering economy were nurtured for the next year than plunged into political chaos. It doesn’t make sense to dump someone who seems to have at least some idea about what he is doing for someone who, at the moment, clearly doesn’t. Unless I see some compelling and coherent economic policies from the Cameron camp I see no reason to change my mind.

The decision to keep Alistair Darling in his job is an encouraging indication that the government is holding its nerve in the face of the ham acting from the Tories and their allies in the press and the screaming hysteria of many on the Labour side. Investors seem to agree as Sterling recovered after the announcement.

This is no time for buggering about. Politicos and hacks can have their fun but the government should ignore them. The most important task now is to help business recover so that the taxes start to flow again. Then the long slog of rolling back state spending will have to start. Most probably, it won’t be Gordon who takes that on but, right now, I can’t see anyone else doing it either.

Update: The Independent’s Stephen Foley reports from the US. American business leaders think we’re bonkers to be talking about getting rid of Gordon.

While the world is just tiptoeing out of this crisis, it looks simply perverse to ditch a leader who took his country unburned through that fire, and who is most engaged in the effort to prevent such a fire from igniting again.

The critical economic and financial challenges facing Britain will be tackled precisely in this arena of international co-operation and in the global markets. At a moment when the country seems poised to ditch him, his expertise seems more invaluable than ever.

Removing him is not just perverse. It looks a little dangerous, frankly. For a frenzied few minutes yesterday lunchtime, currency traders were seized by the notion that Brown was about to pre-empt his ouster by announcing his resignation, and the rumour sent the pound plunging.

There are very few politicians in the UK who are better placed than Gordon Brown to keep the confidence of financial markets. Certainly none of the candidates for prime minister in any party can match him.

The US has just ditched a dumb leader for a smart one. The UK looks from here as if it might be about to do the opposite.

In a rare twist, foreign business leaders and the financial markets prefer a Labour prime minister to a Tory one. Or perhaps it’s just that they prefer the old CEO to the polished trainee from the high-flyers’ management development programme. Whatever, the people who are going to work with us to get out of this recession and the people who are going to lend us the money to do it, for the moment at least, think we should stick with Gordon Brown.

The day after the budget I expressed some doubts about Alistair Darling’s plan for public sector cost savings. It appears that I’m not the only sceptic. One of the Operational Efficiency Programme’s authors, former Logica CEO Martin Read is not convinced either. He questioned ministers’ commitment to backing the necessary changes in a meeting of the House of Commons Treasury sub-committee:

To achieve the kind of radical savings that’s talked about in the OEP you need to simplify and standardise processes. Certainly in locally delivered services, you will need the collaboration between different organisations within a particular area across organisational boundaries and that I think requires huge political will.

I’m not really sure that this has ever been a matter of very evident, collective ministerial will right at the top of the agenda. And I think for the next tranche of savings to come out of the OEP process, one of the preconditions for that will be sustained, very visible, ministerial political commitment.

In other words, if civil servants procrastinate and, in a desire to retain control of their silos, thwart all attempts to cut costs by sharing services, then someone will have to go and knock their heads together. And Mr Read doesn’t think anyone in government has the balls to do that.

LSE’s local government expert Tony Travers doesn’t buy it either:

[I]t should be possible to manoeuvre through the difficult years ahead without compromising the level of service provided. By using resources more productively, additional provision could be bought with the same or less money. Magically, the books would balance and the public would receive the services they need.

But it is never that easy. Between the silkily convincing words in official reports and the provision of lower-cost services, huge changes in performance will be needed. This is a Stakhanovite approach; one that imagines productivity improvements cascading down from Whitehall to town halls, hospitals and police stations, with eager officials over-fulfilling their targets. Inevitably, the policy-makers who churn out proposals for more efficient government will hardly ever be the managers who must implement the restructuring, contracting out and collaboration necessary to cut costs. It is in this gap between Whitehall initiative and local delivery that optimism fades.

His conclusions are not that far way from those of Martin Read. At the root of the problem is the unwillingness of government departments and their agencies to collaborate across organisational boundaries and the inability of ministers to do anything about it:

Despite good intentions within the Department for Communities and Local Government, Hazel Blears has very little influence when it comes to getting service departments, notably the Home Office and the Department of Health, to do anything they do not want to do. Faced with a hostile media demanding action about, say, child protection or knife crime, central departments will always resist pooling their resources within local initiatives.

He also warns that, if the savings in the OEP report are not realised, then the blunt instrument of across-the-board cuts will be the last resort of a government with no other options left:

There will either have to be a radical change in the way services are provided, as suggested in the OEP report, or something else will have to happen.

‘Something else’ could include the abandonment of some public provision altogether, means tested benefits and/or charging for many more parts of the state. None of these options would be easy. Real efficiency savings might now be forced upon government. If such savings are to be real and ‘cashable’, it will mean privatisations, contracting out and the shedding of public sector staff. There will be a political cost in making such radical changes. But, even if these are successful, improved productivity will not be sufficient. Other, even more difficult, steps will be required. Efficiency alone will not save the public services.

So here we have a former businessman and a left-ish academic both saying pretty much the same thing. The public sector has one last chance to make real efficiency savings but those savings will only be achieved if ministers force empire-building mandarins to make the necessary changes in the way they work. If this opportunity is missed, which both seem to fear it will be, the alternative will be savage cuts to the front-line services most of us take for granted.

This is funny. Well it made me laugh anyway.

Cassette Boy produced this spoof of The Apprentice by splicing together clips from 43 episodes. Listen through headphones if you’re at work!

Hat Tip: Guru