The Scrapheap Challenge Approach to Public Services

I had a friend who was a great fan of ‘The Scrapheap Challenge’.  He loved to tinker, whenever anything went wrong he would be in his element finding a ‘fix’, he’d be there with his toolbox, a bit of wood, a piece of metal, some screws or wires and before you knew it the errant piece of machinery would be up and running once again; well up to a point anyway. 

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.