One day my friend’s wife
complained to him that the washing machine was playing up. It was still working, sort of, but sometimes
it just wouldn’t go through the whole cycle; it would stop on rinse or spin and
had to be coaxed though the routine by manually turning the knob on the front. She insisted that they needed a new one. Well the thought of spending three or four
hundred pounds on a new appliance when he was sure he could repair the old one
horrified my pal so he set about conjuring up a solution. Unfortunately though whatever he tried failed
to get the trusted old machine working again and he had to conclude that the
fault lay within the electronic control box, repair of which was way beyond his
expertise. After making extensive and
unsuccessful enquiries about a replacement component he was forced to conclude
that the faithful old appliance had washed its last underwear.
Standing arms crossed at the
kitchen wearing a smug expression, his wife announced, “I told you, we need a
new one.”
That evening, as he settled
down to watch TV, my friend’s mind began to wonder how he might bring all his
skills to bear on the problem of the broken washing machine. After an hour or two of consideration he
resolved that a piece of laundry equipment was not going to defeat him and
decided that he would build its replacement a la Scrapheap Challenge.
First thing the following Saturday
morning he was waiting at the gates of the scrapyard as they opened and within
the hour was driving home again with a selection of used parts in his van. He had a motor, a pump, some rubber piping, a
copper drum with a heater and various other bits and pieces which together with
some the parts of the old machine he was confident he could construct a working
appliance. By the end of the weekend
looking very satisfied with himself he announced to his wife that he had built
a replacement piece of machinery and saved them ‘a fortune’ into the
bargain. The ever suffering spouse
reluctantly agreed to have it installed in the kitchen before fetching the full
load of washing that had accumulated after the demise of her previously loved
equipment. At this point she should have
been reminding herself that they had been down similar routes to this many
times before.
The replacement looked on
the outside very similar to its predecessor and apart from a few bumps and
scrapes, and the rather odd looking control knobs at the top it appeared
harmless enough. So she stood back and
watched as hubby bent to load the best part of their combined wardrobes and
some soap powder through the door of the contraption. He then straightened and with a proud smile
that would not have been out of place on Brunel as the Clifton Suspension
Bridge was opened, he switched the power on at the wall and turned the control
knob. There was a brief pause before the
drum began to turn and a loud whoosh of water passing through a pipe at high
pressure became audibly and ominously present.
The machine began to shake and rattle and the lady turned to her husband
looking for reassurance.
“It’ll be fine once it’s
settled down.” He said with a confidence
that was not reflected on his face.
By this time, as the speed
of the drum increased, behaviour of the machine became increasingly agitated,
banging itself violently between the oven and the fridge and with each movement
it inched its way out from the beneath the worktop. The realisation dawned on the pair that
perhaps this venture might have been an experiment too far but by this time unfortunately
the wayward equipment had assumed a life all of its own. It was now dancing around the kitchen at the
end of its water supply pipe making a dreadful noise and bashing against all
the cupboards and releasing a lot of their contents all over the floor smashing
plates and containers of foodstuffs and cleaning materials. The violent lurches of the apparatus by now
made it all but impossible to safely reach the control knob or the electrical
socket, but nevertheless being the intrepid man that he was, my friend
attempted to outflank the machine with moves he had observed from Jason
Robinson in the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
But this courageous manoeuvre was doomed, the water pipe suddenly
separated from the machine and began pumping gallons of water all over the room. Without this restraint the only thing holding
it back was the electric cable which sadly gave it enough wiggle room to bash
my friend against the wall several times breaking his leg in the process. Thankfully before the injuries became
life-threatening the ferocious thrashing about at the end of the cable
eventually caused the plug to come out of the socket, the machine stopped and
allowed the terrified wife to wade through inches of water to her
half-conscious husband. The pipe was
still pumping huge volumes of water all over, but having seen how her dear
husband was hurt the good lady ran to the telephone to summon an ambulance.
The arrival of the
paramedics was a great relief and they quickly had hubby on a stretcher and
inside the vehicle and whisked them both away to the hospital. A helpful neighbour turned off the water pipe
and everybody thought that was that.
However, all the water
sloshing around the kitchen had got into the house electrics and in the absence
of any occupants a fire started, which became quite serious before it was
discovered. The conflagration even
burned through the ceiling into the roof void of the bungalow and spread into
that of their next door neighbour.
The ultimate consequences
were that by saving a few quid on the price of a washing machine, my friend
destroyed his kitchen, smoke damage most of the rest of his house, burned the
roof off his and his neighbour’s house, and shredded most of his and his wife’s
clothes. This is not to mention his
broken leg which had him off work for several months.Now most of his and his neighbour’s losses were insured but by the time loss adjusters and insurance excesses were taken into account my friends were considerably out of pocket. That is without considering the personal impact on them and their neighbours.
***
What on earth have I been
going on about, I hear you ask, as well you might? Well the sort of approach that my friend adopted
to solve his problem of an expensive replacement washing machine is very
similar to the method that the government is using to solve what it perceives
as public services that are too expensive.
Instead of relying on
professional people with decades of experience and training in their field to
provide services (ie washing machine manufacturers), our wonderful government
takes upon itself to hire random companies with no experience or training (like
my friend) to carry out the tasks. This
disparate group of organisations, many of which have no history in the field,
bid for the job because they think they can bodge their way through the task
and at the same time make a profit.
Needless to say this leads to a huge downturn in the quality of services
because these companies employ unqualified or poorly trained people and give
them less resources to carry out their tasks (they pay them less, it saves
money, improves profits). And of course
if it all goes wrong which it frequently does they can just pull out and leave
the public in the lurch and the taxpayer to pick up the pieces and pay a second
time to put it right.
The reason that public
services are ‘public’ is because, almost by definition they are essential
services which, if they had any real commercial value, the private sector would
be providing them already. These
services include those that provide for the needs of the most vulnerable in our
society, in other words the health, education, social service, fire brigade and
justice systems. When those systems fail
sick people don’t get treated correctly, our children are not adequately
educated, old people are abused in care, people’s homes, lives or livelihoods
are lost to fire, and guilty people walk the streets while innocents go to
prison. The workforce of these services
consists of professional doctors, nurses, teachers, carers, firefighters and
lawyers.
So why is it that the
services need fixing anyway? They always
seemed to work okay in the past didn’t they?
Why are they too expensive? Well
the systems in which these highly skilled, qualified and dedicated professionals
operate are not designed or supervised by similarly qualified professionals but
by civil servants that in the main have little or no knowledge or experience in
the disciplines they oversee.
The departments are led by
politicians, most of whom have little or no experience of any workplace
let alone the ones to which they are appointed.
These people arrive at their desk one day, having been attempting to
operate in a totally different field the day before (or even having been
previously unemployed) and then basically wing it until they move on to some
other unsuspecting department. They all
seem to hope that by the time it all goes toes up they will be long gone; but
if they are ever caught in the act, they appear to suffer some sort of amnesia (“I
have no recollection…” etc) along with an innate ability to find someone else
to blame. When asked to make a statement
about an event in their department’s field, they are provided with a prompt
sheet of soundbites by one the afore-mentioned civil servants which will
contain a selection of rhetoric and lies for them to use to obfuscate their way
through the process.
The appointment of a new
department head whether due to an election or a cabinet reshuffle will almost
always result in a new broom sweeps clean approach which called ‘reform’, (remember:
“no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS”). Interestingly enough it very
rarely involves getting rid of the civil servants who are probably at least 50%
to blame for it being wrong in the first place; and if any do move on it will
only be to do the same sort of damage in another department. Translated, the
‘reform’ they speak of means to rip everything up and start again it never
means to put things back the way they used to be when they worked. None of these individuals ever heard the expression,
“If ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
The foot soldiers of these
departments, the services they provide and the general public will always
bear the brunt of the actions of these incompetent oafs, and the taxpayer will always
bear the cost. And the scrapheap? That will be where this country will end up
while they carry on this way.
