Michael Gove plays with his organ

Looks like Michael Gove to me.

Bloody good playing anyway.

Here.

A university experience from America

I have been following the university applications of a friend's son with some interest. He applied to eight institutions, all of them established and esteemed universities and all of them American. In the circumstances that is hardly surprising because my friend is American and lives with her family in Massachusetts. Her son has always done well at school, obtaining very high grades in almost all subjects. He is not a wholly outstanding student but his grades gave him a realistic chance of a place at Harvard or Yale. Despite being shortlisted for interview at both, he was not offered a place at either and instead had to choose between two other very well known universities. I won't say which because it doesn't matter for the purpose of today's screed. What I want to write about is an aspect of how the whole process works for people of modest means in the USA.

Unlike here, there is no culture of expectation and no culture of entitlement. The concept of education being "free" is unknown because everyone knows it is not free, it is just a matter of who pays for it. Suggest to my friend that her son should be entitled to have his tuition and keep paid for and her question will be "who by?" (they are not very good at 'whom' over there and care not a jot if a sentence ends with a preposition). Parents understand that universities are independent institutions and have to raise money to pay the costs of providing the tuition and other facilities that youngsters wish to use to increase their prospects as they enter adulthood. Equally, the universities exist to provide a service and have to justify that existence through offering a service that is sufficiently attractive to entice people to pay. Insufficient paying customers and the course is scaled back or eliminated. The thinking at the universities is not that they are entitled to paying customers and some means must be found to pay for however many courses they choose to offer, it is that a loss on one course means students on well-subscribed courses will be at risk of receiving a lesser service than would be the case if poodle varnishing were left off the curriculum.

My friend's son applied not just for a place but also for funding from university bursaries and scholarships. His parents have ordinary jobs, each paying under the national average wage. They have saved for each child to provide a college fund but their resources have not allowed them to create a big enough pot to do more than make a contribution towards the costs of a university course. Two factors affect the decision about which offer to accept. The boy has to decide which course is best for him but he also has to consider the cost implications of that decision. One offer will require the family to find about $4,000 a year more than the other course which calls for a nominal contribution. That's a significant sum for them, particularly because there are younger siblings, one of whom will be of university age while the eldest is still an undergraduate. The parents have said he should choose the course that he thinks will serve him best and that he should not concern himself with the financial side of things. No doubt he will have little appreciation of what it would mean from day-to-day to find $4,000 each year, but it is hard to imagine that even a teenager could leave it out of his thinking entirely.

For the parents the position is simple. Their son has an opportunity to go to a very good university and gain a qualification that, subject to his own endeavours, should equip him for a good career. They did not have that opportunity and will do everything they can to ensure their child utilises his. There is no scintilla of remorse, envy or bitterness that they will have to make a contribution towards the costs of tuition any more than their son feels such emotions at the thought he will have to find part-time work throughout his college years to keep himself in beer and condoms. American college students have a long history of taking evening and weekend jobs to pay their way. My experience is that they make excellent waiting staff at restaurants because they are bright and attentive and have enough about them to know that the more you please the customer the larger the tip is likely to be. Some go into prostitution, in which field the same rules apply.

Last week there was uproar among the professionally entitled when the London Metropolitan University announced a plan to cut the number of courses offered from 557 to 160. There is a delicious article in a newspaper local to FatBigot Towers giving a headline figure of 400 courses being abolished, with a first paragraph saying it is more than 400 and only by the seventh paragraph does the writer do the sums and work out that 557 minus 160 is 397 (here). The London Metropolitan University is an amalgamation of a number of former polytechnics. The greatest distincition achieved by any department of the constituent parts was probably the Law faculty at the City of London Polytechnic which was as good as that of many minor universities, but there is no basis for arguing that LMU is anything other than a make-weight new university. Why does anyone suggest it, or any part of it, is entitled to remain in being if it can't pay its way?

The contrast with the USA is marked. Universities over there are forced to close courses all the time when they don't attract sufficient paying customers. Most marked is that they attract paying customers who pay with their own money save where the university has funds which it allocates to those who show the greatest aptitude for the subject according to the judgment of the university itself. Now, I am not so blind as to ignore the existence of a degree of tokenism in US universities, especially where future funding is dependent on appearing to give advantage to minorities today; but that is all part of the same process - they sometimes take the wrong person and exclude the right person this year because doing so ensures 1,000 of the right people can be funded next year.

This field is one of a long list in which good intentions have combined with electoral bribes to create a situation in the UK that is fundamentally artificial. We seem to have, at least among the political chatterati, an established phrase that is treated as the starting point of all discussion about higher education, namely: "free university education". Any call for contributions towards tuition fees is seen as an affront to reasonable expectation because the assumed ideal is that all students should get whatever they want at someone elses expense. No sane person could ever talk of "free university education". University education is a hugely expensive business, it is not and never has been free. Someone has to pay for it. Over here the culture is that taxpayers should pay for it, over there the culture is that the student and/or his family have to pay for it.

Provided there is a sensible system of scholarships and bursaries for the promising but impecunious, those who deserve university places will receive them (yes, some will always slip through the net for more reasons than you could shake an elephant's willy at but that will always happen). Provided universities are dependent on people using their own money to decide which courses are worth paying for, they can remain in being but only if they offer good courses at a competitive cost. When both the customer and the supplier have their limitless demands met by the milk of the taxation udder you will get low-grade courses being followed by low-grade students to the benefit of nobody other than the very people who are currently making the most noise about the London Metropolitan University - udder suckers who can only maintain their positions with the near presence of a soft and generous teat.

As usual I have waffled all around the houses but I think there is one point about my friend's experience that is more important than any other. Her son's education is a private thing, it's funding is a private thing, both are sorted out in the family and between the family and the university. It is not the business of anyone else and it is not the responsibility of anyone else. The expensive dead hand of The State is nowhere to be seen.

And everyone is happy.

The graduate tax might be rather cunning

There have been renewed mutterings over the last few days that an additional income tax might be levied on university graduates. It's all rather vague at the moment, presumably because it is a novel idea to introduce an income tax surcharge for one group of people so the government is letting out little hints in order to see what reaction they receive. Obviously the usual suspects are against it - trades unions, Labour politicians, quangocrats and university employees. The proposal could be to expand university places by fifty percent and these members of the awkward squad would condemn it for not being sixty percent, so we needn't take much notice of them ... unless they support their objections with sound reasoning.

As I understand the present system students are required to pay tuition fees each year and to provide for their living costs. Indeed I remember having a pupil about twelve to fifteen years ago who had gone through university and the Bar course under that system and left with debts approaching £40,000. It is the spectre of young people being saddled with hefty liabilities that invites examination of alternatives. Now, it shouldn't be thought that all students incur big debts, many go to their local university and live at home, many receive grants, scholarships or bursaries to help defray the costs; nonetheless with the student contribution to annual tuition fees currently set in excess of £3,000 (it's said to be a maximum, ha ha ha) that's still the best part of ten grand for a three year course.

The massive expansion of the university sector over the last fifteen years has provided the benefit of call centre workers having some specialist knowledge of media, fashion and football but it has also meant that the old system of grants for those without the means to pay became unaffordable. When the last government increased the tuition fee contribution they consistently justified their position by arguing that graduates earn more on average than non-graduates. That argument only goes so far because there are only so many jobs for which a university degree is actually necessary (or, at least, of significant advantage). Increasing the number of graduates does not increase the number of graduate jobs. It might allow someone to join a business one rung up the ladder but the difference in lifetime earnings for someone in manufacturing or retail cannot be calculated. I know graduates working in retail who did join a rung or two up the ladder but further promotion depended on experience so by the time they reached the third or fourth rung they were on a par with their non-graduate contemporaries. They had earned a little more for a few years while their colleagues had been earning for the three years they had incurred debts.

Essentially the same argument seems to be being put forward by the current government but in a slightly different way. The clearest hint given of current thinking was by David Willetts last weekend who is reported as having used the phrase "higher contribution to the benefits of the university education they have received". That is deliberately vague but it has been interpreted by some as the graduate tax expounded by Vince Cable a few weeks ago (reported here). Cable's proposal was quite wide-ranging and expressly kick-started a debate rather than being a fully formed policy. There is much to be said for it although it's not without its difficulties.

As with so many problems the current government has to address the first observation is that they really shouldn't have to start from here. This is just one more in the long list of utter failures concreted in place by Labour over the last decade to try to buy votes regardless of the longer-term consequences. However, we are where we are so the first question should be to ask what is wrong with the current system. I have identified the two main problems already - students leaving university with heavy debts and insufficient graduate jobs being available to provide the added earnings required to pay back those debts. These are both consequences of one thing and one thing alone - political interference. In this instance the same type of interference has caused both, namely the desire to buy votes by promising university education (almost) regardless of the suitability of individual students. It started when John Major turned the Polytechnics into Universities and has been a boast of every government since that young people have better educational opportunities than ever before. All that has really been achieved is the opportunity for many to get worthless pieces of paper when previously they would have had to earn a living for three years.

The ideal situation is that each University should be wholly independent and should sink or swim according to its ability to attract students. If the university is able to raise funds from graduates or businesses or elsewhere to provide bursaries it will have more students, apart from that it's pay-as-you-go. How many would offer courses in Football Studies or Feminist Sociology? I've no idea, if they can get the business that's fine if they can't they'll have to offer something useful.

This will require a massive culture-change, one that will take many years of small steps, weaning the universities off the tax teat and leaving them to "struggle" for students just like the University of Buckingham and BPP University College. I see the graduate tax as a step in the right direction albeit for a somewhat quirky reason. It seems to be the case that current students are not put-off university by the threat of debt, perhaps the lie of higher earnings has not been exposed sufficiently or they think they will be among the lucky few who will secure a true graduate job. It's rather different if there is a long-term tax consequence because liability will not (on the face of it) end when the cost of their tuition has been repaid. Perhaps there will be a long-stop but it is, after all, a tax and we all know they rarely go down, indeed once established the possibility for expanding them has been seized by every government in living memory.

Given the choice of having your fees paid by the taxpayer and then facing an unlimited tax or securing private funding, I know which I would find more attractive. Private funding might involve the need to reimburse part or all of the money but you can be as sure as the Stoke-on-Trent College of Art is now Staffordshire University that it will be cheaper than the new tax.

What is the quirk? Here's where I think Mr Cable and Mr Willetts are being rather clever. As the availability of non-tax bursaries for able students expands so incurring debt will be less attractive. It's not attractive now but lots are in the same boat. so they don't see themselves at a disadvantage compared to their peers. The fewer in that boat, the more they will be forced to examine whether incurring debt is right for them. I see this plan as a back-door way to reduce undergraduate numbers and weed-out pointless courses at third rate institutions, and to do so not by having students sign-up to it but by having them follow a different path. The taxpayer will not lose out because the universities will be funded by government only for those students who volunteer for the tax.

As I say it's one step in the right direction, albeit one that comes at a price for the students caught by it. Sufficient lead time will focus universities' attention on raising funds privately to entice quality students and should mean relatively few choose to commit economic suicide in order to get a fancy certificate signed by the Vice Chancellor, Professor M Mouse.

The problem with new graduates

By coincidence, the subject raised in Mr Stan's latest missive cropped up in conversation today when I chewed the fat with a couple of old friends. Mr Stan pointed out the futility of pushing up to fifty percent (by number, not amputation) of young people into university and saddling them with huge debts to pay for course fees and maintenance costs and he proposed a way out. The friends I was talking to included a chap in his forties whose son has just finished a degree in International Studies, or something like.

I recall talking to the boy about it before he went to an obscure midlands Polytechnic that used to specialise in engineering draughtsmanship until it pretended to be a university and started creaming in fees for courses in waffly nonsense. It doesn't offer courses in engineering draughtsmanship any more, that would be far too useful. He explained that the course concentrated on the study of international organisations like the UN and its many sub-constructs. It seemed to me to be just the sort of thing you should pay for if you want to waste three years of your life. But I digress.

The boy's father said his son was about to graduate and had been looking for work. The positions he seemed likely to be able to fill were just the sorts of jobs he could have obtained three years ago as a school-leaver with A-levels. Of course he is not an 18 year-old with A-levels he is a 21 year-old with a degree, yet his starting rung on the ladder of work appears to be what it was three years ago.

This doesn't surprise me because the "old-fashioned" demarcation between "graduate jobs" and "non-graduate jobs" was based on substance not pieces of paper. Some jobs required young people whose brains had been extended by true academic study so that they had something extra to offer by reason of their advanced education. That is not to say that others could not move into those positions by proving themselves to have the wherewithal despite not having had the formal academic training, but the job required an extended mind so graduates were the first port of call for the employer. It presupposed that a university degree in certain subjects would equip the graduate with the necessary skills. Employers learned over time which universities and courses produced people best suited for junior positions in their businesses. I do not ignore that any degree course will provide a graduate with knowledge he or she would not otherwise have but acquiring knowledge is different from brain-training.

I suppose it is inevitable that having more people going to university will not change job prospects very much. After all the presence of more graduates cannot create new "graduate jobs". The same jobs are available whether the applicants have been to university or not because businesses need what they need and those needs do not change when more applicants have more certificates.

Two rather unfortunate consequences flow from this. One is that graduates, like my friend's son, find they are no better placed than they were when they left school; indeed they are in a worse position because they now have heavy debts to pay off. The other is that many first degrees are not valued by employers any greater than they value A-levels, so youngsters with first degrees in nonsense from the new wave of quasi-universities are under pressure to commit more money and more time to obtaining a Master's degree in the hope that it will provide an edge when the time for work comes. That is the course my friend's son is minded to follow because his first degree appears to give him no advantage over a school-leaver.

The other friend involved in the conversation has a granddaughter who has been offered a job provided she completes a Master's degree. Ten years ago that job would have required only a 2:2 Bachelor's degree but now everyone seems to receive a 2:1 or First so the prospective employer has upped the stakes. She and/or her parents will incur another £15,000 of debt in order for that extra degree to be obtained.

Except in the fields of work in which specialist qualifications are required we seem to be approaching a position in which most bachelor's degrees from most universities carry no more weight than A-levels. I find it desperately sad to hear of graduates working in call centres or as junior managers in fast food outlets. The sadness is not in the fact that the particular people are in those particular jobs, they might be exactly the right jobs for them. The sadness is in the false expectation generated in the teenagers who have been pumped into universities.

"Get a degree and you'll get a better job" is patent nonsense, although it was exactly the lie told to justify the last government's target of half the country going to university. There is no sea of unfilled jobs that can only be filled if there are more graduates. Nor are there very many positions in which a degree will allow a junior employee to perform better than he would had he started at eighteen and worked at it for three years rather than being at university for that period.

I have known my friend's son since he was one year old. He is not academically gifted. He's far from thick but he could never do a job that required someone clever. He wants a "graduate job" because he is a graduate. He will be disappointed, all the more so for having a student loan to repay when he finally starts work. My other friend's granddaughter is academically gifted. She already has the qualification to do the job she wants to do, but because the market is flooded with young people with degrees she has to spend another year and a lot of money getting a qualification she does not need.

It's a real dog's breakfast. It's also a classic example of the consequences of government seeking short-term popularity by promising benefits it could never deliver. The result is not young people springing into splendidly well payed jobs that did not exist before, it is young people doing the same job they would always have done but starting it later and with thousands of pounds of debt around their neck.

The only way to social mobility

I don't understand class. Well, in a way I suppose I do, but only in a way. I am from a working class background in that my father earned his living through manual work, but after spending my working life in the law I count as middle class. It was once the case that barristers were upper-middle class according to some classometer or another, but as far as I can tell that is not so these days. Yet I am not and never could be a toff.

Undoubtedly I now speak differently from how I did as a teenager, I smoothed some edges because people expect their brief to speak "proper". Early in my career I was appearing on behalf of a youngster who was following the family path by stealing things. He was only about 16 or 17 and already had an impressive string of convictions. The family was out in force to give their support at a preliminary hearing. He was refused bail and after the short hearing it was my duty to explain the state of play to his parents, cousins and grandmother (known, inevitably, as his "nan"). When pausing for breath at one point, Nan took the opportunity to turn to her daughter and say "aw, dunee speak noice". Your criminal classes expect their brief to speak noice.

There, you see, an example of class in action. To me, the criminal class consists of those who make their living from criminal activities, those who supplement their income from criminal activity and those who hit people. A great many of them exist. They know they have chosen to act as they do, they know they might get caught and they know they cannot defend themselves in court as well as a trained lawyer can - even a lawyer of pretty modest ability. So they are always grateful for any help they are given and go out of their way to thank you at every step in the court process. They will happily go to a specialist criminal solicitor with a cockney accent, but their barrister must speak like a gent. That's just part of the natural way of things for them. But woe betide you if you speak down to them. They might be the criminal class but they know their instructions pay your bills so they expect respect and politeness at all times.

I speak of the "criminal class" as shorthand for people who choose to behave in certain ways, ways that happen to be against our current laws. Whether they count as a class for the purposes of politicians and the great concept of "social mobility" is beyond my knowledge, I would guess they don't but I don't know.

When I read anything about social mobility there is one central theme running through the piece. It is not about getting invited to a Duke's cocktail party or playing polo in the grounds of Windsor Castle, it is about education. In particular, it is about families with no history of working in fields that require high educational qualifications and the difficulties faced by their children in gaining access to those jobs. Since I started writing this piece I have completed my daily blog reading and have found that both Mr Raedwald and Mr Tyler have addressed this very point, but I'm going to plough on anyway.

Spending a working lifetime in the law you get to meet a very wide range of people. At one end of my historic spectrum of clients were uneducated thugs, at the other were senior executives of multinational corporations. Many of the former were more pleasant to deal with and more sensible than many of the latter. And among my legal friends and acquaintances are numerous QCs, a fair number of judges and a smattering of members of the House of Lords. That is just a consequence of the world in which I worked, it says nothing about me other than that I worked with a lot of people of greater ability and/or drive than me. At no time did I find the social background of anyone to be relevant to any issue I had to address.

Perhaps the time when it could have come into play was when assessing applicants for pupillage - the apprenticeship barristers have to undertake. All applicants submit a detailed synopsis of their education, their hobbies and any non-academic achievements they have to their name. Inevitably they include the name and location of their secondary school and university. In the three different sets of chambers from which I practised I am not aware of a single example of anyone being refused an interview or a pupillage because of where they went to school or university, still less because of what their parents did for a living. In real life, outside the dreamy world of politicians with an agenda, the quality of the applicant is what matters. We did not want to waste a scarce pupillage on a turkey any more than an employer wants to take on someone who will be a burden to his business.

As it happens we took plenty of people from nicely expensive schools, but only because they appeared to have the necessary wherewithal. On occasions we were wrong and they were in fact turkeys. Equally, we took on plenty from St Bog-Standard's Comprehensive school in the town of Notta Niceplace, only to find some of them were turkeys too. What mattered was not where they came from but who they were at they time they presented themselves to us. Good people from poor backgrounds were still good people and an asset. Poor people from a wealthy background were still poor people and a burden. Education at Eton and Cambridge simply don't help if you are competing against someone better than you, no matter where they went to school and university.

The key to the type of social mobility I am addressing is education. Pure and simple. It is about having a mind that has been developed throughout the school and university years. It cannot be engineered, it cannot be spun, it can happen in one way only - by providing a strong academic education for those children of strong academic ability. The fee-paying schools will always provide this and for that reason they will turn out plenty of would-be doctors, accountants and lawyers. There is no point pretending that children educated in the State sector can gain access to these jobs unless they are provided with the same opportunities for academic development as those against whom they will later challenge for the limited number of available places.

A range of factors combine to make it difficult for many children educated in State schools to gain access to the professions despite them having the natural abilities required. Four factors seem particularly important to me.

First, academic education is valued insufficiently as a good in itself. Because not everyone can do it, so it is seen by some as being undesirable.

Secondly, targets and league tables dictated by politicians make it more important for a school to squeeze as many as possible into a C grade for fear of the consequences if insufficient numbers of pupils meet the target. Resources that might be better targeted at stretching some from a B to an A or a C to a B are instead focussed on the natural Ds and Es to move them up a grade despite it being of no real utility to those children themselves.

Thirdly, far too few children are advised to aim for these jobs. I don't know this as a fact, my view is based wholly on things I have been told by people who did make it and related their experiences of "career advice" at their State school. The finest example of this was described to me many years ago by a dear friend with whom I worked for several years, it involves unashamed name-dropping on my part, but I'll risk my reader's opprobrium. The lady barrister in question told me that when she was at school she was advised to aim for a career as a secretary and to learn short-hand and typing to increase her chances. Her name is Patricia Scotland, she is now the Attorney-General.

Fourthly, and perhaps most absurdly, those who are not burdened by the first three factors or who have had the strength to overcome them must then face university. Some grants are available but not many. It is an inevitable consequence of the ludicrous policy of cramming as many people into university as possible that it is not feasible for the taxpayer to cover the cost of course fees and maintenance for all those whose families cannot afford it themselves. One hears tales of students graduating with £30,000 or more of debts. It is necessarily the case that some very able young people will not be prepared to take on such a liability and will forgo a university education despite being eminently suited to it. It is also necessarily the case that some who do attend university will be deterred from taking professional qualifications because the additional cost/debt is a step too far. And, quite obviously, those who are deterred by cost will mostly come from families of modest means.

Social mobility is nothing to do with "class" as such. It is everything to do with providing academic education for children of an academic bent. No one seems to complain when special sports or theatre schools combine general education with specialist development of the particular talents for which the pupils have been selected. When the England football team is ailing or there is only one British male in the top fifty in the world at tennis, cries go up for special provision to be made to identify the most talented youngsters and nurture them. Everyone involved knows that not all those who show talent at age twelve or fourteen or whatever is the cut-off point will turn into professional players, everyone also knows that some who are pretty average at that age will develop their talents later. Yet the principle is sound - identify those who appear to have a special talent, develop it as well as you can and provide the finance needed to allow it to develop. The same applies to academic ability.

Unless that is done, social mobility will remain nothing but a dream for far too many people who started just as I did and just as my accountant did, and just as my GP did and just as the Attorney-General did.

Health and education, think fruit and veg

All enterprises operate according to the pressures they face. If you have a market stall selling fruit and veg you have to buy produce and sell it for a profit or you pack up and find something else to do. The pressures on such a business are almost all about profit. What are the overheads? How much does stock cost? How must wastage is involved? At what price can the stock be sold? Wastage involves a number of factors some of which are imposed by law. If you sell produce of unsatisfactory quality your customer can claim redress and your reputation might suffer. If you sell produce that is unfit for human consumption you might face prosecution. The law imposes a quality threshold and it dictates the minimum you should pay any staff you employ, but apart from that everything is about making a margin between buying price and selling price. The position is essentially the same for every business in the private sector. There are certain legal constraints on what you can do but apart from that you either create a sufficient profit to make it worthwhile or you close.

Privately-funded education thrived for generations without government targets and league tables. Not all schools in the private sector survived. Those who couldn't make the grade had to close and others arose in their place where there was perceived to be unfulfilled demand that could be met at an affordable price. So also with privately-funded hospitals. If they were not delivering a service people were prepared to pay for they would go to the wall.

One freedom the private sector has is to reject potential customers who cannot afford the fees or who would cause trouble. That does not apply in the public sector for so long as there is a legal right to medical treatment and a legal obligation on parents to send their children to school. But leaving these special factors to one side there is a particular pressure on state schools and medical services that the private sector does not have, and that is political interference.

If the government is running schools and hospitals it knows that problems can cost votes, so it feels the need to be seen to be acting to anticipate difficulties that might arise and correct those that have arisen. This is why we have countless initiatives being forced on teachers and medical staff, often before the previous initiative in the same area has taken full effect. The emphasis is on what's good for the politicians rather than on delivering the best possible service at ground level. And with every change comes a stream of paper going through numerous layers of bureaucracy, it flows down from the top and then another stream of paper heads in the opposite direction in order to report back on how the initiative has operated.

Contrast this to the position in the private sector in which the overriding need is to keep administrative costs to a minimum so that the best possible service can be provided for the lowest possible price. Of course they have quality controls but these are the responsibility of the hospital general manager and the head teacher who knows that failure means the possible loss of his job and collapse of the whole business.

A further contrast is that there is no pressure for uniformity in the private sector. To my mind this is one of the most costly, damaging and misguided aspects of state provision. There is no more a single correct way to provide medical care or to teach than there is a single correct way to bowl a cricket ball or butter a slice of bread. Seeking uniformity of practice stifles the sort of initiative that leads to improved practices. Seeking uniformity of outcome is simply absurd. There is no logical basis for saying that, for example, lung cancer recovery rates should be roughly the same all over the country or that resources in every hospital should be allocated so as to ensure that no patient has to wait longer than an arbitrary target time before being seen by a consultant. The former ignores inevitable regional differences in lifestyle and the latter is both administratively expensive and hugely wasteful as other work is put on ice in order to meet the target.

What is often overlooked when state provision of services is discussed is that the political pressure to fiddle with everything is both inevitable and entirely reasonable. No government can afford to sit back and say "we are not seeking to improve things" without risking its political future. Part of the reason for this is an apparently widespread belief that the government can effect improvements. I have grave doubts about this but then it really depends on how you define improvement. Can they change things to create an impression that an identified problem has been alleviated in the short-term? Yes, of course they can. But at what cost to other aspects of the service? Take a few million out of the budget to pay for a new gimmick and you might buy a good headline but that money has to be taken from another part of the system; there is no way of knowing whether the perceived solution to one problem is a price worth paying unless you can measure and compare the detriment suffered elsewhere.

I do not see how political interference can be avoided for so long as the government has direct responsibility for running things. This applies not just to schools and hospitals but to every other service it provides, but it is seen most keenly in the electoral battleground of the three Rs - reading writing and rheumatism. Remove direct political control and you remove the massively expensive need (for, in reality, it is a need) to fiddle with the system and monitor every aspect of it from on high.

Are health and education too important to be left to local decision-making by individual schools and hospitals? It is often asserted that they are, but I cannot see them as more important than providing food. Yet no one seems to be suggesting that Tesco should be nationalised because making sure we have affordable food is too important to be left to the private sector. And who would trust the government to run supermarkets? Stand for election on a platform of establishing the National Grocery Service and see where it gets you. Education and medical services are no more natural monopolies than are the sale of food and drink. Of course it is unrealistic to seek to run so many competing hospitals that there is not enough custom to allow any of them to receive the income it needs, but the same can be said of theatres, professional football clubs, hairdressers, solicitors, accountants, plumbers, architects and every other service business.

The best services are those providing good quality for an affordable price. Quality is maintained in the private sector by the need to be good in order to attract custom. The customer is a far better judge of quality than a government minister or any number of civil servants. Of course there are lapses in the private sector and failure to maintain proper quality can cause great harm before the customer base learns about it and votes with its wallet, yet state control does not prevent mistakes being made. Indeed we hear a lot about "superbug" infections and expensive lawsuits over negligent medical practice in the state-run system but few if any such stories about privately-funded medicine.

Bureaucracy is kept to a minimum in the private sector by the need to control costs in order to be affordable. Quality does not require bureaucracy but political control does, political control requires vast bureaucracy. And that costs a lot of money. To my mind, it is wasted money because there is no need for the state to run these services. That money could be used better in other ways and the services themselves will be subjected to far more telling and relevant quality controls if they are localised. Parents know if their children's state school is providing a poor service but can do nothing about it at present. Patients and their families know when a state hospital is not clean or is not providing a reasonable level of care but can do nothing about it at present. The inability of the customers to affect the service they pay for with their taxes tells us all we really need to know about the central failure of state services. When have you ever heard of a BUPA hospital not being clean or not keeping dependent patients clean and properly fed? When have you ever heard of a fee-charging school having no one the parents can turn to when their child reports on the inadequacy of Mr Quelch's pedagogic abilities? Maybe you have heard of such things, I know I haven't, yet they are the daily fare of reports about state services.

The whole thing is upside-down at present. Demand for private healthcare and private education has never been higher. How can that be if state control is a workable and effective system? Morale in both the HNS and state education is said to be at a low ebb. How can that be if state control is a workable and effective system? Politicians must be removed from day-to-day involvement in both fields except in two respects. For most people both education and healthcare are only affordable if paid for out of taxation; just as replacing their car if it is stolen is only affordable if paid for out of insurance premiums. Government must still fund the services but it must do so by passing the money directly to the most local possible level and trusting those who run schools and hospitals to use their allotted funds to best advantage. The other part government has to play is, in truth, a responsibility for Parliament rather than government. It is to set the legal framework within which services must be provided. Just as it sets the legal framework for a fruit and veg stallholder. Except in these two respects, politicians should leave things alone because they do far more harm than good.

If it ain't working, fix it

In the real world, if something doesn't work it is abandoned. It might have seemed a good idea at the time and its intended outcome might have been a great boon to mankind and to fluffy bunnies, but if it doesn't work it doesn't work so we say "nice try, bad luck" and we move on. Abandoning an unsuccessful experiment can be very expensive for those engaged in the project. History is littered with many thousands if not millions of "greatest inventions since sliced bread" that never got anywhere near the toaster let alone were buttered and consumed. Countless inventors and investors have lost every penny pursuing an idea which either failed to meet its potential or failed to find a market. Because that's what real life is like - someone has an idea, it seems like a good idea so it is tried. If it seems like a really good idea initial failure might justify further attempts. Always, sustained failure results in abandonment. The money required to continue the experiment can no longer be justified so the tap is turned off.

This illustrates one of the many fine qualities of money. Money allows us to measure success or failure of every commercial project. We can tell from a profit-and-loss account whether it has been a financial success to date, if it hasn't yet made a profit we can tell by the level of loss incurred whether it has a decent prospect of becoming profitable within a reasonable time. Money not only allows us to measure how successful a commercial enterprise is, it also provides a means by which we can assess whether a commercially unsuccessful venture should be continued (through private or public subsidy) because it provides a benefit that is perceived to be affordable. For example, a local council might operate a swimming pool and choose to spend up to £100,000 of taxpayers' money subsidising it each year; once running costs exceed entry fees by more than £100,000 questions will be asked about whether it should stay open. The mere fact that the swimming pool has been built and provides a benefit can never justify limitless spending on it. Some would say no such subsidies should ever be given, others might argue that £200,000 is the correct maximum figure, but whether a subsidy is given and if so how much it should be are decisions taken with an eye to money - the universal means of measurement.

Some areas of government expenditure cannot easily be assessed in monetary terms. The armed forces, the police, prisons and the fire service can only be effective if they have a certain number of front-line personnel and the equipment necessary for them to do their work. The level of necessary service determines how much must be spent, it is not possible to say "we can afford half a billion for the police and that's that". Of course countless arguments can be had over what level of service is appropriate, how it should be organised to get best value for money and whether there is a sensible role for the private sector, but at heart these services must be funded according to need (however you wish to define that) and cannot or should not be limited by purely financial considerations. The central point about these services is that they are protective services, they exist to prevent trouble and to protect us when trouble brews.

Other so-called public services are not protective in nature, they are intended to provide a positive benefit rather than to protect us from a threat. Health, education, refuse collection, laying and maintaining roads, providing street lighting and many other things are essentially commercial activities being carried out by one arm of the State or another. Some of them are usually provided by private sector businesses but paid for from taxation, road maintenance and refuse collection being perhaps the most widespread examples of this.

Not so long ago refuse collection was manged by local authorities and performed by people employed directly by them. In many areas the task has now been contracted-out to private businesses who are paid less than it cost the local council to run it's own service and are subject to a contract requiring them to provide a service at least as good as the one they replaced. As far as I am aware, no council has chosen to revert to the old system once a contract with a private provider has expired. No doubt one reason for this is that a council would incur a substantial cost in buying or hiring the necessary lorries and installing managers on its payroll but the more compelling reason is that the work is a service which is best left to the private sector because only that sector is subject to market pressures to keep its costs as low as possible, not least because they do not have to battle against the monopoly public-sector unions. The provision of refuse services is a normal commercial exercise. Local authorities specify the service they require, price is a matter for negotiation and the result is a binding contract. There is an important public health element to the work but so there is in the supply of all sorts of goods and services, appropriate contractual terms and general legal obligations on suppliers ensure (insofar as you ever can) that health is not adversely affected by the identity of the supplier.

The effectiveness of private-sector delivery of services such as refuse collection can be measured by money. Once the standard of required service is defined it is a matter for competitive tender who can give the purchaser (the council) the best price. That these tenders will be pitched at a level that allows the supplier a profit does not mean that the state sector could provide the same service at a lower cost in particular because working practices in the state sector are not subject to the same constant pressure to be efficient as the private sector because the provider is also in charge of paying the bills.

When it comes to health and education is there any reason to believe the private sector will provide an inferior service? After all, non-state schools and hospitals have to provide what their customers want or they lose business. MRSA infections don't happen in private hospitals because a single occurrence could cost the business millions in lost custom. Indiscipline and a failure to teach to a high standard can have the same effect in private schools, so it just doesn't happen. It doesn't happen because the system is designed to deliver a service not to deliver a political agenda.

The NHS doesn't work. It doesn't do what it was set up to do. Part of the problem is that it is not operated as it was intended by its founders to be operated. The original idea was for it to be a universal health service funded by insurance but operated as the best private hospitals and general practices were operated. Instead it has become a perpetual opinion poll, fiddled with by government after government with at least as much of an eye to political advantage as providing a service. There is now about twice as much money in real terms being pumped into the top of the NHS as twelve years ago. It hasn't resulted in twice as good a service at the bottom, despite the efforts of the vast majority of doctors and nurses to do their very best by every patient. The NHS is the largest single employer in the western world and it has the highest rates of hospital acquired infections of any developed country. It simply isn't working.

State schools don't work. They don't do what they were set up to do. Levels of general numeracy and literacy at age sixteen are pitiful. Far too many bright children are not stretched as they should be to develop their analytical powers. Universities have to hold remedial classes for those who have splendid examination results on paper but struggle in real life to construct a sentence. It simply isn't working.

Why have these failed institutions not been farmed-out to the private sector which has a long record of providing a better service for a lower cost? No doubt part of the reason is the desire of politicians to use health and education as measures of the success of their time in government. If they had any sense they would realise they are onto a hiding for nothing in the long term. A system that cannot deliver, cannot deliver. You can fiddle with it to your heart's content but it still won't deliver. You can boast of so many more billions being spent on the NHS or school and, as we have seen, you can win elections, but a system that cannot deliver, cannot deliver.

The central problem is that additional money is pumped in at the top rather than the bottom. Pumping in extra money at the top means, in the mind of government, that there must be additional oversight of how the bit that gets down to the coal face is spent. Ah, but there's more, you can't just pump money in and distribute it to everyone, you have to choose where it goes. That requires committees. Extra committees to deal with the extra money. And if more is getting down to a region the region will need an extra manager or ten to supervise it, and every hospital will need an extra manager or five to report back on how it is being spent. The whole system doesn't work. It's almost as far as it could be from Beveridge's idea of a private system funded by public insurance.

In the real world a system that doesn't work must be replaced, root and branch if necessary. We are seeing at the moment how the public have a taste for radical change where systemic inefficiency, waste and corruption are to be avoided. Today it is MPs' expenses and allowances, this is the perfect time to widen the debate and expose systemic inefficiency in the state delivery of services. Strike while the iron is hot and tomorrow we can spend less and receive more.

A lesson for the government

An interesting proposal has been made by the Conservative Party to release primary schools from central and local governmental control. It is one of those truly inspired policies that comes along from time to time. What makes it so interesting is its acknowledges that teachers, headteachers and school governors might actually know better than politicians what is best for the pupils they have to educate. I have never understood where politicians get the magical powers that make them all-knowing and all-wise, this policy seems to accept that there are no such magical powers.

The proposal links two themes dear to my heart. One is that services paid for out of taxes do not have to be provided from the centre. The second is that government ministers cannot possibly know how best to deliver any service at ground level.

I am perpetually intrigued by the very concept of central government directing the provision of anything to the public across the whole country. Take food as a most obvious example. We all need to shop for food every week or so. Making food available at affordable prices is an essential service, arguably no service is more essential. Yet we don't hear many calling for the production and supply of food to be nationalised and run by the government. The point can be taken further. Is there anyone who would argue that the government, through a National Food Service, could provide the range and quality of food provided by the existing supermarket chains? It's completely untenable, utterly laughable. Of course the cost of setting up a scheme would be prohibitive but it is not that that makes it untenable, it is the idea that centralised direction of a monopoly provider could even begin to approach the efficiency and flexibility of Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Waitrose, Lidl and the rest. So why should it be that the provision of good quality education requires direct management from Whitehall?

I read various figures for the average annual cost of school education ranging from £6,000 per pupil to about £9,000. The actual figure really doesn't matter very much, what does matter is delivering an appropriate education for every child. This requires schools to be able to cater to a wide range of abilities and to be flexible enough to vary their approach year-by-year as the new intake varies in ability. Only those at the metaphorical coalface can do this. They can be, and are, told by government that a certain level of test must be passed by a certain percentage of pupils at a certain age but that doesn't make it happen. Nor does it make it possible where the pupils of the relevant age group do not have the ability to pass the prescribed test in sufficient numbers.

To my mind the biggest problem with government-directed education is that doing the best for the pupils comes second to doing the best for the government's chances of reelection. Every year we hear ludicrous claims being made about increased performance when what is measured is the ability of schools to squeeze pupils through arbitrary tests. The government boasts "look how well we are doing" when they are doing nothing other than forcing schools to follow a particular path that will result in statistics the government hopes to use for its political advantage. Indeed, I find the very concept of government claiming it has achieved anything in education to be deeply offensive. Teachers and parents combine to elicit the best from children, government ministers add nothing of value. Getting government out of schools will be a good start, it will allow teachers to educate in a manner appropriate to their little charges rather than in a manner appropriate to the opinion polls.

That is not to say that there is no legitimate role for government in school education. In fact it has two extremely important roles. The first is to fund schools from taxation. There is no other way of paying for universal school education than through taxes. The second is to supervise standards. This second point is where, in my opinion, they have got it completely wrong. Let me explain why.

I'll go back to food to explain the point, because I am a fat boy and I like food. The supermarket chains I mentioned above, and all other sellers of food, could try to foist unfit meat and fish on their customers. They would probably get away with it most times because any illness suffered is as likely to be attributed to the cook as to the ingredients. They cannot and do not do so because the law requires certain standards to be met. Those standards are imposed by government through laws passed in Parliament. They are basic quality standards that set the culture for the industry. Supermarkets know that any breach of the quality standards could damage their business through adverse publicity far more than any fine imposed by a court could ever do. But without a legal standard setting the benchmark for adverse publicity it is impossible to know whether they would keep the quality of their products as high as it is. And the same principle extends across the whole range of what they sell, the law requires a minimum standard to be met and that pervades the very culture of retail food sales.

Schools don't sell products in the way supermarkets do, they provide a service, but that is a distinction without a difference. The provision of services is subject to legal quality controls just like the sale of goods. Failure to maintain a satisfactory standard of service leaves you open to legal action by your customers and to damaging adverse publicity. I have never heard of any such claim being made against an independent school. Perhaps such claims could have been made but instead the parents chose to take their child out of the school and send him or her elsewhere rather than wasting time reopening old wounds through the courts. The role of government is to keep the law under review and to propose changes to Parliament if a deficiency is found. In that way, and that way only, does government have a legitimate supervisory role over the quality of education provided in schools. With parents as direct customers and schools competing to attract their money normal commercial pressures will operate to keep standards as high as can be afforded, just as happens in the private education sector.

Not only does government have no magical powers to deliver good quality education but education itself is not a magical business, it is just another service. It is an important one but so is selling food. What we know for certain is that central direction and interference have not resulted in universally high standards in state schools. The system has had long enough to prove itself and it has been found wanting. The Conservative's idea is a radical change from the status quo. The government says it would be expensive to implement, I doubt that very much because it will (or should) involve the removal of vast amounts of bureaucracy through which current meddling is effected every year. The unions are against it lock stock and barrel. No higher praise can ever be bestowed on a new policy.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this proposal is that it marks a shift of primary responsibility for education from government to parents, thereby putting it firmly where it should be. Education will then be funded from the centre but run by the schools themselves. There lies the heart of the matter ... state-funded. State-funded does not need to mean state-run. We know that from the simple fact that some children are funded by the state to attend independent schools. We know it also from state funding of medical procedures at private hospitals when NHS hospitals cannot provide surgery without undue delay. We know it again from state funding of legal advice and representation. The quality of the service is determined by the people providing the service not by the source of funding. And the quality of the service they provide is driven by the need to keep the quality high or lose business to a competitor. It is always possible that a particular school will fail miserably to provide a satisfactory standard of education for its pupils ... or is it? Does that happen in the private sector? I don't know the answer to that question but I do know what will happen in that situation, the school will have to change its ways pretty sharpish or it will have no pupils.

The problem with "public" services

Something that has perplexed me for a long time is why we put up with government providing so-called public services. Ask the little people two questions and I think I know what the answers will be. "Would you send your children to an independent school if you could afford to?" "Would you use private healthcare if you could afford to do so?" There will be some who will answer in the negative on grounds of political ideology, but my guess is that the vast majority would give affirmative answers. Then ask them why they would use private-sector services and my guess is that they would say they are better than the services offered by the State. It would, of course, be fair to point out that many of the answers would not be based on direct knowledge of the superior quality of private-sector schools and hospitals (although increasing numbers are now receiving treatment in private hospitals where they have had to wait too long for a new NHS hip or the removal of a gall bladder). However, one factor cannot, in my view, be denied namely that those providing services in the private sector have to keep their standards high or they will lose customers.

Current provision of education and healthcare by the State is sought to be justified by three main arguments. First that the little people cannot afford to buy these services privately, secondly that there are some services (such as emergency medicine) which are not routinely provided by the private sector and thirdly that universal provision can only be guaranteed by the State delivering the service. Each of them has something going for it, but not much.

It is undoubtedly true that Mr Average on £27,000-ish a year would probably find it very difficult if not impossible to fund his childrens' education and his family's healthcare if it had to come out of his wages. But that is an argument for the cost of these services being borne by all through, in effect, insurance. After all, that is what taxes spent on healthcare and education really amount to, they are insurance premiums collected from the many and spent when they are needed. There is absolutely no need to go one step further and say that because Mr Ordinary can only receive these services because everyone else pays premiums as well, so the collector of the premiums must provide the services. I am not aware of calls for the Prudential and Norwich Union to have in-house teams of builders and mechanics to provide the service required by a customer who makes a claim on his household or motor policy.

It is also undoubtedly true that the provision of emergency medical cover is not routinely undertaken by private healthcare companies. That simply gives rise to the most important question in the English language: "so what?". The reasons they don't offer this service are that their customer base is not wide enough to justify the enormous infrastructure costs of a 24-hour emergency department and the costs of premiums would be too high to attract sufficient customers to cover those costs. These limitations do not mean the private sector cannot provide emergency medicine and the limitations themselves will not apply if the government is simply the funder of health care.

What is not true, in my opinion, is that universal provision can only be guaranteed if the State is the direct provider. There is a need for universal provision but this can be assured by contractual and/or statutory duties to provide services to Scumsville as a condition of having the contract to provide services to Nicetown. The State can retain a responsibility to provide services if no one else is prepared to do so for the money offered. I can be fairly sure that power would rarely if ever have to be used.

It seems to me that the problem with State education and healthcare is that they are provided by the State rather than just funded by the State. It leaves them open to political interference which, as we have seen in spades, creates huge difficulties for those actually delivering the services at the bottom of the pyramid. Constant chopping and changing of performance criteria does nobody any favours. One manifestation of that problem is that a top-down nationwide system of anything requires so many layers of bureaucracy that vast sums of money are consumed passing information back and forth.

My most serious concern is that government run services are affected by the need to satisfy the government first and the consumer second. What actually happens in schools and hospitals is what the government requires to happen, and even that fails to be achieved in too many instances. Some of these requirements are intended to improve the service for the consumer, but not all. Now, the government will say they are all aimed at benefitting the consumer because the government thinks it is best placed to define what the consumer wants. I don't think that is so, nor do I think it can ever be so because there is no such thing as a single set of desires or values of the users of all schools and all medical services. Furthermore, when government wishes to use these public services for the purpose of social engineering there is a necessary conflict between what it wants and what the little people want. If there were no such conflict there would be no case for social engineering. By its very nature social engineering is about trying to coerce the little people into changing their ways and that automatically creates conflict.

If the top-down model of providing these important services were sound we should be able to expect uniform excellence after sixty and more years of honing the model. Instead we find governments of both parties launching more top-down re-structurings and constantly fiddling with their day-to-day operation. The concept of State provision is, in my view, fundamentally flawed. It does not work, it has never worked and it can never work. Government should be striving to find ways in which it can fund these services at acceptable cost to the taxpayer while keeping its interfering nose out of things it has no capacity or ability to manage.