Author: johnredwood

Lord Mandelson is a poor choice for this job. Our current Ambassador pulled off getting an appointment for the PM and Foreign Secretary to see Donald Trump shortly before his victory and  did her best to help Lammy move on from his offensive remarks. She could have continued for longer.

Lord Mandelson is said to be experienced and charming. He will  need to be both to win over the President. He will come to crucial trade issues from the EU standpoint  that is likely to inflame the  President and  will probably urge Starmer to align with a losing and no growth EU. To prove me wrong he should begin by persuading the PM to cancel negotiations to give away the Chagos. This is a clear policy where the U.K. and US interests are the same. The absurd and expensive surrender line from the Foreign Office needs to be dumped.

The U.K. has a great opportunity to clinch a free trade deal with the US whilst the EU and the US impose more tariffs on each other. The U.K. should not copy the EU plan to impose high and wide ranging carbon based tariffs under the so called carbon border mechanism.

Let me try again. My main point was what someone studied at 18-21 may  be irrelevant by the time they come to an important job twenty or thirty years later. It is quite possible for someone with a non technical/scientific degree to gain experience and professional qualifications later.

I am all in favour of people who know what they are doing running things. Most management tasks require teams of people with different skills. The Leader needs leaders skills, which are more about choosing  talented and qualified people, incentivising  them, establishing correct accountabilities, setting targets  and making ultimate decisions where need arises. The team may need a scientist, a technician, a stats and maths analyst, an engineer etc.

Having a relevant degree at 21 does not mean you can run something 20 years later. Someone without a relevant degree who is good at choosing people and leading may do well as they gain management experience.

If you are a professional you have to take exams. Equally important you need to keep up to date and keep practising as experience and evolution of knowledge matters. Medics, lawyers, finance professionals etc do this through Continuous professional development learning and testing sessions. I was certainly not proposing seeking medical advice from a non qualified person, but would be happy to see a Dr at a clinic or hospital run by a good manager whatever their degree. I took a professional qualification later in life and keep up to date on investment and economic issues daily.

Five months in, several months talking down the economy and a bad tax raising budget have done damage. Inflation is up from 2% to 2.6% on the CPI. Unemployment is up and job vacancies well down

On the ONS preferred wider measure of inflation including housing costs inflation is back up at 3.5%. Rents are shooting up thanks to a shortage of homes and further demand surges from high levels of migration. Wage inflation led by inflationary  public sector awards with no productivity promises is sticky. The hike in National Insurance and other wage costs is keeping inflation in services too high.

The Bank of England should not cut interest rates until the pay and productivity issues are sorted out.

Some writing in have a strange idea that education ends when someone completes their degree. They say that because someone studied subject A for three years around the time they were 20 this determines what job they can do 20-40 years later. If you want to assess a person’s aptitude for a job you need to look at what they have done after university and what they have learned in recent years as they will recall that more easily, as well as what they when young.

My experience is different. I have studied economics and investment in my business and public service life all my adult years. I have not refreshed my university studies of economic history and the history of ideas since I was 22 completing my doctorate.I have taken an Investment qualification later in life and have written and spoken about leading economic issues. In order to keep up to date with a subject takes daily energy and curiosity, assisted by practical experience of decision taking based on analysis and forecasting.

It is quite possible for a Minister to make good judgements without having a specific qualification in a relevant subject. Ministers are there to weigh up specialist and professional opinion and relate it to practicalities, likely efficacy and the public understanding.

Several contributors wish to write in every day making the same points about their own single hobby horse. I am not posting the persistent allegations that a couple of billionaires control the world’s governments, nor the angry denunciations of both main political parties in wholly negative and repetitive language. I aim to set out a variety of topics and arguments in moderate tones.The task is to contribute to the public debate and understanding of government and society.   The blog works better if people follow suit.

The civil service has too many grades, switches people around too often and then has to buy in expertise from consultants.

If some one is only going to spend a couple of years or so in a job before moving onwards and often upwards there is difficulty in that person learning enough, building enough relationships and contacts to do the job well and having a wide and deep body of knowledge about that set of problems. The civil service needs to keep more people in jobs for longer, and reward them better for staying in post with performance pay or with promotion whilst staying in the same area.

I remember as Single market Minister finding our officials were often switched whilst some other countries kept people in post in Brussels for much longer to build their contacts and understand how the system worked.

Regular  switching is linked with several grades of official being involved in Decisions and framing advice.It means no-one is ever to blame or responsible for handling a problem when it emerges. If something goes badly wrong the enquiry usually concludes it was a system failure an£ recommends a set of procedural changes for the future. In business there is more individual responsibility set out in the definitions of jobs and the authority levels granted to the staff. There can then be a more direct relationship between performance, pay and promotion, and faster response  to problems which may need staff change.

There needs to be more regular review of tasks and staffing in the civil service. Flatter structures for more matters would help. Clearer named responsibility and build up of expertise is  essential. there should be less resort to consultancies to do the work when there are officials on the payroll to do it.

The areas of the private sector that achieve the highest levels  of efficiency are usually very driven by competition. The leaders of the businesses know if they cease the search to do better with less and give up the drive to innovate and change, their competitors will take their customers.

Advocates of nationalisation say that should  be more efficient and low cost because it removes the need for competing management teams, multiple head offices and advertising. Looking at past experience  shows this is just not true. Large nationalised monopolies offset the economies  of scale with the inefficiencies of monopoly provision.

When the U.K.electricity industry was privatised the nationalised management fought against creating competing generators, claiming it would be dearer and less productive. The  government split up the industry and created competition. In the first decade moving to a competitive system labour  productivity doubled and electricity  prices came down. The industry that had believed in fuel inefficient  coal power stations went for the dash for gas. The new power stations were 60-70% more fuel efficient, greener and cleaner.

Public sector trading bodies that charge the customers should be subject to competition.

MPs are meant to run the complaints department. Much of the case work is trying to remedy failings in public services. I will be writing a few blogs on some of the reasons there are so many complaints.Many of the Statements and  debates are about what to do when things go wrong..

One of the principle causes of complaint is rationing. Key public services have too little capacity, leading to access denied or inadequate service performance  or long waits to get the service.

We have fully nationalised roads. All my life we have been kept short of road space by local and national road managers who want to deny or limit access to roads or think it a good idea to allow bad traffic jams. There is still no south coast motorway, the M25 remains too small, the A 303 to the West Country has not been fully dualled, with similar gaps in provision elsewhere in the country. Many Councils now close or limit what roads they do have to make access to towns increasingly difficult.

The NHS dominates healthcare. It has excessively long waiting lists, delays in getting appointments and lets  some down who need urgent treatment.

The fully  nationalised rail regions have poor records for delays and cancellations to train services. Train travel fails to offer much capacity for freight traffic in ways that could shift loads off the roads.

The heavily regulated and controlled electricity utilities rely more and more on imports as government will not design national security into its over managed system.

The water companies under nationalised ownership and more recently under privatised and regulated ownership have lacked capital and permissions to replace worn out old pipes and put in enough capacity for a rising population.

So now we read confirmation the the EU wants us to accept freedom of movement for under 30 s.
They want to grab more of our fish for longer, demanding an extended and generous access for their trawlers and super trawlers to our waters.

They want to impose more of their  laws on us. They are offering no new and improved access to their market.

None of this makes any sense for the U.K.Still the U.K. government fails to ask for anything that we might need to make our lives better.

Although the U.K. establishment did its best to wreck Brexit and avoid taking advantage of the freedoms, we are saving £12 bn a year and putting that into the NHS, We have avoided a large Share of Euro 800 bn of extra EU borrowing they agreed as soon as we left, and do not have to impose hundreds of costly and unhelpful laws they have imposed since we left.

I was pleased to see the government now recognises the productivity collapse in the public sector. They say they wish to reduce the civil service by 10,000. That would be a modest start.

They need to be more ambitious. Applying a policy of natural wastage to avoid any redundancies should free more than 30,000 a year. As people retire or move to another job so you can slim the establishment and promote or transfer existing staff into the important jobs you need to keep. A speedier policy could augment this with a call for voluntary redundancies, though this requires suitable severance payments.

It is also important to widen this to include the enlarged administrative cadres of the wider public sector, especially the NHS.

We read a suggestion the government may find £1.5 bn of extra money to help buy ammunition in an EU scheme. If the Chancellor can find such a sum it should be given to our military and spent on munitions, equipment and personnel from the U.K.

Meanwhile the Metrology Bill is working its way through the Lords. This is a Bill to enable Ministers to lock us back into EU laws more easily. Why? Exporters need flexibility to follow US rules when selling to th3 Americas, Asian rules when selling to Asia and EU rules when selling to the EU. We must not be bound into the EU way of doing things.

The Chancellor failed to spell out what she wants from Brussels that would help growth. Our growth was very slow  this century when fully in the EU. Some say the U.K. needs relaxations to sell more milk, cheese, beef  into tge EU. What we need is better support for farmers to grow food for the domestic market. We import too much food with long food miles from the EU already.