On Thu, 9 Feb 2023 14:51:26 +0000, Chris Youlden <
fbx@youlden.co.uk>
wrote:
<snip>
The financial advisor we were given came to us following the big
internal revamp of the NHS. You may recall that the NHS internal market
was one enormous cock-up. I attach a link below for anyone who has
forgotten what happened.
<https://navigator.health.org.uk/theme/national-health-service-and-community-care-act-1990>
I asked the advisor about his work with the NHS reforms and he said he
was really proud over what had been achieved.
That really gave me confidence as to what was about to happen in the BBC.
The NHS seemed to us (I was Chair of London TV2 at the time) to be
about a couple of years further down the same road that management
wanted to take the BBC. Studying the press, it seemed to us that the
NHS's "internal market" - and, looking from the outside in, we were
very far from convinced that it was a true market-based system - was
having the effect of removing funds from clinical functions to pay for
the bureaucratic overheads.
One of my then colleagues was married to a senior nurse in the NHS,
and through her, we had a dialogue with one of the health service
unions, which confirmed our analysis and revealed that the health
service union believed it was detecting that some of the "reforms"
might be about to be reversed, as, indeed, they subsequently were.
This was interesting, because the Government at the time was stoutly
denying that anything of the sort was in contemplation.
BECTU therefore asked the BBC at national level to defer the
introduction of Producer Choice for 12 months in order to learn
lessons from the NHS. This request was denied out-of-hand. We
inferred from this that the advertised reason for Producer Choice -
improving internal efficiency - was unlikely to be the real one. We
simply could not see how the small army of accountants, cost managers,
internal sales and PR people, contract compliance teams etc etc etc
that would clearly be required to operate Producer Choice in the way
it had been presented to us could possibly result in more broadcasting
hours for the same revenue funding. The experience of the NHS
strongly suggested that the reverse was by far the more likely
outcome. We thought that the funding required would end up coming
from somewhere else, and that the "somewhere else" was likely to be
staff terms and conditions. In this, we were proved absolutely
correct.
In an effort to keep this vaguely on-topic for a technical newsgroup,
Producer Choice was the end of the old BBC maxim that "we make our end
as good as it can be, so all the choice as to quality rests with the
viewer/ listener". Technical quality decisions were, ultimately, made
by accountants who had to learn the hard way the lesson we had tried
in vain to teach management: that it is easy to be mediocre at low
cost, but that wit and ingenuity are required to be good for not much
more.
My own view at the time was that I was not remotely interested in
being mediocre, and if management were going to stop me trying to be
good, I would rather do something else for a living.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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