Dennis Benson

Posts Tagged ‘Jags’

Albert has headed off for his annual holiday in Blackpool, all is peaceful on the allotments. Bob remarked that we only miss people when they have gone but he didn’t have a lump in his throat. Given this morning’s glorious sunshine our old pal undoubtedly now has his knotted hankie on his head and a pint in his hand. It is not his help with the chickens that we shall miss so much as his ability to start a fight in an empty telephone box, he unwittingly prevents us ever falling victim to ennui or depression brought on by the England one-day cricketers. With His Moanship away there was less chat this morning but we did notice one story which illustrated, for the umpteenth time, our various government’s ability to  pour money down the drain.

The National Audit Office (NAO) has published a damning report on a project to replace 46 fire control centres in England with 9 regional sites. It was, says the NAO, a “comprehensive failure” which wasted £469 million of taxpayer’s money. The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) is accused of rushing into the project, managing it poorly and failing to follow proper procedures.

The project was launched by the Labour Government in 2004 and was axed in December last. No IT system had been delivered, and eight of the nine regional control centres remained empty. The DCLG is committed to paying at least £247 million – possibly rising to £431 million – in rent on the centres, which will never be used for their original purpose, until the final lease expires in 2035. So the eventual cost to the taxpayer could be very much higher that presently forecast.

The idea of replacing fire control centres with a small number of regional sites was controversial from the start and bitterly opposed by the fire service itself. According to Tory MP Richard Bacon, Lord two-Jags Prescott “forced his pet regionalisation project upon local fire and rescue services without proper consultation, without competent project management and without any understanding of the complexity involved”. Bacon is a member of the Commons public accounts committee which is chaired by Labour MP Margaret Hodge. She agrees. “The project, she says, was a “monumental failure of mismanagement and a careless approach to fundamental elements”. So the two parties are agreed on something!

The original estimate for project costs on this hairbrained scheme was £120 million. By last year £250 million had already been spent. By December the anticipated delay to delivery of the project had reached five years and it was cancelled by the coalition. But not in time to prevent the completion of the buildings which, on top of their initial costs, will account for another £431 million in rent and upkeep unless purchasers can be found, an unlikely prospect given their specialised nature.   

How could any department waste a minimum of £469 million? According to the NAO the DCLG failed to provide leadership and handed management resposibility to management consultants. It also failed to sort out problems with delivery by the contractor. This is near-unbelievable for everyone knows that management consultants are a joke, people who can write elaborate reports but who lack implementation skills.

Hardly a week passes but we learn of yet another fiasco of this kind. How will any government ever convince the electorate that the time has come for sacrifice when it is clear that it is totally incompetent and expert only in the art of pouring money down the drain.

And expect no sackings over this. Contrast that with the treatment you would receive should you forget to file your tax return or pay your council tax. It isn’t just their constant dishonesty that has brought politicians low in the public esteem, the fact that their incompetence wastes more than the savings from a hundred painful cuts plays its part too!

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TOMORROW (TUESDAY); A NEW EGGHEADS QUIZ TO CHALLENGE YOUR NOUS!!!!                                         ?????????????????????????????????????????????

Two of tioday’s stories give me great pleasure. At long last someone up there has worked out that theNHS  managers and red tape we hear so much about are not to be found in our hospitals but in the multi-tiered bureaucracy under which they suffer. And by way of a bonus ‘two Jags’ Prescott made his debut in the House of Lords. But we must turn to the NHS initially since its fortunes affect every family in the land whereas those of John Prescott touch only the members of a Hull working-mens club.

Apart from ferret-breeding the NHS is the only subject known to man on which I can claim to have hands-on experience and regular readers will know that I have regularly banged on about the the £1.5 billion being squandered on Strategic Health Authorites and Primary Care Trusts, neither of which makes any useful contribution to patient care and both of which cause great frustration at busy hospitals who have enough to do without filling in a zillion forms per day. I therefore raise my glass to Health Secretary Andrew Tilsley who has decided to abolish them. At a stroke he has saved a fortune and made it easier for clinicians to do what we want them to do.

However I must now put down my glass because Mr Tilsley has selected the wrong replacement. The theory of GPs running the NHS is fanciful and, in my view, will not work. I suspect that somewhere in this is the Conservative dream of privatising our health service. GPs are part of the private sector and many of them have vested interests in setting up services to be bought-in by the NHS. Governance could be a major problem here and for once George Osborne was right to flag up concern at handling £80 billion into their care. But there are other and more practical reasons for fearing failure.

The relationship between a family doctor and specialists/surgeons is a key part of a patients pathway. Placing one in the role of commissioner and the other as a mere provider will create huge tensions and will damage what even now can be a fragile realtionship particularly when the GP referral or preliminary diagnosis is inappropriate. Then there is the problem of ability and/or willingness to undertake such a role. Few GPs have any expertise in business accountancy and even fewer wish to spend their precious time coping with it.The result will be that a large number of practices will come together to float a professional commissioning body and they will recruit many of the people now facing redundancy in the Primary Care Trusts. And a complicated web of constant debate will ensue with the smaller practices continually complaining that their larger competitors are influencing things their way.

Worse still we will end up with post code lottery that will make the present system look fair by comparison. Decisions on form of treatment and affordability of special drugs cannot  be left to local decision, there must be a nationwide ruling to ensure equity. And in my view the worst outcome of all will be the attempt by some ambitious GP entrepeneurs to take away the routine work form hospitals. There can only be one outcome from this-the hospitals close. The previous government tried this and had there not been a massive public reaction one of the hospitals that I chaired would now be closed. As it is it has the UK’s first Assessment and Treatment Centre. The attempt by Patricia Hewitt and her team was to hand outpatient services to a South African company. The loss of the ‘profitable’ and easy work would have left the hospital unable to subsidise the complex life-saving work.

The Tories have got it half right and have my applause for that. They now need to look again at the GP route which is fraught with danger. There is a simpler and safer solution. They should allow the Department of Health to set up a network of small regional offices and administer cash allocation from those. The existing Health Care Commission should be responsible for clinical inspections. They should add the Foundation Trust regulator, Monitor, to their list of closures.And they should stop perpetuating the ridiculous Labour habit of isolating, and thus alienating, the hospital Consultants. Our lives regularly depend on them!

Whatever the government believes it is quite impossible in the UK to privatise health services.They quote as an example the United States but that is quite different.The private health suppliers there provide a total service including all aspects of emergency medicine. The private ones here do not and even their care of minor ops patients rests on their ability to send any patient with complications tot he nearest NHS hospital.

Now with a sigh of relief and a hearty belly-laugh let us turn to the arrival of Baron Prescott of Kingston-upon-Hull in our county of East Yorkshire in the House of Lords. Letters from the Queen were read out, they explained in pitiless detail why she had picked her ‘right, trusty and well-beloved counsellor John Prescott’ for the job. If job it be. Any attempt to express all this in Prescottese would fail because it is written in just that. All the ‘grace of God, especial grace, certain knowledge and mere motion’ was so obtuse as to have been penned by the great man himself. But I for one begrudge him not.

Yes we are the world’s most class-conscious nation and yes our John has always banged on about the working class. But that is what he will continue to be and any Minister prepared to dive into the crowd to thump an egg-thrower has my vote. So long as this farcica,l class-ridden place continues it is only right to place  a few real people in it. And he will liven the place up, especially if someone calls him an oik!

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OTHER NEWS FOR TODAY; Education Minister Michael Gove established a new record for the number of errors made in a single day when he published a list of schools whose new buildings were to be axed and included over 30 errors. The resulting lawsuits may cancel out any savings hoped for.  XX  Harry Whittington who changed the way we understand the origin of animal diversity, has died at the age of 94.  XX  12 women await execution in Iran on adultery charges  XX The new Office for Budget Responsibility is under fresh attack for slashing its forecasts for expected job losses from Osborne’s budget just days before publication.

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SOMETHING I LEARNED FOR THE FIRST TIME YESTERDAY; The number of players performing in the top Spanish League who are qualified to play for Spain is 77.1%. The number of players in our Premier League qualified to play for Englnad is below 40%. And Spain are in the World Cup Final!#

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