In a regulated world with apparently strong laws and a representative democracy, it is easy to feel complacent about just how our services and their oversight systems operate. Dr David Cliff explores the fact that many people do not find that they are well protected when they have need of support.
Imagine it, you have a domestic burglary, and you phone the police. In certain parts of the country, you now receive a crime number which facilitates your insurance claim with a self-declaration that will result in an act of fraud on your part if you have misrepresented that claim. Society and insurers are therefore almost 100% protected from you committing fraud because there is a clear evidence trail. Conversely, the thief that actually steals your goods and violates your home has a putative likelihood of apprehension and conviction in only 3 to 9% of cases, depending on which part of the country you are in. We believe we have the police and other public services that can protect us. The reality is when push comes to shove, the lived experience of receiving that support often falls increasingly short of the mark.
This underpins the concern of many people around our public services and their inadequacy, their underinvestment, their excessive application of “woke” approaches that may be modernising, transformational and contemporary, but take many organisations away from the delivery of their core function. Namely to serve an organised society, and its citizens who collectively contribute to public service by direct payments through taxation and other hypothecated means.
Take the Health Service. We have recently seen targets that have become so impossible to meet, there has been a rationalisation of them. The bureaucracy that ensues results in an experience by patients of increasing disappointment, rather than the services being held to account to deliver within an agreed timeframe. As there is no particular redress that’s tangible for most patients if they’ve got to wait seven hours in A & E or two hours for an ambulance. Equally, the accountability of governments that have failed progressively to deal with the fundamental systemic logjams within the NHS, that of poor work planning and, the trans-decade fudge that has been social care, suggest that we have a system that is not particularly well held to account by the ballot box.
Consider Ofcom and the years it has taken to even begin to address the inflationary hikes on mobile phone contracts. Then, there is the inability of the energy regulator to actually meaningfully regulate prices, supply sources, supply dependency factors, and oh yes, the profiteering by energy providers who provide energy on what has now become known as the ‘rocket and feather’ approach to pricing.
Yes, it’s easy to see that we live under an illusion of protections that don’t exist. Swimmers are finding that in the rivers, despite some improvements, we remain the ‘dirty man’ of Europe in a relative sense, whilst government ministers espouse the fact that our water quality is subject to massive investment and progressive improvement. So why are water shareholders doing so well whilst the companies that pay them these dividends amass such huge debt that ultimately will need to be picked up by the public who are left to swim in a solution of human waste and agricultural chemicals?
You can’t run a society with values reduced to rules that selfinterested people have ‘get rounds’ or create the illusion of protection without outcomes that are actually meaningful, beneficial, tangible and part of the lived experience of the recipient.
It’s therefore small wonder that so many people are finding so many of our public systems wanting. When they have a need, it is often unmet.
The private sector is also culpable. Alongside the illusion of protection in both private and public sectors, we have the illusion of good customer service wherein customers individuality is just not that important to these large organisations and an algorithm will do. People are greeted with anthropomorphised AI, are cut off and are told almost 24/7 there are high call volumes. The truth is providing greater call handling capacity that involves real people affects the bottom line and profits are maximised when you oblige customers to patiently fill the gap by them waiting unacceptably long times for a response.
In all of this, we have a small business community that seeks to try and thrive and grow often despite the might of competing large organisations, both public and private. So many of these small businesses continue with a personal approach to customers and are usually far more connected to the people they serve than larger organisations ever will be.
Yes, public service and big business could do a lot to learn from small business. The world is about people with identities and rights, both legal and moral, not systems, digitisation, automation, and virtue signalling protections that ultimately have very few teeth. But if board bonuses, shareholders dividends and the politicians being happy how the public purse has been balanced are the central considerations – what really matters?
Oh, he’s having another rant you may say. But let’s be clear, we have a mental health crisis which isn’t going to be corrected by meditation apps and counselling services when people’s fundamental empowerment, their value as individual citizens and their true value as customers and employees to organisations is not celebrated in board rooms, county halls and Whitehall. Let’s remember we’re all in this life together and truly humane ethics within organisations are about how they serve the smallest voices in the system well.
gedanken.co.uk