Let's have proper analysis, not ridicule

Tweet Yesterday's Sunday Times ran another of their fairly regular articles highlighting what they refer to as 'non-jobs' and 'waste' in the public sector. It was a large story – occupying a whole page – but it left me a little cold.

Picking on ridiculous-sounding job titles (and there are certainly some which easily fit that description!) makes for an easy story, but the article made no real effort to go behind the ridicule and seriously discover whether the jobs are wasteful or not.

To pick on just one example of their non-jobs – a "city events and international links officer" - I would have liked to know the answer to questions such as whether the events organised generate additional visits (and therefore spending) in the town or not. Is there, in short a net gain to the local residents? Without asking that sort of question, how can anyone form a balanced judgement?

One of the examples of wasteful expenditure they quote is the refurbishment of offices for the National Audit Office. The cost per head of furnishings certainly looks excessive to me, and the talk of marble flooring and leather sofas makes one wonder about value for money. But for me to make a proper judgement, I'd like to have known how suitable the offices were before the refurbishment - did they, for instance, comply with relevant legislation? Do we expect staff to work in poor conditions, just because they are in the public sector? I'd also have liked to know what the alternatives were, and how much they would have cost.

I would never argue that there isn't waste in the public sector, nor that there are no non-jobs which we could easily do without. It may even be that every single example quoted in the article fits into that category. But there wasn't enough information to reach that conclusion, and it ended up being just another 'bash the public sector' piece. In this case, it's the media leading the charge - but there seem to be plenty of politicans equally happy to seek a quick headline on a simlar basis.

People in Wales working in the public sector are in for a tough time, with jobs likely to go. They deserve to have their situation considered properly and thoughtfully during that process, rather than be subjected to ridicule and abuse purely on the basis of who pays their salaries.

"It'll be over by Christmas"?

Tweet David Cameron's statement to the troops in Afghanistan that they'll only be there until the Afghans are ready to take over responsibility for their own security sounds rational at first. It does, however, ignore a few pertinent facts.

Firstly, of course, Afghans actually were entirely responsible for the security of their own country until Bush and Blair decided that they were the wrong Afghans, and needed to be replaced.

And secondly, there seems little prospect that any particular group of the Afghans currently involved in running that country are likely to be greatly preferable, or to last long in power without the firepower of Western troops to back them up.

If no long-term solution has been negotiated and agreed, then whenever Western troops leave, the likeliest outcome is that there will be a central government, nominally in control of the whole country, but whose writ effectively runs over only a small part of the country. The rest will be in the hands of warlords and drugs barons.

The unwillingess of leaders in the US and UK in particular to accept that is prolonging the tragedy and leading to the continuing loss of UK troops on what seems to be virtually a daily basis.

If we have learned anything from recent history, it is surely that military might cannot impose a solution in situations like this, and that we must, eventually, sit down and negotiate with the various parties involved. Until Cameron and Obama recognise that, there is no end to the killing in sight, and upbeat messages are just sound bites.

Red, White, and Blue

Tweet I've never been a fan of football. In fact, I don't think I've ever watched a whole football match from beginning to end in my life. When I was a small boy, watching the Swan Stars play on the Murch Field in Dinas Powys consisted of spending ten minutes on the touchline before we all got bored and went to kick around a ball of our own in a far corner of the field.

So no-one will be surprised if I don't particularly suffer from world cup fever. I don't think that I've paid any attention at all to the world cup since 1966.

I didn’t pay a lot of attention then either, to be honest, but my youngest brother did manage to collect a complete set of the little plastic coins of the England team's players which were being given away with petrol. That was quite an achievement, really, considering that we didn't have a car. Indeed, only about three families in the whole street owned cars, but one of those had no small children of their own, and were feeling kindly towards us…

I can still remember the song, though. World Cup Willy it was called, although a name like that would probably be taken to mean something rather different today.

Insofar as I and my friends supported any team at all, it would inevitably have been England. There simply wasn't, in my part of the world at least, anything like the same awareness of the difference between England and Britain as there is today. For most of us in Wales, that has changed, and markedly so. But it still hasn't changed that much in England, and we don't always understand that.

So, when Cameron pointedly urged MPs from Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland to get behind the England team, I think that he really didn't understand the way that will sound to many of us. We've moved on; they haven't. He simply doesn't understand that his remarks are likely to have precisely the opposite effect to that intended.

As for me, well with the avowed lack of interest in the game itself which I outlined above, I won't be supporting anyone. But I usually feel a slight surge of pleasure when any small nation defeats a much larger one at any sport. I somehow doubt that Cameron would understand that, either.

What are we really missing?

Tweet There are a number of basic and very important facts in today's front page story in the Western Mail. There are also a few assertions which are not facts and which need to be challenged. And the headline is a complete non-sequitur.

The headline, like much of the story, seems to be based on the assumption that high earners and wealth creators are almost interchangeable terms. They are not.

Certainly, there are high-earning entrepreneurs who do create wealth, but not all high earners fall into that category. And low-earners can create wealth as well.

There are other high earners who accumulate wealth, mostly by redistributing it from other people into their own bank accounts. Then there were the high earners in the banks and hedge funds who managed to destroy a lot of our wealth by their actions. And finally there are high earners working in the public services. More of any of these might not actually be the answer to anything.

The other myth which needs to be challenged is the idea that becoming wealthy is the same as creating wealth. It is not necessarily thus.

Wales certainly does need to create wealth, in the sense of increasing our overall collective wealth and our levels of GDP per head. That doesn't necessarily involve ever greater levels of inequality, though, and to suggest that it does has more to do with ideology than economics, as does the underlying assumption that 'becoming personally wealthy' is the only driver of economic activity.

The fact that Wales has a comparatively low level of income inequality is actually something which I welcome; the gross levels of inequality which permeate the world in general are a major part of the world's problems, not part of the solution.

If we are to solve Wales' undoubted economic problems, we need to make sure that we understand what they are. A lack of billionaires isn't one of them.

Two legs, four legs

Tweet Around a quarter of the workforce in Wales is directly employed in the public sector. Nobody doubts that cuts in public expenditure will reduce the number employed in the sector, although by how many is still an open question. It would be a mistake to assume that the private sector will somehow 'pick up the slack'. It would also be a mistake to assume that the private sector will be immune to public sector cuts. It's not always straightforward to differentiate between the two sectors.

As an example, I work freelance through a limited company which I use to invoice customers, pay my own suppliers, and pay myself a regular salary out of irregular income. Very private sector. But a lot of my work comes from the public sector.

Sometimes, I get work passed on from other companies which have sold more services than they are able to supply in-house. Those companies are also very much in the private sector – but an awful lot of the end customers are in the public sector.

It's one small illustration, but there are many thousands of employees in Wales who appear to be working in the private sector but who are actually heavily dependent on public expenditure for their livelihood.

My point is two-fold. Firstly, if anyone working for a private company is sitting there thinking that public sector cutbacks will only affect other people's jobs, they may well be deluding themselves. And secondly, we need a better understanding of the complex relationship that exists between sectors in our economy, rather then the Public Bad, Private Good mantra which many seem happy to chant.

Base motives

Tweet The response of the Lib Dems and Conservatives to any suggestion of holding the referendum on further powers for the Assembly on the same date as the Assembly elections was pretty hostile. To the point, even, of threatening not to support holding the referendum at all unless it could be guaranteed that the two dates would not clash.

The main reason given, as I recall, was that it would be impossible to organise cross-party support for reform at a time when the parties were involved in an electoral contest with each other.

It's interesting therefore that the same parties seem to be moving in the direction of holding a vote on AV on the same date as the Assembly election next year. The reason given by 'senior Lib Dems' is that that would give them the best hope of achieving a yes vote. That sounds awfully similar to the sort of base motive which they found so unacceptable a few short months ago.

In one case, getting the right result is apparently more important than keeping the campaigns separate; in the other case, the opposite applies.

Exporting jobs

Tweet It's not often that spam e-mails attract my interest, but one I received yesterday did. It was advertising this event, a conference to help the private sector to 'Prepare Now for the Coalition Government’s Significant Push on Outsourcing'. The e-mail also said that the event "will examine various outsourcing models (including off-shoring)".

I know a little about outsourcing. I found myself 'outsourced' in 1996, and then sat on the other side of the fence when I went on to manage parts of transition projects, as my new employers helped other companies to 'outsource' their IT in our direction.

In theory, the process allows organisations to concentrate on their core business – the bit that they're allegedly best at - and let experts in other fields take over the running of the rest. In theory, it allows the companies to which work is outsourced to gain benefits from economies of scale as they combine operations from a number of different organisations into larger teams, and share expertise. And, again in theory, that allows them to 'share' those savings with the outsourcing organisation.

The practice doesn't always live up to the theory of course. The companies taking on the work and staff, unsurprisingly, have more experience in drawing up the contracts and service level agreements than do their customers. And once the service to be provided is tightly defined, it's not unknown for the customer to find that 'contract variations' are expensive animals.

It's not going too far to suggest that, sometimes, it's the contract variations which make all the profit, after the base contract has been sold as a 'loss leader'. Such variations also make it difficult to know whether the original employer has actually saved money or not - they've often paid less for the defined service, but more by the time the 'extras' are added in. Whether there are real 'savings' often depends on how the numbers are presented – but I suppose that is what bean-counters are for.

There are other ways in which the contractors can squeeze profit out of the situation as well. One is by working the employees harder – more hours for no more pay, for example - and another is by worsening their terms and conditions. The second is supposed to be prevented by TUPE regulations, but staff wastage over time combined with new recruitment can reduce the average staff cost without breaking TUPE rules. And TUPE rules themselves are not as insurmountable as some believe.

The other aspect of all this is 'off-shoring'. It means taking a service currently provided by staff in the UK, and transferring it to another country, where labour costs are lower. There's no doubt that there are direct savings to the customer organisation and increased profits for the contracting organisation - but what about the wider economic questions?

If the staff made redundant are snapped up by other employers at similar rates of pay to those they previously enjoyed, then there can be an overall plus to the UK economy. But if they end up claiming JSA, then the 'savings' made by one government department can quite easily turn into increased expenditure for the DWP.

Clearly, there are those in the private sector who believe that government spending cuts will create new opportunities for off-shoring, and they will rush to seize them. But do we really want government to be saving money by exporting public sector jobs, which is effectively what this would mean? It'll be interesting to see how Conservative and Lib Dem apologists explain why this would be in the national interest.

Capital Gains and tax avoidance

Tweet I'n quite enjoying the spectacle of Tory backbenchers getting het up about proposed changes to Capital Gains Tax. It's one of the policies insisted on by the Lib Dems – and goes directly contrary to what the Tories themselves would otherwise have done, so I can understand the backbench frustration.

Part of the problem with the debate on the substance though is that the two different viewpoints are based on very different perspectives on the issue.

Plaid, like the Lib Dems, called for an increase in the rate for Captial Gains Tax. We actually argued that it should be set at the same rate as income tax, and subject to the same single tax free allowance. The principle behind that was, very simply, that 'income is income', and should be taxed as such.

We were mindful of the way in which the differential rates of tax were leading some people (hedgies, for instance) to take their income in the form of capital gains, which means that people with a very high income end up paying tax at a lower rate than the most low-paid in society. It's a practice which costs the Treasury around £1billion a year in lost revenue.

Those objecting to the change seem to be doing so on the basis that it hits long-term savers, including those who have invested to fund their retirement. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that position, but I somehow doubt that there is an easy way of differentiating between the two different things without creating more loopholes which those who simply wish to avoid paying tax would seek to exploit.

Strategy and implementation

Tweet I've been reading the Welsh Government's strategy for Welsh-medium education. Like most of the government's strategies, it's full of fine-sounding words. How about this, for instance: "We therefore expect local authorities in which there is a choice between Welsh-medium and English-medium provision to identify how they will provide sufficient and appropriate places for children whose parents/ carers desire then to have Welsh-medium education".

I can't find any clause which excludes Carmarthenshire from this requirement, although they have clearly been excluded from it by the government. Nor can I find the clause which says: "and after you've been working on the plans for two years with our full knowledge, we can then reject them on a whim", although such a clause clearly applies in the case of Cardiff.

I was glad to see that they do recognise that the term 'bilingual provision' is used to mean a wide range of different sorts of provision. Looked at in detail, the range is so wide as to make the term pretty much meaningless in practice. The killer line in what they have to say on 'bilingual settings' is that "Bilingual provision, therefore, does not always ensure that an individual becomes a bilingual speaker".

It's true, if something of an understatement – the reality is that 'bilingual provision' as seen in much of Wales hardly ever results in a child who was not already fluent in Welsh becoming a fluent speaker of the language. But it's a fact about 'bilingual provision' which authorities are rarely willing to spell out to parents. If they did, the demand for true Welsh-medium education would likely increase further.

Their strategy requires education authorities to factor in 'the additional demand which often appears when a new and convenient Welsh-medium school is opened'. But that's a meaningless exhortation if authorities are simply allowed to ignore the base demand in the first place.

As with so many government 'strategies', I was left with the impression that the production of a strategy is seen as an end in itself, rather than a basis for implementing meaningful change. I'd be delighted to be proved wrong, but I won't hold my breath.

Planning for schools

Tweet There's been a lot of analysis and discussion of the decision taken by Carwyn Jones on schools in Cardiff. Syniadau in particular has looked in detail at the rationale given and why it was fundamentally flawed.

The decision was one taken by the First Minister himself, and – officially at least – it's in the nature of a quasi-judicial decision by the minister on a proposal put to him by a council, rather than a political decision which one would have been expected would have been discussed by ministers in advance.

Others have imputed political machinations and motivations – I'm prepared to start from the assumption that there has been no political interference. But that doesn't mean that the decision came from nowhere - the case would have been looked at in detail by the relevant officers who would have presented their views to the minister before he made his decision.

And that's the part that concerns me most. The education department in the Assembly seems to be remarkably good at producing fine-sounding strategies, but what happens when it comes to implementing them? The decision taken by Carwyn Jones seems to fly in the face of two important strategies which are, I thought, the policy of the Welsh Government.

The first is Welsh-medium education. The education department seems to, at best, not understand the demand for Welsh-medium education, and at worst to have a deep antipathy to it. I have noted before that the department has been actively colluding with Carmarthenshire County Council in preparing a scheme which deliberately ignores the demand for Welsh-medium secondary education in the Tywi Valley. The decision in Cardiff is not a stand-alone case.

The second is rationalisation of empty school places. The department seems to relish demanding that rural counties close schools with surplus places, but faced with a similar urban issue on their doorstep in Cardiff, their enthusiasm for resolving it rapidly evaporates.

I don't pretend that I know enough about the detail in Cardiff to judge whether the proposal put forward by Cardiff was the only solution, or even the best solution. But I do know that they'd been working on it for some time, and went through all the proper processes in submitting it. There surely has to be a better way of working through this sort of issue than allowing a council to work on a scheme for two years – the government department in Cardiff must have known what was being looked at – and then simply rejecting it.