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to SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage Beware
the jobsworth with a target, my son.
Why do quangos pay bonuses for
simply doing a job properly?
Magnus Linklater
Editor of The Times, Scottish Edition
Filed 06 Aug 07
©Magnus Linklater
This article was originally published
on the 1st August in The Times.
It is reproduced here with the kind permission of its
author and of the newspaper
The idea that executives of the Environment
Agency should be made to hand over their bonuses to the flood victims
of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire is absurd. The money would
be but a drop in the muddy waters of this affair, and anyway it
was earned long before the rivers broke their banks. A better question
is this: why were they paid bonuses in the first place?
My understanding of a bonus is that it is an additional
payment from an employer, made in recognition of increased productivity.
Whether it is earned by an investment broker in the City, a hod-carrier
on a building site or a salesman in a Mondeo, the money is meant
to represent something over and above that specified in their contract
of employment; it is paid out because of the difference their work
has made to the performance of a company. More effort equals more
profit equals enhanced pay; it’s known as capitalism. I cannot
see how a quango, which is a non-profit-making organisation, can
step up production, unless it is the massively increased output
of red tape.
The EA executives were paid their five-figure
bonuses because they were judged to have met 42 of the 49 performance
targets set by the Government. These included five out of seven
flood-management projects (no irony intended), improving the environment
for wildlife, protection of inland waters and the quality of bathing
water. In the section on flood risk, the agency was judged to have
“fully achieved its targets”, though not, it emerges,
in those areas that suffered from the worst of the flooding. In
defending the bonuses, Sir John Harman, the agency’s chairman,
said they had been calculated “by reference to the extent
to which predetermined objectives have been achieved”.
In other words, the executives were rewarded with
extra money for fulfilling the terms of their employment. Not for
exceeding them, not for building those extra flood barriers or filling
up those much-needed sandbags, but simply for doing the job, as
specified by their employers – the Government.
Meeting targets is what every nondepartmental
public body is expected to do. As someone who has served my time
on an NDPB, I am deeply familiar with the concept of the predetermined
objective, but I never heard that we might be paid more for meeting
one. Targets are things that are laid out in lists, each with its
carefully crafted definition, its impenetrable jargon and its box
to tick once it has been achieved. They are, in my view, a severely
limiting form of creative endeavour, because they actually discourage
individual enterprise; either a box is ticked or it is not; no one
was ever congratulated for double-ticking or for adding in new boxes,
so quite what the function of a bonus might be I find it hard to
imagine. On the other hand, a failure to meet any targets was instantly
noted and condemned. I do not wish to labour the point, but if the
Government laid down 49 performance targets, and the EA only fulfilled
42, should that not have meant a reduction in salary rather than
a bonus?
There is a more serious aspect to this quango
culture, however. It is the rise and rise of the petty but all-powerful
official, armed with clipboard and bearing all the authority of
an impenetrable organisation, positively bristling with predetermined
objectives. Because a target missed is now, apparently, a bonus
postponed, these plenipotentiaries of the new bureaucracy are on
the warpath.
You may recognise them by their ability to say
“no”. Anybody who lives in the countryside will recognise
the type, because it is here that their rules are most rigorously
imposed – you may not block a path, run water off a hill,
bury a farm animal, dig a ditch, light a bonfire, put up a fence
or erect a shed without fulfilling the most rigorous set of procedures,
and with the threat of sanctions should you fall down on the job.
Thus it was, the other day, that we learnt of
new rules governing the use of water for irrigation on farming land
in Scotland. Since our weekend retreat is deep in the Perthshire
hills, where rainfall is a regular phenomenon, we had not regarded
irrigation as high on the list of our priorities. Nevertheless,
the letter that arrived was ferocious in its language. Unless we
responded forthwith to new rules that had been imposed by the Scottish
Executive, we would be liable to an increasing set of fines, starting
at £50 and rising to several thousand. I noticed that the
“target” date for imposition of these rules had already
passed, and we were therefore in fining territory. I was able to
assure the quango concerned (the Scottish Environment Protection
Agency – Scotland’s equivalent of the EA) that we had
no intention of digging Mediterranean-style irrigation canals, and
the correspondence ceased. I have no doubt, however, that if we
had been in breach, retribution would have been swift and unremitting.
What these organisations should perhaps remember
is that we the public are not just their customers, we are their
owners. We pay their bills, it is in our interests that they are
supposed to act, it is to us that they are ultimately responsible.
When, therefore, they deal with us, it should be in a spirit of
cooperation rather than control. And if they have performed well
or badly, it is we who should judge the results rather than their
own boards, the Government or perhaps some distant office in Brussels.
I may be growing paranoid, but the more
I think about those 49 targets, the more I wonder who drew them
up. Was it the Department for Environment, to whom the EA is responsible;
or was it the EU, which lays down criteria for water standards in
Britain as elsewhere in Europe? It couldn’t have been the
EA itself could it? No – that’s unworthy. After all,
a situation in which an organisation lays down its own guidelines,
then pays itself a bonus for meeting them would be unthinkable.
Wouldn’t it?
©Magnus Linklater
Note by Editor www.land-care.org.uk
A jobsworth may be defined as
"a person in a position of minor
authority who invokes the letter of the law in order to avoid
any action requiring initiative, cooperation, etc".
Keating, Matt (2007). Hug a jobsworth and spread
a little happiness.
The Guardian, Monday July 16, 2007
http://jobsadvice.guardian.co.uk/officehours/story/0,,2126986,00.html
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