Published by Justin Lewis-Anthony on 16 Dec 2008 at 10:47 am
3MT : Relaxed about Public Service
For thirty years we have been told that the public sector is bad at providing the things we want and need. In the wake of another private agency blunder, perhaps we need to rethink this orthodoxy.
In the papers today is another public/private government mess. Tens of thousands of retired public sector workers (from the Health Service, the Civil Service and the Armed Forces) have been told that their pensions have been overpaid for decades. They’ve been getting too much money. Reassuringly, that most reassuring of politicians the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced that the overpayments “need not be repaid”, but all the pensioners will face the prospect of receiving corrected, reduced, pensions from April next year. So far, so typical, but my attention was drawn by the report in the Guardian which explained the role of the public/private agency responsible for the mistake.
The company responsible for the mistake is Xafinity (and I really have no idea how you are supposed to pronounce its name), a company that has, so the Guardian says “handled public sector pension payments for more than 170 years.”1. Really? In the 1830s there was a company called Xafinity? In 1836 the office of Her Majesty’s Paymaster was set up to pay the pensions of the army and navy following the ending of the Napoleonic Wars. A quick google to find Xafinity’s website, where we discover that Xafinity is actually the inheritor of a whole series of mergers and acquisitions intended to do the heavy-lifting for the Office of the Paymaster General, integrating the government’s finances with the commercial banking sector. Or, in the words of Xafinity:
…three ‘pillars’ of People, Process and Platform, bound together in an agile, innovative learning environment, make Xafinity a potentially invaluable resource in providing effective and economic member services for public and private sector employers, pension fund managers, trustees, third party administrators and public policy makers alike.
Right up to the point where they get your pension payment wrong.
What does Xafinity mean for our society? Can we see something hopeful emerging from the mess. I see two things. First, a silly name does not make a great company. It doesn’t matter how much you mangle cod-Latin or cod-Greek to give your business a cool name, if you can’t organise the business, then you have no business being in business (how many churches spend all their effort in getting the name and the logo right for a new initiative and leave the content of the new initiative to the Holy Spirit or chance?).
Second, we have lived under the orthodoxy of public-bad/private-good now for thirty years. The private sector is able, we have been told, to do it better, cheaper, and… (well, that’s it, better and cheaper), than the public sector. If we sack the cleaners employed by the hospitals, and let private agencies be responsible for the cleaning; if we don’t pay civil servants but management consultants; if we lay off financial regulators and financial regulations in favour of creative banking innovations, then we will be well on the way to the New Jerusalem. Even putting it like that shows how ridiculous the answer has proved to be. Instead, perhaps now, we will begin to recover the idea, the dignity and the honour of public service, not being in business for “the management and transformation of corporate rewards environments”2 , but to serve our fellow citizens.
Early in New Labour’s administration, Peter (now Lord) Mandelson said “we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Perhaps it is time for the government to get intensely agitated about public service.
- Phillip Inman, ‘Firm at centre of storm has been paying public sector pensions for over 170 years’, The Guardian, Tuesday 16 December 2008. [↩]
- The Xafinity Group, Company History [↩]
