It's a sunny morning and I have a day of admin ahead including the
joys of tax returns. So, instead, here is an off the cuff, undigested and
unrefined list of ten things that would make the sun shine more frequently for
me. Yes, it’s political (it could hardly be anything else) but these are frustrations
with the current state of the public policy debate across the piece:
1. Fair, living
wages: a low wage economy treats working people as units of production not
humans and has immense impacts on our economy and our society; not least it cost
shunts from employers to taxpayers through benefits and tax credits
2. Fair rents:
high rents subsidised by the benefit system is yet more cost shunting onto the
public purse and leads to misery for many
3. On social
issues, morality after the fact is at best unhelpful and in some cases
positively disastrous. Everyone makes duff choices in their lives; some of us
are in the fortunate position to be able to pick up the pieces ourselves. We
should not be damning people who are not in that position and compounding their
problems - whether through withdrawal of benefits or services
4. On economics, in contrast, morality needs to play a bigger
part. In particular, paying taxes is an entry pass to being a member of
society: thin lines between evasion and avoidance should cut no mustard
5. Collective
insurance is almost always a better bet in terms of efficiency than individual
arrangements: from the licence fee in broadcasting to tax and national
insurance for health and social care
6. Choice should be
about much more fine grained issues of how things are done not about who does
them. Obsessive discussion about choice of provider has occupied us far too
much for far too long
7. Dodgy financial arrangements are generally just that: dodgy.
PFI has now been shown to be what most of us always thought: a very expensive
way of paying for things with complete capture by the provider but precious
little by way of real transfer of risk. Don't repeat the same kind of problems
with some of the new wheezes being dreamed up and in particular recognise that
payment by results means lots of different things to different people. It is no
more a panacea than PFI
8. Innovation is
frequently not innovative. That doesn't matter particularly but the clamour for
bright shiny and new can be distracting: for the most part we have been there
in some form before and frankly that's fine
9. Co-production
has a major role but it should not be oversold. People, residents, users
(whatever name we use) do have a genuine interest in being involved with some
design and with some delivery but imagining that this translates into a whole
new way of business across swathes of services is fanciful
10. Anti-politics
must be fought. Politicians in modern democracies have a dreadfully hard job
but a vital one. Whether it is businesses who prefer to avoid the messy stuff
of deliberation in favour of nice clean 'deals' or that 'plague on all their
houses' feeling we need elected and accountable political leaders and decision
makers. In the current climate, politicians need to matter more in stark
contrast to big finance and big business. But they also need to do the very
hard job of saying things to us that we don't want to hear: such as 'the
local district hospital really does need to close if we are really going to be
able to shift money to more effective primary care'.
The sun has now gone behind a cloud. So I’ll stop.
