Tom Richmond: They’ve proved they are useless... so why does this trio of bunglers still prosper?

HOW bad do things have to get before politicians and senior civil servants resign – or are sacked in the public interest because of their serial failings?
Chancellor George OsborneChancellor George Osborne
Chancellor George Osborne

George Osborne, Lin Homer and Sir David Nicholson, to name three individuals, have all presided over catastrophic and costly failures that have damaged public confidence and hit taxpayers in the pocket.

They’re not alone. Never before has Britain been so badly led – and that was before the global banking crisis exposed those public sector spending excesses that had been left unchecked for too long.

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But the absence of any humility on the part of this terrible triumvirate – highlighted by yesterday’s devastating Parliamentary critique into the incompetent implementation of asylum and immigration policy under Homer – illustrates the widening gulf between David Cameron’s “cronies” and hard-working families who simply want their taxes spent more efficiently as their living standards decline in this lost decade.

Take the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Britain has lost its cherished triple-A credit rating on his watch; borrowing has risen and growth has stalled – with the worst of the public spending cuts now delayed until after the next election following the Budget.

His response? A token gesture to reduce beer duty by a penny from Sunday night – while maintaining planned increases in the cost of wine and spirits – and a claim that things would be even bleaker under Labour. That may be so, given that the Opposition is bereft of economic credibility, but it is a desperate state of affairs when the country’s finances are determined by the “least worst” option. How demoralising.

Next in the dock is Sir David Nicholson. Head of the regional health authority that stood idly by when hundreds of patients were dying in Mid Staffordshire because of a litany of care failings that can only be described as a national scandal, he was promoted to become chief executive of the National Health Service.

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As well as presiding over the transfer of commissioning powers to GPs, Nicholson is presiding over £20bn of efficiency savings that are already seeing some treatments rationed while public confidence in out-of-hours services reaches an all-time low. He’s also had to apologise to Parliament for misleading a select committee about his dealings with an NHS whistleblower.

Now there’s talk that the PM will ask him to bring forward his retirement – presumably with the promise of a taxpayer-funded golden goodbye – to silence those MPs who have signed a Commons petition demanding Nicholson’s resignation. Is there no honour left in public service?

And then there is Lin Homer, who came to prominence as head of a dysfunctional UK Border Agency which has so many outstanding asylum applications that, according to the Home Affairs Select Committee, the backlog is equivalent to the population of Iceland.

The UKBA has 150 boxes of unopened mail; 100,000 unopened letters and 59,000 applications that have not been uploaded onto the Agency’s computers. At this rate it will 
take 24 years to clear the 
backlog – with many asylum applicants likely to be granted residency by default.

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MPs concluded that they have “little confidence” in Homer’s ability “to run any government department” after exposing “a catastrophic leadership failure” that led to no discernible improvements during her four-and-a-half years at the helm.

Will she be held accountable? No. After leaving the UKBA to become the top civil servant at the Department for Transport (coincidentally at the very moment when the rail franchise process was disintegrating), she was appointed to an even more senior job – chief executive of HM Revenue & Customs, which has just been criticised for failing to answer 20 million phone calls from the public last year. She has now received the backing of Osborne’s Treasury, where officials say they have complete confidence in her abilities. Seriously, you could not make it up.

I accept that the economy, NHS and immigration are very difficult policy areas – even more so at a time of the longest recession since the war – but it does not excuse the complete lack of leadership being shown by the Prime Minister and his senior officials in accepting this complacency.

By allowing Osborne, Nicholson and Homer to remain in post, Downing Street is effectively saying that there is no one better in the country to undertake these roles.

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While the Chancellorship is a reflection of the rise of career politicians with little hands-on experience of the real world, the absence of anyone better to lead the NHS and HMRC is a damning indictment of the public sector and its inability to produce talented – and inspiring – leaders who understand the meaning of the word “competence”.

It is why I would have performance-related pay for all town hall bureaucrats, NHS managers and civil servants working for Whitehall departments and quangos 
who earn in excess of £100,000 
 a year.

Part of this salary must be allied to performance – whether it be a council chief executive making sure their authority empties the bins and repairs potholes; specified waiting list targets for hospital bosses and, in the case of HMRC, answering 99 per cent of phone calls within five minutes.

This is not revolutionary. It’s about public servants proving their worth to taxpayers, their employers, on a yearly basis rather than moving on to another job before they can be held accountable for their failings.

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Regrettably, it is very difficult to see this happening when so many Cabinet ministers – Chris Huhne being the most recent – seem to have difficulties with the concept of probity and when so few politicians are prepared to resign with the honour shown by Foreign Secretary Peter Carrington after Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982.

Then his resignation was expected. Today it would probably be refused. That is how far standards have slipped in the culture of buck-passing and reward for failure which has now come to symbolise the governance of this once great country.

I leave you with this thought. How can the Government expect individuals to take responsibility for their own household finances – or young people to behave in the school classroom – when it is not prepared to issue sanctions against those politicians and public servants who have exacerbated Britain’s demise?

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