07 February 2008

When is progress not progress?Answer; when it makes things worse rather than better.

This riddle came into my mind as I stood staring, last Friday, at a large map in the kitchen of a house in Charminster.

The map showed in glorious technicolour the scheme proposed by the Environment Agency for relieving flooding in Charminster.

For those who are not familiar with Charminster, it is a village that has, at its centre, a beautiful old church, a confluence of various streams, and a number of lovely old houses coming down a rather steep hill.

For many years, I have been trying, at the behest of people living in the village, to persuade the Environment Agency to devise a scheme to make it less likely the village will be flooded by the streams.

You might have assumed the early morning inspection of the map was something in the nature of a celebration. Here, at last, was an Environment Agency scheme for doing exactly what we had all been seeking.

Alas, there is a hitch.

The parish council chairman reports the scheme has succeeded in achieving unanimity in the village, something that is rare in any place. Unfortunately, the unanimity resides in the fact there is no-one who approves of the scheme.

There seems, in fact, to be various kinds of objection. Villagers believe the scheme will probably make flooding more likely rather than less, at least in some places; not an auspicious start for a flood alleviation project.

This is not the end of the matter. Villagers are also alarmed at the aesthetic damage the scheme will cause, creating a rather intrusive and unsightly bund in a location of exceptional charm.

As I listened to the various objections to the Environment Agency proposal, I reflected on how extraordinary an achievement it is for a public agency to devise something that is clearly intended to fulfil aspirations but has managed to unite residents in feeling it would be worse than useless.

I do not suppose the cost of producing the drawings and doing the other work associated with the proposal will have been enormous, but a consultancy was nevertheless employed and we will all have contributed a small amount through our taxes in paying for this objet d'art.

It is a little irking that we will now have to spend a certain amount of energy persuading the Environment Agency to abandon the very thing we had expended so much energy persuading them to undertake.

The strange thing is when one inspects the proposal, it transpires that enormous numbers of worthy bodies were duly consulted. The so-called Scoping Consultation Document has been issued to Natural England, English Heritage, West Dorset District Council, Dorset County Council and the Dorset Wildlife Trust. These worthy bodies will, no doubt, now have to expend some time and effort considering their responses to the proposal.

The thought flitted through my mind, as I left the kitchen meeting, that it might have made sense for the Environment Agency to ask their consultants to have a quick word with the locals at an early stage, to see what might be acceptable, before they did all the work.

I quickly banished this ludicrous fantasy from my mind. A quick word with the locals is not, after all, part of a proper bureaucratic process.

A MODERN RESPONSE TO EMPLOYMENT NEEDS

31 January 2008

It never fails to amaze me how much one can find out about Britain by talking to people in West Dorset.Last Friday, I visited a firm in Dorchester that specialises in an unusual form of recruitment; temporary staff.

If you read the economic literature or listen to pundits talking about employment on TV programmes, you could be forgiven for gaining the impression that people in Britain are either employed in permanent jobs, self-employed, unemployed or outside the labour force.

But you only have to visit this recruitment agency to discover the usual list of alternatives leaves out a large part of the picture.

In today's West Dorset, a considerable proportion of the population is gainfully occupied through employment agencies doing every kind of temporary work you can imagine. This is reflected in today's Britain, with an enormous number of people, millions rather than hundreds of thousands, engaged in temporary employment.

The stereotyped image of the office temp has become outdated.

In manufacturing, food processing, construction and dozens of other parts of the economy, both locally and nationally, firms are relying more and more on being able to respond flexibly to increases and decreases in demand by adjusting the numbers of temporary staff. Correspondingly, an increasing number of people are opting for temporary work as a way of life, at least for periods during which they prize flexibility above security.

As I talked to the management team of this Dorset agency, it was like watching a kaleidoscope settle into a new pattern. A hidden part of the explanation for the responsiveness of the British economy since the early 1990s came steadily into view.

When asked what, if anything, was getting in the way of the agency's admirable effort to match the changing needs of employers with the changing desires of people seeking jobs, I was immediately told that, guess what, a European Directive was coming down the road like a large juggernaut.

So there we have it; the British economy in microcosm. An impressive, modern response to market conditions and lifestyles, brought about by flexible and imaginative businesses in our rural areas as much as in our cities.

And then the threat that this flexible and forward-looking home-grown response may be put at risk by some well-intentioned but cack-handed new regulation dreamed up by officials in Brussels, who are focusing more on the way things work on the mainland than the way they operate in our little offshore island.