SIR PETER Gershon, the head honcho of ‘government commerce’
and Britain’s most highly paid civil servant, has come up with a cunning plan.
He wants to sack tens of thousands of public-sector workers, particularly civil
servants.
Bill Mullins
These will be replaced by an army of ‘specialists’ who like
superman or superwoman can be sent to any part of the public sector –
hospitals, schools, police stations or JobCentres – and deliver ‘expert’
front-line services to the general public.
Gershon has already shown his financial and management
expertise in the private sector. He was managing Director of Marconi from 1994
to 1999, when he oversaw the company’s collapse, with £5 billion losses and
the sacking of 6,000 workers.
In a pre-Christmas present for Blair and Brown, Gershon
held a teach-in for them in Downing Street. His interim plans include merging
the 1,800 central government high street offices like JobCentres and benefit
offices with the 3,000-plus local government high street offices dealing with
housing, council tax and other council matters.
Jobs for the chop
If he gets his way, this will mean tens of thousand of
public sector jobs will be for the chop. But this would only be the beginning.
He wants to spend the ‘savings’ he estimates at up to £15 billion a year on
creating and training ‘specialist’ workers who would be sent to take over the
classroom from teachers, replace nurses in the NHS and to do police casework in
their spare time.
The Financial Times calls this: "as big a change in
the way the government does business as the privatisations of the 1980s and
1990s".
Gershon estimates that the £8 billion spent by the
government on policy making, regulation and inspection is a waste of money. He
also calls for a cut in the £7 billion spent ensuring that private contractors
doing government work have to comply with basic minimum standards, such as on
health and safety.
This he says is a waste of money, including the 5,000 civil
servants involved in checking that the regulations are being observed.
Gershon thinks that these compliance regulations are an
obstacle to big business getting its hands on some of the £120 billion a year
spent by the government to provide services to its citizens. They, apparently,
are a great burden on the private sector – read big-business’ profits.
Compliance regulations such as on safety, the TUPE
regulations on the transfer of staff to private companies and the minimum wage
regulations costs big business, according to The Financial Times, much more
than the £8 billion spent by the government.
Gershon’s remit is so wide that he is also proposing
wholesale changes to every public sector department. He wants private insurance
companies to take over the running of vehicle tax collection.
Higher level teaching assistants would replace teachers.
"Para-professionals" (whatever they are) would be drafted in to
become case managers for the police and medical and nursing support staff.
The Financial Times summarises another aspect of Gershon’s
proposals: "The new JobCentre Plus offices should be transformed into a
one-stop ‘high street retail network’ for people of working age. This would
handle tax-credit queries and benefit claims, answer queries on housing benefit
and council tax, and administer grants for free school meals and uniforms. A
single means test would replace the myriad existing ones."
Anybody who has used the new council-run one stop shops
will tell you it’s difficult enough now getting the overworked and underpaid
staff to deal with anything more than typing in your name and address.
Every over-worked civil servant and local council
front-line worker, as revealed almost every week in the pages of this paper,
will tell you they can hardly cope with the huge amount of enquiries already.
And they do this for appallingly low pay.
Victorian levels
Gershon’s plans would reduce the provision of public
services to Victorian levels for the mass of the population. But this doesn’t
matter as long as his pals in big business can rake in maximum profits.
Every public-sector trade union has to take this threat to
the jobs and working conditions of hundreds of thousands of their members
extremely seriously. Never before has the need for co-ordinated action across
the whole of the public sector been more urgent.
Gershon’s proposals are completely in line with New
Labour’s mantra of "private – good, public – bad". Lying behind this
thinking is the idea that the private sector is able to deliver services to the
public more efficiently than the public sector.
But privatisation over the last twenty years or more has
been a complete disaster. The coffers of big business are bulging at the
expense of the mass of ordinary people.
In the NHS, in the education services and in local
government and above all the national rail system, it has been a catalogue of
crisis and catastrophe for the workers in those industries and the working
class in general.
New Labour continue to rush headlong towards the next stage
of privatisation. The public sector unions must get their act together and
co-ordinate a massive campaign of opposition to the Gershon proposals.
The first thing they must do is explain to their members,
in a skilful and accessible way, what is at stake. At the same time they must
make it clear to the New Labour government that they will oppose these vicious
anti-working class proposals all the way.
The unions should give Brown and Blair a proper teach-in –
not in the language of top civil servants but in mass trade-union action. This
should include a united campaign of demonstrations and industrial action if
necessary.
And a campaign to defend the public sector, to bring back
all those parts that have been sold off and looted by big business into the
public sector.
In modern society, a properly funded and democratically
accountable public sector is the difference between a civilised existence for
millions of working people and the hell of an unrestrained capitalist market –
a market that seeks to maximise the profits of big business and let the needs
of the masses go to hell.
