Thanks Pete for sharing this. It's quite terrifying. And we can all guess which groups are exploiting this lack of oversight. Leftists leep telling us that Britain isnt broken but surely this tells us that it is.
If you hadn't noticed already, the whole country is collapsing, a lot of it not very quietly. If the state is set on paying people to sit around doing nothing, and importing the Third World to fill the gap, the course is set for complete failure.
I would predict the end is about 5 years away at the current rate. With any luck, I will be dead by then and will miss the Final Solution.
Have to agree with you here. The state has no idea how to deal with the very human fallout from AI. I’m recently retired than Goodness but I worry about my sons and grandchildren and what this means for them.
It does make you wonder what will happen to all the migrants doctors and engineers will do with their time as NHS operations will almost certainly be undertaken by AI robots in 5-7 years. Musk has switched production lines from Tesla’s to his robots which tells you everything about the direction of travel.
There’ll be work for some artisans for a while but not for long as robots will lay bricks and fix plumbing faster and better and without tea breaks. They’ll also act as carers.
I’d forgotten the Tories (and Liberals) abolished the Audit Commission in 2015. Of course the Audit Commission was established by Mrs Thatcher in around 1984 tasked with rolling out best practice in local government and the concept of value for money. I don’t know what happened to the Audit Commission. Maybe like most quangos it was captured by the left and lost its way. But as Pete says if services don’t get monitored they usually don’t get done. My guess is the huge private accountancy firms would see local government as something between a cash cow and a pain in the arse and use it to train junior staff. Maybe the bigger question is why is the British State incapable of delivering any services at an acceptable level anymore? Answer? Crap politicians anyone?
What you see here is the normal life cycle of every state organization and bureaucracy, and in general of monopolies, where cost tends to infinite and service or good provided tends to zero.
And there is the famous Friendman tale about Peter buying Jack a dinner with John's money. T
Please notice: you dont need to have government inspector and large bureaucracies to let people know which pub serves good beer, or which shoes are of good quality.
Recently there was a fire in a bar in a swiss mountain resort. Many people lost their life and i am sure you saw that in the media.
That is what you get when you let the government run private affairs. You can install combustible fire proofing, and then routinely use large sparklers to celebrate stuff.
There were even fire estinguishers in place but nobody knew how to operate them and anyway everyone was too busy filming the fire...
Turned up the place complied with regulations even though it had not been inspected in years. The insurance insured the place no question asked because, well, it complied, didnt it? And people went there because, well, it had a regular license and was regularly inspected, wasnt it? It must have if it was open for business.
In a world run by people and not by bureaucracies, an insurance would have regularly inspected the place and declined to insure it, and the owner would have to respond with his own money and time, so maybe he would have taken better care.
NHS is broken as every state bureaucracy is. In state affairs, efficiency consists in spending all the allocated budget +10%, in order to have a larger one the next year.
I found this really interesting. I was a compliance officer for a professional body, responsible for self-regulation and direct reporting to the Government. We had very experienced people on the team and we had built up a huge database of those we were monitoring. But of course we were 'older' and the newer, younger managers wanted to run this organisation like a business. The two are not suitable partners. The upshot is that over a period of a few years, all of the experienced people who of course were being paid salaries 'too high' (along with pension contributions) were weeded out by downgrading performance reviews, leading to demoralisation and lack of commitment. Essential benefits were also removed, e.g. we travelled extensively throughout the UK and the Republic of Ireland but our company cars were removed. We were replaced eventually with people with little to no experience of the skills required and who, frankly, were not up to the job. As a result, membership is declining and the cash cow that the organisation relied on is a reluctant prisoner with little loyalty. The replacement staff do not even have experience of the area they are monitoring. Blind leading the blind. Exasperating and demoralising beyond belief.
25 years ago,before the CQC started inspecting private clinics according to a large box ticking exercise I spoke to an experienced inspector who was doing the inspection of my clinic.
Pony tailed 40 something with a lot of experience as an inspector and a nurse,he told me that things were changing. He had just visited what he called an excellent gynaecology clinic down the road that he had known for years. He now had to fail it on 30 points.
My clinic was also rated as excellent by him,with no post-op infections recorded in 18 years.
He told me I had to get rid of the Little Sister counter top autoclave and send my instruments to an approved sterilisation centre.
Instead of an immediate turnaround requiring only 2 sets of instruments,I now needed 10.
Instead of personally looking after the instruments I had to hand them over to a central CSSD,which did general surgery and orthopaedic surgery.
As a result delicate instruments were frequently damaged or destroyed. Imagine finding the tips of a pair of forceps unable to grip tissue at a critical moment.
Surgeries were delayed and cancelled.
All of this vastly increased costs and therefore prices and is just one of many examples of a box ticking,culturally amnesiac system,which looks good on paper and is a disaster in practice.
Some sort of system is necessary,but rigid adherence to mindless bureaucracy is actively harmful.
When Marageet Thatcher started selling off British industry I was against privatisation.
Why?
Because it had been tried before and failed.
Car companies regrouped due to foreign competition and were later either closed or sold by government to foreign competition.
The same happened to our train companies and our computer company.
On a different level the water companies were sold off.
How successful have they been?
All our car companies finished or foreign owned.
Train subsidies higher than under public ownership.
Water companies spewing more filth than ever into the rivers (and sea) whilst charging customers more than ever.
Ripped off by foreign computer companies, contract after contract.
Quangos are supposed to be independent but are selected by government and bosses chosen by government.
Not much independence there.
Who would be upset if OfCom was closed? Staff perhaps?
Ofwat? The water companies might grieve a little?
NHS England? DEI staff?
BBB - the Covid bank that lost just short of £5 billion in tax payers money to fraudsters? Gone but not forgotten.
It isn’t the numbers of staff of quangos, it’s the incompetence and corruption. The very reason they were invented in the first place, they just got worse than what they replaced.
Passing audits of public sector spending also seems to be a big problem.
I noticed somebody on X talking about large government departments not getting a clean bill of health from the National Audit Office for decades at a time.
He claimed DWP hadn't passed an audit for 37 years - this checks out as I found a transcript from the Public Accounts Committee stating as such (ie qualifed NAO opinion on DWP accounts due to fraud and error).
For HMRC the X user says it has been 20 years since they passed an audit. I can't find any parliamentary committees discussing this though. Certainly they are years behind, and the 20 consecutive years claim may well be findable on the NAO website.
He also claims MoD not cleanly passed audit for 16 yrs (and lost £6B in a black hole), and the Cabinet Office also having £7B unaccounted for.
It seems a REAL mess.
BTW, for council auditing, things improved (slightly!) for 2023-24, with 4% English councils (up from 1%) providing audited accounts (according to the Tax Reform Council, but again quoting NAO figures).
Checklist management took off in business in the 90s and I experienced it first hand.
Joining business from 10 years in the Army I like to think I led and managed my pub estate successfully during my 18 years with Bass plc.
However, I was eventually made redundant, with at least a package above the statutory minimum, and replaced by a graduate entry who was supplied with a glossy A5 ring clip folder with a number of tick box checklists that were supposed to pass for good management.
Not so many years after I left Bass was broken up with Coors buying all the drink brands and Punch Taverns taking over the large pub estate. IMO tick box management was part of the reason for its demise.
AI is much more sophisticated than computerised checklists. It asks follow up questions and operates remotely, to a higher standard than most humans and understands complex problems and solutions.
Without a doubt. Musk can’t produce enough Tesla cars to sell but he’s switched two production lines from cars to robots. Why would he do that unless that’s where the real change lies? Ask yourself whether if you had let’s say an eye problem requiring an operation would you want a robot or a surgeon who’d been on the beer the night before or had a row with his missus? We are no time away from having robots in our homes that could provide social care. What the role will be for people is yet to be determined.
Thanks Pete for sharing this. It's quite terrifying. And we can all guess which groups are exploiting this lack of oversight. Leftists leep telling us that Britain isnt broken but surely this tells us that it is.
If you hadn't noticed already, the whole country is collapsing, a lot of it not very quietly. If the state is set on paying people to sit around doing nothing, and importing the Third World to fill the gap, the course is set for complete failure.
I would predict the end is about 5 years away at the current rate. With any luck, I will be dead by then and will miss the Final Solution.
Have to agree with you here. The state has no idea how to deal with the very human fallout from AI. I’m recently retired than Goodness but I worry about my sons and grandchildren and what this means for them.
It does make you wonder what will happen to all the migrants doctors and engineers will do with their time as NHS operations will almost certainly be undertaken by AI robots in 5-7 years. Musk has switched production lines from Tesla’s to his robots which tells you everything about the direction of travel.
There’ll be work for some artisans for a while but not for long as robots will lay bricks and fix plumbing faster and better and without tea breaks. They’ll also act as carers.
I’d forgotten the Tories (and Liberals) abolished the Audit Commission in 2015. Of course the Audit Commission was established by Mrs Thatcher in around 1984 tasked with rolling out best practice in local government and the concept of value for money. I don’t know what happened to the Audit Commission. Maybe like most quangos it was captured by the left and lost its way. But as Pete says if services don’t get monitored they usually don’t get done. My guess is the huge private accountancy firms would see local government as something between a cash cow and a pain in the arse and use it to train junior staff. Maybe the bigger question is why is the British State incapable of delivering any services at an acceptable level anymore? Answer? Crap politicians anyone?
The purpose of a system is what it does (Stafford Beer). It is there to maintain itself - nothing else.
What you see here is the normal life cycle of every state organization and bureaucracy, and in general of monopolies, where cost tends to infinite and service or good provided tends to zero.
And there is the famous Friendman tale about Peter buying Jack a dinner with John's money. T
Please notice: you dont need to have government inspector and large bureaucracies to let people know which pub serves good beer, or which shoes are of good quality.
Recently there was a fire in a bar in a swiss mountain resort. Many people lost their life and i am sure you saw that in the media.
That is what you get when you let the government run private affairs. You can install combustible fire proofing, and then routinely use large sparklers to celebrate stuff.
There were even fire estinguishers in place but nobody knew how to operate them and anyway everyone was too busy filming the fire...
Turned up the place complied with regulations even though it had not been inspected in years. The insurance insured the place no question asked because, well, it complied, didnt it? And people went there because, well, it had a regular license and was regularly inspected, wasnt it? It must have if it was open for business.
In a world run by people and not by bureaucracies, an insurance would have regularly inspected the place and declined to insure it, and the owner would have to respond with his own money and time, so maybe he would have taken better care.
NHS is broken as every state bureaucracy is. In state affairs, efficiency consists in spending all the allocated budget +10%, in order to have a larger one the next year.
Ah, checklists. The phrase “hitting the target, missing the point” was never so apposite.
I found this really interesting. I was a compliance officer for a professional body, responsible for self-regulation and direct reporting to the Government. We had very experienced people on the team and we had built up a huge database of those we were monitoring. But of course we were 'older' and the newer, younger managers wanted to run this organisation like a business. The two are not suitable partners. The upshot is that over a period of a few years, all of the experienced people who of course were being paid salaries 'too high' (along with pension contributions) were weeded out by downgrading performance reviews, leading to demoralisation and lack of commitment. Essential benefits were also removed, e.g. we travelled extensively throughout the UK and the Republic of Ireland but our company cars were removed. We were replaced eventually with people with little to no experience of the skills required and who, frankly, were not up to the job. As a result, membership is declining and the cash cow that the organisation relied on is a reluctant prisoner with little loyalty. The replacement staff do not even have experience of the area they are monitoring. Blind leading the blind. Exasperating and demoralising beyond belief.
I have a slight counter argument.
25 years ago,before the CQC started inspecting private clinics according to a large box ticking exercise I spoke to an experienced inspector who was doing the inspection of my clinic.
Pony tailed 40 something with a lot of experience as an inspector and a nurse,he told me that things were changing. He had just visited what he called an excellent gynaecology clinic down the road that he had known for years. He now had to fail it on 30 points.
My clinic was also rated as excellent by him,with no post-op infections recorded in 18 years.
He told me I had to get rid of the Little Sister counter top autoclave and send my instruments to an approved sterilisation centre.
Instead of an immediate turnaround requiring only 2 sets of instruments,I now needed 10.
Instead of personally looking after the instruments I had to hand them over to a central CSSD,which did general surgery and orthopaedic surgery.
As a result delicate instruments were frequently damaged or destroyed. Imagine finding the tips of a pair of forceps unable to grip tissue at a critical moment.
Surgeries were delayed and cancelled.
All of this vastly increased costs and therefore prices and is just one of many examples of a box ticking,culturally amnesiac system,which looks good on paper and is a disaster in practice.
Some sort of system is necessary,but rigid adherence to mindless bureaucracy is actively harmful.
When Marageet Thatcher started selling off British industry I was against privatisation.
Why?
Because it had been tried before and failed.
Car companies regrouped due to foreign competition and were later either closed or sold by government to foreign competition.
The same happened to our train companies and our computer company.
On a different level the water companies were sold off.
How successful have they been?
All our car companies finished or foreign owned.
Train subsidies higher than under public ownership.
Water companies spewing more filth than ever into the rivers (and sea) whilst charging customers more than ever.
Ripped off by foreign computer companies, contract after contract.
Quangos are supposed to be independent but are selected by government and bosses chosen by government.
Not much independence there.
Who would be upset if OfCom was closed? Staff perhaps?
Ofwat? The water companies might grieve a little?
NHS England? DEI staff?
BBB - the Covid bank that lost just short of £5 billion in tax payers money to fraudsters? Gone but not forgotten.
It isn’t the numbers of staff of quangos, it’s the incompetence and corruption. The very reason they were invented in the first place, they just got worse than what they replaced.
Passing audits of public sector spending also seems to be a big problem.
I noticed somebody on X talking about large government departments not getting a clean bill of health from the National Audit Office for decades at a time.
He claimed DWP hadn't passed an audit for 37 years - this checks out as I found a transcript from the Public Accounts Committee stating as such (ie qualifed NAO opinion on DWP accounts due to fraud and error).
Source: https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/16850/html/
For HMRC the X user says it has been 20 years since they passed an audit. I can't find any parliamentary committees discussing this though. Certainly they are years behind, and the 20 consecutive years claim may well be findable on the NAO website.
He also claims MoD not cleanly passed audit for 16 yrs (and lost £6B in a black hole), and the Cabinet Office also having £7B unaccounted for.
It seems a REAL mess.
BTW, for council auditing, things improved (slightly!) for 2023-24, with 4% English councils (up from 1%) providing audited accounts (according to the Tax Reform Council, but again quoting NAO figures).
Checklist management took off in business in the 90s and I experienced it first hand.
Joining business from 10 years in the Army I like to think I led and managed my pub estate successfully during my 18 years with Bass plc.
However, I was eventually made redundant, with at least a package above the statutory minimum, and replaced by a graduate entry who was supplied with a glossy A5 ring clip folder with a number of tick box checklists that were supposed to pass for good management.
Not so many years after I left Bass was broken up with Coors buying all the drink brands and Punch Taverns taking over the large pub estate. IMO tick box management was part of the reason for its demise.
Management by AI is about to take over, which is only a computerised version of management by checklists.
Then profits will fall!
AI is much more sophisticated than computerised checklists. It asks follow up questions and operates remotely, to a higher standard than most humans and understands complex problems and solutions.
You reckon?
Without a doubt. Musk can’t produce enough Tesla cars to sell but he’s switched two production lines from cars to robots. Why would he do that unless that’s where the real change lies? Ask yourself whether if you had let’s say an eye problem requiring an operation would you want a robot or a surgeon who’d been on the beer the night before or had a row with his missus? We are no time away from having robots in our homes that could provide social care. What the role will be for people is yet to be determined.