There’s been a lot of stuff in the news this week about how the British public respond to change:
and of course:
Brown wins crunch vote on 42 day detention
I think all of these issues show how difficult people find change, irrespective of the politics or truth behind them.
Let’s take the police station closures. Lots of police stations means lots of building maintenance costs, lots of power bills, and lots of administrators. All these cost money which divert funds from the front-line service provision. The nature of society means, rightly or wrongly, that communities don’t have the same level of relationships anymore. We don’t know our community bobby, and if we need to report a crime, how many people would actually choose to go to a police station to do it? I suspect that the vast majority of public contact with the police is by phone. I certainly would rather be able to make a phone call when I need to than traipse around looking for a police station. The buildings which are being earmarked for closure could bring in a lot of revenue when they are sold, which can then be used to fund more police officers on the streets. Does it really matter whether their base is in a traditional police station, in a shopping centre or on an industrial estate, as long as you can make contact with an officer when you need one?
In the same way, few people have the same relationship with their family GP that they used to. You’re now registered with a practice rather than a specific doctor. I know I’m fortunate to be a patient at an excellent GP practice and I’ve never had a problem getting an appointment (with my preferred clinician) when I needed one. Where is the issue with these so-called “Polyclinics”? In my mind, having a number of medical services available under one roof is much more beneficial than having to see your GP who will then refer you to someone else, somewhere else. Ok, inviting GPs to tender for the work alongside private companies may be contentious, but here’s hoping the NHS will learn from the Dentists’ contract debacle!
And the biggest hot potato of them all. Should those suspected of terrorism be able to be locked up for 6 weeks’ without being charged of an offence? In an ideal world, no, of course not. It runs contrary to the idea of an individual being innocent until proven guilty. But in an ideal world there wouldn’t be any terrorism. The sad fact is that if we want to be protected from more 9/11 and 7/7 events, then the way crimes of this nature are investigated needs to change. Investigations of this level are highly complex, and I can certainly understand why the police may need to arrest individuals suspected of planning terrorist attacks in order to protect the public, before they have all the evidence necessary to bring charges. And if they are under time pressures to charge or release suspects, this could lead to rushed investigations where important evidence is missed. Yes, suspects could be released on bail, but in reality, would you want someone who the police are 90% certain has been planning a suicide bomb attack released back on to the streets? If such person then went and carried out an atrocity, the police would then have every finger pointing at them for releasing them in the first place!
So, do these issues mean that we don’t like change? Is it that we’re suspicious of our Government’s motives? Are the media responsible for hyping up the public without presenting a balanced view? Probably a mix of all three, but before we get on our soap-boxes about how bad our public services are getting, lets think rationally and pragmatically about why such changes are needed, and make sure we get all sides of the story, not just what the BBC, Times or Daily Mail want to tell us.