Demand management in public services

Moving beyond the back of the fag packet

Now that the manifestos are out in their full resplendence, we are going to discuss what a more intelligent right wing political movement could do in place of the typical dross about ‘getting that funding to the Front Line’ or ‘less bloody managers’ - which is currently the best that Reform/Tories can come up with.

If I could impart one lesson on to my readers, it would be this; for the most part, how public services are organised matters very little, it is mostly a case of tax and spend. Trace your finger across comparable Healthcare systems in Europe looking at performance and you will find that the only real trend you can find is a correlation with spending. The reason that the NHS does not perform well in Britain, as the Brownite Bruisers explained when Blair was twittering on about ‘Reform’, is that it is actually funded less than semi-privatised Health Systems on the Continent.

The Dragon has expounded before on the great Blairite scam that was ‘internal markets’ - the idea that by appointing CEOs in the Public Sector and getting barnstorming Performance Leaderboards underwritten by independent regulators (OFSTED and the CQC) you could recreate the efficiencies of the Private Sector within Nationalised Industries - a way of protecting Atlee’s Britain - Comprehensive Education and the NHS.

None of these efforts at ‘reform’ have really made a substantial difference to performance. The reason that the Health Service began to perform better in early-mid 2000s is because Gordon Brown was flooding it with money, enabling it to run more services. There is not a clever trick you can use, or some contortion assisted by a ‘joint taskforce’ to magic up resources.^[1] A new blimmin Change Champion. It doesn’t work, and it never has.

The whole concept of ‘Reform’ is one that must be challenged relentlessly, as it provides an emotional comfort zone for politicians to avoid confronting what is happening with the inputs and outputs. The tax base is shrinking, the population is getting more elderly and we are compounding the problem by inviting third world immigration, the solution - Reform it. Just bloody Reform it. Bring in the Police and Crime Commissioners. There are sprawling institutions, Think Tanks etc making tens of millions of pounds from propounding these nonsenses.