It's not all London's fault

Tweet In the nick of time, the UK’s Parliamentary dinosaur managed to pass the necessary legislation to ‘allow’ us to have bilingual ballot papers in Wales for the PCC elections next month. 

It would be hard to find a better example of why the legislative processes in London are unfit for purpose.  In the first place, we have the revelation that a specific resolution of parliament is needed to enable bilingual ballots despite the fact that it has been established practice for decades, and in the second, the complete inability of the system to produce and pass such a resolution before the ballot papers were printed.

The result of this incompetence is that Returning Officers across Wales printed two sets of ballot papers, just in case the legislation was not passed in time, and will now have to pulp 2.3 million of them.  There’s an environmental cost to that, as well as a not insignificant financial cost.  It seems that £350,000 has been wasted on producing the two sets of ballot papers – and the politicians are blaming the government in general and the Home Office in particular for that wastage.

But hold on a minute – did those Returning Officers who had two sets of papers printed really believe that it was going to be acceptable to issue monolingual ballot papers?  Despite all the advances in the use and visibility of Welsh in recent decades, one can only conclude that, yes, they really did believe that they would have been able to use English-only documents if the legislation had not been passed.  If they had not believed that, then they would never have authorised the printing of two sets.

It says a lot about their understanding of where Wales is today.  Time for some new Returning Officers, perhaps.  Ones who understand the linguistic reality of contemporary Wales might be a good start.

Revealing old news

Tweet I’m not a big fan of newspaper stories which contain the words “we can reveal” in their first sentence.  Rarely, if ever, is that which precedes or follows the words (depending on journalistic style) much of a revelation in practice.  The Western Mail has excelled itself today, however, although only the inside story seems to be on their website, not the more senstaionalist front page intro.

Their ‘revealed truth’, which is that councils can and do sell copies of the electoral register, turns out not to be ‘news’ at all.  In fact, as the quote from the WLGA spokesman confirms, this has been done since at least 1832, and maybe longer.  I would not have believed that any newspaper would present news which is at least 180 years old as such a big story if I hadn’t read it myself.  And they submitted 22 FoI requests to councils as a basis for this story.

I think that I can safely ‘reveal’, without needing to submit a single FoI request, that there has been some wastage of public money involved with these FoI requests.  I don’t expect to see that story splashed on the front page though.

Exaggerated hyperbole

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On the basis of their performance so far, it looks to me as if the Lib Dems are going to be struggling to keep their daily wastewatch going through the whole period of the election.  I’m not sure that it was a particularly good idea in the first place to focus on alleged Labour-Plaid waste; it’s too much like motherhood and apple pie for me.  After all, no-one is going to stand up and say that they’re in favour of waste are they?

(Although, actually, the Tory Finance spokesperson came close to doing so a month ago, when she criticised ‘excessive waste’.  The conclusion which I drew is that ordinary non-excessive waste is OK.  That’s what happens when people use superfluous adjectives in pursuit of a nice-sounding phrase.)

But back to the Lib Dems.  Their little series hasn’t even started particularly well. 

The example that they gave us on Day 2 was that Labour-Plaid had lost 31 laptops, 10 Blackberries and 6 mobile phones.  To make this stand up as a valid accusation, they would need firstly to show that that is a very poor performance in relation to any other body of similar size (because, like it or not, all organisations suffer such losses from time to time), and secondly to demonstrate exactly how the politicians in charge were responsible for and/or could have prevented such losses.  Failed on both counts.

Then, on Day 7, they told us that Labour-Plaid had spent too much on external consultants, whilst recognising that expert advice is sometimes necessary.  So, Goldilocks, how much is ‘just enough’?  Answer was there none.  All they can really say is ‘less than the other parties’.

Criticising waste is easy, and it may even grab a few headlines.  But fighting a Welsh general election on the premise that a Lib Dem Government would lose fewer laptops serves only to demonstrate a paucity of real ideas. 

The problem though is wider than that.  I suppose that the Lib Dems really are too irrelevant to deserve the effort of a serious media debunking of this sort of stuff.  But I’ve seen all the parties making statements which are open to serious challenge and getting away with it. 

There are times when it looks as if the media see their responsibility as just reporting what people are saying, but they’d be doing us all more of a service – and perhaps making the election a bit more interesting – if they were to start dissecting the exaggerated hyperbole and forcing people to defend their glib statements.

The other coloured report

Tweet I referred to the Browne report yesterday, time to turn to the Green one.

Some of the examples of price differences across government departments are horrific, of course. And there can really be little excuse for the way in which some departments have been persuaded to part with our money. It’s hardly a good advertisement for some private sector companies either that they’re prepared to take advantage of the incompetence of their customers to charge excessive prices.

But some aspects of Green’s recommendations do give cause for concern.

The suggestion that there should be more central purchasing so as to achieve bulk discounts might well produce some savings in terms of public expenditure in the short term, but what is its overall economic effect? It is likely that government would be supplied by a smaller number of larger companies rather than a larger number of smaller ones, which would be less able to supply the quantities required. Guess where they’re likely to be located? And pressure on prices means corresponding pressure on costs, usually labour costs.

The suggestion that government should simply extract more credit from its suppliers by delaying payment is also something that would make smaller companies less willing to do business with government – and again increase pressures on costs.

Both are things which large companies do as routine, of course. And both are potentially damaging to the business prospects of their suppliers. I’m aware of one large company which routinely looks at the accounts of its suppliers and demands price reductions if they regard the overall profit margin as being too high. Note – not the profit margin on the business done specifically with that large customer, but for the supplier overall, effectively demanding that the profit made on dealings with other customers is shared with the largest single customer.

It’s like supermarkets and the price of milk - large buyers can distort the market in their favour – is that really what we want of government?

We need to take a more balanced and holistic view of government procurement than to simply assume that forcing prices down is always the best answer.

Conjuring up numbers

Tweet I have considerable sympathy with Gordon Brown's response to Cameron's extra £12billion of savings. It seems clear that faced with a need to offer an unsustainable reduction in income by promising to cancel the NI increases, Cameron has been forced to pluck a figure out of the air and claim that he will 'cut waste' to achieve it.

The problem with Brown's argument, however, is that his own starting figure of £15billion is as arbitrary and unfounded as is Cameron's extra £12billion. And if one of them can just pluck figures from the air, why shouldn't the other do likewise?

Everyone wants to 'cut waste', of course. But it's impossible to simply put a figure magically on how much waste there is available to cut. And the phrase 'cutting waste' conceals a multitude of sins. As we saw in the coverage of the IoD/TPA report recently, the word 'waste' can be used to refer to any government expenditure with which someone disagrees.

So for the IoD/TPA, free bus passes seem to count as 'waste'; for the Tories, 'free prescriptions' is a form of 'waste'. Politicians - of any party - who claim that they are going to fund spending pledges by 'cutting waste' need to be challenged far more robustly over what they mean by 'waste' than seems to be happening currently.