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.

Another Letter To The Lord Chancellor

Over the last year or so I have written either directly or indirectly to the Lord Chancellor quite a number of times on the subject of changes to our Legal Aid system.  In every case I have received a reply containing the normal selection of platitudes, rhetoric and misinformation.  The latest such response can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/86yz9vjpvl3rin6/Grayling%20Response.pdf 

Given all that has happened and continues to happen the contents of his reply have particularly enraged me so I thought I would share my responding letter with you.

Dear Mr Grayling

LEGAL AID REFORM

I am responding to your letter of the 29^th May 2014 to John Hayes MP which was in itself a response to a letter I had written to him on this subject.  Your letter was quite long and includes a number of matters with which I have to take issue and I shall deal with them in order that they arise in your letter.

1.    It was entirely unnecessary to explain to me that, “The justice system in England and Wales has a world class reputation for impartiality and fairness and is a model for many other systems the world over.”  Especially in view of the fact it was me that has reminded you and Mr Hayes of that fact in several of my earlier correspondences, I find it more than a little patronising.  I think you will find that the damage that your policies have done is more than likely to discredit our criminal justice system in the eyes of the world.

It is particularly infuriating to see you state that “publicly funded legal services must be provided in as efficient a way as possible” when it obvious to all but those that do not want to see that the whole way that services are provided have been and continue to be neither efficient nor effective; and very little of that is to do with the lawyers themselves who you seem to want to punish for it.  The (LAA) Legal Aid Authority and (CPS) Crown Prosecution services are without doubt amongst the most incompetent of all government services and none of your ‘transformations’ have even started to address that.  In fact tales that I regularly hear tell of LAA behaviour that would not be at all out of place in an episode of ‘Rogue Traders’; and the regularity of CPS failure to disclose documents to the defence seem like deliberate attempts to pervert the course of justice.

Furthermore to claim that any of the actions that you have taken will make the system in any way ‘fairer’ is without doubt an outrageous falsehood when it is quite obvious the reverse is true.

2.    Once again you reiterate the roundly discredited soundbite about Legal Aid costing £2bn per year with around £1bn on criminal legal aid.  This figure has been falling steadily over the last decade or so and continues to do so.  Constant repetition of an inaccurate statement will never make it true.

3.    You talk about maintaining the credibility of legal aid.  I fail to see how you can possibly achieve this by making it inaccessible to those who most need it; and protesting as much as you like about it still being available to those who have little or no resources would also be disingenuous as the reality regularly proves that not to be the case.  In your letter you say, “Access to justice and access to taxpayer-funded legal aid must not be confused”; which of course would be true if you were only referring to wealthy people accused of crime, however that is not the case in point here.  Already people accused of crimes who are unable to fund representation are regularly coming before courts as litigants in person, their ineptitude is understandably causing massive wastes of court time and God knows how many miscarriages of justice.  In previous times many of these accused would on the advice of their lawyer have plead guilty at the first opportunity thereby saving hours of court and prosecutors’ time.

It is a well-known fact that a very large proportion of people charged with a crime either never reach trial or are found not guilty at trial and your changes to legal aid mean that someone on even a modest income may have to use their life-savings or even sell their homes in order to fund a defence against a publicly-funded prosecution for an offence they may not have committed.

4.    Your letter refers to the government’s undertaking in 2010 to carry out a fundamental review of the legal aid scheme to make it work more efficiently.  It appears though, that what was really intended to just unilaterally cut costs across the board without regard to the consequences.  The evidence suggests that you have paid little or any attention at all to the warnings or opinions of the professional bodies and other than a few cosmetic changes following tens of thousands of responses to your ‘consultations’ you have just ploughed ahead regardless totally ignoring very workable suggestions that could save the amount of money you say need to..  The consequences of the various legislative and regulatory changes to the legal aid system amount to little less than a catastrophic erosion in both criminal and civil justice systems.

5.    The embarkation on your next step of ‘reform’ outlined in the document Transforming Legal Aid’ delivering a more credible and efficient system, which can hardly have been more inappropriately named, has continued to wreak havoc upon our once great (CJS) criminal justice system.  Although one could hardly argue with its claim to have transformed legal aid, however the resulting chimera that has emerged is a hideous representation that in name only is similar to what has gone before.  Once again you insult my intelligence by providing a link to it, as if by following it. it was going expose some sort of Rosetta Stone providing the legend to explain some kind of sense in your methods.  Did you really imagine that I would not have already have read the ridiculous document? 

6.    You conclude by saying that ‘we cannot ignore the financial situation we face’; and yet in all your actions you appear to be doing exactly that.  The courts, prisons and probation services are in chaos, the court interpreter system is in meltdown the prison transport and tagging arrangements have been brought into disrepute; and this is all as a direct result of your policies.  Your relentless privatisation strategy which you have explained as being ‘ideological’ have not saved any money and in actual fact have cost a great deal more which you will no doubt deny by not revealing additional costs appearing in different budgets.  Your actions have resulted in such pandemonium in the courts that you have been forced into a massive expansion of the (PDS) Public Defender Service, paying publicly employed barristers almost double what you would have to pay them in private practice to do the same thing.  It seems to me to be an extraordinary state of affairs when we hear of a Conservative led government conducting the nationalisation of a private service.  You have appointed whole lists of outsourcing companies to provide services formerly in public control and the catalogue of ineptitude, fraud and mismanagement that resulted is there for all to see.  Not least the court interpreter services costing double what they had under previous arrangements.  One can only guess at what the motives are behind this ‘ideological’ shift.  I can only think of two and neither are very flattering.

Destroying the criminal bar and bankrupting thousands of solicitors in order to clear the way for outsourcing companies without experience or knowledge in the practice of criminal advocacy will not provide ‘a more credible and efficient system’ but will no doubt have precisely the opposite effect.

All of these matters are extremely serious but none as serious as for the victims of crimes where the perpetrators have gone unpunished; nor for the wrongly convicted who may have lost their homes, livelihoods or even liberty as a result of your government’s woeful mismanagement of the justice system. 

Numerous experts who have lived and worked in the CJS all their lives from all sections of the profession, the bar, solicitors, CILEX, ACPI, NAPO, the judiciary and even lawyers within the Treasury Department have all condemned the changes.  Knowledgeable commentators from the quality press have seen through the rhetoric and misinformation that issues forth from your little citadel in Petty France.  The continued denial of these consequences by you and others at the MoJ by maintaining the charade that all is okay insults the nation in every possible way. 

Over the last couple of years, at every given opportunity you and your underlings at the Ministry of Justice have attempted to justify your actions by trotting out some tired old cliché or other about the country’s financial situation.  So if we are to take you at your word then basically what you are saying is that justice is okay if the country is doing quite well, but as it stands we are currently so broke it’s a luxury we can’t afford, it’s a shame but there it is.  Well Sir, I have news for you, it is the duty of every government to insure and protect the basic rights of all persons to life, a decent standard of living, security, dignity, identity, freedom, truth, due process of law, and justice.  Justice is not optional and in your position as Lord Chancellor you should know that before anything or anyone else.

Yours Sincerely,

 

CR Mardell

What's So Wrong With Democracy?

There many models for governing countries; monarchies, republics, ocracies and isms galore.  Well our system is a bit of a hybrid democracy and whilst not being perfect, seems to have worked reasonably well up until now.  I can hear some of the alternatives being bellowed even as I write.  I can even understand a lot of the objections some people have.  However, I think most people in this part of the world seem to think that whatever model they prefer, they believe that it should have a basis in democracy.  If that is the case then will someone please explain to me why we are all sitting practically silent in the face of a deliberate dismantlement of our own democracy. 

This government has embarked on an enormous programme of privatisation of public services going way beyond anything that has been attempted before, some of it has happened overtly such as The Post Office, but much, much more is happening.  I imagine most people still believe we have a National Health Service, a public service staffed by public employees funded directly from taxation. However, that is no longer true.  Piece by piece, and in larger and larger chunks it being 'outsourced', in other words privatised.  Huge parts of the service have been sold off to the lowest bidder with increasingly negative impact on the quality of service provided. This is not a criticism of those people at the coalface of providing the healthcare; they can only do what they can with the resources given them.  Let me explain what I believe the problem is.  I have used this analogy before and I can't claim to be it's author but it's which rather cleverly demonstrates what is happening.  If you think of outsourcing in the following terms:

1. Hold your hand out to one side, level with your shoulder and think of that as the service you are paying for.
2. Now hold your hand out once again this time level with your waist and think of that as the service you are getting.
3. The space in between you can regard as profit for the supplier.

No matter how wrong you might think that is, however enraged you might feel about this enormous earth-shift in policy that is happening without you being consulted, what I have described is only a tiny part of what is happening. They have no electoral mandate for any of this, the Tory party made no reference to privatisation on this scale prior to the last election and they haven't informed us what they were doing or how far they intend to go. In fact the only clue as to what their intentions are is in a quote from Oliver Letwin made in a private meeting prior to the last election, 'the NHS will not exist within five years of a Conservative election victory'.  And as I mentioned earlier, this is only the tip of the of the iceberg. Here are just a few of the services going under the hammer either now or in the near future: Legal Aid, The Land Registry, Crown Prosecution Service, the Fire Service, what is left of the Ambulance Service, and the Police. Yes you did read that correctly 'THE POLICE', West Midlands and Surrey police forces are to be the first up for grabs.

What seems so wrong with this process is not just that this ideological shift has taken place without our knowledge or permission; and not either because we are told it will save money (because in most cases it actually costs more, it just shifts expenditure into a different budget); but many of the companies bidding to take these contracts have long histories of incompetence and fraud.  Many of these company names will be familiar to you such as G4S, Serco, and Capita but there a few others.  Often they are awarded a contract in an area of expertise that they have no history or experience in, purely on the basis of the size of their bid.  The contracts are enormous and so when they fail, the government has to try to find a new contractor at very short notice meaning they may have to pay much more to get the fulfilled. 

I'm not sure that a lot readers will be aware that this is happening, I'm even less sure if many will support it.  But one thing I'm completely certain of is that the only way to stop it is to protest about it to your MP about it. If enough people make enough noise they will have no choice but to rethink.  For those of you that have never written to your MP, it's easy; just go to the BBC News home web page. Near the bottom of the page under 'Democracy Live' there is search box called 'Find a representative'  where you can just type in your postcode and it will take you to the information page for your MP including his/her email address. Just click on the link and send your thoughts off to your parliamentary representative. He/she will normally reply by way of an automated email, and perhaps more formally a week or few later by post.

Divesting Ourselves of Statehood

If any of you out there are still paying attention to any of my rants you may remember that one of my pets subjects has been ‘outsourcing’.  Well today I discovered why this slimy bunch of worthless scum we call a government are so hellfire bent on selling off everything we have, it’s because of something called TTIP.  Ever heard of it?  No, I didn’t think so.  It seems it’s an obscure little deal currently being negotiated between the EU and the US which, to quote EU Commission website is, “The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a trade agreement that is presently being negotiated between the European Union and the United States.  It aims at removing trade barriers in a wide range of economic sectors to make it easier to buy and sell goods and services between the EU and the US.” 

Sounds pretty innocuous doesn’t it?  Unfortunately it isn’t; the ramifications for the UK are absolutely massive.  It will mean that practically every service currently the responsibility of government or local government will be required to be available for tendering by private companies.  That will be schools, hospitals, ambulance services, fire services, possibly police forces, the courts, civil service functions in other words almost everything.

So why haven’t we heard of any of this?  Well once again to quote the EU Commission website, “For trade negotiations to work and succeed, you need a certain degree of confidentiality, otherwise it would be like showing the other player one's cards in a card game.”  Politician speak for “We didn’t want you to know until it’s too late.”

According to David Cameron we are not going to hand over any more powers to the EU without an in/out referendum.  However, included in this little soupcon of legislation is something called “Investor to State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)”.  This a tiny snippet of legislation that to all intents and purposes emasculates a country’s courts in cases where a supplier is in dispute with the state.  To illustrate what this might mean to the UK let me remind you of the recent scandal involving outsourcing companies G4S & Serco overcharging the government by tens of millions of pounds for work on offender tagging contracts that they either didn’t do or they did entirely incorrectly.  Notwithstanding the fact that this corrupt government is in the process of allowing these maleficent organisations to buy their way out of any prosecutions, which in itself smacks of corruption; under TTIP the UK courts would be unable to enforce a punishment if it chose to award one.

I don’t know if the EU’s plans for a federal Europe have yet progressed as far as developing a system of honours and awards; but if and when it does rest assured Cameron and Grayling will be among the first up there to collect their gongs.

I Predict the Ministry of Justice’s Remarks For 7th March

Last Thursday the government issued its final plans for Legal Aid following two ‘consultations’.  As predicted these proposals, many of the changes will come into effect little more than a fortnight from now, and will mean a catastrophe not just for the legal profession but for the administration of justice in this country. 

In a demonstration of the strength of their feelings, on Friday 7^th March 2014, all barristers and most solicitors practicing in criminal law will stay away from court bringing most courts including (magistrates’ courts) to a standstill for the whole day.  This will be only the second time in 500 years that this is happened, the last was on the 9^th January this year when the action lasted only half a day.  This dignified and essential profession feel they have no choice because they believe that the changes proposed by a Justice Secretary without qualifications or experience in the law is making will have disastrous effects on the administration of justice.

In layman’s terms these will be the effects if these changes come into effect:

·         Most people, when accused of a crime will not be able to get a lawyer without paying for one to assist in their defence.  Their choice will be to either represent themselves or maybe to sell their house to pay a lawyer.

·         In the short term, a very large number of small specialist and highly qualified solicitor firms that have been giving expert advice to accused people in police stations and courts for many years will go out of business.

·         In the long term, most of the remaining existing solicitor firms giving advice to accused people will cease to do so.  This will leave the way clear for these services for whole country to be provided by four or five multi-national companies after having tendered down to the lowest possible price.  The ‘lawyers’ employed by these companies will a great deal less qualified and will have a financial incentive to persuade their client to plead guilty (i.e. the same fee for a guilty plea as for a trial).  This will happen in spite of the fact that the government accepted that it would be contrary to justice if clients had no choice of lawyer to represent them and especially in those terms.  But of course this is exactly what the government has wanted all along.

·         The Criminal Bar will be destroyed meaning that it will practically impossible to viably operate as a barrister practicing criminal law.  As barristers both prosecute and defend in criminal cases, these tasks will fall to people a great deal less qualified and many may choose to represent themselves.

·         There be a huge increase in the number of miscarriages of justice caused by people being poorly or unrepresented in court.  Innocent people will be fined or imprisoned for crimes they did not commit and the guilty left to walk the streets.

·         Victims of crime cross-examined by the person they have accused (imagine that in a rape case or if the alleged victim were a child)

·         If people act for themselves the amount of court time spent on the case, and therefore court operating costs will increase exponentially.

·         If people are wrongly convicted or acquitted then retrials, appeals and imprisonment costs will increase enormously.

This is what I predict the government spin will claim on or about Friday:

·         They will claim, “At about £2 billion pa this country has the most expensive Legal Aid system in the world.”  The government has trotted this statistic out like some sort of religious mantra at every opportunity since these proposals were first made in the early part of 2013.  It is not true of course and has been indisputably established to be a myth by people from within and outside the legal profession.  Of the top seventeen developed nations our expenditure on legal aid per capita stands about tenth.  Many other countries have a completely different legal systems, in France and Italy for example their systems are ‘inquisitorial’, where as ours is ‘adversarial’ and defence costs appear in different budgets and therefore cannot be readily compared.  And in any event the cost of criminal legal aid in this country is actually less than £1 billion and falling and has been falling for a number of years.

·         They will say that everybody with a disposable assets of less than £37,000 will still be entitled to Legal Aid.  That is completely misleading because that figure is to include any equity in your home and any savings you might have.

·         The government will imply one way or another that lawyers in general and barristers in particular are overpaid ‘fat-cats’, and will issue yet another set of spurious statistics to support their assertion.  These claims have all been made before and have been completely disproven.  They will release a table of statistics showing that a handful of barristers were paid huge sums of money over a selected period of time; lost in the accompanying small print will be explanations that barristers are not paid until the conclusion of a case and that could be up to 2 years after the event.  Complicated cases can themselves go on for two or more years.  The sums of money paid out will include VAT at 20%.  They will probably not mention that barristers are self-employed and they have considerable operating costs such as chambers fees (possibly 20-25%), professional body fees amounting to hundreds of pounds and travelling costs.  They won’t mention that rather than just turning up at court on the day of the trial there will be many hours of research and preparation in advance, nor will they refer to the junior counsel or expert witnesses that have to be paid.  I anticipate that they won’t mention the average debt of a newly qualified barrister (about £60,000).  The average pay of a barrister is somewhere in the region of about £34,000 per year, £11,000 less than a train driver and broadly comparable with a London bobby.  Many earn a great deal less.

·         The government will also claim that in the current economic climate they have little choice but to make savings and that Legal Aid should not be immune.  This is wrong on just about every level.  Legal Aid fees have already been reduced many times meaning that they are already up to 47% less than they were more than 10 years ago.  This year the budget is already £56 million underspent.  The Criminal Bar has shown that the so-called ‘required’ savings could easily be made by making the Ministry of Justice operate more efficiently; they have demonstrated where these savings can be made but their suggestions have fallen on stony ground.

·         The government will claim that it has listened to what the representative bodies have had to say and made changes to their plans accordingly.  This is not completely true either, they have consistently refused to meet with representatives of the Criminal Bar, except under restrictive reporting conditions (What do they want to keep secret I wonder).  It is true that they have one or two cosmetic changes to their original proposals but none that will prevent the inevitable outcome.

There is a popular opinion around that lawyers are massively overpaid, and who are only in it for the money.  This myth is perpetuated by some TV dramatic interpretations of lawyers.  However, contrary to that widespread view, lawyers working in criminal law are the lowest paid and in a particularly specialised branch of the profession.  Much of the work they do is unpaid and their working week far exceeds that which is commonplace elsewhere, duty solicitors are often called out in the middle of the night to drive to police stations many miles away and attend the interview of an accused person.  If these so-called fat cats were only in it for the money they would not have chosen to work in criminal law in the first place, there are a lot of other more lucrative areas of law. 

The reality is that the administration of justice is an expensive business and to cut costs just to save money to the point where it cannot operate and/or is not available to all is not justice at all.  To quote a former Justice Secretary, "I genuinely believe access to justice is the hallmark of a civilised society."

I hope then, that having read these few remarks, people might take the spin that the Ministry of Justice and the Justice Secretary (a man with a history of telling lies and misleading Parliament) put on things on Friday and view them in a different light.

The Great British Rake Off Part II or Fire Sale of the Century

The media astonish me sometimes, occasionally they latch on to a story and won’t let go until every possible aspect has been explored and exposed.  We can all think of examples; the Iraq war, MPs expenses, numerous Northern Ireland issues, child abuse by priests and Jimmy Saville.  But there another even more obvious scandal happening at present and most of the press seem to be treating it like a ‘dog bites man’ story and concentrating on things that happened years ago.  For example, however sensational and titillating gossip about what some of our prominent politicians may or may not have been doing in the 70s is; and it may indeed be interesting or worthwhile knowing about in the long term.  It is not as important as what they currently doing, things that govern our present and dictate our future that surely should be occupying their time and our minds.

This government is in the process of selling off our public services to the private sector at a rate never seen before.  They are making Thatcher's government look like a street corner barrowman by comparison.  They have no mandate to do what they are doing and yet the magnitude of their actions is breath-taking.  And much of what has been and is being done is irretrievable, in other words ‘When It’s Gone It’s Gone’.  We hear the words 'academy' but not private school, we hear 'foundation hospital' not private hospital; and yet that what we've got.  Some might think 'but surely that's okay isn't it?  Aren't private schools and hospitals operated to a higher standard than state run ones?'  Well if you imagine a private hospital run by a private healthcare company with patients funded by private health insurance that may be so.  Or perhaps if you imagine a private school funded by the wealthy parents of its pupils at thousands of pounds a term.  But don't imagine that that is what academies or foundation hospitals are like.  Many will be run by and for the profit of shareholders of enormous companies (many from overseas) whose sole raison d'etre is provide the lowest possible service level for the highest possible price and to make the greatest possible profit margin.

Why am I returning to this theme you might ask?  Well this is an extremely important time, this is a week where the government has revealed that ‘E-ACT, one of England’s biggest academy chains, is to be stripped of almost a third of its schools amid serious concerns over education standards’.  This piece of news reveals so much more than just what it says.  First of all E-ACT is only one of England’s academy chains!  My children have long since grown up and left home so I was more than a little surprised to learn that there was such a thing as a ‘chain’ of academies.  I imagined that the whole point of these so-called academies was that they were independent.  On its website, E-ACT proudly claims that they, ‘have a proven national record of developing schools into high attaining institutions and were delighted to celebrate a fourth year of improvements across all E-ACT academies in 2012’.  Well so much for the improvement and their national record then.  It was also interesting to read that they claim to be ‘sponsors’ of education.  I had always thought that a sponsor in this context was a person or organisation that contributes towards the costs of something, not an organisation that takes public money to provide a service.

This episode with academies is just the latest in a long list of privatisation adventures by the coalition.  The entirety of these policies is a scandal of monumental proportions.  Public money is routinely being given to private companies who cannot or will not provide the services they are paid to.  The welfare state in all its facets is being systematically dismantled by a government that has no mandate to do it.  They claim it is an ideological thing, as if that makes it okay to do it without seeking an electoral mandate to make such an enormous shift in public service policy.  They say that the ideology is that by moving things to the private sector it creates wealth that we all benefit from; however, the only wealth that is being created is for the shareholders and executives of huge corporate companies who mostly pay their taxes abroad.  It was recently revealed that at least two of the biggest of these companies paid zero corporation tax in the UK last year.  They claim that these changes will save money; that is not true either, mostly they only appear to save money by shifting additional costs into a different budget.  For example when making the changes to Legal Aid this will add enormous costs to court operating costs whilst appearing to make Legal Aid cheaper.

All this would be absolutely fine I suppose if we actually were saving money and/or being provided with the better services we have been promised, except of course we are not.  Time and time again we see examples of privatised services coming short of the standards expected, repeatedly we find service providers unable to fulfil the promises they made when taking the contract, some even having to relinquish the task, unable provide even the unexacting standards demanded by this government.  We even see examples of deliberate fraud where the government is billed for services never provided or asked for.  You could be forgiven for thinking that these failings are rare and or only of insignificant sums amounts because sometimes they barely get a mention in much of the press.  They disappear from the front pages to be replaced by news of Simon Cowles baby or other such trivial nonsense.

Whenever some new titbit of public service comes up for sale the usual suspects are there slavering at the bit, waiting to get their greasy little fingers on another little piece of the action.  It matters not that these companies mostly have no history in providing that service; or that many do have a long and proven history of incompetence and/or fraud.  Indeed many of these companies can boast ministers and MPs as shareholders.

This week also marks a tragedy for Britain with the final nail in the coffin of our reputation for being a just and fair nation, and being considered a beacon for justice throughout the world.  Today the government have announced their final plans for Legal Aid.  These plans will inevitably, in the short term, lead to the closure of hundreds of small solicitors firms with all their highly qualified and support staff finding themselves out of work.  In the longer term the system will become unviable leaving the way clear for one of the usual suspects to move in and employ poorly qualified staff to represent accused people in court.  Or worse still, people forced to defend themselves in court.  The long established Criminal Bar which both defends and prosecutes people accused of criminal offences may actually not survive.  There will be many miscarriages of justice innocent people found guilty, perhaps even jailed for crimes they did not commit, and the guilty left to walk the streets and possibly re-offend.  If you were the victim of rape would you want to be cross-examined in court by the accused because he couldn’t get a lawyer?

The changes announced today will NOT save money but will indeed increase costs.  They have been condemned almost unanimously by every section of the legal profession, ie barristers, judges, magistrates, solicitors, legal executives and court interpreters.  Even the government’s own lawyers have criticised them.  And yet Chris Grayling the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice is pushing them through.  This is a man who has absolutely no training or experience in the law, has consistently used spurious statistics, misled parliament on a number of occasions and made defamatory remarks about the legal profession in order to support his arguments.  Has been found to have lied on several occasions.  A man who claimed thousands of pounds to decorate a second home yet lives only 16 miles from parliament; and who employs his wife as his secretary at £37,000 pa cost to the nation.

There are many aspects of the these changes that are wrong, and I have covered most of them in earlier postings of my blog, but suffice it to say that our Criminal Justice System is just the latest of our public services being sacrificed on the altar of profit.

For your information:

A list of some of the companies that are buying us up:

G4S, Serco, Capita, Atos, E-ACT

A list of some services that have been sold off or are about to be:

Court interpreting, disability assessments, schools, hospitals, legal aid lawyers (defence & prosecution), prisons, police back office functions, prisoner transport, fire service, pension payments, council office functions, many NHS services, probation services.

So Much For Enterprise and Ambition Then

So then the philosophy of this government is, if you work hard at school you can gain a place at university where you can pay £9000 per year for 9 - 15 hours per week tuition.  Once you graduate (with debts between £30 - 45,000) this will enable you to get a job (or probably not) with a salary barely above minimum wage, out of which you must:

·         Feed and clothe yourself (although your parents will probably have to do that until you’re at least 25;

·         House yourself (parents might do that for nothing until they are in their dotage).  If your parents are not completely without resources by now they may be able to give you the money for the 5% deposit on a house enabling you to try to buy a house with the government’s ‘Help To Buy Scheme’ (HTBS).; and if you have been particularly fortunate and your job pays significantly above minimum wage you might be able to afford the repayments in the quarter-million pound loan you have had to take out.
The HTBS is a government initiative designed to provide profits to builders that make large donations to party funds.  It has the unique advantages of pushing up the prices of houses making it look as if prosperity has returned to this bankrupt country so that you will be persuaded to vote for them at the next election.  Of course there is minor disadvantage that when interest rates start to rise, which they will inevitably have to, even a very tiny rise will have enormous consequences on mortgage borrowers as the size of their loans are so large.  This of course has the effect that many will not be able to afford them and will have their houses repossessed, leaving them in a position where they have to return to live with Mum and Dad or rent a house from one of the ever burgeoning role private landlords costing as much or more as their previous mortgage with the help (if they can get it) of welfare payments.  Alternatively they could just go on the streets, many already choose this option.
However we should not forget that the banks (who made the unsustainable loan in the first place) will then own what used to be their house which they can then sell and make a profit from the process.  Does any of this seem familiar?

·         Oh yes you must not forget, you will need to start saving for a pension because by the time you need to retire you will need to be about 103 to be eligible for the State Pension even if your body gave up about 35 years earlier.

Well you shouldn’t feel too bad about it, you could always sit and read your degree certificate while you sit round a fire on a piece of waste ground somewhere and recall those halcyon days of academia.  Perhaps you could swap tales with those around who chose to take up law and burdened themselves with even greater debt by becoming criminal barristers or solicitors only to have their professions destroyed and handed to people who didn’t bother to go to university, and those whose small businesses were asset stripped by big firms prepared to do a sub-standard job for a pittance and who pay little more than the minimum wage to their employees.

You shouldn’t feel too down of course, out of every tale of woe there shines a little light.  There will be plenty of people to benefit from the wonderful policies of this government even when the economy goes tits up again as it inevitably will.  There are the millionaire politicians whose nests are well and truly lined the executives and shareholders of their party donors (such as big outsourcing companies and builders) and we must remember the bankers.