Institutional arrogance must be rooted out

Ken

http://tinyurl.com/5uq6au - Even if only 1% of the NoW's appalling account is correct heads should roll, starting with E.Balls. Top management at Haringey SS should be prosecuted. Indeed the Baby P scandal should be enough of an indictment of the buckpassing New Labour ways to force Brown out without more delay. Footnote: How on earth can the CPS still be unable to prosecute the adults in that house for murder? Retrial/mistrial?

Slim Jim

This tragic incident highlights how badly governed we are; not just at local level, but government level too. We are witnessing the outcomes of Nulab's relentless politicisation of the public sector. Shoesmith is just a typical gauleiter put in place to ensure the plates (or is it pie charts?) keep spinning. The type of person who receives a large handout of public money for failure - like the woman in charge of a Kent NHS trust with a dreadful MRSA record. Or the prison governor (without any experience in the field) instructing his staff to call prisoners by their first names so as not to offend them. I'll wager every other sentence they utter contains the words, 'diversity' or 'equality'. Right on brothers and sisters! The entire public sector is awash with these dissemblers and professional liars. They mirror the image of the high command. When, oh when are we going to get some forensic journalism highlighting this blight on the political landscape? Dig deeply, and you will find the root cause of why New Labour have managed to cling onto power for so long. I suspect that as the recession deepens, we will start to dig, and dig deeply. It may be slow, but it's still a train crash.

Anthony

Slim Jim...........Well said!

Archie

Everyone, and I mean everyone, involved in this appalling tragedy should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law! Anything less would be an insult to the memory of that poor child.

Rhoda Klapp

Excellent Slim Jim.

I'm going to propose a theory now, whereby all the bad things in government stem from the same source. A bit of a stretch, you say? Well, read on. It began in the 80s, and it comes from the business world. It is tickbox culture. Call it targets, call it benchmarking, call it what you will. The company I worked for then used to reward its people by customer satisfaction. Managers soon discovered that if they took control of the survey, they could manage how the customer responded to it and get the results they needed for advancement. What mattered was not to make the customer happy, but to get his tick in the right box. We had targets, and we reached them by managing the numbers, not our actual performance.

This approach had much appeal for managers. They made their numbers but they didn't have to achieve actualk quality. Then we got BS3750(?) and ISO9000 and they were all about process, not actually doing your job right. Those who got into process and tickboxing were promoted, those who cared abouth the job they were doing were not.

This wasn't rejected by all the workers, because those who were not all that experienced or good at it were able to appeal to the god of process, and prove they'd done everything right according to the procedures, and so should be graded as such. Never mind if someone else had to do their job again afterwards.

The public sector rapidly picked up on the fashion from industry, and gave us a target culture in the NHS and the schools. Note that the targets are fine if properly formulated, but it's a short step from sensible targets to tickboxes, and nobody has it in their interest to look behind the tickboxes to see whether they are honestly scored.

And that leads on to Haringey, where all the requirements were apparently met, but the baby died.

And to the banking collapse, where dumb 'regulators' let the banks run rings round them by claiming asset values for stuff which could never realise those values in a fire sale, yet have no intrinsic base value in their own right (sorry about how badly that is phrased, it isn't really right)

Nu labour spokesmen really subscribe to this culture. It is enough to say you did everything by the procedures. The Press must wake up to the fact that it is wrong. Whoever's in charge is responsible for what happens. Responsible for the performance of their organisation in the real world, not the fantasy world of procedures and targets.
Why are there no resigning issues any more?

Marian C

Ken & Slim Jim:- Well said, both of you

mac

Slim Jim

Well said. Completely agree.

Unfortunately, there are droves of MSM journos and broadcasters who are of exactly the same cast, so the investigative digging you mention will require consciences to be searched and backbone to be discovered.

David Boothroyd

Isn't it amazing how many newspaper columnists are secretly professional expert social workers who know exactly how to run social services departments? And isn't it odd how few of them have ever actually worked anywhere near a real life local authority social services department?

Austin Barry

In Brown's Britain moral and intellectual discipline and responsibility have been replaced by flabby cultural relativism. We are ruled at every level by self-serving cowards.

Nicholas

Rhoda, the irony is that the "targets" methodology came from the production ethos of the manufacturing industry which was already in decline. The same methodology which had failed our manufacturing industry was neatly sidestepped into everything else from finance to the NHS and welcomed by the bean counters who saw it as a convenient means of "measuring" those "results" and "outcomes" which had hitherto been intangible. Everything became "products" and later "product". Do you remember that clichéd newspeak phrase "If you can't measure it . . ."? From that point on every professional who had based his or her judgements on years of experience and finely honed instinct was under threat.

Like the Emperor's New Clothes peer pressure ensured that everyone signed up to the jargon even when they didn't understand it. Looking at it now and in the context of Haringey it appears ridiculous and very, very sad. While idiots like Shoesmith preside over these towers of babel the old guard who knew a bit are probably stacking shelves in the supermarket. The same is true of politics. Wisdom & experience victims of what things appear to be rather than what they are and bullshit, plenty of bullshit.

CharlieRay15

Mr Boothroyd - you don't need any experience of Social Services departments, you merely need common sense!

Dalesman

Slim Jim & Rhoda, excellent comments.

David Boothroyd, as an ex-psychiatric nurse I have had a great deal of experience of social workers and Social Services departments. I have also worked as a social worker.

Heads need to roll in the case of baby P, and if you don't think so you are as malfunctioning as all the other NuLab types.

Fergus Pickering

David Boothroyd, Dr Johnson said you didn't have to be a carpenter to judge the worth of a table. Youdon't have to be a politician to judge the worth of a government. And you don't have to be a social services director....

The Laughing Cavalier

Following on from earlier coments, I am of an age to have been at University with the sort of people who now occupy senior positions in the social services and local government. I remember them well, posturing in the students union and doing the bare minimum of work. They despised the private sector but were too dim to pass the civil service exams so they went into local government. Now, by a combination of longevity, buggins turn and cronyism these municipal marxists are in a position to do real damage. Make no mistake, they are doing it. Learning that they victimised the whistleblower at Haringey and falsely accused her of child abuse comes as no surprise, these people will stoop to any depths to save their own skins. When the government changes - as we all hope it will - there must be a root and branch reorganisation, with these people being dismissed with ignomy.

JimBob

The lack of accountability isn't just the preserve of the public sector- CEOs weren't exactly queuing up to resign when the banks failed.

It seems to be lower down the chain where the difference lies. In the private sector, if you screw up badly then you're out the door. In the public sector this isn't the case. A Goldman Sachs style worst 5% fired every year would do quite nicely-remove the feckless and drive up performance of the rest.

David Smith

Nicolas and Rhoda have it exactly right. I saw this when doing a training contract with a large firm of chartered accountants in the late seventies. Statistical based "processes" replaced judgement, and based on nonsensical rules we chose to do lots of work or not much in terms of testing transactions and the accuracy and veracity of the book keeping and accounting entries that underpin any company's financial statements. Yet no stisticians or mathematicians ever agree, any more that do those other charlatans, economists. Yet it was the fashion, and all the big firms were doing it. I looked foreward to a court case, when partner in the witness box had to explain why they only tested 30 purchase ledger transactions out of hundreds of thousands, and for him to rely on the Audit Process Manual and get shredded by the "expert witness, a different statistician" - where as if he said it was his judgement based on decades of professional experience and knowledge of similar comanies in the same industry sector, he's be fine.

As it was, of course, those up the sharp end doing the planning and the audit work skewed the process to minimise the amount of hard work we might otherwise have had to do.

As to this case, please join http://www.new.facebook.com/groups.php?gid=34344572356&add#/group.php?gid=39856852002 or similar, and let's stop them getting away with it by letting them know we are seriously angry.

mac

David Boothroyd again shines his torch at the light, not the darkness.

Ms Shoesmith is blameless, because all the rules were followed? How dare anyone who isn't an "expert" offer any criticism? Pitiful.

Anything to avoid criticism reaching beyond risk-averse, doctrinaire management automata to your favoured politicians, DB?

Verity

Has this "doctor"Dr Sabah al-Zayyat, the paediatrician who only partly examined the boy and failed to spot that he had nine broken ribs and a broken spine, been struck off for life yet?

Alfred T Mahan

IMHO at least part of the problem lies with employment law and Employment Tribunals. It's just downright impossible to fire people.

One of my employees last year caused, through a deliberate failure, a service user in one of my homes to be injured and taken to hospital. It was gross misconduct. I followed to the letter our disciplinary procedure (and took legal advice) and fired her. If I hadn't, the home would have been closed by CSCI, so I had no choice anyway. She took me to the ET, said she hadn't meant any harm, and the idiots awarded her £15,000 for wrongful dismissal.

I've had other similar cases in the past, and it's getting worse, so it there any wonder that poor performance is condoned? Is it any wonder that 'rewards for failure' are so huge?

Without the threat of the company losing competitive advantage, and therefore the business going bust and everyone losing their jobs, there is little incentive on a manager to take that sort of tough action against a defaulting employee. You become unpopular, it nearly always damages staff morale, there is the huge hassle of being taken to a Tribunal to consider (which is crippling for a small firm, by the way), and there is the cost of it all.

Naturally, therefore, in the public sector (and especially in local government where external oversight is almost non-existent) where those pressures are absent, poor performance is endemic.

It may very well be that some of the seniors in Haringey Social Services are aware of the problems (not all social workers are useless by any means, although some undoubtedly are), but the dice are so loaded against them taking any decisive action that I bet they just don't bother.

And a left-wing Labour Council probably won't have given any support if senior officials had tried to discipline the staff.

The Dandiprat

David Boothroyd.

Newspaper columnists - and other lesser observers - do not need to know how to run social services.
It's sufficient that they know how n o t to run them when confronted by such a dreadful episode as the Haringey situation.

Are you seriously saying, along with the coven of local headmasters, that all is well in that department?

Cogito Ergosum

How about a new version of decimation? For every dead baby, the top ten officials lose their pensions.

(The top ten that still have pensions, that is.)

David Lindsay

Rhoda, yes, it goes back to the Eighties.

After the War, there was no underclass until the Eighties, because the economy was organised in such a way that there could not possibly have been one.

The Swinging Sixties did eventually create the underclass, but in that the Swingers, who hated Old Labour but were very lucky to have only “good old Mr Wilson” to hate, caused Thatcherism.

They voted for it. They, and they alone, benefited from it. And it entrenched economically their peculiar social and cultural attitudes.

Blair (and thus also Cameron and Clegg) was the logical next stage.

But the process as a whole was, and is, single and indivisible.

Floyd Rose

David Lindsay: What rubbish. The underclass has existed long before the 1960s. The main difference now is that we have a welfare state that positively encourages such a class to exist. A welfare state which, incidentally, was not created by "Fatcher."