The “back office” and the “front line”

In this age of austerity and “cuts”, a new political refrain has arisen in Northern Ireland – we must make the efficiencies in public services “without affecting the front line”. This is an appealing line, but it has no real meaning whatsoever, and is symptomatic of an ongoing lack of political leadership in Northern Ireland. In fact, if anyone sought to carry it out in practice, the consequences would be damaging.

At its heart is a populist notion that public services are delivered by “front line” people such as nurses, teachers and police officers, backed up by the “back office” of faceless bureaucrats and pen-pushing administrators. In the logic of the world of “front line” versus “back office”, we could get rid of all those bureaucrats and administrators (never mind the fact they too have families to feed and mortgages to pay) but as long as we kept the front line, public services will go unaffected.

The fault in this logic is immediately apparent – if these bureaucrats and administrators are not necessary, why do they exist? If we were bolstering the public sector just to provide employment, we did we bolster it only with bureaucrats and not add any front-line personnel? None if this stands up to rational scrutiny.

However, the real problem lies in the notion itself. As a local Councillor, I am frequently (and rightly) reminded, for example, that police officers spend too much time “filling in forms” (i.e. on bureaucracy) and not enough time “out on the streets”. This does not demonstrate the need for more “front line”, in fact it shows there is not enough “back office”. Remove the back office, and police officers will have to handle more bureaucracy, not less.

We could also put this in a business setting. If our sales team is “front line” and those who administer the invoices and the purchase orders are “back office”, and we get rid of the “back office”, how on earth would we know what to sell and recoup the money for selling it?

The idea that there is a division between “front line” and “back office” is a nice political line, but it needs to be challenged at every turn. The challenge for our politicians is that there is too much waste in the public sector (enhanced, not helped, by the rush to “create” public sector employment over the past decade, as noted in my previous blog), and thus an awful lot of effort put into work which simply is not necessary. Added to this is the unspoken challenge of assessing, rationally, what the government should really be doing in the first place – are managing events, funding minority languages or preparing for the euro really government functions?

Before you can find the right answers, you need to ask the right questions. The next time someone suggests our financial mess can be solved “without affecting the front line”, the right question is to challenge this for the nonsense this is. The real issue is waste, and people involved in irrelevant “failure” activity which does not enhance (indeed may even hinder) the public services politicians are ultimately responsible for delivering.