Beaten by Britain’s blundering bureaucracy?

Friday blog

I try to avoid writing about my sad, boring little life on this blog. But two recent incidents gave me some understanding why nothing in Britain seems to work anymore and nothing ever seems to get done to fix this.

Incident 1: The permanently leaking beach shower

For various reasons, I haven’t been able to go to the gym for a while. So, to get some exercise, I’ve been doing a 7-mile walk along the seafront each afternoon. I noticed that one of the beach showers has been leaking water for more than a month. A couple of weeks ago, I reported this to one of the local council staff working/lounging (delete as appropriate) at the beach. He assured me he would report this. Of course, he didn’t bother and the leak continued.

But yesterday, hallelujah. I saw a van from an organisation called ‘Dorset Water’ parked outside one of the blocks of toilets at the beach and on the van in nice big letters, Dorset Water boasted about how they fixed water leaks and some other things like that. So, I got the driver’s attention and told him about the leaking shower. He looked at me with incredulity. And, shaking his head, he said that there was nothing he could do about that. I explained that all he needed to do was turn off the tap feeding the shower then the leak would stop.

The leak repairman told me that he was there to fix a leak in the toilets, but couldn’t possibly deal with a leaking shower. The process was that I would have to report the leak to the council, the council would send someone out to check the cause of the leak, the council would then raise a job number, this job would then be assigned to Dorset Water and only then could the brave repairman look at the problem and either repair the shower or else turn off the tap feeding the shower.

In my naivety, I suggested that, as he knew the process and the people involved at the council and Dorset Water, could he report the leak. A look of total astonishment and shaking of his head. Of course, he couldn’t possibly report the leak. That was my job as a member of the public, not his job as a water leaks repairman.

It was a hot day and I was in no mood for a conversation with the human equivalent of a brick wall. So I gave up. It seemed that the shower leak would continue for at least another few centuries.

As I continued my walk I was approached by a gentleman who had been sitting in sun outside his beach hut.

He asked me what I had been talking with the Dorset Water worker about. I explained that I had told the hero from Dorset Water about the shower which had been leaking water for over a month. The gentleman then asked: Did he say “thank you very much sir. We know about that and will get it fixed as soon as possible” or did he say “thank you very much sir, we didn’t know about that, but I’ll report it and we’ll get it fixed”. I answered that unfortunately the Dorset Water repairman had (politely) suggested I get lost as being a water leaks repairman in Dorset he was totally uninterested in hearing about water leaks in Dorset. The gentleman walked away shaking his head and muttering about how his taxes were being wasted.

Incident 2: The great gas meter conundrum

Some workmen are currently replacing the old metal gas mains in the street where I live with new plastic pipes. As part of this, they have to run new pipes into my house. A couple of weeks ago, an ‘engineer’ and two workers from the utilities company carrying out the work visited me to see what work had to be done to connect my gas meter to the new pipes. When they saw my gas meter, there was much shaking of heads and discussion about problems with V16 gas meters and the difficulty of getting the pipes round ‘knuckle bends’. And I was informed that new holes would have to be drilled in my walls and cabinets removed and suchlike. Getting the feeling that I was dealing with some possibly incompetent ‘right-said-Freds’ who were about to wreck my house just to install some gas pipes I politely suggested they send someone who actually knew what they were doing.

A week or so later, three intrepid workers turned up to stand around discussing my gas pipes and gas meter. One was an engineer from SGN (my gas supplier) and the other two were from the utilities company carrying out the work. After a great deal of learned discussion they informed me that they could solve the problem with the ‘knuckle bends’ but that their job would be a lot easier if I had my old large V16 gas meter replaced with a more modern smaller V6 meter.

I replied, “OK, no problem, you’re welcome to replace my gas meter“. Once again (as with the Dorset Water leaks repaiman) looks of absolute consternation. They couldn’t possible replace my gas meter. The engineer from SGN was only responsible for the gas supply, the workers from the utilities company were only responsible for replacing the pipes. The gas meter was owned by Octopus Energy (my energy supplier) and only Octopus Energy could replace the meter. Again, displaying my naivety, I asked whether they could contact Octopus Energy and get the meter replaced. They looked at me as if I was mad. They couldn’t possibly do that. That wasn’t their job. It was up to me to contact Octopus Energy to get the meter replaced.

I did contact Octopus Energy and was told it would take 7 working days for a request from ‘Customer Services’ to reach the Engineering Department. Then the Engineering Department had up to 21 working days to set a date for the meter replacement. Clearly I couldn’t possibly get my meter replaced in the two weeks before the utilities company intended to carry out the pipe replacement

Broken Britain?

I have worked with a lot of engineers as many of the companies where I did projects were engineering companies – oil rigs, jet fighters, aircraft maintenance and office block construction – which were moving from ‘Cost Plus’ projects to ‘Fixed Price’ contracts. Managing a ‘Fixed Price’ contract requires quite different organisation structure and management systems compared to ‘Cost Plus’. And my, admittedly limited, experience of real engineers suggested to me that that ones I met from Dorset Water, SGN and the utilities company were less than professional and totally lacking in any form of initiative or taking personal responsibility for anything.

It’s rather lucky we didn’t have these (IMHO) useless, bureaucratic, initiative-free, blundering buffons running our country in 1939, otherwise we’d all have been speaking German long before the first soldier had been recruited or the first Spitfire had been built.