For those of you who have been living on Mars for the past year (or outside the UK) there is an election coming up. It's time for parties to polish up their policies and put their wares on display. As such, I thought it was time to examine Conservative policy and provide the following quiz; if it was a crime to be Conservative, would you be convicted?
1. You have inherited a multi million pound business from your father. On examination of the accounts, you find that the cost of administration has doubled from 6% to 12% over the past fifteen years. This can be traced back to a change your father made in bookkeeping, where he required the individual account of every customer to go through the main office instead of each office keeping its own accounts and reporting back. Your main rivals in Scotland rely on each office to keep its own accounts and its admin costs are 5%. Do you;
A)change over to the system your rival uses;
B) stick with the status quo?
2. You have a waiting list of customers that you cannot deal with alone. You decide to sub-contract work to another firm and pay them £15 million in advance for a five year contract. After you have signed the contract, the company come back and say that they can only do half of the work involved, due to health and safety issues, but the contract means that they keep the £15 million. Do you;
A) Consult your lawyers about possible breach of contract, sue the idiot who drew up the contract, and never do business with sub-contracted company again;
B) Shrug your shoulders, pay out the £15 million, and recommend this as a way of doing business?
3. You have an in-house cleaning team who are slightly more expensive than another company. You hire the new company, only to find that they will not clean the toilets, because their contract does not include cleaning up bodily fluids. Do you;
A) bring your old team back and tell the others to take a hike;
B) get some of your office staff to assume toilet cleaning duties in addition to their own work?
4. You want to build a dividing wall in one of your offices. Do you
A) Get a couple of quotes from local builders, take the lowest one and build it;
B) Take out an advert in the European journal?
5. A light switch is not working in your office and requires an electrician. You go to a local electrician, who, on hearing the location, tells you that he will have to charge you £300 for the job because it's in the contract tied to the building. Do you;
A)Accuse the business consortia that drew up the contract, of profiteering and hire another electrician;
B) shrug your shoulders and pay out?
6. You want to build a new office. You go to a group of lenders who borrow money on your behalf from the bank and they charge you a lending rate of 20% on the money. Two years later, you find that the bank has lowered its lending rate to 15% and the lenders have re-financed your deal, but they are still charging you 20% interest. Do you;
A)attempt to negotiate for some of the refinanced money;
B) sit back and let them pocket it all?
7. Some of your skilled workers have recently been unavailable for overtime. You find out that this is because they are moonlighting for another company. Do you;
A) Warn them that if they keep this up, you'll sack them;
B) Invite their company to take over part of your premises and allow your workers to prioritise their customers at the expense of your own?
8. The government decides to introduce a new tax for business that charges you 4% of the value of your land and property. This is a particular problem for your city offices where the land is much more valuable. Do you;
A)unite with other businesses to protest at this new and unnecessary tax that is forcing you to downsize;
B) close all your city offices and move into the country?
So how did you do? Well the good news is, that if you voted 'A' on all those questions you would not be convicted as a Tory. You would be handed the key to the cell and walk out the front door of the jail to a car with its engine running and a bottle of bubbly.Now I bet all you rank and file Tories are scratching your heads. Because 'A' is the answer that you would give to all these questions. Because they make good business sense. Because the market is about competition, minimum cost and minimum waste and providing a good service to customers. No one in their right mind would answer 'B' to any of those questions.
Except- that that is precisely what the Conservative Party has answered on all of those questions. The above are all true life scenarios from the NHS. They are all examples of how a small number of private companies have taken the NHS for a ride and pocketed its money. Private companies that are being supported by the Conservatives and Labour. They are not business men. They are profiteers. Normal business men understand the difference. And this is what I do not understand-why the hell is any self respecting Tory supporting this? If you are a Tory, you believe in the market. You believe that you should get good value for money, that things should be run efficiently without waste. Why do you not chuck these guys out on their neck? What sensible business man would deal with people like this and allow them to take him for a ride? Has the Tory party gone mad?
I know very little about the Conservative party, so I don't know how much of a split there is between the leaders and the rank and file. But if I were a Tory I would ask why my party was supporting policies that went against all sensible business practice. And why they were supporting the kind of cads,bounders and shocking bad hats that your old Tory grandee would not have put in charge of a farthing of the public money, let alone £75 billion.
The Tory party is meant to be the party of thrift and business. If you as a Tory believe this, truly believe this, then you must believe in getting rid of these companies. And if David Cameron wants to put some clear blue water between himself and Nu Labour he could do it by promising to get rid of all these leeches. Then a few of us who aren't Tories might vote for him. And even end up in jail for it.
PS the examples in order are;
1. The introduction of fundholding and the purchaser/provider split;
2. The independent sector treatment centre Stracathro;
3. The situation with most hospitals re cleaning; nurses have to do the cleaning of any bodily fluids, because the cleaners won't do it. Which is pretty useless in a hospital.
4. Most contracting work now has to be put out to tender in the European journal. This example comes from 'Can Gerry Robinson Save the NHS?'. They wanted to build a dividing wall to divide one operating theatre into two. They were going to have to advertise in the European journal. It was at this point Gerry Robinson decided he couldn't save the NHS..
5. Hospitals built under PFI are usually tied in to particular contractors. They charge inordinate amounts for maintenance work.
6. Again a feature of PFI. The consortia that borrow money on the NHS's behalf make millions through re-financing. The government tried to bring in a voluntary code where 30% of profits from re-financing would be given back, but it has been largely ignored.
7. This is the practice of consultants treating private patients ahead of ordinary NHS ones. In NHS hospitals..
8. This refers to the capital charge, a tax of 4% on land and property owned by the NHS. This has been a really big problem for the London hospitals, where the value of land has shot up. Hospitals are now being shut in cities and moved out to the country where the value of land is less. Which is bad news for city dwellers.
6 comments:
I don't aspire to get into congratulatory blogging often, but this one sums up the position with insight and precision that is truly brilliant!
I have been a lifelong labour voter and supporter and was once a politician within thier ranks myself. That is, until the pressure of providing my family with a living together with a hatred of the 'infighting' in the power group made me exit. But as New Labour became increasingly the party that shadowed the Tories and became the friend of Business my loyalty has turned into a controlled but nonetheless incandescent anger. I place myself amongst those that feel business can be conducted in a humane and responsible manner that empowers a work force to strive for excellence and helps to guide its goals. The main goal of which is to provide the service or product that it's customer base needs and wants in a timely and frugal manner. I suppose it has gone some way to preventing my wealth from becoming profligate but the principle of humanity has always guided my treatment of my small workforce. It engenders loyalty that on occasions has both belittled and amazed me.
That is precisely that which is missing from the NHS business plan. People who are valued and given power usually rise to the occasion and deliver excellence. People who are overseen, harangued and have their protocols changed so often as to make them dizzy do not make for happy workers and let's face it, work in the NHS is stressfull in the extreme under the best of circumstances. So the best leave, or worst shrink into a cacoon of indifference, now heightened by the fear of losing thier jobs if they try to blow the whistle on anyone or anything. Sadly this creates a haven for the worst type of bureaucrat and 'dumbded down' professional (so called) to hide. Nurses who 'power dress' I've met ''em. Couple this with a Government so removed from reality that it constantly needs to pull up the flowers to check if the roots are growing and you have the recipe for the rolling disaster the NHS has become.
We don't need a business plan or model to correct this, we need to get rid of the management and replace it with a workforce team who work together with patient cohorts to deliver humane and effective treatment. Patients are the customer base and need to be taken heed of in this eandevour and real sanctions must be in place for those in the Profession that transgress.
Are there any politicians or parties that would do this? At the moment I think not. Both Tories and Labour would probably answer B to your questions.
As you rightly point out Tories should be A's but life is never simple and Tories since Thatcher are a new breed, pragmatic in thier justification of Finance and always ready to feather thier own nest and that of thier friends in Business which includes ISTC's and Private Medicine. The 'old school' Tory is a thing of the past with the possible exception of Ken Clarke who has all but given up.
Perhaps we should just get the Germans to come in and run it or the French or Dutch. They all make a better fist of than us and can you believe Consultants answer the phone when you call them not some minion or service company as here.
All answers to the problem to be put in a brown envelope with a million quid and stuffed down the back of a sofa at 11 Downing Street on the first Tuesday in the the month (unless there is an R in it). Oh, no!, thats the protocal to start an Academy. Sorry must be losing it; too many meetings with NHS bureaucrats.
Incidentally the Police are run exactly the same but they only kill a few (mostly).
'Pull up the flowers to see if the roots are growing..'
I like that! My mum was a teacher and it used to drive her mad that every seven years, government would change the education system just as the previous one was bedding in, (or the teachers had found a way round it). It's the same in the NHS. I think the trouble is that there aren't that many who really know the brief for health and it is complex. By the time a politician has got to grips with it, there's an election. I wish these guys would sit down and read Allyson Pollock or John Lister, but they're just not going to do that.
Um, while I don't deny that the Tories may well have done all that stuff. The simple fact is that Labour have been in power for 12-years at the moment.
Have they rectified any of these problems?
From what I can see, Labour have followed on the Tories policies in quite an aggressive way that has led to some bizarre money wasting opportunities.
I don't have a problem with Tory bashing, but lets not pretend that everything Labour has done since has been better (or even different).
I'm no fan of Labour either, phatboy and I know they have done this. What I'm trying to do, is to get rank and file Conservatives to look at their health policy in a different light and to understand that what's going on is not about the market, but is actually profiteering, which is a different thing. I think people have very little knowledge of what's going on in health; if they did, they would be horrified. There is an opportunity for the Conservatives to turn the tables on Labour over this, if they can take it, but it means removing the ideological blinkers of 'market good, public ownership bad'.
"I wish these guys would sit down and read Allyson Pollock or John Lister, but they're just not going to do that."
Ah yes, Allyson Pollock the well known champagne socialist
who believes that the private sector is the root of all evil. It isn't; our Government is to blame for its inability to manage contracts with the private sector.
So...errm... Anon 16.20... the public sector commissioning types are wholly to blame for not knowing that private sector contractors are rapacious profiteers? Who are not interested in delivering value for money but simply in trousering all they can rake in?
While you can certainly blame the Govt for their ideological obsession with PFI and contracting out, and the public sector bureaucrats for incompetence and naivete, you can hardly exonerate all the private sector contractors who have locked onto the Golden Tit sunk their claws in, and milked it for every penny. Whatever happened to social responsibility?
Much of it strikes me as yet another example (if more were needed) of the self-serving and self-congratulating "no downside, mate - we're making stacks - payrises all round" greed of the financial sector.
There is also the revolving door between the companies doing the PFI and contracting business, and the ministers, civil servants and consultants running the outsourcing. It often seems to be exactly the same people on both ends. But all the time it is Joe Taxpayer who is getting screwed.
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