Published: 07/02/2002, Volume II2, No 5791. Page 19
'Excessive' pay rises for managers, babies' bodies sent to the laundry, Tony Blair calling the unions 'wreckers' over public service reform and (reportedly) getting little Leo's MMR jab... Amid all his other problems, Alan Milburn narrowly missed some bad parliamentary publicity last week.
It arose over his reluctance to give more evidence to the all-party health select committee.
Quite by chance, the headlines were diverted to the broad shoulders of Tony Blair and his old BBC chum Lord Birt, but it reinforces the adage that it never rains but it pours.
You may recall that Lord Birt took some stick from the transport select committee for refusing to give evidence on his long-term thinking for road and rail. Downing Street feared a lynching, and kept Birty away.
The health secretary didn't need rescuing when he faced a similar problem with David Hinchliffe's committee. It is close to completing its report into public-private partnerships (PPP or PFI) in the NHS, and has taken evidence from Mr Milburn twice already - which is once more than usual.
I get the impression that, despite their chair's strong traditional feelings, the MPs will reach a pragmatic conclusion, accepting that the private sector (mental healthcare? hospices? ) has long played a role in NHS care and that it is not in itself automatically better or worse.
But the MPs, more assertive than in the 1997 parliament, were offended by last month's Milburn speech on the possibility of private managers taking over failed hospital trusts. Why? Because he had given them evidence a few days earlier without mentioning it. 'Nothing new, ' he would later explain, a bit disingenuously. Please come and explain yourself, the committee wrote. Well, to cut a long story short, a compromise has now been reached. Mr Milburn will not appear in person. But he will answer the MPs' questions by letter.
So we can all breathe again. Or can we? Mr Blair's weekend 'wreckers' speech to Labour's spring conference in Cardiff struck many observers as plain daft, coming so soon after his lavish praise of public service employees in Newcastle. 'The trouble with Tony, ' quips a senior minister, 'is that he's never run anything except the country.'
Even the TUC's quietly clever general secretary, John Monks, called the Cardiff speech erratic and juvenile. Attempts by David Blunkett to claim it wasn't directed at the unions were, frankly, pathetic. The pre-speech spin in the Sunday papers showed that the PM was reverting to his familiar device of attacking 'conservatives with a small c' - left as well as right - who resist private sector involvement.
This is dangerous territory. The government has been neither clear nor consistent about its strategy, let alone the detail of what it means in practice: you cannot, for instance, expect managers, public or private, to manage if you tie their hands. If you do not tie them they are, being only human, certain to do some stupid things to their staff.
The railways show that. The privatisers initially sacked too many drivers; now the drivers are holding them to ransom and, incidentally, threatening to reduce their support for Labour.
No wonder moderate leaders are jumpy.
A Labour loyalist I spoke to at the weekend called the union complaints 'pretty predictable stuff '.True, but even he admitted that the government thinks that setting up a committee, appointing Lord Birt or allocating some money is in itself a solution to a problem when It is actually only the beginning.
Jim Dowd, MP for Lewisham West and a member of the health select committee, for instance, was horrified during last summer's election campaign when he inquired (on behalf of a constituent nurse) about the new£200m scheme to help key public sector workers buy homes in London. 'Not one penny of the announced scheme had been spent, ' he recalls. In any case, with a mismanagement crisis the size of Enron's in full view, John Monks, Unison's Dave Prentis and the ever-inflammatory John Edmonds (GMB) are entitled to challenge Mr Blair's glib faith in private sector solutions.
It is also fair game, surely, to attack the pro-PPP/PFI reports drawn up by 'big five' accountancy firms like Andersen, which stood to gain substantially from their own findings - for instance, that there are 17 per cent savings to be made via PFI. There is a large, unregulated conflict of interest here.
The unions have been ringing me all week about dodgy accounting practices.
But nothing they have said matches the hair-raising things I've been hearing about accountants from accountants. l
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