Let’s have smart meters to measure the competence of public servants

THERE was much about the new EU measures to combat climate change during the week. One of the big changes for this country will be the introduction of smart electricity meters to help people measure how they consume electricity, but it would be a lot more effective if we came up with a way of measuring the competence of our public servants.

The smart meters are being promoted as a way to save money for electricity consumers. They are, in effect, smart meters for stupid people.

The current meters tell people how much electricity they are using, and people know that the more electricity they use, the more they have to pay.

It will be the same with the smart meters, except that consumers will get feedback about the amount of electricity being consumed for particular purposes, thereby making it easier for them to cut down where it counts.

Of course, if everybody cuts down, you can safely bet the price of electricity will then go up. In addition, consumers will have to buy the new meters and pay for their installation.

Human nature being what it is, everybody will not cut down, but those who do so should be relatively better off. Some people seem to be getting the meter bug because there is also talk about the installation of water meters in private houses throughout the country.

Water is without doubt our most plentiful resource, but we still contrive to create difficulties for ourselves. There should be no shortage of clean drinking water, but thanks largely to the ineptitude of our public services, we have the highest rate of cryptosporidiosis in Europe.

There are 135,000 people currently at serious risk of a cryptosporidiosis outbreak, similar to what happened in Galway last year, according to a report published during the week by the EPA on the quality of our drinking water. One might understand the water meters in private homes if they could guarantee the quality of the water. Otherwise the whole thing is just a gimmick to collect more taxes.

Some people think drinking water is currently free because there is no charge for water in private homes. The payment comes out of Government funds and it is the taxpayers who provide that money. There is the old saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody always pays for it. The price of the water meters and the cost of installing them, as well as the cost of reading them, will all be needless expenses that will fund jobs for the boys. Ultimately new taxes will only further damage our competitiveness, and the last thing we need is more needless paper-shufflers and meter-readers adding to the cost of our bureaucracy. We have enough of them already. The public service seems to be great at coming up with ideas to measure what we are using, but it would be nice if somebody would come up with a means of measuring the effectiveness of public servants.

For example, we have had controversy for some time over the publication of examination results so that a kind of league table could be drawn up to measure the performance of various schools.

In New York city they have come up with a different twist to find, measure and train good teachers. They are evaluating teachers by measuring the progress of their students through special annual testing. The scheme is being undertaken on a pilot basis in 140 schools, one-tenth of the total number of schools in the area.

School districts in Dallas and Houston and schools throughout the state of Tennessee are using student performance and improvement factors to evaluate teachers. When interviewed more than 30 years ago, a leading educationist in Dallas explained that his main goal was to reach the point where every high school graduate in the city could read and write. Illiterate people were actually graduating from high school.

Fortunately, this could not have happened here under our Leaving Certificate system. This is one of the benefits of the national system of testing, but unfortunately the test comes too late for the students who are already in difficulties. Most people can probably remember a teacher who inspired them to learn. At the same time, however, there were other teachers who turned children away from education. But the bad teachers were left in place and blighted the lives of many pupils.

The old terrorist ways of teaching have mercifully changed, but incompetent teachers are still essentially left in place. And worse, they are probably assigned to classes with the weaker students.

Evaluating pupil progress would help to identify those teachers in need of remedial training to improve their teaching skills, or demonstrate that they do not belong in teaching. Teacher unions would probably kick up, but surely the education and welfare of children should be the prime consideration, not the protection or perpetuation of teaching incompetence.

Rewarding teachers on their performance, should help everybody, especially the weaker students. We also need a scheme to measure the effectiveness of public servants. The level of incompetence seems to know no bounds. We sold off a national treasure in the form of the telephones and people who were encouraged to invest in the new company as a patriotic duty were ripped off. Then look what happened to Aer Lingus.

Now our public servants are presiding over the poisoning of our drinking water and our healthcare is in crisis despite being the best-funded area of government.

This week marked the second anniversary of the Government’s much-hyped plan for mental services, A Vision for Change.

But the HSE has done essentially nothing to implement that programme. Yet HSE chief Prof Brendan Drumm received a performance bonus of €80,000 last year. This was more than twice what the average industrial worker earned for the whole year. If one could see some tangible benefits, maybe this would be understandable.

PEOPLE are now afraid to go into hospital for fear of catching something worse inside. Our hospitals have been incubating superbugs, which are more likely to eliminate the waiting lists than the civil servants.

The old Dickensian approach of treating mental patients was to incarcerate them behind high walls and engage them in various projects within the institutions, which had a considerable amount of land.

The new plans envisage selling off much of that property for the benefit of a modernised mental health approach which seeks to reintegrate as many patients as possible back into society. This requires proper resources.

The property could hardly have been sold at a more propitious time, but the money has been diverted elsewhere or squandered.

Instead of funding the proper development of the new mental health approach by treating as many patients as possible within the community, we are just jailing many of them. And then because there is not enough room in the jails, we are putting criminals back on the streets. That’s what really crazy.

One of these days we are going to realise that the whole nation has been asset-stripped. It’s time to wake up.