More red tape to help remove red tape

I do not think that the irony caught these bureaucrats. The basic thing is that schools are now scared of taking the kids out on school trips because of red tape around insurance, health and safety, licences, etc. etc. So what does the government do? Provide more red tape to remove red tape. Mind boggles.

The government is publishing new guidelines for parents and teachers in England which it hopes will mean more children go on school trips.

The Department for Education has told schools and local authorities to ditch "unnecessary paperwork", and has cut its 150 pages of guidelines to eight.

Education Secretary Michael Gove said it would mean a "more common sense approach to health and safety".

And the Health and Safety Executive said it hoped to dispel legal "myths".

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PAGES OF GUIDELINES? good heavens. But remember, EIGHT pages of turgid prose still remains and here’s a prediction, the number of school trips are still going to fall. As if this is going to change. So what do the guidelines say?

The Department for Education says the revised guidance:

• Summarises the legal duties of head teachers, governing bodies and local authorities on health and safety, and covers activities that take place on and off school premises
• Makes clear that a written risk assessment does not need to be carried out every time a school takes pupils on a regular, routine local visit, for example to a swimming pool or museum
• Tackles "myths and teachers' fears about being prosecuted" by making the law clearer
• Clarifies that parental consent is not necessary for pupils to take part in the majority of off-site activities organised by a school, as most of these activities take place during school hours and are a normal part of a child's education.

Well, ok, sounds fair enough. What do the teachers say?

The National Union of Teachers has welcomed the move but said proper protection for staff and children should be maintained.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

there you go, you can issue whatever guidelines you wish, they will not change. Unbelievable.

The trains must run on time, babies be damned

Fairly typical, eh?

Marie Luise Krach, two, sat alone as the train sped through the countryside near Berlin for an hour while a police car raced to catch it up.

Ulrike Kracht, 19, had pleaded with Deutsche Bahn staff to somehow stop the train after its automatic doors closed at a station. She was unloading her possessions and pushchair before returning for Marie Luise when her way was blocked and the train began pulling away.

Ulrike spoke of how she had spent the weekend with Marie Luise at her grandmother's near Berlin and was returning to Pritzwalk.

“I was getting my things out of the station at the stop when the doors suddenly closed with my daughter inside!“ she said. “It was the worst moment of my life. I heard Marie Luise shout 'mama' and she was gone!“ She said two German railways employees banged frantically on the doors to try to get them open but without success.

But when she asked to radio ahead to stop the train she says she was told: “We can't do that. It must run on schedule.“ Later a railways spokeswoman said: “There was no train coming back in the other direction anyway because of a strike.“

The child was alone for an hour until the train halted in Neurippin. Her mother was in a police car racing through the countryside with its lights and sirens blaring to get to the station before the train moved again.

“I was all right until I saw her and then the tears came and she started crying then too,“ said Ulrike.

Great law of Bureaucracy

Gary North’s first law of bureaucracy: “Some bureaucrat will enforce a written rule in such a way as to make the rule and the bureaucracy seem either ridiculous, tyrannical, or both.”

Brilliant stuff, I quote:

I have come to recognize a series of near laws governing bureaucracy. This one is, as far as I can see, unbreakable, comparable to the law of gravity.

Some bureaucrat will enforce a written rule in such a way as to make the rule and the bureaucracy seem either ridiculous, tyrannical, or both.

There is no way to write the rules so that some bonehead in the system will not find a way to become a thorn in someone's side – a thorn that cries out for removal.

There are corollaries to this iron law of bureaucracy.

1. The bureaucrat in question will not back down unless forced to from above.
2. His superiors will regard any public resistance to the interpretation as an attack on the bureaucracy's legitimate turf.
3. The bureaucracy's senior spokesman will defend the policy as both legitimate and necessary.
4. Politicians will be pressured by voters to have the policy changed.
5. The bureaucracy will tell the politicians that disaster will follow any such modification of the policy.
6. The public will finally get used to it.
7. The politicians will switch to some other national crisis.
8. The internal manual will then be rewritten by the senior bureaucrats to make the goof-ball application mandatory.
9. Senior management will increase the budget so as to enforce the new policy.
10. Politicians will acquiesce to this increased budget.

This leads me to North's law of bureaucratic expansion:

Any outrageous interpretation of a bureaucratic rule, if widely resisted by the public, will lead to an increased appropriation for the bureaucracy within two fiscal years.

There is an exception.

If the enforcement of the interpretation requires major expenditures for new equipment, the process will take only one fiscal year.

Height of bureaucratic nonsense

I saw this letter in this week’s economist from a gentleman called as Kenneth Hill. Never you mind about the contents of the letter, but in case you must, it related to child mortality data. This gentleman was writing on behalf of the:

 

MEMBERS OF THE

TECHNICAL ADVISORY GROUP

THAT PROVIDES METHODOLOGICAL ADVICE

TO THE INTER-AGENCY GROUP

(OF UNITED NATIONS AGENCIES)

ON MORTALITY ESTIMATION.

We function independently of the agencies themselves.

 

Do you see what made me go wtf? This is bureaucratic nonsense piled on top of another one and and and. Why cant this be done out of one agency? but no, they need to have an independent agency to link other agencies. And then they need another group to tell this inter agency group what to do? and not just simple do, its advice on the method!

The mind boggles, this is what our tax dollars are going to? Sometimes makes me wonder what these world is coming to. Why dont we stop funding these frankly bureaucratic parasites from proliferating like mad?

Look at the problem, I as an ordinary citizen, do not understand why this group exists or why I am paying for this man’s salary, expenses or honorariums. I mean, I can understand what it does in English language, but why? We dont really have that much money to spare. If we shut this down I am sure we can use this money to save 100 kids from an early death.

This is why I never give money in terms of charity to these multi national boondoggles. In any case, my government pays up to 0.7% of its GDP on my behalf in aid. Without asking me. Which means its not charity, its forced contributions. Plus to think that my hard earned money is going on these useless gits just irritates the hell out of me. Pay your charity if you will to a local charity where you can see where the money is going, not to these utterly useless make-work jobsworth pencil pushing time wasting carbuncles on the body politic bureaucrats

Wear your seat belt in South Africa

This was gobsmacking to read as to how difficult it is to get a licence in South Africa. Some quotes:

K53 method of defensive driving. Herein lies a problem, for the K53 method resembles normal driving about as much as Snoop Dogg resembles Perry Como.

But not the only problem. Securing a South African driver’s license is not as simple as passing the K53 test, which is not simple at all. It also requires that one apply for the license, a bureaucratic process so daunting that it set off riots this year. It necessitates eye examinations before applying for a license and before the road test — and all over again, should one fail. It often demands that one game the driving examiner, who may wish to flunk the hapless applicant to meet the day’s failure quota.

It is helpful to learn South Africa’s extensive and sometimes charming traffic code, which sometimes rates children between 6 and 13 as one-third of a passenger and includes a road sign that depicts a stick-figure man astride an ostrich.

If one does all this, one can proceed to take the K53, and flunk on the merits. For the K53 is just part of the Catch-22 that faces every aspiring motorist here: To drive legally, one very sensibly needs a license. Except that licenses often seem impossible to get.

All right, not impossible. They are nevertheless very difficult. In a two-year period that ended in July, the national transport ministry says, 1.5 million people applied for driver’s licenses. Fewer than 4 in 10 actually received them.

Based on Britain’s national driving exam, the K53 effectively requires an applicant to imagine that he is driving a live claymore mine under assault by guerrillas in bumper cars.

Even though the K53 method has been used for a dozen years — or perhaps because so few drivers have obtained licenses — traffic accidents and deaths are rising fast, to 15,400 fatalities last year, up nearly 9 percent from 2005. The fatality rate per mile traveled, the best measure of road safety, is five times that in the United States, which is in turn higher than in most developed nations.

License applicants are supposed to apply by telephone, which has proven less than successful. “I have attempted to call the call center — in quick succession — 271 times. Not joking,” one miserable soul wrote

Among those caught in the act is the speaker of the South African Parliament, Baleka Mbete-Kgositsile, nabbed in 1997, but not prosecuted, for procuring a phony license from a government testing center.

Ms. Mbete had a ready explanation. She was, she said, too busy to stand in line.

Technorati Tags: Bureacracy , South Africa

Doing Business has just gotten better across the world

Very good news for many countries, they are listening to their people and others, and making it easier to do business. I was quite impressed by Egypt, which has made the biggest jump in rankings! It moved from 165th to 126th. And as the World Bank reports, it made starting a business simpler, slashing the minimum capital requirements, halving the startup time and costs. So you have better entrepreneurship help!. And there is nothing like getting entrepreneurs to kick off work. Make it easy for them and jobs, investment and better growth will follow.

See the example:

Starting a business is not easy in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It takes 13 procedures and 155 days—and it costs five times the annual income per capita. The situation is even worse for women: they need the consent of a husband. And if you are a single woman, a judge decides whether you can become a businesswoman. The result: Only 18 percent of small businesses are run by women in the DRC. Next door, in Rwanda, which has no such regulations, women
run more than 41 percent of small businesses.

See here for a great overview:

But not all were good. Venezuela, the great people's socialist wonderland fell to 172nd from 164th last year. But President Chavez is a ninny anyway and he is now the proud possessor of the title of being runner-up to the Democratic Republic of Congo for doing business in!.

India is mixed, it improved a bit but its still ranked 120th compared to 83 for China. In India, the time to obtain a business licence ranges from 159 days in Bhubaneshwar to 522 in Ranchi, compared to everything done and dusted and up and running in TWO days in Australia. I dont think the Australians are moaning are they?

Looking at the United Kingdom rankings, I am afraid the news is not that good either. Well, they are definitely better than India, but the competition for the UK is not against the Indians but against Singapore, New Zealand, USA, Hong Kong and Denmark. The UK is ranked 6th in terms of ease of doing business. The only place we hit the top is the ease of getting credit, but in all the other factors, we were rather bad. And some of them are really stupid (we can fix them very easily!)

We are 54th in terms of dealing with licences, 21st in terms of hiring workers, 19th on registering property, and 24th in terms of enforcing contracts, just to pick some of the most egarious aspects. Truly bureacracy gone wild, and these factors are gobsmacking. Why on earth are we 19th on the list of registering property? the land of the Domesday Book? And 24th in terms of enforcing contracts? the country which gave modern law to the world? Horribly Bizarre!. And the UK is getting worse if you look at the yearly progress instead of improving!

Read and Learn!

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Divorces fall but weddings fall as well in the UK

The ONS has released new divorce figures which suggest that English divorces are falling, in part due to the change in divorce settlement cases. Which, given the fact that children are clearly better off in married family households, is good.

Mind you, the corresponding aspect, the weddings are falling is not good. And the number of out of wedlock and single parent households keeps on going up. See my previous post on the Child Support Agency reasons for not knowing who is the father of the child.

Given that economic incentives seem to change behaviour, here's an idea. Give a higher amount of child benefit if the parents are married, a still higher amount if they are living together. I am sure it will change behaviour. You ask how we can fund it? Close down the CSA and use that money. Such a waste of money and increase in bureaucracy.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Round III, Sarko rampant in France - this time its the French Bureaucracy and Civil Service

I feel like I am suffering from a disease, I am actually going to praise something about France, not once, not twice but thrice!.

Sarko now wants to reduce the dead hand of the state and reduce the civil service bureaucracy in France. Bloody hell, I am so impressed with this chap, good man!. and He will achieve it as well. This is a man who can shake France out of its sloth!

Mind you, he has to keep an eye out on the common man and the common elements of living, dont ever let the price of bread rise too high/too fast, Sarko, therein lies the seeds of revolution.

Some excerpts from the Independent

The principal exception was his promise to cut into the bone of the French state, which employs 40 per cent of the working population. Previous attempts to impose such biting reforms have been successfully resisted by the civil service and by trades unions. President Sarkozy said that he was "not afraid of reform of the state because we need a strong state and a state cannot be strong if it is collapsing under the weight of debt and stifled by bureaucracy".

"All structures will be simplified and all useless organisations will be abolished," he said. The two separate agencies within the sprawling finance ministry which assess and collect taxes would be merged. So would the two agencies to help the unemployed.

Go Sarko Go!

And perhaps Gordon Brown could ask Sarko about something about kicking economic butt besides wittering on about Darfur. Those wittering ons are just talk, not much use but Gordon can actually do something about the dead hand of the state in the UK by getting rid of the variety of Quango's. Why dont you have a sunset clause on the Quango's? And when they have to renew, they have to actually show what value they added and why the private sector cannot do it (under legislation/regulation if required!)


All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!