Funding cuts at Universities are in the news again today. I heard someone from one of the Unions responding with the old classic “We can’t be expected to do more with less.”
Expect to hear variations on “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” time and again over the next few years as cut follows cut follows cut. Union officials and opposition MPs will tell us that it’s inevitable that a 20% cut in a budget will lead to a 20% cut in a service.
Is it inevitable? I think it is if you have an archetypal public sector mindset. Where your only response to a cut in your budget is to cut your service – with the people you serve being the ones who lose out. Where you put out a press release saying how terrible it is that services will be cut, when what you really mean is that budgets have been cut – and your response is to cut the service. Not, perhaps, to consider how you could offer a different service with less money.
But are you telling me that there aren’t ways that services could be delivered differently – saving money whilst also improving services? I’m pretty sure that we’ll be reaching limits in terms of the obvious cost savings – I wouldn’t want to be in the Post-It Note sector in the coming years. Yet perhaps it’s time to start thinking a bit more radically – about ways to tackle failure demand for example.
Perhaps we also need to start challenging vested interests a bit more. I can’t say I truly believe that the BMA have the best interests of patients at heart, for example. They say they’re looking after us, but I think we all know who they’re really looking after. And are University academics really the selfless souls we’re told they are? Or are many of them unmanageable mavericks who need to be dragged into the modern world where, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s not as much money around as there once was.