I’m not one to gloat however; I really can’t help wanting to shout down the telephone … “Bloody told you so you!” I know it wouldn’t help the predicament we face in our communities and, I probably wouldn’t get an answer to my call in the first place…
The management tinkering and messing with command and control functions at North Yorkshire Police over recent years has left many incredulous, not to mention unemployed. That’s before you even start to consider the high levels of sickness and other personal impacts suffered by the staff. In addition to the people who have been continually shafted during much of the change management process, what of the service to the county? It appears that the evidence is mounting to support the fact, all you get from trying to do more with less is… Less!
North Yorkshire Police are taking twice as long as last year to answer 999 calls, as force bosses continue to try to cope with Government cuts. Figures obtained exclusively by The Press show that emergency calls to North Yorkshire Police are now being answered after nine seconds on average, up from four seconds last summer. The proportion of 999 calls answered within the target of ten seconds has fallen from 94 per cent in August 2010 to 77 per cent in August 2011…(York Press)
How long are our emergency service workers (and our society) expected to suffer at the hands of the often self-serving and lack lustre feckless muppets who call themselves managers?
It’s time the emergency services (not just the police), stop hiding behind and/or using statistical information to placate their failures. After all, the figures are usually manipulated to enhance their credibility in any case. With my knowledge of how the quoted call statistics are recorded and prepared, I suspect the actual problem at NYP is probably far worse than the FOI request (above) suggests.
The Emergency Services are supposed to provide a ‘service’ to the community they ‘serve’. Often these days it appears far more is being done in the name of serving individuals within the service. A prime example are the host of non service delivery departments still in existence, and often staffed by individuals on vastly inflated salaries. People who produce sheaves of charts, graphs and management speak toilet paper, which already contains more crap than it will do after it has been used.
Effective management of any organisation, let alone a public service, requires a little more than buzzword bollocks, some carefully contrived documents and a myriad of PR feel-good stories!
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Dave's Bankside Babble 
Sadly Dave, you are wrong! Good management these days is the facility to anger decent people and provide material for satire in Dilbert cartoons. When I started in management education it was a very critical discipline with statements like ‘send your managers to work with scientists, artists even Bohemians – anything is better than a management college’ – Peter Anthony’s ‘The Foundation of Management’ was a classic. This attitude was worn down and what’s on offer now is textbook twaddle peddled by ‘believers’. We know why and knew from around 1900 in the work of Veblen and Weber (key phrase ‘the iron cage of bureaucracy’).
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