Picking Losers

Government

• Hundreds of register offices across the country have been ordered to abandon a new online system for recording births, deaths and marriages in the latest IT fiasco to hit the government. The huge £6 million IT project has met with "complete system failure" and online registration has been suspended in half the 3,000 offices. Registrars have been told that a long-term solution will take "many months" and in the meantime those affected should revert to the old computer system, even though that means none of the hundreds of births, deaths and marriages that occur each day will be centrally recorded. Registrars have complained bitterly about the problems caused by the new system, which at times has forced them them to ask grieving family members to give details of their loved ones twice because the data has been lost. In many areas, multiple death certificates cannot be issued because of the problems. Multiple certificates are vital for transferring assets and pensions as companies do not accept photocopies as proof of death. The hardware and software, developed by Siemens and US group ManTech respectively, was tested extensively before being introduced at register offices late last year. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1739313.ece
• Patients could see operations postponed this summer as hospitals struggle to cope with the junior doctor recruitment fiasco, doctors' leaders said last night. Concern was voiced a week after two serious security breaches forced the Department of Health to suspend the new website junior doctors are meant to use to apply for jobs. Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, told MPs this week that the website would only return to action once ministers were satisfied confidential information provided by junior doctors was secure. However, consultants leaders warned the Government last night that the confusion had left hospitals in limbo, with no idea which junior doctors - if any - were going to start working for them this summer. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/03/nhealth303.xml
• Charles Clarke yesterday gave a strong hint he would not be stand for the Labour leadership by lavishing praise on Gordon Brown and describing him as one of the best chancellors for 200 years. The former home secretary had persistently argued that it would not be in the party's best interests to simply anoint Mr Brown as prime minister without a debate on Labour's future. He had even raised questions over his judgment, last year giving a remarkable interview to the Daily Telegraph in which he claimed Mr Brown had profound "psychological" issues to address; Mr Clarke variously accused him of lacking courage and vision, and being both uncollegiate and a control freak. http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,2071043,00.html
• All schoolchildren should have "happiness" lessons up to the age of 18 to combat growing levels of depression, according to a senior Government adviser. Pupils should study subjects such as how to manage feelings, attitudes to work and money, channelling negative emotions and even how to take a critical view of the media, said Lord Richard Layard, a Labour peer and professor of economics at the London School of Economics. In a speech last night, he said that Tony Blair's Respect programme - the crackdown on young offenders and problem families - was "far more repressive than preventative" and may be fuelling levels of depression. He said all state school pupils should receive tuition in "how to be happy" up to the age of 18 and their progress in the subject should feature in university applications. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/03/nhappy03.xml
• The Ministry of Defence plans to open its "X-Files" on UFO sightings to the public for the first time. Officials have not yet decided on a date for the release of the reports, which date back to 1967, but it is hoped to be within weeks. The move follows the decision by the French national space agency to release its UFO files in March, the first official body in the world to do so. http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,,2071030,00.html  

World  

Government  

• Tony Blair has firmly rejected Conservative calls for an independent inquiry into the July 7 bombings. David Cameron told MPs on Wednesday that revelations in the wake of the fertiliser bomb plot trial had raised "important questions". The Tory leader said this week's convictions "reminds us about the risks that we face", and said public wanted a full inquiry "to get to the truth". He said there was now a need for "a proper independent inquiry". But the prime minister insisted: "I have ruled out having another proper and independent inquiry." He added that the intelligence and security committee, which is made up of MPs and peers, had gone into "all of these details in immense detail".

With only days to go before Tony Blair steps down as our leader after 10 years, the debate over democracy is likely to hot up. Watching Hazel Blears bumble her way through five minutes of complete illogical nonsense whilst being grilled be the ever rude and slightly (unintentionally) amusing Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last night made me begin to think about the issue slightly more than I had previosuly. There were two clear issues raised in this interview that summed up new Labour (and probably the Tories as well).

As predicted, the Home Improvement Packs (HIPs) debate is rolling on and intensifying by the day. The Lords merits committee, chaired by Lord Filkin, published a report on the committee's findings, which concluded "We cannot but conclude that the government has not been able to convince the principal stakeholders in the housing market that their proposals as they now stand are worthwhile or sensible, or are likely to be effective for their declared purposes." In other words they are a complete waste of time and money.

Government  

• The government's home information packs came under renewed fire yesterday when a Lords committee said the packs had been stripped of their original purpose and were opposed by the property industry. The committee urged the government to take the criticism of the packs, also known as Hips, seriously before they are introduced on June 1. Estate agents and legal bodies have told the government that they have not had enough time to prepare for the packs. http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,2070232,00.html  
• Tony Blair effectively disowned his own Government's drive towards fortnightly rubbish collections yesterday when he came out in support of the weekly bin round.
  

Government

• Small business owners and the UK's main business representative organisations will meet today for the first of a new series of round table meetings to discuss key issues facing the UK's 4.3 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The new Small Business Forum will provide an informal way for the Government to engage with the small business community and an opportunity to seek the views of individuals and representative groups, on a range of policy issues. Members have been chosen to reflect the diversity of the small business community and the wide range of issues that affect this sector.

Surprise of the day: Labour party peers were 10 times more likely to get cushty jobs with government quangos than opposition counterparts. Twenty Labour peers to only two Tory and three Lib Dem peers have been handed top public sector posts - some earning up to £200k; though I guess they need the high earning salaries more than the Tories or Lib Dems to pay for their peerage in the first place.

I haven't watched it, but apparently on GMTV this morning Tony Blair said that there must be better ways to boost recycling rates than fortnightly bin collections. He described himself as a bit of a traditionalist on the idea according to the BBC. This comes just one day after the Dustmen's Union declared that weekly rubbish collections could be saved if town halls recycled more efficiently. Who actually backs this scheme apart from the jobsworths in the local councils and Whitehall? The Right Honourable Anthony Blair doesn't. Who would have thought, first the NHS and now local councils? The man is on a roll.

Well now we know how Tony Blair would vote in the poll. Yesterday he shot down Brown's hints that the NHS should be taken away from political control. He described it as "a great idea in theory", but warned it would disrupt the reforms and become a device for avoiding tough decisions. Blair also admitted that his programme of reform was slow to start off with and is unpopular with voters and professionals in the NHS.

Government  

• Tony Blair poured scorn yesterday on a proposal advanced by Gordon Brown's close political allies for putting the NHS under the control of an independent board free from day-to-day ministerial interference. The prime minister said the idea of taking the NHS out of the hands of politicians might sound good. But handing power to an independent board, representing the service's vested interests, could become a device for avoiding tough decisions. The proposal for NHS independence was advanced by Mr Brown's supporters in the run-up to the Labour party conference as a key change in health policy that the chancellor wanted to make if he took over as prime minister. It paralleled his well received decision in 1997 to give control of interest rates to the Bank of England's independent monetary committee. http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,2069363,00.html  
• The gap between what voters in the south-east of England pay in tax and get back in public services has widened sharply since Tony Blair won power a decade ago today. The calculations by the Financial Times set an ominous backdrop for Labour ahead of Thursday's local elections. While the prosperity of the south-east has long meant its residents pay more into the exchequer than they get out, the region's net contribution to the national Budget has increased sharply since 1997. This perceived inequity could help to explain why Labour is likely to do badly this week in southern England, where thousands of crucial swing voters have seen their standard of living rise more slowly than the economy has grown. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/a2bd6eb4-f77f-11db-86b0-000b5df10621.html

EU

Government

It is rumoured that Gordon Brown will give the NHS independence from political control in his first 100 days in power. No doubt he is hoping that this will be right up there with his decision to give the Bank of England independence in 1997. Would this be a good move for the NHS or another smoke screen? Please leave your comments below and/or vote in the poll.

"Private security staff who operate prison vans will decide from today whether young adults awaiting trial in London are mentally strong enough to survive in the toughest prisons." I had to read that sentence a few times before I realised I read it right in the first place. Indeed, according to the Guardian, White Van Man will be doubling up as Sigmund Freud. What is going on? The article continues "Serco private escort officers staffing the vans which move prisoners between courts and prisons in London will decide whether a young adult on remand is too much of a suicide risk to be held at an adult prison and should be sent instead to Feltham young offender institution." If I were one of these van drivers I would point blank refuse - you can not put that sort of responsibility on security staff who have no training or understanding of psychology.

Nobody has spun a story better than Alistair Campbell. He was one of the big players behind new Labour and one of the big reasons they have won three elections. He is portrayed as a heartless and ruthless character and will use every trick in the book to get policy through. While Blair was the smiling face with the "like me, like me" speeches, Campbell was always lurking in the background - it all seemed rather sinister to me. He also always seemed to have the last laugh as well. Though now he is about to be apoplectic with laughter.

More bitter experience. More unfinished business.

LP has pointed out The Guardian article in which Lord Falconer declares that Tony Blair has "big regrets" about not tackling the culture of public-service provision earlier. "I don't think we even really clocked that agenda until four or five years on", he is reported as saying.

This is looking like a theme. Why would the departing leader and his supporters be drawing attention to his failures? Has anyone got an alternative explanation to the one I posited yesterday?

Government

Forget the legacy and the lecture circuit. Tony Blair has no intention of retiring from the front-line, nor even of being a good back-seat driver. He is preparing for the next phase of his political career, not for life after politics. How else are we to interpret his article in yesterday's Telegraph?

Mr Blair is positioning himself as the voice of wizened authority, of hardbitten realism, of painful lessons learned through bitter experience. Even the picture accompanying the article displays a harder-nosed Blair, staring out from the paper with a look of contempt that seems strangely familiar.

Anthony Blair	Alan B'Stard

The Telegraph interpreted Mr Blair's article as an admission that he "got it wrong on problem families". But that was merely a tasty morsel offered out to a right-wing journal. It was not the main message. The main message was that you need experience to understand the real causes and solutions to social problems, experience that Blair has and Cameron does not.

JG has been highlighting the MTAS fiasco. Besides the fine illustration it provides of this Government's incompetence and refusal to take responsibility for their mistakes, it also sheds an interesting sidelight on another bad Labour policy. On Thursday's Question Time, Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, explained the necessity to scrap the old system in the following words:

"I have heard, for example, from clinicians about how applications used to turn up at hospitals, they'd put them in a pile and literally pull them out at random. So it was all agreed that that system wasn't right."

A bad system is no reason or excuse to introduce something worse. And one of the main criticisms of MTAS is that it made the selection process more, not less random. But equally importantly, does this not describe almost exactly the "lottery" approach to assigning places in schools to students, introduced by egalitarian Labour councils and approved by this Labour government? Why is a random approach wrong for selecting junior doctors but right for selecting students?

But let's be fair and give credit where credit is due if a Minister manages to be sensible (a task made all the more compelling by the fact that Ms Flint is by a long chalk the hottest minister and probably the hottest MP in parliament, and that is not intended to damn with faint praise). Yesterday's Telegraph reports that Ms Flint has taken a robust and rational stance against the call from Alcohol Concern to make it illegal for parents to give their children alcohol. If parents can't teach their children how to drink responsibly, it is hard to know who should have that responsibility. And how would such a law have been enforced? Ms Flint is to be congratulated on resisting blinkered pressure groups, giving short shrift to such a nannyish idea, and choosing masterly inaction over ill-considered action.

Now if she could only teach the rest of her colleagues to apply the same approach, we might have fewer MTAS-style fiascos.

Congratulations to Dr Crippen for his massive success in getting the deficient NHS recruitment IT system shut down. Whilst it is too late for all those people who have had their personal details disclosed and for the tax payers who have had to stump up for this mess, at least it is a real disclosure that this government can not do IT projects. Now will the government accept that it can not do IT projects and shelve plans for the ID card scheme? I doubt it, but I hope the electorate take note. An ID card scheme will be far, far bigger on scale and will hold personal details (like the MTAS) on all of us. Do you still trust the government to keep the details secure? I certainly don't, and I don't want to pay the billions of pounds to test this fear either. Scrap it now, Gordon (you are in charge, right?) for the sake of our security and our bank balances.