EDINBURGH City Council is looking for a walking co-ordinator. The successful candidate will be expected "to increase physical activity levels of whose who live and work in Edinburgh through walking".
That is assuredly a fine and worthy aspiration. It would certainly help if more of Edinburgh's citizens walked to work, but should we really be spending up to £26,000 a year on someone to co-ordinate it?
The council pointed out yesterday that th
e position was being funded from a central health improvement fund not from council coffers, but that is not the point.
It really doesn't matter whether the Scottish Government is paying or the city council is paying, it is our money they are spending – and by our money I mean taxpayers' money, provided by those of us working in the private sector.
It's easy to see how the decision to recruit a walking co-ordinator might have come about. The council and NHS Lothian would both have policies of getting more people to walk. They would almost certainly have a target to achieve of getting a certain percentage of Edinburgh's corpulent burghers out of their cars and buses and on to the pavements. So what do they do?
They put the issue to a committee and the committee decides to employ somebody to co- ordinate their walking efforts. This sort of move might have been understandable in the days of plenty, when budgets were rising and the public sector had money to spend. But it now seems extraneous at best and a waste of money at worst. Not only is public spending going to start shrinking, dramatically, but councils are also going to have to start answering for their actions to an increasingly embittered private sector.
A walking co-ordinator may be successful in improving physical fitness and helping the NHS in the long term, but it will go down on the list alongside trampoline development officers – which several Scottish councils already employ – as worthy and well-intentioned posts that do not really appear to help deliver core, front-line public services.
This is the key issue, perception, and some parts of the public sector do not really seem to get it. If you start advertising for a walking co-ordinator or a trampoline development officer when your council tax payers are losing their jobs or struggling to pay their own bills, you cannot be surprised if they feel aggrieved by it.
Indeed, it does now seem as if the gap between the private and public sectors has widened to such an extent that they do not seem to be operating in the same universe.
Private firms are taking the brunt of the impact from the economic downturn. Companies in every field are collapsing, on a daily basis. Many of those that are surviving are either axing jobs, cutting wages or reducing the hours of those who remain. What they are not doing is employing someone just because they have a target to hit.
It always used to be said that public sector employees enjoyed job security, gold-plated pensions, flexible hours, good holidays and annual pay rises, but that they suffered in comparison to the private sector when it came to pay. This is no longer the case.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics released last week show that the median full-time weekly wage in the public sector last year was £454, compared with £400 in the private sector. They also showed that the gulf is widest in Scotland, where public sector workers now average £3,133 a year more than private sector workers.
So, not only do public sector workers get all their traditional benefits of job security and gold-plated pensions, but they also now get paid more than their private sector counterparts, many of whom are either losing their jobs or seeing their take-home pay cut because of the recession. It is no wonder that JobsGoPublic, a website advertising positions in local and central government only, received 1.5 million hits last month – 50 per cent more than in any month last year.
Private sector workers, on the whole, don't begrudge public sector workers their pay and conditions, particularly those who work in front-line services, but what they do begrudge are decisions to spend their money on projects that appear to be hardly necessary.
Last week The Scotsman revealed that three of Scotland's most successful businessmen, Sir Tom Farmer, Brian Souter and Donald Macdonald, wanted a meeting with Alex Salmond, the First Minister, to express their concerns about the Scottish Government and its approach to the economy. A key worry for them was this administration's apparent inability to live up to its promise of slashing the size of the public sector in Scotland.
They know that the current imbalance in Scottish society, with so much weight in the public sector, paid for by a shrinking private sector, is not sustainable. In fact, everybody in the private sector knows it.
There used to be a mindset in government that could be roughly translated as "public sector good, private sector bad". That does not need to be reversed totally, but what does need to happen is for the public sector to take on some of the same attitudes of the private sector, particularly when it comes to employment and reacting to the recession.
Homecoming is the Scottish Government's favoured initiative at the moment, but how much better and more efficiently would it have been run had it been farmed out to the private sector? How would it have looked had Pete Irvine and Unique Events been in charge, rather than VisitScotland and the Scottish Government?
We will never know, but what we do know is that if the private sector ethos was really embraced by public sector managers, then there would not be walking co-ordinators, nor a fund to create walking co-ordinators nor anything else of that sort unless and until the economy had improved enough to justify them.
