Changes

When someone important in a business has a good idea, a project is started to look into it, feasibility studies are done, a budget is set, and then the work is carried out.

Things are a little different in the public sector.  Someone important has a good idea, writes it down, and we on the front line are just expected to get on and do it, somehow.

For example, remember the Policing Pledge?  Leaving aside the obvious facts that some of it is meaningless and some of it is impossible to deliver (how can a calltaker possibly know how long it will take an officer to get to you when he doesn't know which officer we in Despatch will choose, where he's coming from, or which sort of diesel-powered car he's driving?), the main problem with it was that we heard about it about three days before it was made public - and with a huge advertising campaign, at that.

Did hundreds of new Neighbourhood PCs and PCSOs turn up the next day so that they could spend 80% of their time "visibly working" as well as all the other valuable work that they do, you know, inside buildings?  They did not.  Did we get loads of new Response officers and cars so that we could handle non-emergency calls quickly, and promise to have someone available to go to all 999 calls immediately?  I think you probably know the answer to that.

I don't disagree with the bits of the Pledge that actually make sense, and it's good for the public to have clarity on what they can expect from us.  But as it stands, it's just words.  Without an investment in recruiting new officers, it's completely meaningless.

We just carried on exactly as before, doing the best we can with limited resources.

It happens on a local level, too.  Without going into detail, one of the Supers decided to fiddle with the way that a certain thing works on our despatching software.  They obviously thought it was a brilliant idea and just went ahead and trialled it on a particular area.  Unfortunately, they didn't ask us despatchers what we thought about it, and they didn't tell us, or our line managers, what they'd done.

You can imagine the swearing from my colleague who was working that area when her screen suddenly starting doing something unexpected.  She also realised within about a minute that it couldn't possibly work.