I said I would return to some interesting YouGov polling commissioned by the Adam Smith Institute for its new report, Britons Say No to Nanny.
Key findings include that 9 per cent of people believe politicians and civil servants are well-equipped to make decisions on ‘my’ behalf, with 65 per cent in total disagreeing. Hurrah for choice and plurality and innovation and choice, you might think. But then 38 per cent of people believe the government has a duty to provide secure housing for people like ‘me’ whereas only 29 think not.
This goes back to the endless arguments we have – and will continue to have unless we change the way we think – over the role and therefore the size of the state. Or, as John Rentoul puts it more snappily in a column for Wednesday’s Independent, eating your cake and having it. If we want the government to do and provide and pay for all these things, we have to be prepared to pay for it in taxes – and we means lots of us, paying lots of tax either directly or indirectly.
A good example of this conundrum is Tim Montgomerie’s tweet:
This is the question facing all of us. If we want X, it needs to be paid for. I want to see greater transparency, greater choice, greater innovation and lower taxes – but I also know that we cannot continue to spend as we have been.
Everything is always too expensive – you never hear anyone saying that X is really cheap, or even really good value. We all value different things that our taxes pay for, for different reasons, but realistically none of us like paying for them. The real question therefore is what do we need, what do we like, and what are we willing to pay for? Until that question is answered, we cannot continue to say leave me alone to decide for myself, but I want to keep eating that cake as well.
New blogpost: Leave me alone (except for that. And that. Oh and that too) http://t.co/mq4CMmgZ #fb
New blogpost: Leave me alone (except for that. And that. Oh and that too) http://t.co/2w71qxVy
“@PlatformTen: New blogpost: Leave me alone (except for that. And that. Oh and that too) http://t.co/TTsssDsv”>> brilliant piece
Last night’s blogpost: Leave me alone (except for that. And that. Oh and that too) http://t.co/2w71qxVy
I don’t think you’ve fully described the problem. There’s also the boring stuff such as efficiency, effectiveness and outcomes based actions.
I will restrict my examples to government online services but I think the analysis is easily extensible.
Back at the turn of the century much was made of getting the population online (of course it’s still happening, see, e,g., http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/02/martha-lane-fox-one-of-unwritten-bits.html). And, indeed, where would we be, in our lunch hour, without internet banking?
There was a big push to enable public services online. And this is the start of the slippery slope. Government started spending money on building stuff that perhaps it didn’t need to. It’s as though they looked out of the window and saw, e.g., Tesco , and said “we can do that” rather than look out of the window see e.g., Nestle, and notice that they decided to use Tesco rather than do it themselves.
I might indeed prefer to do my taxes online rather than find a stamp and an envelope, but, e.g., for self-assessment, does the current government portal save me any time or convenience for collating the information or actually filling in the form?
It seems like they’ve produced an extremely expensive letter box to save me the price of a stamp – and sell it in on the basis of quicker refunds. Is that a business case?
If they had done a Nestle and enable me to do tax though, e.g., my current account – somewhere I go already, then it would seem that government got what it wanted, in terms of outcome but without building and maintaining its own customer channels, doing customer insight and all the other customer stuff that really is the expertise of the private and charity/third sectors. And in the same way that Nestle gets resilience through multiple customer channels so would government.
A simpler example is the much lauded “car tax disc online”. Do you do your car insurance online? If the government wants us to do tax discs on line it could put them with online insurance companies. But no, it built a platform for goodness knows how much money, fuller discussion here:
http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/132/89/
but among other things it demonstrates “that about a 40% of us are content to pay £2.50 extra for the privilege of helping HMG save 80p”
And so on. Without a greater focus on the need to enable/facilitate rather than attempt to replicate, but expensively and badly, we’re only having half the discussion.
New blogpost: Leave me alone (except for that. And that. Oh and that too) http://t.co/2w71qxVy #fb
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