the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

Easter Monday began dull and grey, the dawn seeming to be unable to cope with the clocks wanting daylight an hour earlier. TCB was up and about feeding the cats and making tea for himself and the Berkshire Belle and looking forward to watching the motor racing from Brands Hatch that he had recorded the previous day. He’d switched on the TV as the kettle came to the boil, but it seemed that, rather than the news, there was a special broadcast to the nation by the Prime Minister on all channels.

Through the noise of the kettle he heard the familiar tones waffling on about poor delivery of services. How boring the current crop of politicians are as speakers he thought; all slaves to political correctness and spin, but then the words “one glowing area of success in recovery so far is in facilities management”. As he danced around the cats trying to pour boiling water his concentration was elsewhere, but phrases along the lines of “taking over delivery of essential local services” came through. TCB was intrigued, but delivery of tea to the lady upstairs was a priority that he, quite correctly observed.

Once back downstairs the broadcast was thankfully over so he looked amongst the recordings on his Sky box only to find that he had recorded an afternoon of St Trinian’s films instead. Never mind he thought and dragged out his laptop to find some news of the broadcast he had missed. A transcript was available and so he opened the document, scanning the opening paragraphs about hoping that we had all had a peaceful weekend with family and friends and how delivery of essential public services was dragging at the pace of recovery, and there is was; “One area that has contributed significantly to business recovery since the winter of 2008/9 is through the management of the business infrastructure and here the facilities management profession has done the nation a great service. So much so that we are to seek their expertise in running major parts of public services., and from the 1^st of May this year we will be installing teams of qualified and experienced facilities managers to run local services provided by local and civic authorities. In these matters they will have the sole authority to determine how such services are run and they will ensure that these services are provided to benefit the communities that they serve in the same way that they have done in helping the country’s commercial organisations recovery from recession.”

He read on “From the 1^st of June the same principles will be applied to public transport and more facilities managers will be brought in to true integration of these essential services and to ensure that the money that you pay in fares is well spent. They will work with their colleagues in the local authorities to bring value for money to the way that transport projects are designed and executed. And then from the 1^st of July we will grant the facilities managers running other public services in health and education powers to take over the running of these services”.

TCB put the lap top down and thought for a moment about what he had just read. This was fantastic news, for it would put an end to many of the stupidities he saw day by day; the ridiculous vanity projects that got people’s names into the paper, but did nothing to help the community other than providing a bit of employment, but you could provide employment through projects that helped.

He picked the lap top up and scrolled down the document. There was just the one page and so he pressed Print. As he did so he saw the final line; “This Release expires at noon on April 1^st 2013”