For example, parents want to know how their children are getting on at school. Twenty years ago they would receive a school report with a list of school subjects, a simple mark against each one, and sometimes a comment by the teacher like 'Well done!' or 'Could do better!' Parents said, 'We want to know more. We want to know why Peter is worried at school. What kind of maths is Sarah studying? - it is nothing like the maths we studied at school. How does Tom compare with his friends in learning to read?' The parents could meet the teachers at 'Parents' Evenings' but many of them wanted a full written report which showed that the teachers had carefully thought about their own child. At the same time, the government thought that a full account of a child's school career would be very useful for employers and for universities. So teachers have learnt to write these long reports. Forms must be checked against forms, and teachers must consult each other about the child's progress in more and more detail. That means less time in the classroom, and perhaps administrative assistants are employed to help with the forms. The long reports are wonderful but in the end there is less money for teachers, more for form-fillers.
Similar problems occur with policemen carefully recording the details of each case in which they make an arrest or discuss anything with an arrested person. The records help to ensure that arrested people are treated properly, are not intimidated, and that their evidence is not falsified. So such reports are essential for justice. But now more policeman are sitting behind desks, and not out and about doing the work they were trained to do.
The group which is loudest in condemning bureaucracy is the business community. Businessmen do not like seeing their profits disappear as they are forced to obey rules imposed by government. They believe that businesses should be free to follow their own routes to success, unencumbered by many regulations. Twenty five years ago, we had a Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who agreed with the businessmen and thought that their ideas should be developed widely in British society. She decided that if public services - like the National Health Service and Local Governments - were organised as if they were businesses, they would be more efficient. Although she could not 'privatise' the NHS, she believed that it would be efficient to privatise parts of the organisation. For example the NHS could sign a contract with a private company to clean a hospital. The company would employ the cleaners instead of the NHS employing them. Municipal housing could also be organised as a business - and then the builders and plumbers and electricians who were needed to maintain the houses would be employees of a business which would ensure that they did the work properly, on time. In fact, she argued, the more public services that could be privatised, the better for everyone, since business methods would cut bureaucratic red-tape!
Those who disagreed with Mrs Thatcher argued that the ideals of 'public service' were absolutely different from the ideals of 'business'. Businesses needed to make profits, but schools, hospitals, city councils were not profit-making organisations and should not be treated as if they were. Public services should be responsible in their own way - responsible to the public, to ordinary citizens, not to business and its shareholders. If the priority of a company is to increase its profits, then it will look at the cheapest ways, not the best ways, of cleaning the hospital.
At the time that this argument was at its height, the Soviet Union was struggling in its final phase. When Russia became an independent federation at the beginning of 1992, many Russian policy-makers adopted Mrs Thatcher's privatising schemes, believing they were a normal part of Western society and its organisation. In fact they were controversial reforms, with good consequences and bad consequences.
'Privatisation' of public services did not always reduce bureaucracy. According to the privatisation plan, the local NHS or the local City Council had to advertise that 'Hospital Cleaning' or 'Municipal Housing' was going to be 'contracted out' to private businesses. They had to look at all offers, decide which was the best value, devise a contract, and hand over the work and the workers. But this was not the end of their responsibilities. They had to inspect the new privatised businesses and ensure that basic regulations were kept. Administrators were appointed to deal with these new problems and they had to have assistants, and secretaries and computer clerks.
So bureaucracy was increased. Was the result more efficient? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. An infamous example was the contracting out of hospital cleaning services to private companies. In order to make profits, the businesses reduced workers' pay, reduced hours - and infections from dirty corners and unwashed bathrooms began to invade the hospital wards.
At the same time, those sections of public organisations which were not privatised had to examine their own accounts and explain very carefully just how and why they spent public money. So they had to have new accounting systems - based on business accounting systems. Every organisation had to be 'accountable' - which meant, quite literally, that its accounts had to be open and available to the public, if any public money was involved. Most of us will agree that if an organisation is spending our money - money from the taxes which we have paid - we ought to have the right to investigate the accounts. Who is cheating? Who is being honest? We ought to know!
The British and the Russians can certainly agree on that. But suppose that an organisation - let us say, a small public library -receives public money from the local administration. The money pays for the librarian, the assistant librarian, a secretary, the buildings, their heating and lighting, and, most important, the books. All these expenses can be shown on the financial records. One day the librarian decides to organise a special children's day at the library. She buys balloons, cards, paints, and some colouring books. She rearranges the books, suddenly remembers that they will need tea and rushes to buy a cake. She invites a speaker, an elderly gentleman who does not walk well, so she arranges for him to have a taxi back to his home. Who pays? The money has come out of her handbag, but she should not pay for all these things herself. She can get receipts - for balloons, for cards, for a cake for tea, for the taxi fare - but to do so takes up time and effort. Then all these transactions have to be transcribed into the accounts, so the secretary has no time to catalogue the library books, and while she is writing out the cost of the balloons she wonders if 'accountability' is the best way of spending public money.
Similar situations are so common that they provoke debate up and down the country. How do we make things happen in a friendly and efficient way without being out of pocket (i.e. spending our own money when official money should be spent)? Everyone can see the problem; but it is not easy to know what to do. It seems that hardworking people with little money have to show that they are accountable, whereas rich people somehow can avoid doing so. That has been true throughout history, but when some scandal of misused expenses and accounts is revealed, the British population become extremely angry. Their anger is expressed in the form: 'What you (the rich) are doing is not fair!' We struggle to do our best, often paying our own money to do so because completing the necessary forms takes too long. But you can cheat and avoid regulations and you don't feel how unfair that is!'