UK borders, cuts and promises
If you read one piece today, read this one by the FT’s Nick Timmins. It goes to the heart of the UK Borders Agency row, the NHS row, the welfare reforms and much else.
We are a country that is less well-off than it used to be (subject to the euro crisis, perhaps a lot worse off even than the number crunchers currently calculate). But politicians of all shades don’t relish telling you what that might mean for the public services you’ve come to know.
Just briefly, on the UK Borders Agency, talking to someone who has now looked at all the evidence at the Home Office, it looks to them as though Brodie Clark, now resigned as head of UKBA, habitually relaxed security to stop excessive queues.
Ministers obviously think he pulled the emergency cord too readily and should only have done so if the police were about to bring in dogs and water cannon.
He appears to have taken the view that to run a dignified, half-respectful service that didn’t treat ordinary travellers insultingly badly, given the resources he had, he had to relax security and get the flow of visitors up through border checks.
No doubt he’ll emphasise health and safety and public order worries when he speaks to the home affairs select committee today, but the feeling you come away with is that he was trying to do the best with reducing resources, to make some sort of fist of his job.
Home Secretary Theresa May
The Office for Budget Responsiblity addresses the demographic time bomb in this piece of research from the summer, suggesting that even if the government managed to pull off its deficit reduction plan, they or their successors look like having to go through something similar all over again, finding extra money equivalent to 6 per cent of GDP, to cope with the pension, healthcare and other needs of an ageing population.
On a completely different note, Peter Kellner wrote a piece published in September which, amongst other things, looks at whether Labour should start thinking of promising less in order to make sure what it promises can be delivered (p.9 onwards particularly in his article.
The government would say that it is dealing with a lot of this through changes to state and public sector pensions, for instance, and re-thinking the way the NHS works. Well, up to a point. They are also promising that thanks to “more from less” management wizardry etc, a lot of public goods at the point of delivery will stay the same – you won’t feel the pain.
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