Dying down a bit now, but another interesting and lengthy blog post to draw your attention to, this time from Lib Dem blog ‘The Burbler’:
Beginners to the art of delegation often think that it involves simply choosing experienced staff and telling them to do tasks. Of course, it is devilishly more difficult than that. It involves endless subtlety and judgment.
For example, it is a good thing to be extremely familiar with the tasks you are delegating. So, when Boris delegated planning to someone (Simon Milton? Ian Clement?) he did it knowing not the first thing about planning. Oh, I take that back. He knew that it involved balsa-wood models.
He makes the point I’ve started to realise, which is that this week’s events really mark the start of Mayor Boris Mk.2, Mk.1 having been the traditional innovative but flawed prototype built in someone’s garden shed. Now read on…
Then, for light relief, the Tory Troll has dug up Neddie Gilligoon’s glowing approval for Parker’s original appointment. Who’s laughing now, Andy?
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4 responses so far ↓
The Mayor of London is an executive position. The Mayor has to make the decisions, or at least own the decisions that others make. He has to be able to defend decisions to the Assembly and the press and the public. That means that he has to read the reports and go to meetings and understand why X was decided and not Y. If he asks someone else to back him up it is to supply some details: the Mayor has to make the main case.
It looks like the first few months of Boris’ regime were an attempt to do something different and this has come apart at the seams. So probably from now on Boris will be forced to act as a proper executive Mayor. But Boris either is, or has developed a personna as, an amateur who leaves things to “the boffins”. Will he be able to tell us clearly and consistently why X was decided and not Y? It will be interesting to see.
Absolutely. I’m salivating at the thought of Boris getting his head round the convergence of ITSO and Oyster smartcard technology. That’s a mindbender of epic proportions, and all to be done while renegotiating the Oyster deal and with the immoveable deadline of the Olympics shortly afterwards. That’s only *part* of the TfL job.
The main thing here is that, as a lot of people said at the time, there really isn’t a period after the election where you can tolerate a bit of uncertainty and to-ing and fro-ing while things settle down. He’s got to be ready to go on Day 1, either with a new team already transitioned to the role (which is impossible) or by basically carrying on with the old team, for pragmatic reasons.
He’s done neither, he’s brought in an unprepared new team with obvious fault lines plus ejecting many of the people who could keep things running in the mean time. This all means we’re four months down the line and still don’t know which projects he’s backing, which he’s cancelling, where the budget will be reprioritised next year, who’ll be running things. Basically there’s a lack of clear direction (not helped by the whole Mayoral Strategy piece, which is a massive bit of work - we won’t actually know which direction we’re going until that’s done, which will easily be into next year).
The strategy ought to be a development of the Mayor’s manifesto. In theory we were voting on alternative strategies. Unfortunately you cannot develop a strategy from some disconnected sound-bites, so now time has to be spent in developing a strategy. Implicitly the Team Bojo message has been that Livingstone’s administration was wasting tons of money, so now you can have everything plus Routemasters plus cuts in council tax. It is likely that there isn’t much waste to be cut (except ordering paper-clips in bulk) so tough decisions will have to be taken against the backdrop of bloated expectations. It will be interesting to see how the key decisions are spun, or shuffled into the shadows, or simply don’t get made.
There is much in what you say - TfL were on a strict diet, since they know full well that central government have already settled their contribution for the next 10 years, there’s not likely to be much rise in fare income (particularly in recessionary times). They were already well aware of what they could and couldn’t do, and were looking to make efficiency savings.
There’s not likely to be much more you can cut, and Boris gets no marks for saying ‘here, Alistair, we don’t need the money’ while cutting services. He shouldn’t get marks for cutting services to pay for abolishing bendy buses and buying Routemasters, either, of course.