View report page

9
Directorate of Social Services,
Municipal Offices,
Royal Hill, S.E.10.
To the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors,
London Borough of Greenwich.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have much pleasure in presenting this account of the health
and social services in Greenwich for 1969. It has been a year
when some of the longterm plans made for expansion of the
services have come to fruition and it is a matter of satisfaction to
see buildings which were at the design stage two or three years
ago occupied and in full use.
Undoubtedly this year will be remembered as the one when
management consultants arrived in the Borough. It would be
premature to attempt a definitive assessment of the contribution
which management consultants have made, or can make, to the
efficient organisation and quality of services to the public but in
any judgement they cannot remain exempt from the criteria by
which they would deem to judge others. In attempting to arrive
even at provisional conclusions, what evidence do we have from
the earlier experience of industry and other local authorities? I am
bound to say it is not encouraging. What techniques are we being
offered in the health and social services which we should not equally
have known without them? What are they enabling us to do that
we would not have been able to do without them? Notwithstanding
the elegantly presented reports, quoted in smooth, persuasive and
happy phrases, it is difficult to recognise any profitable truth that
would not be obvious to the most thoughtless schoolboy. There
is no mystery about management: it consists of a continuing process
of logical analysis and prudent housekeeping, allied to a broad
appreciation of that which requires to be done. This has to be
balanced against the resources which are available. The danger is
that in some forms of management, the way local government must
work in a democracy has not been clearly understood and the
means are often more deeply considered than the ends. The great
principle to which I would subscribe—that local authorities exist
only for the purposes of increasing the sum of individual happiness,
wellbeing or convenience—is not recognised with sufficient clarity
or sympathy. Despite the present munificent patronage of these
management firms, I would imagine that they are now on an expiring
lease; for the time has now come for the soundness of their
systems and principles to be related to the real world of practical
achievement.