Another open letter to Minister Arlene Foster from Grumpy Old Will
Dear Minister,
Wasted years, wasted wealth
During his reign as Chancellor in the heady days of New Labour, Gordon Brown threw public expenditure at NI to keep the lid on unemployment.
This largesse was delivered over the years almost as a budgetary afterthought from Westminster, and indeed accepted joyfully, if lazily, by Stormont.
Neither party seemed to give any serious thought to applying the massive amounts of money towards creating a coherent strategy for a competitive private sector. Instead they aquiesced in fueling the well documented out-of-control growth of the public sector cuckoo in our economic nest.
A 20 year fix?
In 2006 a group of 10 public-spirited business people produced a private report on the Northern Ireland economy.
Their stark conclusions highlighted a number of areas needing urgent attention but I want to focus on their view, that in order to balance our economy, around 117,000 jobs must be shed in the public sector and in due course replaced with new private sector led jobs.
This equates to a £2 billion annual payroll, and in the opinion of the group it could take 20 years to accomplish the necessary transition.
Now these are not my figures and I am sure there are many experts who can argue them up or down, but whatever the precise numbers, most would agree that we have a problem that seems intractable - and for me, 20 years is far too long.
Minister, break it down to 10,000 jobs a year over 10 years and let's get on with it.
Compulsory military service
The Barnett report made a brief mention of the state of Israel as an exemplar of good practice in economic development, but did not give any clue as to why the Israelis were successful. My blog of December 5th 2009 says why. The mindset.
I would refer you to the book "Start-up Nation". It refers to Israel's innovation, self-reliance, knowledge and networks, but the crucial central driving force of their mindset is "the experience of compulsory army service that truly sets young Israelis apart, ........ helping to equip them with the skills and mindset of entrepreneurs".
No more armies
Now Minister, after our decades of troubles I am certainly not advocating that we create any more armies in Northern Ireland, but I do think we should consider adapting and adopting the model of compulsory economic development service.
General Grumpy's plan
Here are my early thoughts on this.
• Grasp the nettle, but don't just shrink the public sector in an unplanned or unfeeling way.
• Plan a one-year programme of "private sector mindset conditioning" (analogous to compulsory army service) to be run for 10 consecutive years.
• 10,000 participants shifted from the public sector on day one into the programme. 5,000 economically inactive people to be included from day one.
• We are already paying all these folks anyway, or providing them with benefits.
• Involve them as individuals and as teams in skills training, opportunity search, networking with growing, established NI businesses and preparation for integration with the private sector, either as employees or in some cases as entrepreneurs, at the end of their "boot-camp" year.
• It needs to be spread right across the province. On average that only amounts to about 500 people per Council area.
Leadership
Minister, our problems will not be solved incrementally or by political compromise. It will take leadership; radical leadership.
This is a radical approach; there are many clever people who will rubbish it; there are major hurdles to be overcome in its implementation; but the model works in Israel and I don't see anything as potentially worthwhile jumping off the pages of the Barnett report.
Yours sincerely,
Will McKee
6 comments:
Happy Christmas Will! Tell us, are these open letters in print and on the way to Stormont? She needs to see them!
Maybe a recruitment freeze in the public sector would help too? Or at the very least an end to final salary pensions for new entrants?
Happy Christmas Will! Tell us, are these open letters in print and on the way to Stormont? She needs to see them!
Maybe a recruitment freeze in the public sector would help too? Or at the very least an end to final salary pensions for new entrants?
Aha Mouse. I've rumbled you, cos you sent that message twice and now I see that you are anonymous ....er... Ok, I'm still in the dark!
No. I'm hoping one of my followers sends the open letters on to the Minister. And Happy New Year!
Unfortunately they will never do something so radical. They are too busy arguing the petty issues and scoring one up on each other.
(Hate hate hate any concept of compulsory service however).
It's a question of attitude. Huge problems - and people still don't get just how huge a problem we have - demand radical solutions. Look at the "compulsory service" in the same terms as the compulsion applied for people to go to school. All these civil servants have to be reorientated to cope with the new private sector led economy. The alternative for them is not pretty either!
OK Willo. There is no doubt that scientifically and probably in business too Israel punches way above its weight, and much of this may be due to the mindset that gets inculcated in young Israelis by their national service. Mind you, Israel was hit pretty hard by the recession, and they have a significant ongoing brain drain, particularly to the US. Having said that, if you have the brains, you need to expect some drainage.
In NI it is difficult to see what sort of model would actually work (agreed - not military!) but getting people out of the public sector for even a short while during the week sounds like a fine plan.
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