Abolish the rump and would we notice?

Apr 2 2008 Bill Gleeson

MILLIONS of people employed in the public sector do a great job. Doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers and soldiers serve their country well, and are worth every penny of the money spent on them.

But some would argue a sizeable rump of the public sector, employing perhaps 1m people, fails to deliver any value at all.

Many of the inhabitants of this group work in the economic and business development sector.

We could abolish all their jobs overnight and the country wouldn’t notice the difference. It would make no adverse difference to our welfare or economic efficiency.

Another key characteristic of the Rump is that it likes writing reports; endless strategy and consultation documents that include pledges about what the agency is going to deliver but never does because it’s too busy writing the strategies, or more likely revising them just a short while after having published the first edition.

There are plenty in politics who would say the Northwest Development Agency (and similar agencies elsewhere in Britain) is a waste of money. We could do away with it and nobody would notice or mind in the slightest.

And there’s another characteristic of the Rump. The people employed take their organisation’s prime purpose to be to keep them in a job.

Most of the NWDA’s duties could be given to local authorities or national government departments to carry out.

Small-mindedness or parochialism is another defining quality of the Rump. Why else, for instance, would the NWDA refuse to market or acknowledge the work done by SOG at The Heath, at Runcorn?

The Heath was left out of last year’s NWDA report,The Northwest Science Strategy 2007, because the privately- owned business park for science companies was not funded by them.

But if you compare the work of The Heath, and the way it has filled up with scientific businesses, with progress at the Liverpool Science Park or Merseybio, both of which are included in the NWDA’s report, you would conclude The Heath wins hands down.

And why might that be? Could it be that the highly-motivated clever people at The Heath have spent their time working out and delivering what science businesses really want instead of writing reports about it?

TALKING about economic quangos, yesterday saw the start of the new Liverpool Vision.

Last week, we heard from the old Liverpool Vision, which proudly told us about all their great achievements over the last decade.

It’s true, the old Liverpool Vision, the first urban regeneration company in the country, mustered resources that were previously dispersed and some of the bigger projects in its original plan have come to fruition, notably Grosvenor’s Liverpool One shopping scheme and the development of an Arena at Kings Dock.

However, it should not be forgotten there were some notorious failures along the way, not least the Fourth Grace and the first attempt to redevelop Kings Dock by building Everton a new stadium. It’s also doubtful that Liverpool Vision should be claiming too much credit for Liverpool One, as it would have happened anyway, without Liverpool Vision’s intervention.

As for the new Liverpool Vision, it has to be a good thing that local SMEs have a single one-stop shop source of advice rather than having to navigate their way through a confusing array of agencies all doing different bits of the business support job.

As for whether the newly-agreed protocols between Liverpool Vision and The Mersey Partnership, governing who does what when it comes to inward investment, will work is another matter. Somehow, I doubt it.