March 22nd

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.