The probation service is the target for critics of bureaucracy. So what is it that everyone's tying themselves in knots over?
Another day, another report bemoaning entanglement in red tape. This morning it's the turn of the probation service to be damned as hopelessly knotted with red ribbons. No doubt the justice select committee has a point in fretting about the monstrous complexity of the National Offenders Management Service, and the high proportion of time that its officers are spending on filling in forms as opposed to talking to clients; I've written previously about similar concerns in policing myself.
A political perennial
The desire to prune pen-pushing is, understandably, a political hardy perennial. Long before he was prime minister the young Harold Wilson promised a bonfire of wartime regulations, just as John Major promised to stop the march of the paper-chase into the class room, and Gordon Brown pledged to the City that he would move from "light touch to limited touch" supervision, on the basis of "trust". This last example, however, came just before the credit crunch, in which footloose finance proved beyond doubt that the tape-trimming itch can go too far.
Red-tape: a new challenge?
The great red-tape debate is hardly a debate at all, as it is always entirely one-sided. The disputed origin of the term, however, is one reminder that it ought not be so. According to The West Wing and American myth, the original tape was that tangled around the service records of American civil war veterans' records, which made them needlessly fiddly to access. But the genesis may in fact lie in the pink ribbons that barristers continue to wrap round their documents, to keep them in order and signify their importance. A fusty tradition? Perhaps. But then other traditions, such as the recording of every Whitehall decision in formal minutes, were also dismissed as needlessly bureaucratic ? until Tony Blair's "sofa government" fell out of fashion after the Iraq war.
While public servants ought of course to spend most of their time serving the public, as opposed to ticking boxes and explaining what they are doing, without some record keeping and regulation, the aggrieved citizen who has been clobbered by a cop ? or for that matter a probation officer ? will struggle to establish their complaint. And under a market-mad government, there is a particular danger that the much-heralded "red tape challenge" will provide rhetorical cover for doing business's bidding, and assaulting workers' rights.
Easy to mock, but ...
If you doubt it, and think I'm going the way of Yes Minister's Bernard, the civil servant who proposed a "red tape saves the nation advertising campaign", then just have a look at the six general regulatory fields up for grabs in this consultation. Health and safety? Easy to mock, but it has played a tremendous role in reducing workplace deaths to a record low. If you are a construction worker you might be less interested in cutting red tape than in making sure that your employer has meaningful duties to keep you out of harm's way. If you are one of the 151 families bereaved by workplace injuries last year, you will be even more resistant to easy slogans about liberalising the law.
Then there are environmental restrictions, which are more important than ever, and those strictures which ensure that companies' pension promises have to be honoured. Ask the former steel workers at ASW, who lost their pensions, if you doubt these rules are worth having. Perhaps some of the hard-fought-for equality laws, which protect women, black and disabled people from prejudice, could be recast in a less bureaucratic manner, but I would want to see the detail before countenancing it.
Last but not least is that great swath of laws that ensure employers can only sack someone by the book ? and pay redundancy where there is no blame. I, for one, find it staggering that the government should even be posing the question "Should we scrap them altogether?". They won't, of course, because the voters wouldn't wear it. Red tape might not save the nation, but when it comes to the crunch, the great British public well understands that it just might save your job.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/27/red-tape-facts-untangled
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