The Friday Blog: Bring on the Cider Lake
I think I heard this on the Farming News, although it is quite possible I dreamt it. The thing with the Farming News is that it is on very, very early in the morning. Well, obviously, that is farmers for you, so do not tell me that the BBC does not understand its audience. Anyway, since all of this I am no longer a regular passenger on the 0550 out of New Street. Consequently, the Farming News and I have become strangers. What may very well have happened was that I fell asleep during Today in Parliament and, as I was semi-stirring in dawn’s early glow, a magic word stimulated my neurons and news entered brain subliminally. At least I hope that is what happened, because the news I thought I heard was that this Autumn, England, apparently, will have a cider lake. Bring. It. On.
It is good to know that some things will be in abundance as we head into full lockdown again, which is where we are going is it not? They, whoever “they” are, have been preparing us for it for the past few weeks, softening us up. How many times have you heard about “leaks” betraying the private thoughts of senior policy makers about what we need to do next. “Leaks.” Do not be so naive. The number of stories purporting to reveal secret government plans, that government does not know about before they are published, is vanishingly small. That is largely because government puts them out there in the first place. Tit bits are drip fed to media outlets who report them as scoops. SPADS and Spin Doctors then keep their ears open to find out how whatever is being tested might land with the chattering classes. That is a lot easier these days with social media and software that monitors it all. It is just as well, because the traditional method of visiting the nation’s pubs and clubs is getting trickier by the minute. Striking up conversation with strangers is now viewed with as much suspicion in the rest of the country as it always has been on the London Underground. Eavesdropping from two metres away, with no prospect now of following people up to the bar, is also difficult.
After a couple of weeks of softening up and trailing what might be coming, the gory details have been appearing this week. After saying last time that I was unimpressed about how Downing Street was conducting its communications, I have followed with interest how they have gone about their business over the past few days. They pulled a cunning stunt. Ok, it was one that you could see from a mile off, but it was a cunning stunt none the less, and one that afforded me a smile. On Monday, our two most senior Medical Scientists were allowed out on their own to give the bad news on how we were doing on the Coronavirus front. And it was very bad news. The Brothers Grim, the red tops called them. The point is that they were on their own. No PM. No Health Secretary. No senior government figure at all. When I was a trainee sales rep all those years ago, I was taught to stand next to the screen when giving a presentation. Preferably on the right of it, so as the audience read the content their eyes would alight on you, and you would be part of the message. You are selling it, be part of the message. Monday was the complete antithesis of that. Do not stand next to the screen. Do not be part of the message. Do not even be in the same room as the message.
It was more softening up for the PM’s address to us all on Tuesday. Is it bad to confess I did not even bother tuning in? I am not sure how much good shutting the pubs at 10 o’clock will do. It merely illustrates to me the extent of the disconnect between the lives of those who are making the rules and the lives of those for whom the rules are made. It will not trouble me personally too much. I am well at an age when the most appealing time to visit the pub is late afternoon / early evening, and I have got over the FOMO that, for years, compelled me to order a double round at the bell and be there until lights were switched off and doors bolted. What has upset me is applying the same restrictions to restaurants. It is the most nonsensical or all the nonsense we have had to endure. If the concern is that everyone will run out of the pub at closing time and into a restaurant for a basket of bread and another six pints of larger, make last orders 9.45, it is anyway in most places, and enforce it. Do not make last orders, effectively, 8.00. Restaurants are the places where I have felt the most safe when I have been out and about. You are easily seated in your own space and table service is what they do. A whole lot of individual eateries and quality chains, who have behaved responsibly and offered solace for families, weary of their own dining tables, will have their capacity smashed, many will not survive and getting a table at those that do, will become close to impossible.
It could all be academic anyway, if we end up in full lockdown. The PM delivered the final softening up when he suggested how long the new restrictions would last. Two or three weeks I was expecting, but no, six months. Well, forget it. The festive season is cancelled, no prospect of behaving badly at the Office party or caning it with your mates on Christmas Eve, no pressies because Santa is a super spreader and you will need legal counsel to work out who is allowed to share your Turkey. How much worse can it get. Put us out of our misery, make it easy for everyone, and just lock us down again.
Speaking of communications style, my daughter is positively brimming with wisdom and witty and wry remarks since she started big school. This week she delivered in some style. One of the things she has to endure when I do the early school run, is listening to the Today programme. I know that sounds mean, but we do use the time to chat and, to be fair, her Spotify playlist is pretty decent, more to my tastes than those of her mother, but at that time of the morning it is just too loud. On Tuesday, Mishal Husain was serially interrupting Michael Gove, making the interview difficult to follow. You know how I feel about the inability of highly paid journalists to conduct these conversations with any skill. I was beginning to feel sorry for Gove, (did I just say that out loud?) and was wishing she would just shut up and let him answer at least one of the questions she kept firing at him. After one section, which consisted of about 30 seconds of the two of them speaking simultaneously, my daughter hit the mute button. “How can you listen to this Dad?” she asked, “It is basically just two people squabbling. It is like a bad version of The Apprentice.” She was not too far wrong. She also thinks that the official graphs of the ebbs and flows of COVID infections look like the spice charts in Nando’s.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster invaded my world again on Tuesday night when I got the “private” letter from him outlining the “reasonable worst case scenario planning assumptions” for freight flows at the end of the Transition Period. It came with a strict warning that it was embargoed until the CDL made the formal announcement to Parliament on Wednesday afternoon. Any breach would involve henchman from the Cabinet Office whisking me away to the Tower of London. On Wednesday morning it was the lead item on the BBC news. Another “leak.” The letter is actually worth taking seriously. The biggest fear government has for the end of the Transition Period is trader readiness, and that was the doomsday vision laid out in Gove’s letter, all and sundry turning up at Dover without the correct documentation. Gove assumed the persona of the angry bloke on the does what is says on the tin adverts. “Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.” There is a plethora of government advice on this, with Webinars ongoing, and you can find it all on our Brexit webpage. We are also working with officials on further improving content and making it as accessible to you as possible. But please let us know what else you need and do take the time to fill in our Brexit survey.
Exiting our lives this week was Jin Sahota who resigned as Chief Executive of NHS Supply Chain Coordination Ltd. Given the controversy surrounding supply, I was a little surprised that it did not garner more interest from the lay media. Even the HSJ just put the news out quietly at the weekend and I only heard because Nish sent me a text on Sunday morning. If the timing of the announcement was a deliberate move to go under the radar, I am neither surprised nor begrudging. In April, Sahota received a horrible savaging courtesy of the Daily Mail. That article was deeply and unjustifiably personal, and we wrote to him offering moral support and disassociating ourselves from comments attributed to an individual who seemed to want to make much of a decades’ old affiliation with the ABHI. To say Sahota had a difficult job does not cut it. It was probably impossible. I remember chairing a session at an ABHI procurement conference just after I had been handed responsibility for leading our response to Brexit, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. After listening to those responsible for making it happen talk about how the new operating model was going to work, about category towers and vertical integration when the rest of the world was going horizontal, I began to think that my brief was actually fairly straightforward after all.
There is a lot of talk about lessons learnt during COVID, but just as important for me are the things we already knew for which it has served as a reminder. We knew there was a better, more sustainable way to deliver out patient care, rather than bringing millions of people, the vast majority of whom do not need to be there, into the large sheds attached to our acute hospitals. Using the telephone would be an improvement in a lot of places. We knew that examination gloves, drapes and gowns were not simple commodities, but first line technology in infection prevention, which you procure on price alone at the peril of patients and the healthcare workers that look after them. And we knew that trying to deliver at large scale can be complex and clunky. We tend to think of ourselves as living on a tiny, little overcrowded island, but in truth, England is a big country in its own right, especially in European terms, and very few places in the world try and run a health and care system on the scale we do. Procurement is a case in point, of which I have been reminded in my NHS role. At our hospital, we have tried to follow the rules on nationally sourced products, we really have. But on just about every occasion we have had an issue that needed escalating, the national response has been insufficient, and we have had to fall back on local contingencies or our relationship with individual suppliers. There will be (another) review of NHS procurement at some point, and it will conclude that the sheer scale of trying to buy so many products on a national level, in search of economies of scale that do not exist, is not the answer. And we will point out, again, that using third party, for profit intermediaries cannot possibly achieve the best value for the taxpayer. A lot of you have the T-shirt.
So, as we reach the end of another tumultuous week in what are our strange lives at the moment, I hope you will be able to enjoy a restful weekend and spend some quality time with those close to you. I am off to explore that lake.
