A glimpse into the mind of Rupert Lowe

It’s very often the little things that tell you how a man thinks, and today we get a little insight from a Rupert Lowe LinkedIn post in which he says “A Restore Britain Government would implement free car parking on all NHS sites for staff, patients and visitors. NHS medics should not have to pay to park at work”. If memory serves this was a Ukip trope going back at least a decade.

My immediate question then, as it is now, is how would that work? The thing about parking for most large organisations is that there is more demand than supply - which brings a whole mess of problems.

Throughout my unremarkable career as a SQL database developer I’ve had a number of unglamourous jobs, but perhaps the dullest of all was running the parking allocations database for a large West Yorkshire based bank. It was only supposed to be a small part of my role but ended up taking up most of my time.

The basic problem was that there were more employees than there were parking spaces. The company rented two floors of a nearby multi-storey carpark but it still wasn’t enough, and the council were pressing the company to do something about the levels of on-street parking. This was around the time when councils were taxing parking spaces and mandating smaller parking lots for new build offices to encourage ride sharing.

Now you might think that parking allocations might be straightforward (as did I), but it turns out to be an intensely political job. Spaces are allocated (rationed) on the basis of disability, childcare needs, distance from home, proximity to bus route, length of service, hours worked and seniority. This ended up being quite a complex SQL stored procedure. Once a month we’d run a query into the very slow HR servers to see if anyone had left the company and freed up a parking space, and then we’d re-run the parking allocations script.

Every month, there were more people eligible than there were spaces available so we had to refine the criteria even more. And that meant pissing a lot of people off, and on the first day of the month, we’d basically lose a morning to angry staff asking why they hadn’t been allocated a space.

Naturally, I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone since I have all the tact and subtlety of a menopausal rhinoceros, so it fell to one of the secretarial staff. At peak, the system (an adjunct of the swipe card door access system) was quite hefty in terms of IT resources and admin, requiring a .60 FTE database administrator and two admin staff, with the occasional adjudication from the director of estate security. You did not want to accidentally tell the CEO’s golf buddy he was out of luck.

The notionally cheaper alternative of sacking us all and making it a free-for-all, would have been utter chaos, invoking the wrath of the local council, and possibly even opening up the bank to discrimination lawsuits. It certainly didn’t help that the council was determined to reduce the number of car journeys, but at the same time, you could see their point. The town simply wasn’t big enough to sustain that many parked cars.

As such, the idea of making hospital parking a free-for-all, is about as far from sensible as you can get. It simply cannot be done unless you’re prepared meet ever rising demand. Otherwise, price is your best deterrence mechanism. If you make it free, you will increase demand. It’s a problem and problems have to be managed. It would not surprise me in the slightest if large regional NHS hospitals have similar levels of administration for this exact problem.

This is the exact kind of administrative bloat that libertoryans like Rupert Lowe complain about, and swinging the axe in their eyes is the only way to solve these problems. He shares that in common with Reform’s Danny Kruger. As usual, the populist trope completely disregards the nature of the problems and doesn’t see the requirement for them to be managed. Looking at health in particular, the problems stem from a lack of proper management.

While you might think free parking in NHS hospitals is a bit of throwaway populist fluff, it still tells you a lot about how populists think. If they do not see the immediate value in administration then it simply shouldn’t exist.

We then get some confirmation of how Lowe thinks from an interview with David Starkey. Lowe wants to recruit candidates who are accomplished business leaders (basically people like Rupert Lowe).

Regardless of what you think of Lowe's values (there's not much I disagree with), the bottom line is that he's hopelessly naïve and has absolutely no idea what he's doing. Starkey is right. Politics is not business. Businessmen are often successful because they take risks, and delegate the details to their people. It does not make them experts, and it does not mean their business success is transferrable to politics. Setting things up is a lot different to running things (as Lowe is about to discover).

Very often businessmen have very little understanding of the day to day running of their businesses. They hire people to do that for them so they can think about other things. We saw this during Brexit, where the media was asking CEOs how Brexit might affect their businesses, to find they were no more informed about the complexities of EU customs rules than the man in the street.

This, again, is why policy research must inform messaging, otherwise you end up making promises you can’t keep, and telling people who work in the unglamourous world of parking allocations (and others in the boring part of the economy), that complex things have simple and cost-free solutions. This is not how you win a reputation for seriousness.