Enriched by Public Services

Only the crassest and the most shallow minded consider that everything costs and therefore everything must pay its way. A way of thinking as befits a grocers daughter or some similar philistine banal mindset. We have to lift our heads up out of the mud our feet are wading through to see higher aspirations, to have hope for a better future, to be inspired by the achievements of those around us and most of all to have a vision for how all on this planet can experience a better life. Big dreams. In the real world there is not unlimited money and there are a thousand competing priorities. Put cost as your first and overriding starting point and the dreams will never even emerge. But without dreams we can never realise a better quality of life no matter how that quality might be imagined. Cost and payback are not the determining factor in a civilised society. Never to be ignored, always with a watchful eye but not the bottom line criterion that they have become.

I am ranging way beyond culture the obvious candidate for cost cutting. Yes culture of course to lift the spirit, to raise the hope even just to endeavour to reach beyond the immediate now, we need arts, we need crafts, we need music, we need graphics in all its forms to give shape and meaning to otherwise vague ephemeral glimpses beyond the mundane over familiar present day. Can we agree that culture, with its high costs and indeterminate payback, is a given must have, that frames us as civilised and not savages? If you think it is a no, then this site really is not for you, you must look elsewhere.

What I want to promote is the concept of service as an aspirational tool to achieve a better quality of life, for all. 'Service' this word is heavily overworked and has an extraordinary wide range of meanings and connotations. The common usages I want to focus on is, according to the sOED, 'Service' as conduct tending to the welfare or advantage of another and 'Service' as a branch of public employment of such body concerned with some particular work or the supply of some particular need. Service in today's climate is denigrated and demeaned, seen at best as a charity cause to help out those pitiful people too poor to do better. It didn't use to be like that, service industries were once seen as the powerhouse to lift and raise our aspirations as a nation and power us to a better more modern way of life. These are not bad or irrelevant objectives even in today's world? Being able to offer service to an individuals must be the hallmark of a democratic civilised society. Helping those in their moment of need until they can strike out confidently on their own again. Sounds like the sort of place I would like to be.

Maybe a ticket office manned to help cut through the complexities of tariffs, timetable and alternate conflicting options. Maybe a visible approachable and friendly policeman able to calm, reassure or direct, that would be nice. Of course the more obvious of a nurse with time to reassure, talk and to really understand what is troubling a patient. Or a teacher able to spend time one to one to help that one child overcome their confusion about some new topic. Service providers who are not seen as cost centres, who are required to prove their worth on a daily basis, who are not required to complete offers of help to some predetermined timeslot. The worth is there in payback dividends but not in profit returns the bean counters understand. So the list can go on, Tax Collectors able to spend time to understand the exception's and find more fitting rules, or JobCentre Advisers with the skills and time to actually understand a seekers capabilities with the realistic knowledge of local opportunities. Indeed wherever we as individuals interface with the providers of our wants or needs then there is an essential service input, an input which may not show a profit but certainly oils the wheels and helps society to move smoothly. What price do you put on that?

Services also include all the utility services, water, electricity, gas, sewers, telephones, refuse collection and the mail. Once state run they were sold off, amid a great fanfare, to companies whose driving force is profit first. Yet they are essential services, services that are at the foundation of the wellbeing to our UKplc. If any of these cinderella services are not there in place with the right capacity our ability as a nation to grow and develop is hampered. Look no further than the stranglehold the provision of highspeed broadband has on any commercial enterprise that is not located in a major conurbation. UKplc is held to ransom because it is 'not profitable' to provide in these smaller communities. Utility Services sold off because in some naive tunnel vision view of some other fantasy world, competition equates to efficiency. No. Equally, state run enterprise does not mean inefficient and extravagant. So make your choice, do you run them for profit for the benefit of shareholders, or, run them well for the benefit of the society that relies on them?

Finally, Public Service, another broad wide ranging category, now much maligned and held in disdain. Once the pinnacle of UKplc governance, held in esteem around the world, for its expertise, for its detachment and for its impartiality. What happened? Did we run out of good enough scholars to enter the civil services. No, of course not. A deliberate decision was taken to politicise the output of the civil service, overturning centuries of impartial advice. In this new way of thinking, unless civil services responses fully reflected the political aspirations of the government of the time, it was rejected and overturned. Such a small seemingly innocuous step but having catastrophic impact. Now there is no government edict, no report, no forecast, nothing emanating from government that can be trusted or relied on. Everything has to viewed with suspicion for political bias. There is no objectivity, there is no impartiality, everything is tainted with political expediency. Not any way to run a company let alone UKplc.

One woman overturned centuries of governance evolution and wrought chaos. Benefits? Once the initial feeding frenzy for the 'free' goodies on offer had subsided, are we better off, driven by profit for shareholder benefit? Have we totally lost the concept of service to the people to enable them to grow and blossom? Bring back Service to the People, bring hope for a better future for us all.

All Change

Been thinking about my water supply, pressure seems to be low compared to what it was, but then that just maybe an ageing thing with me. If the Supply Company did set about reducing the water pressure there could be significant savings. Low pressure means less leakage, an insufficient pipe network can cope for longer before replacement and lower pressure means slower take up of reservoir water and lower volume to treat. These are big cost considerations. The point is, there is nothing to stop them from deciding to lower the mains pressure. Their objective is not any longer to provide the best possible service. Their primary, if not overriding objective, is to return an increasing profit to their shareholders. User concerns are not on their agenda other than running as minimal a service as they can get away with, just short of referral to any regulatory body or generating a nuisance level of complaint. Providing a good service cost them and brings them no dividends. There are not more customers to win, it is, to all intents and purposes,a fixed quantum. Their consumers have no where else to go to and no one to champion for them. So what, the water pressure is low, what are you going to do about it? There is no statutory requirement. The consumer is left in a hard place.

Not just water of course but all the old public utility industries, electricity, telephones, rail, and good old Royal Mail. Where are the safeguards that keeps electricity at the target voltage and not allowed to settle to the lowest percentile, or what is supposed to stop a next day delivery becoming 'within three days' norm, what checks are there in the time taken to renew a telephone line fault or what ensures there is a seat, on a clean train which is running on time? Nothing tangible that I can see or find. With the need to generate a profit replacing the previous desire to provide a good service, the luckless consumer, without any real alternate choice or options, has to get on with using these declining services. The politicians are in the clear, privatised, nothing to do with them, (except of course the creation of these monsters). The private companies are untouchable, they provide to the standard required when they were setup. Their regulatory bodies, which are supposed to provide a complaints procedure, seem unable to deal with the deluge of ordinary day mishaps and lack of performance. They have no remit to respond to your actual experienced real or imagined complaints. These private companies loyalty is to their boards of shareholders, (predominately pension plans to a tee), you as a consumer have no voice. Those individual share-owners who bought into the bonanza have no meaningful voice against the institutions that ended with the more than lion's share. So, within the prescribed remit, they meet the requirements and you have only to look at the profits and enhanced values returned to 'their' shareholders to see they are successful. Except by that one essential bottom line, service to the consumer.


When there is a more or less fixed market for your 'goods', when that market is stable and will not suddenly disappear, when the regulators have been left toothless, when the glory goals of 'privatisation' far out shines a dimly held desire to give a good service, when there is no tie between making profit and providing that high quality of service, then any incentive to do better evaporates. In this short-sighted flawed application of supposed commercial energisation the consumer has been sold out. Utility services are just that, essential core services to keep the country turning over efficiently, not optional, not marginal, smack dead central. A Nation has to get its utilities working if all other commerce and industry is to thrive. When shareholders around EU and the globe are in control of your utilities, controlling the infrastructure investment and the level of return required, you as a Nation are left powerless. Your citizens, the consumers of these utilities, doomed to declining poor unreliable services putting them disadvantaged against other nations better serviced. We were sold out of our birth right by a shrews fantasy, sold again into servitude for just a few pieces of gold. Long live the revolution.

 

That extra mile

Keep circling back to the same topic, so I suppose must be kind of important to get a good steer on it. When is reward enough and more is obscene and socially divisive? See also my Tax, Salaries and Rewards and Higher Aspirations.This is the core question nagging at me. To better your lot is the principle drive that makes people go that extra mile to achieve the extraordinary. We all benefit hugely from all those around us striving beyond the norms to achieve. We want and need them to do it. Maybe even our best athletes are not just seeing how far they can push their skills, to find their own limits. More than likely the distant prospect of fame, notoriety and possible rewards to come are the spur on those so long cold dark mornings when every fibres protests, stay in bed. Switch athlete for skill or expertise, there is in each of us that internal desire to see just how good we can become or far we can go. Excellent. Just not sufficient justification on its own, it needs that added bolster. Fame, recognition and then the dosh that might follow. Reward of an achievement reached is not enough. Fame absolutely, or at least the attention it brings. Without the bonus of creature comforts? Most cases, not.

What we all want is release from the worry of survival from day to period, we want our progeny to have as good or better start and we want to provide for our kin. Good and wholesome aspirations. Incentives enough to push on and try harder. Proper just reward for making that extra effort, to stand out above the crowd of wannabes. But how much reward is adequate and when is it over the top? Enough to have and enjoy a relaxed none caring lifestyle through to your final days. Spared from the haunting, will I, can I afford relief from discomfort, pain, lack of care and nurture. Sufficient so that comparisons to equal or comparable peers is not unfavourable to you. There is a rub, of course we have a predilection to compare ourselves much beyond our actual modest achievements. There is this built in escalator here to be resisted. Lets assume our peers operate a 'higher or lower' wall to approve or contest comparison claims. Next of course we need enough to ensure our progeny receive the benefits of all our hard efforts. Somewhere along the line of a good home, nice clothes, private education, mind-expanding holidays and leisure, connection to similar influential families, protection from the costs of education, helping hand to set up a home and positive introductions to potential employers or clients, somewhere we pass from fair and reasonable to the inequitable. Where your hard efforts so set up your descendants so that, without any effort on their behalf, they can coast on your successes to the detriment of other aspirants.

Inheritance tax is both the final insult and a social leveller. After a lifetime of hard taxed effort the State seeks to take away any residual value. By doing so it reduces your descendants to well off but not excessively so. With the sting in the tale. Why bother in the first place to put money into permanency when none of your kin will get to benefit? If you follow the logic, might just as well paper over with polyfilla and save yourself the time, cost and effort. Then the Nation loses out, instead of accumulating treasures from the past, it gains just puddles of decomposing goo. No, providing we can keep a lid on excessive rewards, then, on past evidence, the second generations will squander their inheritance and in doing so provide opportunities for upcomers to profit from them. Keeping a lid on excessive rewards is the key. Enough to make the extra effort worth while but not so much as to distort the social fabric and threaten the underlying goodwill of all, to see success rewarded.

Finally, having exploited the benefits of living within our society and utilising it as their base to make their fortunes, when the rich complain as the State takes back or regulates the excesses of rewards accruing, they have a stark choice. Either turn their backs on the society that nurtured them on their road to success or accept that this is the price demanded from all those other tolerant people also wanting a chance to make the big time. The makings of a fair and equitable society.