Looking out on a bleak First-day-of Spring morning with
Seal’s ‘I can’t stand the rain’ playing
in the headphones, I am reflecting on how lucky I am – as one of Cameron’s ‘
Under-Employed Strivers’ , and not working on Fridays, I have been spared
attendance at the New Integrated Youth Service’s Unity Conference; as with many
events, which seek to capture the imagination of the workforce, attendance is
mandatory – a move, which is certain to ensure staff ‘buy in’ and enhance the sense of personal responsibility,
which the new regime seeks to promote in the workforce. The Conference has been
an eagerly awaited event amongst my colleagues as witnessed by discussions, as
I left the office last night, as to whether conference pens will be of the soft-tip-easy-flow
variety or the new-austerity-special – bics – the best thing you get from a conference is
always the free pen .
The focus of the Conference is on Shared Competencies; that is to say that
reluctant Youth Workers (YW) and reluctant Youth Offending Workers (YOW) are
going to be helped to understand how (despite their doubts) they all have the
same knowledge skills and understanding so that they can all do each others’ jobs. Thus, with one bound two disparate
Services will be integrated.
The circle that the new leadership is trying to square is
how to deliver a service with less resource at reduced cost – it is the public
sector’s Holy Grail. IYS leaders have cunningly devised a double pincer
movement, which in a Pythonesque (Monty Pythonesque) way will secure the Grail.
In essence, they screw the problem from both ends by firstly ‘dumbing down’
service provision so that ‘anyone’ can do it; and then secondly by employing
lower skilled people to carry out ‘dumbed down’ tasks for lower wages. There
may be a rocky few years, while they re-align their workforce plan and get rid of
‘residue’ by shedding over-skilled, over qualified (and overly costly) members
of the workforce but in the end IYS will be ‘fit for purpose’. Though for what
purpose it will be fit, we all shudder to think.
So this IYS Conference is an important milestone on our heroic
path to Public Sector Nirvana.
The ‘Anyone Can Do Anything’ (ACDA) approach seems to have
the Public Services completely in its thrall (although in the private sector
companies like SERCO & G4S have been practising it for years). Ironically,
it is competence frameworks developed by Sector Skills to protect standards
(and promote competence!) which, have provided the mechanism for undermining and
de-skilling different public sector workforces.
This is how it works; you take 2 people doing different jobs
- say, A Youth Worker and a Youth Offending Worker - you run an audit of
competences necessary to do each job and discover that several of these are
held in common; you conclude that the 2 jobs are more or less the same and, therefore,
can be carried out by the lower-skilled, lower-paid worker; you make financial savings.
Of course, the reasoning is complete
bollocks; it’s like saying that mice and men have many DNA in common and so men
are mice. The point is that, in configuring the workforce, it is not the
competences, which are held in common by YWs and YOWs, which matter so much as
those, which are not shared.
Once you make the leap of imagination, however, anything is
possible:; a senior Kent County Council
manager sees Librarians registering Births, Marriages and Deaths –
“ I can see you’re upset at the death of your dear
mother..may I offer my sympathy....but what are you going to do about these overdue library books?...”
Eric Pickles sees the same librarian running a cafe –
“ That’s 5 books, 2
DVDs and a skinny Latte, sir; I’ll just pop round the back for my Barista
apron...”
But where will it all lead ? Will the NHS seek SERCO’s assistance to coalescence the roles of Brain Surgeon and Bin Man? –
“ Well nurse, this one’s a gonna I’m afraid; just keep an
eye on him while I slip into my waste disposal over-all and get him down to the
morgue....”
But this could never happen in real life, could it? To return
to the Integrated Youth Service - through the rain outside my window, I think I
can see the adrenalin-fuelled form of the IYS Director powering out of the starting blocks, as the starting pistol, austerity , unleashes
an unholy public sector race to the
bottom. I’m better off at home behind my window.
