We're paying for their irresponsibility

This Green and Strangely Pleasant Land calculates the cost of official hubris and ideological blindness

What lengths will public bodies go to avoid responsibility and pursue suspiciously ideological agendas? The answer is that while there is a shortage of money for everything else, there appears to be a bottomless pit of cash for these purposes.

When it comes to reckless irresponsibility the Post Office, yet again, moves into pole position in the scramble to avoid blame. We now know that rather than own up to the failures of its Horizon computer system, it spent over £250m in legal fees on the wrongful prosecution of sub-postmasters. Some of the Post Office’s victims were jailed and bankrupted, others committed suicide, all of them had their lives ruined by this publicly owned body.

It beggars belief that the sum paid to lawyers almost equates to the cash it has so far been forced to pay in victim redress. Another way of looking at this is that over £500 million of public money could have been saved were it not for the hubris of the Post Office in sticking by an evidently faulty computer system that falsely showed sub-postmasters stealing money. The money is, of course, only part of the story as the real cost in terms of the misery is hard to calculate.

Although this saga has dragged on and on there is yet more compensation to be paid and further legal costs to be accounted for but we are in the land of ‘other folks’ money’ where the still unprosecuted post office bosses remain at liberty to enjoy the largesse they received as remuneration.

Talking of which we now also know that the costs of some two years of railway strikes are higher than the cost of a settlement which would have avoided incredible inconvenience to the traveling public, not to mention the wage loss incurred by strikers themselves.

The overall economic impact of these strikes is disputed and complicated as it includes loss of revenue on the railways, loss of business in other sectors affected by the disruption, plus the knock on effect of lower production and costs incurred by individuals either using alternative means of transport or being unable to earn.

Even Hugh Merriman, the transport minister in the former administration which blocked a pay rise, has admitted that the cost of settlement would have been lower than the economic cost of the strikes. His unconvincing excuse for holding out against the unions was that the government wanted to see more cost-efficient working practises implemented before handing out extra cash.

The same government that stood firm against a negotiated settlement on the railways also claimed to be on the higher moral ground resisting pay claims from National Health Service employees. Rather than restore wages eaten away by inflation or indeed agreeing to negotiations, the former administration thought it was better to force the NHS into costs of some £3 billion spent on employing private agency staff and having senior doctors do the jobs of junior doctors, not forgetting the enormous cost of rescheduling appointments. The longer term damage to patients‘ health is harder to quantify but well known to those in need of treatment.

This is not to mention the impact of low pay in the NHS which has prompted a massive outflow of highly qualified staff to the private sector and to jobs overseas.

A negotiated settlement, fiercely resisted by the previous government, was always there to be had as proved by the new Labour administration. Once it was achieved the Tory opposition, backed by their cheerleaders in the media, released a flurry of fusillades accusing the government of ‘capitulation’ while bemoaning the massive cost of these pay settlements.

The truth is that these costs are indeed high and that, as we have seen on the railways, a pay settlement is no guarantee of preventing further industrial action. On the other hand the much derided alternative of reaching compromise deals with public sector unions avoids a great deal of pain and especially in the case of the NHS, helps stem the even greater damage of a mass staff exodus.

However resistance to dealing with unions is not motivated by practicalities but underpinned  by a Tory ideology which regards unions as ‘the enemy within’ and is sustained by an almost mystical yearning for the days of Margaret Thatcher when she crushed the mineworker’s union and effectively destroyed Britain’s coal industry. The acrid aroma of blood lust wafts over this yearning for annihilation. It ignores the lingering cost of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘victory’ which entailed the destruction of many communities and the singular failure to provide a substitute for an industry that was in decline but whose sudden death left no space for alternative forms of employment.

The combination of ideological zeal and hubris leaves a bitter legacy.