I wouln't focus on the apparent failings of Justine Greening, which can probably be summed up by saying she trusted her senior civil servants to be competent. It looks now as if she was too trusting, but we all depend on some element of trust in our work colleagues. I think it's more interesting to know how the civil servants can have been so incompetent - which is now the subject of an enquiry. There are various possible sorts of reason, which in turn point to deeper reasons. In this case, it appears someone got the results of a calculation wrong. So, the starting point should be who that was - but then who should have checked and who appointed them. Then how the calculation was done - I'd guess on an Excel spreadsheet - it's what people use mostly for financial analysis. But Excel spreadsheets can get complicated quite quickly, and have few safeguards to prevent erroneous data being entered - so they are often wrong - they were a factor in much of the 2008 banking fiascos. So who chose the system - regardless of whether it was Excel, which in expert hands is very useful? Or did they have some bespoke system, developed at ludicrous cost, which would have been harder to see where things were going wrong than with Excel? Then, were there people outside those immediately responsible who might have had a sense that something was wrong? This is where Justine Greening probably can be criticised, especially since she does have a business background -
this from Wikipedia
Greening was born in Rotherham, where she attended Oakwood Comprehensive School.[2] She is a graduate of the University of Southampton, where she studied Economics,[3] and has an MBA from the London Business School. Prior to entering Parliament, she trained and qualified[4] as an accountant, before working as an accountant/finance manager for, amongst others, Price Waterhouse Coopers, GlaxoSmithKline and Centrica.
Ask enough questions, and you end up grasping for vague concepts such as the culture of the department - and probably government in general. Did people actually know what they were doing? If people were useless, did they get fired, or moved somewhere else in a face saving exercise, perhaps even promoted to jsutify the decision of whoever appointed the person to the job in the first place? If someone did ever try to work out how the spreadsheets worked, did they get labeled as 'a bit of a techie', so maybe not senior management material? Here's an email I sent to a young economist recently who showed signs of understanding an Excel workbook:
I’m tempted to offer some career advice. In 1979 I quit a job, telling two of the most irritating analysts I had to work with that they were representatives of the failure of the English ruling classes. One of them was this guy -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Augar- who went on to negotiated the sale of Schroders to Citigroup, and then write a book – “The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of London's Investment Banks” about our national failures. He thought our problem was to do with attitudes to social class – e.g. that the people at the top of UK thought ‘estates’ were where you shot grouse rather than where you found social housing – whereas I understood the failure as being that even bright state educated students such as he realised that the way to get on was not to understand too much about technology; the reason he was particularly irritating was that he refused ever to run applications I had developed for the team he worked in.
Any rational economist, looking objectively at subsequent career paths, would feel that his attitudes, whatever their intellectual content, had the greater utility. So, if you know what’s good for you, work on the sorts of things which people associate with those destined to rise, e.g. the ancient arts of rhetoric and 'writing courses for Directors', but the idea that Directors should also know how to use workbooks effectively is ludicrous. If you need an IT problem sorted out, just get some junior or outsourced resource to do it.
He replied
I had this conversation with my dad the other day, because he felt that people who actually know how to “do” things (e.g. design airplane engines, computers etc) are often highly skilled but both under compensated and under respected by society (he is an engineer of course). I think that your point about it not being worth understanding technology also speaks to this point, and it is something of an issue in the UK I feel.
But actually, I meant this thread to be about Lewisham, which is why I posted it in the Town Hall, not the Pub. The fact that we can find evident uselessness here in local government is hardly an earth shattering revelation, but it's easier to see where it is, and it's just about possible that commenting on it on this Forum will make a difference.
