Experts have clashed over whether Wellington should emulate Auckland and amalgamate its local councils, in a public seminar jointly hosted by Victoria University’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies and the Centre for Accounting, Governance and Taxation Research.

Introducing the debate, Graham Sansom, an adjunct professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, noted that the chances did not look good for super city proponents. Communities “usually vote against mergers when they get the chance”.

He also said there was no “straight-line relationship between the size of a council and its efficiency, and that mergers “usually fail to deliver the projected savings”. That said, the benefits of amalgamation – including enhanced strategic capacity – tended to “emerge over time”, and communities often were happy with the new structures, once change had settled down.

Shared services and joint planning arrangements – a popular alternative to amalgamation – were “often fragile … and fail to deliver solid results”.

Speaking against the super city, Philip Barry, a director of consultants TDB Advisory, said plans for full-scale amalgamation were “asking ourselves the wrong question”. The right question, he suggested, was “what should we amalgamate and not amalgamate in terms of the different functions that local government does?”

Despite claims that Wellington was doing badly, the city sat at the top of quality-of-life rankings, and in terms of regional GDP per person had outperformed Auckland over the last six years.

The three key criteria for any local government reorganisation, Barry said, were cost effectiveness, promoting local democracy and promoting improved economic performance.

When it came to cost effectiveness, the Local Government Commission’s analysis showed that the super city – which would produce $58 million in net present value benefits while incurring $210 million in transition costs – was greatly inferior to “stronger regional delivery”, which would incur benefits of $199 million and costs of just $129 million.

There was little evidence to suggest that larger councils were more efficient, Barry said. In the international research, 29% of studies found that middle-sized councils (of around 50,000-100,000 people) were most efficient. 39% found no relationship, 24% found councils became less efficient as they got larger, and just 8% found larger councils were more efficient.

When it came to promoting democracy, Barry said he was “very sceptical” that the proposed local boards would have any significant powers. “They can’t own property… they can’t raise debt, they don’t have power to regulate. They really are more a lobby group.”

In terms of improved economic performance, he said there was no evidence that the size of local councils affected the strength of the local economy.

Ultimately, Barry said, there were “smarter ways” to achieve improved regional cooperation where it was needed, on issues such as roading, the three waters and public transport.

Speaking in support of the super city, John Shewan, a former PwC chairman and current spokesperson for the Better Wellington lobby group, said the debate was about “what structural change allows the region to act in a more efficient and coordinated way”.

The current model didn’t deliver that, and would struggle even further with oncoming challenges around infrastructure, changing demographics, the environment and social pressures.

Amalgamation would give “far greater scope for improved economic performance”, and create the right incentives for local politicians to plan and execute and deliver on core services. It would also force the region to plan on a coordinated basis for natural hazards and disasters.

The proposed local boards would enhance local democracy significantly, with “more teeth and power” than their counterparts in Auckland.

“Although there is a risk with any model, this model is well grounded in theory and practice,” Shewan said, pointing to the way it drew on the experience of Auckland’s reform. “If you talk to the Auckland business community, and citizens, people are now coming around to saying, actually, this is delivering.”

A super city would allow quicker progress on projects such as Transmission Gully and the airport extension, and avoid local authorities “paddling their own canoe” on where to locate new housing.

The super city would also eliminate inconsistencies in the application of regulations across the region, and greater size would give Wellington “a much stronger hand in negotiations with government agencies”.

While others might hope that benefits could be gained by encouraging local councils to “play nicely together”, Shewan said he had seen too many promising ideas founder on councils’ inability to work collaboratively.

I was at a conference recently about co-operatives and their role in the twenty-first century, and heard something interesting from Girol Karacaoglu, the Treasury’s chief economist.

Karacaoglu, who used to run what is now the Co-operative Bank and has been a big supporter of this conference, was chairing a session entitled ‘Cooperatives as an alternative to state owned enterprises’.

The idea – which has been used by the UK Conservative party – is that public agencies could be spun off into separate bodies, but rather than simply being privatised, they could be turned into co-operatives in which every staff member has a say in running the organisation.

The idea has had a mixed reception even among people who like co-operatives, because they see it as part of breaking up the state and something that will end up with privatisation anyway, because these co-operatives will (in most cases) have to compete for contracts with much bigger multinationals, and inevitably lose out.

Anyway, Karacaoglu’s presence was a clear signal of Treasury interest in the idea. And when asked directly, he said Finance Minister Bill English had been in the UK two years ago, heard about the idea, and come back and said: “This is something we should be looking at.”

Not that action was imminent, Karacaoglu added: “Nobody in New Zealand as far as I know is very interested in it … It’s a matter of putting these arguments in front of decision-makers … Yes, there’s interest, but at the moment no-one is actively pursuing it.”

So it was hardly a ringing endorsement – but even a minimal level of interest (by Karacaoglu, if not his colleagues) is interesting.

Karacaoglu’s other comment of note was on the possible sale of state houses to community groups – and, if that fails, to companies interested in running state housing.

Since charities may not want (or be able) to buy state houses at their current market value, ministers have been asked if they will sell them off at bargain basement prices, as happened in the 1990s.

So far ministers have been a bit coy on that question, but Karacaoglu was more direct. “Government is willing to wear the valuation consequences of that [sell-off], if we can get to the right solution,” he said.

“We are fully aware that the transfer could be painful in a valuation sense.”

That sounds like a below-market-price sell-off is in the works, then.

Novel community-based methods of delivering public services can have the “perverse incentive” of replacing paid public sector staff with volunteers.

That was the message of a lecture delivered by Dr Jonathan Scott, head of the Centre for Strategy and Leadership at Teesside University (UK), in a lecture to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies.

Scott was discussing the Northern CE project, in North East England, designed to get ordinary members of the public acting as “community entrepreneurs”  and finding new ways to deliver public services to alleviate child poverty.

These community entrepreneurs were supposed “to help bridge the gap between the community and local councils to get things done”, Scott said. By playing an active part in the process, it was hoped they would inspire their own children to have higher aspirations.

The Northern CE project also “prefigured” other British initiatives such as the Big Society, which aimed to get more services delivered by community and voluntary groups and to create “an innovative approach to alleviating local social problems”.

However, the project had suffered confusion over the role of the community entrepreneurs. Many had thought they would simply be trying to get parents back into work, rather than setting up long-term public service projects. They were keen to identify projects that could happen, but not necessary to run them, which some regarded as still being the role of local councils.

The entrepreneurs also felt they had ended up “doing several other people’s jobs for less money”, and were performing functions that council staff were supposed to carry out.

“The perverse incentive of community enterprise is that it is a way by which such employees’ jobs will be replaced by volunteers working for social enterprises and these community-based enterprises.”

Another problem was that when the entrepreneurs did identify innovative solutions, they were sometimes blocked by more traditional council processes.

Evidence for the impact of this work on the entrepreneurs’ children was “mixed”, Scott said. And despite the “entrepreneur” tag, none of the employment schemes that flowed from the initiative appeared to be “actually making money”.

Scott said that behind the Northern CE project “is this agenda to cut public spending, particularly to reduce the expenditure of councils”. The voluntary sector was seen as “a way to spin out services to reduce costs”.

New Zealand should be taking a leadership role in international efforts to promote open and transparent government, Dr Michael Macaulay said in a talk to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies.

Macaulay, the institute’s incoming director, attended a recent Asia-Pacific Summit for the Open Government Partnership, which was launched in 2011 with eight countries and now has 64 signed up.

Every participating country has to produce an action plan for increasing transparency, accountability and integrity in government, with measurable commitments. The plans are then evaluated through an independent review process. Some 45% of all partnership commitments have so far been achieved.

The partnership had a number of “grand challenges” and core values, Macaulay added. The grand challenges were: improving public services; improving public integrity; and more effective management of public resources; creating safer communities; and increasing corporate accountability.

The core values were transparency, citizen participation, technology and innovation, and accountability.

New Zealand, which joined the partnership in December 2013, is drafting its initial action plan, to be submitted later this year.

Macaulay said New Zealand “can and should take a leadership role” in the partnership, given its long-standing reputation for being an open and transparent country.

The recent summit had shown that New Zealand was “clearly very highly respected”. But that created “an attendant danger” that it could fail to live up to that reputation and that its efforts could look “half-hearted”.

In addition, the pace of technology was such that policies around e-government were “getting a bit out of date”, as other countries were increasingly talking about m-government, short for “mobile government” accessed through smart phones and the like.

The summit had also shown that collaboration was “king” and governments needed to listen more. This was especially important as fewer than half of participating countries had adequately consulted on their initial action plans.

Civil society organisations were crucial to the partnership project, especially in the long term, Macaulay said. “This is not a one-off. This is a long-term, iterative process.”

However, some key questions remained unanswered, such as how an action plan would translate into specific commitments, and what would be the “participatory infrastructure” to allow input from those groups.

In developing the initial action plan, the State Services Commission had held meetings in Wellington and used the online discussion software Loomio. That feedback had been collected and presented to ministers.

Commission members in the audience for Macaulay’s talk conceded that there had “not been enough” consultation, but promised there would be “full and proper” processes put in place as the partnership work developed.

Progress on a new global treaty on climate change will happen through countries making voluntary pledges instead of signing up to mandated emissions cuts, according to Dr Christina Hood of the International Energy Agency.

Giving a lecture to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Hood said the next big step in international climate negotiations was a treaty to supersede the Kyoto protocol, to be agreed in Paris in December 2015.

Kyoto, which mandated cuts, had covered just 13% of world greenhouse gas emissions. But the new treaty was likely to allow countries to set their own approaches, in the hopes of getting greater coverage and therefore more reductions.

A full negotiated text of the new agreement should be tabled by December this year, with countries submitting their “intended nationally determined contributions” in the first quarter of 2015. “This has really good legs, this idea that countries are in a position to know where they can go,” Hood said.

The promises that countries made could be “very different” to those made under the Kyoto protocol. They could include carbon budgets, renewable energy targets, and targets for long term transformations via infrastructure investment.

“There will be a lot more uncertainty about where things are headed. But Kyoto only provided certainty for a limited number who were willing to participate. We are sacrificing a little bit of foresight about where we’re going, in exchange for more action.”

A total world carbon budget would still be part of the process “implicitly”, she said. The combined national contributions would have to be assessed on whether they were consistent with the 2° scenario – and that could be done only with reference to some kind of carbon budget.

In the agency’s own scenarios for limiting world temperature increases to 2°, the greatest contribution – 42% – came from energy efficiency. On a per-sector basis, the power sector was targeted for the biggest reductions.

When it came to specific policies, carbon pricing was central, because it “levels the playing field” and drove emissions reductions across-the-board, rather than relying on government to target every sector separately.

Far from being “dead”, carbon pricing was being seriously looked at by many countries, including South Africa and China. “Carbon pricing, despite having a bad rap, is progressing at pace around the world,” Hood said.

In addition to carbon pricing, which would make many emissions-reducing policies economically viable, there were policies that were already cost effective but not being implemented because of a lack of knowledge or political will. For instance, on current projections, around two thirds of the emissions-reducing potential of currently cost-effective measures would remain untapped by 2035, even with some new policies.

Setting out policies that would reduce emissions at zero cost to GDP, Hood said tackling four areas – energy efficiency, limiting the use of coal power, reducing methane emissions from coal and gas, and the partial removal of fossil fuel subsidies – would get the world 80% of the way to the 2° target.

Long-term investments in much more expensive policies, such as solar power and electric vehicles, were also needed.

However, progress towards clean energy was “too slow in almost all technological areas”. In particular, infrastructure either already built or planned by 2017 “would, if allowed to run for its natural lifetime, use all the energy permitted under [the] 2° [scenario]”.

That meant that anything built after 2017 should have zero or negative emissions – but also that existing inefficient infrastructure needed to be “retired early”.

Delaying emissions-reducing policies was a false economy, Hood added. Every dollar saved between now and 2020 by delaying spending would cost countries $4.30 in the long run as they made up the lost ground.

The British government’s decision to sweep away the ethics framework for local councils has left the country without an adequate system for ensuring that corrupt and inappropriate behaviour is dealt with, according to a visiting academic.

Gary Hickey, who had formerly worked for the UK’s Standards Board and is now an academic at Kingston University and St George’s, University of London, was giving a lecture to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies.

He said the ethics framework had been set up in the 1990s following scandals in both local and central government, and because people increasingly recognised that ethical standards were vital in maintaining the public’s faith in local democracy.

The first ‘phase’ of the ethics framework had involved a national code of conduct for local politicians, creating the Standards Board as a national watchdog, and setting up standards committees for each local council, which were staffed by councillors and members of the public.

However, this system was seen as “too centralised” because the dominance of the Standards Board marginalised the committees, and the system became clogged up with “trivial” complaints, as when a parish councillor complained about another one “digging up their carrots”.

The second ‘phase’ responded to these concerns by giving the standards committees a greater role to play.

However, this process was seen as being too cumbersome, as complaints had to be dealt with by an array of sub-committees, Hickey said: “There were far too many committees involved.” It also still dealt with too much trivia and was “quite costly”.

Nonetheless, there was growing public support for the code of conduct, and the behaviour of local councillors had improved measurably under the framework. “The framework, for all its flaws, was doing something – and it was working.”

However, in 2010, the Conservative-led government swept away most of the framework, including the Standards Board, the committees and the national code of conduct. In its place were put “monitoring officers” who were supposed to watch over councils, and codes of conduct for each local council.

However, a 2012 survey of a small number of monitoring officers had showed that most doubted the new system would allow poor behaviour to be adequately punished. A number of scandals had already arisen, including one in which councillors were allegedly working as consultants to advise firms on how to get around council planning rules

Instead of sweeping away the system, the government should have been reformed it by making clearer its principles and how it was supposed to function, Hickey said.

That would have involved a commitment to dealing with complaints more quickly, local councils taking responsibility for their own arrangements, using a greater range of tools – including mediation and informal resolution of disputes – and setting the bar for complaints higher to discourage trivial complaints.

“I think that would address all the criticisms of the previous framework,” Hickey said.

The price of unhealthy processed food needs to rise by at least a fifth, if New Zealand is to tackle diet-related problems that threaten to be just as bad for our health as smoking, Gareth Morgan says.

Morgan, an economist, public policy analyst and philanthropist, was giving a lecture to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, about his new book, Appetite for Destruction.

Poor diet was now the “number one killer” in New Zealand, he said. Portion sizes had risen 30% in 50 years, and people ate far too much processed food, which was “energy dense and nutrient poor”. This was affecting people’s health right across the population, not just among those “who on the surface appear to be overweight”.

Morgan said: “Processing has fatally changed the balance of nutrients and energy … This is just as much a problem for [food sold in] supermarkets as fast food outlets.”

Arguing that people will eat 70% more snacks if they are readily available, he said this energy rich food was “just everywhere. It is very hard to avoid and we are not adapted to deal with that environment. It’s very difficult to get through the Koru lounge without stuffing your face.”

While some argued that exercise was equally important, only 20% of the rise in, for instance, obesity could be explained by changes in rates of exercise, he said. It would take an hour of “walking fast” to work off the effects of consuming just one bottle of a sports drink.

The scale of the problem meant drastic action was needed, Morgan said. “We have a smoking-sized problem and we need smoking-sized solutions.”

Part of the solution was restricting the supply of unhealthy food. That included items such as high-sugar cereals, he said, noting testing had shown that the sweetest cereal on sale in New Zealand was 41% sugar.

The cereal aisle in supermarkets “should have a rope across it. It’s desert food, most of it.”

More generally, he said, New Zealand needed to increase the relative price of unhealthy processed foods “by at least 20% – and use the revenue to bring down the price of whole food. Therefore you mitigate the income effects. If you close the loop on the revenue, it shouldn’t affect the poor.”

Morgan also argued for “pretty simple” food labelling to complement the complex dietary information currently provided on food packaging. All food should come with one of three labels: “eat this often”, “eat this sometimes” or “try to avoid this”.

The diminished power of local councillors, election booklets that have “passed their use-by date” and uncertainty over amalgamation all helped drive turnout to a record low in this year’s local council elections.

That was the verdict of Mike Reid, Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ)’s principal policy advisor, in a lecture given to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies. 

Turnout in this year’s elections was 41%, continuing a trend of turnout falling from around 50% in the 1990s. Within that wider figure there were some differences, Reid said, with turnout at 49% for councils serving populations of under 20,000, against 36% for larger councils. The highest turnout was 63%, in Westland, while the lowest, 30.5%, was in Waikato.

There were 13 women mayors out of 67 – roughly one in five – and 30% of councillors women, unchanged from recent years. “It has almost, if you like, hit a glass ceiling,” Reid said.

LGNZ surveys from the early 2000s showed that the reasons influencing people not to vote included:

• Didn’t know enough (31%)
• Not interested (14%)
• Forgot or left it too late (24%)
• Too busy (14%)

It did not help, Reid said, that the candidate information booklet provided to voters “has passed its use-by date … it’s getting harder to distinguish candidates from their 150 words.”

But a more serious problem was the “diminishing” power of local councils, which were being overridden by central government: “Why would you spend time voting, when the people you’re voting for can’t make any decisions?”

The voting process had also become more complicated, the uncertainty created by the amalgamation had deterred many candidates (and thus made election campaigns less interesting), and the large size of New Zealand local councils make them relatively distant from voters, Reid said.

Anecdotal evidence suggested that strong personalities helped increase turnout. This led to the not entirely serious conclusion, Reid said, that “we should encourage John Banks to stand again”.

Another way to encourage greater turnout would be to devolve more power to local councils. Councils could also be supported to engage their communities better, Reid said, pointing to the example of Brisbane, where councillors held regular neighbourhood clinics with support from council officers.

He also noted the promise by the new Christchurch mayor, Lianne Dalziel, to delegate more powers to community boards, and the success of the ‘Vote Auckland’ website in disseminating information on candidates.

However, he warned that more local government mergers would probably drive turnout even lower. In the future, people would be saying: “I don’t think we’ll ever be back to the great days of 40% turnout.” 

The time is right for New Zealand to consider adopting a Committee on Standards in Public Life and a code of conduct for MPs, to ensure it remains relatively transparent and free of corruption.

That was the message from Michael Macaulay, the deputy director of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, in a lecture on whether New Zealand should have its own version of Britain’s Committee on Standards in Public Life.

The committee – which acts as an advisory body – was set up in the 1990s in the wake of various scandals, including one in which MPs were caught taking cash for asking questions in Parliament. The committee has an independent chair, six independent members, and three members nominated by political parties.

Its “very substantial” achievements included getting seven core ‘principles of public life’ – selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership – “adopted by almost every public body in the UK”.

It had created an “ethics infrastructure” and led to much greater transparency on political donations, Macaulay said.

However, as an advisory body, it relied on political will to have its recommendations adopted, and this was “not a priority” for the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. “More recently their [the committee’s] advice hasn’t been taken … indeed in some cases their advice has been ignored.”

In New Zealand, although the country continued to be seen as highly transparent, there was “a feeling of complacency … because New Zealand continues to be highly regarded, internally it’s letting itself slide quite a bit”.

Macaulay said the absence of a code of conduct for New Zealand MPs was “really astounding – in this day and age, it’s the least of the arrangements you should have.” A code of conduct would cover a register of gifts and hospitality, declarations of interest, and how MPs were handling their dealings with lobbyists. 

New Zealand should also consider creating a standards committee, he said. It should not have enforcement powers, but it did need to be independent of government and be “bolder, more far-sighted, strategic and proactive” than the UK version. “It needs a little more bite, frankly.” 

While New Zealand already had various oversight bodies – including the Parliamentary Privileges Committee, the Office of the Ombudsman and the State Services Commission – a standards committee would add “an extra layer of independence”.

That could imply that the committee would be an independent crown entity, although other options included making it an office of Parliament or extending the powers of another body such as the ombudsman.

However, Macaulay said, there was “only so much” any committee could do. Driving out corruption “requires genuine leadership, and it requires behavioural solutions as well”.

The New Zealand media is like “a junkyard dog”, sometimes ferocious but with a short attention span, according to Otago University politics lecturer Bryce Edwards.

Giving an Institute for Governance and Policy Studies lecture, Edwards discussed his report on the media for the New Zealand National Integrity Assessment, an exercise that looks at the transparency and integrity of public life.

Different surveys of the media gave different results, he noted. While New Zealand ranked in the top ten in the Reporters Without Borders survey of press freedom, a recent poll of New Zealanders showed the country as one of only four countries out of 107 where the media was regarded as one of the most corrupt institutions.

With such different results, it was “hard to see where the truth lies”, he said. 

However, for the integrity assessment, he had spoken to “experts and industry” as well as reviewing academic writing on the New Zealand media, and had given it scores out of five on a range of issues:

For providing a variety of perspectives – 2/5. The media lacked diverse ownership and ideologies, and was dominated by four media companies. Being “the most liberalised media market in the world” meant there was little regulation to encourage diverse ownership.

For safeguards against external interference in reporting – 4/5. The ‘Teapot tapes’ saga notwithstanding, the media generally escaped political interference.

For accountability of the media – 3/5. Mechanisms such as the Broadcasting Standards Authority existed, but were “complex and outdated”.

For provisions to ensure the integrity of reporters – 2/5. The industry had no sector-wide code of ethics, and conflicts of interest did not have to be disclosed.

For investigating and exposing corruption – 4/5. The media were “extremely vigilant about the abuse of power or other improprieties”, even to the point of sometimes “exaggerating” the level of corruption. Investigative journalism, however, lacked funding.

In total, he gave the media a ranking of 66 points from a possible 100. But feedback from the audience at the lecture – made up partly of academics, public sector workers and some media representatives – indicated that even that relatively low score was too generous.

Summing up, Edwards said the media was perhaps neither a watchdog nor the lapdog of politicians but “a junkyard dog … the media is more about infotainment, an increasing focus on the trivial and the scandalous.

“The media is not so much about protecting politicians [as some claim]. It’s about ratings, it’s about the tyranny of ratings and profits. That leads to a focus on the gaffes of politicians. The media is not reverent towards politicians.”

A “green” economy is the only realistic way to reverse environmental damage while improving living standards, says a visiting public policy expert.

Professor Daniel Fiorino, a leading writer on environmental and public policy issues at the American University in Washington, DC, was in New Zealand as the second Sir Frank Holmes Visiting Fellow. The fellowship is run by the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies.

In his lecture, Fiorino said a green economy allowed people to achieve their aspirations while respecting “the finite limits of ecosystems”. It was a “creative middle ground” between the traditional oppositions of environmentalism that argued for no or reduced growth, and the view that environmental limits could be continually expanded.

Research indicated that if just 2% of world GDP was invested in green growth, it would be enough to create an economy in which growth was achieved within ecological limits, Fiorino said. A green economy could, if done right, create more and better jobs than the traditional “brown” economy.

The key points of a green economy included valuing “natural capital” and the “services” it provides, such as the water purifying carried out by freshwater eco-systems; integrating the economy and the environment in decision-making; and ensuring environmental considerations entered into “all aspects” of human and economic life.

Fiorino said a green economy recognised that many parts of the natural world had great economic value: for instance, the global value of insect pollinators, such as bees, was estimated at US$200 billion.

Claims made for the green economy did possess a “have your cake and eat it too” quality, he admitted, which made some people doubt its validity.

It was often criticised for being too human-centric and valuing nature only when it benefitted humans economically, rather than for its intrinsic worth. It could also been seen, from the left of politics, as legitimising capitalism and a way to avoid radical change – or even as a kind of “greenwash”.

It was also “derided” by some on the right of politics because it implied a more active government, and – by embracing some form of economic growth – took away the right’s ability to claim that environmentalists opposed progress.

But in fact, it was “the only realistic path to reversing eco-system degradation” while allowing some kind of growth, Fiorino said.

A more radical “de-growth” agenda, while suitable for some environmental issues, was not “politically feasible”, in the United States at least. In contrast, a “relative decoupling” of the environment and the economy would allow for policies like carbon taxes, energy efficiency standards, removing subsidies for activities like irrigation, emission and effluent trading, and incorporating social harm into the cost of resources.

“This strategy of relative decoupling is absolutely essential if we are to live a good life on a finite planet.”

Fiorino added that he was encouraged by recent US poll results showing more people were seeking a life “in which being wealthy is no longer the sole measure” of success.

“Fear and hostility” towards religious values is leaving public debate impoverished, according to Andrew Bradstock, Director of the University of Otago’s Centre for Theology and Public Issues.

Professor Bradstock, who is returning shortly to Britain, said the media were often “indifferent” towards religious perspectives, and members of the public frequently feared that religious speakers sought to dominate or impose their views on others.

But there was a role for contributions from religious perspectives made “confidently and with conviction, but in a spirit of promoting general well-being”, rather than trying to defend a particular religion’s interests.

Contrary to arguments that the world was becoming inevitably more secular, religion was experiencing a “re-emergence”, Bradstock said, in a lecture at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies.

Religious perspectives had much to add to current debates, having the ability to imbue them with “a depth and moral gravity… that can take us beyond a debate that is stuck in arguing sectional interests”.

That did not make religious views an “alternative” to robust evidence, he said. Rather they brought “fresh concepts” and a way of asking different questions.

For example, in the debates on climate change, a quotation from Psalm 24, ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,’ helped suggest that the planet was something to be stewarded, not exploited.

Religious views also encouraged people to explore questions of virtue and morality, Bradstock said. Issues such as abortion were not value-free and could not be resolved without thinking about their underlying moral and religious implications.

People with religious convictions also had a right to be heard as a matter of justice, if for no other reason than that they were a significant part of the population and provided many of its social services.

Nor did they have to “translate” what they had to say into a form that removed all its specifically religious elements, he said. That would be to “discard the beneficial capacity of what they are trying to contribute”.

People with religious convictions had “the right to speak” rather than having to speak “in the right voice”, he added. For example, the idea that people were “created in the image of God” could not be fully conveyed in an argument about human rights.

Bradstock also suggested that the current definition of a “secular” society was too narrow. He urged a “procedural secularism”, in which religious convictions were not privileged but were acknowledged as representing an important moral basis for certain citizens.

This “noisier and untidy” secularism – “inclusive, not exclusive” – would create a richer set of public debates, he added. “Many of our public and political debates are quite shallow.”

Today the campaign for a Living Wage – an $18.40 an hour pay rate for hard-working New Zealanders – took another big step forward with an amazing presentation to the Wellington City Council.

A huge delegation, one of the biggest the council has seen in a long time, was led by St Andrews on the Terrace minister Margaret Mayman, who urged the council to become New Zealand’s first Living Wage council.

“We love living in this beautiful and vibrant city, and we want everybody to be able to participate fully in everything that Wellington to offer its citizens,” she said.

Many council staff – “your people” – earned little more than the minimum wage, Mayman said.

To tackle that, the council was urged to: take the lead in making Wellington a Living Wage city; work with the Living Wage movement to provide an implementation plan to ensure all staff, whether directly employed or by contractors, get the Living Wage; and support local businesses to become Living Wage employers.

Councillors will vote this afternoon on whether to accept the above ideas.

Phil Jones from Thames Publications added his support. “I believe that if we don’t pay our society the wages they need to live, we are in strife,” he said. Thanks to having better paid and trained staff, his firm had low turnover, and more money circulating in society was good for business in general.

Maliki Rahman, a WCC contract cleaner on $13.85 an hour, said: “It’s a struggle to keep up with living costs, to provide healthy food, decent clothes, and coming into winder, the bills are going up.” To give its staff “a better and decent life”, he urged the council to adopt the Living Wage.

Finally, Justine McDonald, the principal of Kelburn Normal School, said teachers were constantly seeing children affected by poverty, and it stopped the school from providing “a starting platform for all children”. Children were coming to school hungry or not properly clotherd because their parents didn’t earn enough to make ends meet.

The school helped cover some costs, but parents “don’t like having the hand-outs” and would rather earn the money themselves, she said.

In conclusion, Mayman referred to remarks by John Key that Wellington was “a dying city”, and said, “Not only is Wellington a living city, but I think we can look forward to Wellington soon being a Living Wage city.”

New Zealand companies are failing to capitalise on the country’s reputation for being open and transparent, even though it’s a genuine competitive advantage – unlike our ‘100% Pure’ brand.

That was the verdict of Suzanne Snively, the executive chair of Transparency International, speaking at a panel session organised by the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies and the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand.

Snively was speaking ahead of the May 8 launch of the findings of the Integrity Plus assessment, an in-depth examination of just how open, transparent and free of corruption New Zealand really is.

Citing New Zealand’s international reputation for having little corruption, she said: “There are a lot of competitive advantages we trade on, including 100% Pure. This one is true.”

Snively said there were seven key economic advantages of being seen as ethical and corruption-free: a good reputation, a low cost of doing business, a low cost of capital, easier access to overseas markets, the higher return on capital achieved by ethical businesses, the greater appeal to staff of working somewhere ethical, and greater customer satisfaction.

But while it was “amazingly easy” to work with public organisations in this area, it was “very challenging to build some sort of partnerships with the private sector – and yet if anybody has anything to gain from this, it’s the private sector.”

Noting that New Zealand’s economy had once relied on money “coming to us” from Britain, she added: “We have been eating our tail for the last 40 years … The reality is that it doesn’t come to us anymore, so things like being good at compliance and managing costs are not enough. We have to think about making our assets work better for us and here we have a real asset.”

The public sector had become “lean and mean so that the private sector can pick up the slack”, she said, adding: “Well, they damn well better start picking up the slack!”

Snively also warned that New Zealand was increasingly trading with more corrupt countries such as China: “New Zealand’s trading markets are changing from the less corrupt countries in Europe and North America to more corrupt ones.”

China coveted New Zealand’s marine zone, the seventh largest in the world, Snively added. “We want to do business with them, but they need to do it on our terms, and this [an integrity assessment] helps us define those terms.”

Liz Brown, the Integrity Plus project manager, agreed that there was “a real danger of importing corruption”.

However, the project team had had to go beyond standard assessments of corruption and devise its own, more stringent assessment for New Zealand, because there is a common perception that “we quite simply aren’t corrupt enough” to register on the standard versions, she said.

The project’s aim had been to “dig a bit deeper” and examine New Zealand’s institutions, laws and processes to see if the examples of corruption played out in the media were “the tip of the iceberg” or not, and to investigate the different forms that corruption may take in New Zealand.

Asked about the recent furore over the appointment of GCSB head Ian Fletcher, Brown said: “We’re revising our reports almost daily … There has been a good deal of discussion between us on precisely the appointments process.”

Helen Sutch, the chair of the project’s research advisory board, noted that good governance had both economic and social virtues. It supported social cohesion in an increasingly diverse society and fostered public trust in institutions – and trust “clearly” had an economic benefit.

For example, if people trusted the IRD, then compliance in filing tax returns was high, returns were filled in accurately and fewer inspectors were needed. The result was greater revenue, fewer administrative costs and lower transaction costs for IRD and taxpayer.

“Good governance fosters a high trust society and economy,” Sutch said.

Asked whether there had been an erosion of trust in institutions in recent years, Sutch said: “Those issues are going to come up very strongly [in the Integrity Plus report].” Tax statistics showed that normal levels of compliance might already have been eroded, she added.

Summing up New Zealand’s international reputation as being a low-corruption country, she said: “It isn’t that we’re the best. We’re the least worst.”

• For more details on the May 8 launch, see: http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/events/Upcoming%20events/index.html

New Zealand has too many Cabinet ministers and too many government agencies – but more departmental mergers is not the solution, Labour MP Trevor Mallard said at a joint lecture for the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies and the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand.

Mallard, a former Minister of Education and State Services Minister, said New Zealand’s government was too fragmented, with “Crown entities for Africa” and agencies like Work and Income New Zealand that were “a body with no brain”.

Too many ministerial positions had also been created to tie caucus into Cabinet, he said, and most of the “talent” in a Cabinet was in the top half. Under Helen Clark, the Cabinet committee of the 10 most senior ministers “worked extremely well … Those ministers were much more likely to have read – which is a good start – and understand – which is even better – the papers they were being asked to consider.”

The “ideal” Cabinet, Mallard said, would have 10 members and 5-6 positions outside Cabinet “with training wheels attached”. However, he admitted this was not a popular view among those ranked 8-20 in his own party.

Mallard also rejected the idea of wholesale government restructuring, saying its effect on morale and productivity made it unattractive. “I don’t have a major appetite for shape-of-government reform. The whole system is not coherent or logical, but the idea of spending years reviewing and changing is not appealing at all … I’m much less a fan of structural change than I was 15 years ago.”

Asked about alternatives, he said: “A lot of it goes to the ability of agencies to work together and have multi-agency budgeting.” Government also needed to relax the “very tight” chief executive responsibilities that inhibited change.

For example, when choosing a new computer system for WINZ some years ago, its senior management had not acknowledged that it needed to work better with IRD systems. They had instead taken a decision in WINZ’s interests only, Mallard said, adding: “We have got to work harder at avoiding that sort of approach.”

On ministerial appointments, Mallard took a softer line on the GCSB scandal than some of his Labour colleagues, saying the prime minister “had the right to make the appointment” of Ian Fletcher, and could have refused to answer questions about the GCSB.

However, he also noted that under Helen Clark, Cabinet “never” declined a State Services Commissioner’s recommendation.

The process then for appointments was that a deputy State Services Commissioner would talk to the relevant minster, “generally with me in the room”, about the skills and attributes that the minister wanted in his or her chief executive. But, Mallard said, “My rule was that ministers were never to mention names of persons who could do the job.”

Asked about Novopay, Mallard said it was “my fault”, since, as education minister, he had felt that the previous arrangement with Datacom left the ministry “captured by an outside organisation who could basically charge us what they wanted”.

An in-house solution was then investigated, before the decision was made to go to a new outside system, Novopay, “because allegedly there were $10 million worth of savings over a number of years and people thought that was important at the time … It was the victim in our time of short-term-itis.”

However, he added, Labour’s planned roll-out had been more careful. “There was to be a pilot, it was to be introduced regionally, and the old system would run in parallel.” National Party ministers, he said, “didn’t bother reading earlier decisions” before they approved the eventual Novopay roll-out.

In general, Mallard said the public service should rely less on contractors “who are here one day and gone tomorrow”. It should also create paths for public sector workers “to work independently of their teams across the public sector”. The public service needed to identify the next generation of leaders and allow them to “shift between agencies as they move along their career on a temporary basis”.

Labour MP and former education minister Trevor Mallard has suggested that the school system might be spending too effort on working with the bottom fifth of students at the expense of “the most talented kids”.

Giving a lecture in Wellington on Tuesday this week, Mallard noted efforts to make sure the school system responds better to – and is shaped by the needs of – Maori and Pasifika students.

But, he added: “I’m not certain that working with the bottom fifth, who are disproportionately Maori and Pasifika, is as important as working with the top fifth of Maori and Pasifika to make sure they achieve their potential.

“One of the anxieties I have is that at the end of my time [as education minister], and since, we have had a disproportionate focus on the bottom end, and we are missing out on ensuring some of the most talented kids, Maori, Pasifika and Pakeha, are achieving their potential. We are losing just about as much with them not achieving their potential [as we do at the bottom].”

An IGPS/IPANZ Panel Discussion on the Governance of Local Government, 5 April 2013  

People’s ability to shape their own community is under threat from several sources, a panel of experts argued at an event last week co-hosted by the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies and the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand.

Wellington City Council’s deputy mayor, Ian McKinnon, admitted that local government is “probably not as efficient or as effective as it could be in all areas”. But, he asked, “what are the trade-offs you make when you go about improving it? You could have greater central control, but the trade-off is you denigrate the word local.”

Victoria University professor of public policy Claudia Scott said policy-makers needed to take a much more “comprehensive” look at how to improve local government rather than passing a series of “piecemeal legislation”.

They also needed to improve collaboration between different levels of government, she said. When central government produced its Better Public Services report, for instance, “nobody [in local government] knew it was coming”. That reflected a “really big issue” about the role of local government, and whether it was a partner to central government or just a delivery vehicle.

It was also “worrying” that central government was not helping local councils be more resilient and capable, and was instead using its lack of capacity as an excuse for “taking over”.

“We can anticipate that happening in other areas – and I don’t want to see that happen,” she said.

Local Government New Zealand’s principal policy advisor, Mike Reid, quoted British academic Geoff Mulgan as saying he had looked at local government in the UK, “and it’s neither”.

In New Zealand, both the genuinely ‘local’ aspect and community autonomy were under threat from amalgamation and central government intervention, Reid said.

“I can’t see much of a future for small councils. I think the dice has been set … Whether we can make it [local government] work within larger councils… The jury is still a bit out. It may work, it may not. But the notion of the community having a say in how the community runs, electing their own mayor and their own councillors, is history to some degree.”

Reid said the “biggest threat” was the “willingness of Cabinet ministers to give themselves the power to overturn local government decisions”. If ministers overrode the decisions of local councillors, it removed local accountability: “We can’t hold those councillors to account anymore.”

UK research showed that people didn’t vote in local elections because they didn’t think local councils had any real power, Reid said. Central intervention just exacerbated that situation, he added, drawing an analogy with Russian dictatorships.

“I’m reminded of Stalin redrawing the boundaries between the Soviet Union and Romania,” he said. “I’m told he used a very thick felt tip pen … and [after the redrawing] the Romanians discovered they didn’t have any oil wells anymore.”

Rounding out the speakers, British academic Michael Macaulay, a new addition to Victoria University’s School of Government, warned that while successive UK governments had claimed to praise local government, “they all actually seem to want to bury it.”

The UK’s 2011 Localism Act, for instance, has a “noble principle” of returning local decisions to local people – but was accompanied by 30 per cent cuts to local council budgets. “I suspect there could be a degree of double standard here,” he said.

A concern for local democracy was also evidenced by the extension of academy schools – similar to charter schools – in which private funders could take schools out of any form of local council control.

British ministers were now perceived as forcing councils to accept particular sponsors, he said.

In the question and answer session, Macaulay added that rethinking local government was not just about “the relationship between central government and local government. It’s about the relationship between all forms of government and people. What they can expect in terms of participation, what rights they have.  Arrangements must be focused on local people first, and then [we should] worry about how to spread that out.”

Elsewhere, it was pointed out that New Zealand has around 1,000 councillors and mayors – compared to 12,000 in Norway, a similar-sized country.

Ian McKinnon noted that ministers were advancing their reform agenda by “blanketing the whole parcel of territorial authorities with the problems of some”.

Finally, Mike Reid said that the Department of Internal Affairs has “on its wish list” something to address the fact that while most legislation has a regulatory impact statement, if a proposed law affects local government, “there is no estimate of the costs that creates for local ratepayers. So it’s a free good [for ministers] because the cost is borne not by them”.

This is an article I wrote for the National Business Review, describing how a government regulator who clashed with NZX, the body that runs the stockmarket, was ushered out of his job – despite his complaint’s being upheld.

A PDF copy of the article is available here: NBR – Whistleblower out after NZX clash

Greg Duncan – an American academic with three decades’ experience researching poverty, welfare dependency and childhood development – will be giving several public lectures in Wellington next month about the long-term damage caused by child poverty.

Duncan, a distinguished professor from the University of California, Irvine, has spent his career examining the long-term impacts of childhood poverty on adult productivity, health and wellbeing.

He has investigated the role of school-entry skills and behaviours on later school achievement and attainment, and the effects of increasing income inequality on children’s life chances.

His public lectures are as follows:

Thursday 15 November: 7.00-9.00pm, Public forum on The Cost and Challenge of Child Poverty followed by questions and discussion, St Johns in the City, Willis St

Wednesday 21 November: Lunchtime lecture at Victoria University, School of Government (12.30pm-1.30pm): Solutions to Child Poverty, Government buildings, lecture theatre 2

Monday 26 November: 5.30-7.30, Evening lecture at the University: The Long Reach of Early Childhood Poverty, Rutherford House, lecture theatre 1

Stem cells are very fashionable right now. They sound good: what’s not to like about a ‘master’ cell that can help repair bodily damage by creating new cells, and can be used to treat illnesses such as leukaemia? So people are inclined to think that anything involving them must be good.

But a couple of research scientists I’ve spoken to are warning that people with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and other conditions are being misled by “thoroughly reprehensible” claims about  products that supposedly generate stem cells.

The claims are made on several New Zealand and Australian websites that sell products based on bovine colostrum, a substance produced by cows immediately after birth to feed their young.

The sites claim that bovine colostrum can fight severe illnesses – including multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and muscular dystrophy – by encouraging the body to produce more stem cells.

One website, Turangi-based Colostrum4Health, sells products such as 60 capsules of ‘Colostem Generation 2 Stem Cell Release’ for $96.23. The company boasts of its “synergistic formulation” and claims the product promotes a “stem cell cascade”.

Alan Simmons, the owner of Turangi-based Colostrum4Health, acknowledged to me that the link between colostrum and stem cells “is not proven to the scientific community, because there hasn’t been blind studies done, I suppose”.

He said there were “dozens and dozens of people who are walking examples of the product’s benefits”, adding: “You try to tell them that [there’s no link] and they will be furious.”

However, Auckland University’s Dr Bronwen Connor, an associate professor of pharmacology and stem cell researcher, says there has been no research published that shows colostrum boosts stem cell growth or combats major illness.

There is “absolutely nothing” behind any claims linking colostrum with stem cell growth, she says.

Her warnings are echoed by Dr Michelle McConnell, who researches colostrum at Otago University. “Nothing, to my knowledge, has been done in humans as a double-blind randomised trial to prove any of the claims being made by these internet-based companies,” she says.

“Personally, I think it’s thoroughly reprehensible, giving false hope to people with these conditions.”

Another site, the Colostrum New Zealand blog, claims: “The science is proven – the more Adult Stem Cells (Repair kits) you have circulating in your bloodstream the better chance your body will have in time to repair its self.” The site also says colostrum can help fight multiple sclerosis and other conditions.

However, Dr Connor is bemused by the ‘bloodstream’ claim. “What do they actually mean? We don’t necessarily want them [stem cells] floating around in the bloodstream. We want them targeted to the site of repair,” she says. “It [the claim] actually doesn’t mean anything to us scientifically.”

New Image, the New Zealand company that supplies Colostrum4Health and Colostrum New Zealand, says its products are only “dietary supplements” and that websites are not allowed to make “therapeutic” claims about the products.

When I was looking into the subject last year, a spokeswoman told me that New Image would warn websites about their claims “as soon as our internal assessment of the material on them is complete.

“If we do not receive a response to our warnings we will stop selling our product to any person connected with the offending website.”

The Ministry of Health, which I also contacted last year, said it would be in touch with companies promoting colostrum-based products, which could be in breach of the Medicines Act if they made claims they could not justify.

However, Colostrum4Health and Colostrum New Zealand continue to make claims about their products’ therapeutic powers and ability to fight degenerative diseases.

Australian-based websites also promote the supposed stem cell-enhancing properties of colostrum. John Gaudio, who runs New South Wales-based Colostrum Immunity, told me his products help fight major illnesses, insisting there was “so much science there, you’d have to be blind not to see it”.

He also claimed that a derivative of colostrum “is treating AIDS right now” and that colostrum “has been accepted in Kenya as a medicine”.

Setting these claims aside, Dr Connor says people won’t harm themselves by taking colostrum, but she’s worried it might be the first step on the way to genuinely dangerous ‘stem cell’ treatments.

A controversial German clinic, the XCell-Center, was shut down in 2010 after an 18-month-old boy died following an injection of stem cells into his brain. The clinic was promoted by the Adult Stem Cell Foundation, an Australian organisation linked to by some of the colostrum sites.

“The concern I have is that people start on these things [colostrum products], having misunderstood what stem cells are, and then progress onto unproven clinical treatments, and waste a whole lot of money in the process,” Dr Connor says.

“These clinics … are absolutely preying on people that are at a very vulnerable stage. They are going down very dangerous lines.”

Unions fear government spending on consultants could skyrocket after it was revealed that the bill hit $375 million last financial year – and John Key warned of “significant” restructuring to come.

The Government spent more than $375 million on consultants and contractors in 2010-11 as a series of government restructurings made thousands of public sector workers redundant, figures show.

Consultants were paid as much as $275 an hour or $2500 a day, according to figures released by 31 government departments and agencies under the Official Information Act.

Some departments are increasing spending on consultants while getting rid of workers who, across all the departments involved, make an average of $33 an hour based on a 40-hour week.

The $375 million is lower than the $400 million the same departments spent in 2008-09, Labour’s last year in power.

Cabinet minister Tony Ryall said consultants were used only when it did not make sense to have permanent staff – for example on short-term projects or schemes needing particular technical skills.

This “expertise” had helped government departments respond to change, he said. “[But] over time I would expect that the costs associated with buying in this expertise would go down.”

However, Richard Wagstaff, national secretary of the Public Services Association, said the $375 million was “significantly” higher than the $335 million the same departments had spent in 2009-10, National’s first year.

That showed departments had lost “a lot of institutional knowledge” when 2000 public sector workers were made redundant under National, and faced “desperate capability and capacity problems”.

The Prime Minister’s promise of “significant” restructurings next year would mean further public sector job cuts and even more consultants employed, Mr Wagstaff said.

It was “extraordinary” that some departments were spending more on consultants despite shedding in-house staff, he added.

Since 2008, the Ministry of Economic Development has increased spending on consultants by $12 million – enough to pay for 161 in-house workers – and made 29 staff redundant.

In a statement, the ministry said the increased spending was due to several major IT upgrades and work on new projects including the Rugby World Cup, the national cycleway and the emissions trading scheme.

Similarly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade more than doubled its spending on consultants, from $4.5 million to $9.8 million, while shedding 14 staff. Its biggest increases came in HR, information and public affairs, and property management.

Other departments to increase consultancy spending but shed staff included the Ministry of Transport, Te Puni Kokiri and the Ministry of Health.

Mr Ryall said consultants were not used to replace staff made redundant. But Mr Wagstaff said many consultants were former public sector workers “doing the same thing they used to do, but for a lot more money”.

Some spending on consultants was appropriate, he said, “but they shouldn’t be doing things that departments could do for themselves and which would be cheaper in the long run for departments to do”.

The figures released by departments under the Official Information Act show government consulting can be a lucrative business. Department of Internal Affairs figures reveal it paid consultants Citrix $275 an hour for advice on “identity services”.

It also paid IT firm Silverstripe $2,500 a day for work on data.govt.nz, a project to give the public easier access to government statistics.

Meanwhile, Housing New Zealand paid accounting firm Deloitte $4.2 million in one year to work on projects including an “affordable housing owners’ forum”.

In the election campaign, then Labour leader Phil Goff attacked National’s plan to pay Australian investment bankers Lazard $100 million for advice on its plan to part-sell state assets.

And the Herald reported in September that the Department of Corrections has hired 18 different firms of advisers for a planned privately run prison in Auckland, at a likely cost of $11 million.

A State Services Commission report from July this year backed some of the concerns expressed about consultancy spending.

The commission’s reviews of government departments found that they needed to adopt “an approach of recruiting skilled personnel … to build internal capability and progressively lessen the reliance on contractors”.

Otherwise, they risked losing vital knowledge about how to carry out their work, which they would then have to buy in.

First published in The New Zealand Herald

Government funding cuts could see struggling district health boards (DHBs) go further into deficit, the Treasury has admitted.

In a briefing paper, officials say the boards will have find an extra $258 million over the next four years because the government no longer subsidises their Kiwisaver and pensions contributions.

“If an individual DHB is unable to fully fund this cost pressure, the level of its deficit would increase,” the paper says.

Capital and Coast Health DHB, which ran a $47.5 million deficit in 2009-10, will have to find an extra $20 million in savings as a result of the changes. It has already cut millions of dollars’ worth of services, including home help to the elderly and mental health clinics.

The DHB did not respond to APNZ’s questions at the time of going to press.

Health Minister Tony Ryall said the extra costs were a “very small” amount – less than 1% of the boards’ total budget of over $10 billion.

Their financial management had “improved significantly” since National took office, and their projected deficits had fallen $160 million to around $30 million this year, he said.

Brent Wiseman, the chief financial officer of the Auckland DHB, said staff were working more efficiently, “which mean that more services can be delivered for the same costs”.

The board hoped to run a surplus next year despite having to find an extra $40 million in the next four years.

However, Grant Robertson, Labour’s health spokesperson, said the government had made it clear that health boards would not get extra funding to make up for the subsidy being cut.

“This means it will have to come from already over-stretched budgets and will inevitably lead to cuts in services.”

Health received an extra $452 million in May’s Budget, but the CTU has estimated that that was nearly $110 million short of what was needed to keep pace with increased staffing and equipment purchasing costs.

“These are DHBs that are already suffering from underfunding,” Mr Robertson said. “The amount of money they have been given has not kept up with the cost of inflation and an ageing population for the last two years, and this is just another blow to them.”

The Treasury briefing paper also reveals that schools will have to find an extra $304 million over the next four years as a result of the changes.
Education Minister Anne Tolley said “no decisions” had been made about how the cost would be met.

However, Sue Moroney, Labour’s education spokesperson, warned that parents would have to pick up the tab.

“It’s worrying, because the only places that schools can get funding is from government, from parents via school fees, or from fundraising.

“So the picture this paints is that they will be even more pressure on parents to pay even higher school fees. Families are really struggling out there, and they just can’t cope with these continued increases in costs.”

Schools got a 2.9% increase in the operation grant funding in the Budget, but Ms Moroney said that was not enough to keep pace with inflation or growth in school rolls.

The Treasury paper also warns that the Ministry of Education payroll system may find it “challenging” to make the changes to staff’s pay by next year. But the ministry said it “considers it will be possible” to make the changes in time.

Ngatikaura Ngati died after horrific abuse by his parents. Children’s advocates are appalled that pictures of a young Auckland boy killed by his parents were posted on a pornographic site featuring beheadings, impalement and necrophilia.

Ngatikaura Ngati died in 2006 after horrific abuse by his parents, who were convicted of his manslaughter.

Pictures of his dead body were controversially released by the trial judge in 2007 to publicise the harm caused by child abuse.

In February this year, the pictures were posted on a website that contains pornography and graphic images of violent deaths.

Victims’ rights campaigner Rachael Ford, who came across the images this week while researching the case of Ngatikaura Ngati, said the site was disturbing.

The website, which the Weekend Herald has decided not to name, claims to be educational and to “wake people up to the reality” of violence.

However, it contains pictures of necrophilia and naked women being impaled, and comments by readers make it clear they find the material sexually arousing.

The pictures of Ngatikaura were published next to explicit images of hardcore pornography.

The website, which is based overseas, also runs caption competitions encouraging readers to make fun of people who have died violent deaths.

At the time the pictures were released, the then Children’s Commissioner, Cindy Kiro, attacked the move, saying that once the images were placed on the internet, there was no way of controlling who saw them or how they were used.

Dr Kiro also said it was abhorrent that the pictures were then circulated in an email petition calling for tougher action on child abuse.

“Circulating them allows for further abuse in the death of a child who was abused in life. It is abhorrent to have them circulated in this way.”

The present Children’s Commissioner, Dr Russell Wills, was not available for interview. But in a statement, he said he was “appalled to learn that images of Ngatikaura Ngati have been used on this website”.

He had referred the matter to the Department of Internal Affairs and the police, and said he would continue to monitor the issue.

At the time the pictures were released, Inspector Richard Middleton, who led the police case against Ngatikaura’s parents, said publishing the photos could have a positive effect and help to prevent further abuse.

This week he stood by that view.

First published in The New Zealand Herald

Government agencies twice failed to act on calls for more research that could have helped Christchurch prepare better for February’s fatal earthquake, victims’ families have claimed.

The families say the agencies “didn’t do the right things” and missed several chances to identify high-risk areas and strengthen key buildings.

They say the first opportunity was missed in 2005, when consultants Opus urged Environment Canterbury to model a magnitude 7 earthquake “on a hidden earthquake source close – say 10km to 20km – to Christchurch”.

February’s earthquake was a magnitude 6.3 tremor on a buried fault around 9km from the city centre.

Environment Canterbury’s director of investigations and monitoring, Ken Taylor, said most of the Opus recommendations were taken up by Crown research institutes GNS and Niwa in a project called Riskscape.

Riskscape models the danger posed by earthquakes, tsunamis and other hazards across the country, but is not yet complete.

Jim Cousins, a GNS scientist who has worked on Christchurch earthquake modelling, said he did not think the Opus recommendation had been carried out. “If it had been done, I would have probably known about it.”

In response to an Official Information Act request, Environment Canterbury indicated it had commissioned further research on hidden faults in 2008, but was unable to explain what use it had made of it.

The agency said it “has tested the prototype Riskscape model, but has not used it to run risk assessments”.

Rachael Ford, whose uncle died in the February 22 quake, said the agencies’ response was inadequate.

“This research should have been done,” she said. “And if it had been, I think there would have been a far better mindset around preparation.”

However, Mr Cousins said even if the modelling had been carried out, a major earthquake might still have been regarded as unlikely and not planned for.

“It would have suffered the same difficulty as other modelling – it would have been given a very low probability.”

Ms Ford also claimed authorities missed a second chance to prepare for February’s earthquake, which killed 181 people.

After the September 2010 earthquake, GNS applied to the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission (Cerc) for funding to carry out a study of hidden faults under Christchurch.

At the time a leading geologist, Geotech Consulting’s Dr Mark Yetton, told a Christchurch newspaper that money spent on “good quality, modern seismic surveys” had been needed “for quite a while”.

However, Cerc was wound up and replaced by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority before it had a chance to process funding applications. GNS’ resubmitted application was approved only after February’s earthquake.

Ms Ford said it showed agencies “just haven’t done the right things”.

“What they should have done, and what’s been done in other cities that have suffered earthquakes, is have the blind faults studied.”

GNS scientist Kelvin Berryman said the application had suffered “a bit of bureaucratic hurdles and go-slow”, though it had been “expedited quite quickly” after February’s earthquake.

However, even if approved immediately, the research might not have been completed before February, and would only have been indicative, he added. “We weren’t going to stop an earthquake happening even by finding out there were faults there.”

Ms Ford also claimed authorities had failed to create a detailed earthquake risk map of Christchurch, as was done in parts of California following a major earthquake in 1971. Such a map might have revealed that buildings in certain areas needed further strengthening or other action, she said.

Mr Berryman said that despite February’s earthquake, Christchurch was an area of low seismic activity. Limited resources meant detailed mapping had inevitably been concentrated on areas of greater risk, such as Wellington, he said.

First published in The New Zealand Herald

The Government will spend $11 million on consultants and $10 million on internal costs before they start building a new prison in Auckland.

Department of Corrections documents released under the Official Information Act show it is already employing 18 companies, including accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and British lawyers Allen & Overy, to help oversee the deal.

The 960-bed prison will be a public private partnership (PPP), in which a private company pays for, builds and runs the facility.

The Corrections Department’s own analysis say this may cost more than a publicly owned prison.

Corrections deputy chief executive Christine Stevenson said costs were high because it was New Zealand’s first PPP prison.

The consultants would provide “specialist technical advice” and outside scrutiny.

But the Corrections Association, which represents prison officers, said the consultants were “hired guns” who offered little value.

“They quickly work out what the payer wants them to say and they research to that,” said the union’s president, Beven Hanlon.

Ms Stevenson refused to say how much a public prison would have cost to set up, or put a figure on the prison’s total construction cost. Internal Corrections documents suggest it could be about $300 million.

PPP schemes overseas have been criticised for employing large numbers of lawyers, accountants and consultants.

The Haringey local council in London spent £24 million ($46 million) on consultants before it started its school-building programme.

Conservative MP Richard Bacon told the Financial Times this year: “It is clear that [PPP] has spawned an entire industry of advisers who have done extremely well out of it.”

Corrections’ business case says the costs of a PPP “will be higher” than those of a public prison, because private companies pay more to borrow money and need to make “commercial returns”.

The deal will be cheaper only if the company can run the prison 10 to 15 per cent cheaper than the department.

The Corrections Association said a private firm would “most definitely” make savings by cutting staff and wages, putting prison safety at risk.

Three consortiums, all headed by Australian security firms, have been shortlisted for the contract, expected to be signed by July.

The numbers:

• $11 million sum the Government will spend on consultants for the new men’s prison at Wiri
• $10 million sum spent on internal costs before the prison is built
• 18 companies employed by Department of Corrections on the project
• 960 number of beds proposed new prison will have

First published in The New Zealand Herald

New research shows councils could save billions on procurement. The hard part is turning those potential savings into reality.

Local councils could save themselves £2.2bn a year by driving a better deal on the goods and services they buy from private companies, according to new research.

The data, compiled by procurement company Spikes Cavell for Guardian Public, shows that if all England’s councils matched their top-performing peers, they could cut 6.6% from their £33bn annual spending with the private sector.

If fully realised, that would be more than the £1.165bn in local council cuts demanded by the Treasury in May, though some of the savings are for one-off capital projects.

Procurement expert Jonathan Jones, of the West Midlands Innovation and Efficiency Programme, said the figures were “feasible”.

The data also shows where councils spend the most money (see graph 1). By far the two biggest categories are construction, which accounts for £7.4bn a year or 22.3% of total spending, and social care, which accounts for £7.2bn or 21.7% of spending.

Spikes Cavell works with two-thirds of the UK’s 463 councils. Its figures are extrapolated from those councils but based on actual invoices and, the company says, are accurate to within 1%-2%.

Some £150m could be saved just by consolidating invoices (see graph 2). That means getting mobile phone companies, say, to send only one monthly bill rather than 20 each month, slashing processing costs.

Some £430m could be saved where different arms of a council have myriad contracts with different suppliers, and consolidating contracts would create a better deal.

Another £310m could be saved by getting better terms from companies that have started doing so much work for councils that they should be delivering economies of scale. In areas where councils deal with just one supplier, £100m could be saved by renegotiating deals or tendering them more widely.

At the most complex end, £530m is up for grabs – but only if councils completely rethink the way they buy goods and services in areas such as adult social care and construction.

Luke Spikes, the company’s founder, says these are the most challenging areas: “You don’t buy adult domiciliary care from a catalogue.” Instead, councils should, he says, follow a three-step process: draw up a new, comprehensive plan for the services they need; buy those services using a pre-selected framework; then create the tools – generally online – that will allow staff to quickly work out which supplier is offering the best deal.

Spikes says his company was able to help Peterborough primary care trust cut £1.8m from its £9m spending on caring for people in their homes – a 20% saving – simply by putting all the providers’ price and quality details into an online ordering system.

However, councils say achieving such savings is not easy. “There’s still huge scope [for savings],” admits David Pointon, Portsmouth city council’s head of procurement. “But it is not just procurement alone. You are not going to make those savings simply by bullying down prices. You are going to do it by fundamentally reviewing … the goods and services we are buying.”

Jones, meanwhile, warns that knowing where savings lie is not the same as realising them. “Sometimes where councils fall down is, they have the spending analysis done, they have good data … but they don’t do much with it.”

First published in The Guardian

Haringey council “squandered” the equivalent of 700 social workers’ salaries on private consultants while overstretched staff failed to save Baby P, the Standard can reveal.

Sharon Shoesmith’s department for children spent £23.8 million on external advisers for the borough’s school renovation programme between 2005 and 2008.

The money – four times the recommended level – would have been enough to build one new school from scratch, or fund the salaries of 740 social workers for a year.

MPs condemned the “shocking” consultancy bill, which mounted during Ms Shoesmith’s tenure. At the same time, Baby Peter was suffering months of abuse from which he eventually died, despite being on Haringey’s at-risk register.

The figures led to fresh questions over Ms Shoesmith’s management of Haringey’s children’s services department and marked another blow for Gordon Brown’s flagship Building Schools for the Future programme.

Lynne Featherstone, Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, said the consultancy bill – far higher than for other boroughs – was “shocking”.

“This looks like an unbelievable sum to be spent on consultants,” she said. “Haringey have got a lot of explaining to do as to where exactly that money has gone. It looks like they did not know what they were doing.

“We need to be sure that they haven’t simply squandered this money. We are desperately short of things like social workers and housing.

“If this happened on Sharon Shoesmith’s watch and is found to be gross incompetence with public money then we need to know what her role was,” she said.

Baby P, now known by his name, Peter Connelly, was abused and neglected at the home occupied by his mother, Tracey Connelly, 28, her boyfriend Steven Barker, 33, and Barker’s brother, Jason Owen. He was found dead in August 2007 after suffering injuries including a broken back. All three adults have been jailed over the case.

Social workers, police, doctors and health visitors saw Peter more than 60 times but failed to take him into care. The inquiry into his death found that extra money for social services on its own would not have saved him. But Haringey was told it must undergo a further investigation into whether it allocated enough resources to children’s services between 2005 and 2008.

Separate reports by Government inspectors found a shortage of social workers and “high vacancy rates” undermined child protection in the borough.

Ms Featherstone said Haringey’s consultancy bill raised questions over whether a borough council was competent enough to manage complicated building contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Official advice states that councils should expect to spend about 3 per cent of the value of their secondary school rebuilding plans on all external consultants and internal staff costs.

Haringey spent more than 11 per cent of the value of its £214 million programme on outside consultancy alone, a total of £23,817,067.91 over the four-year period.

The payments included £9.6million to architects, £687,000 on “consultancy (general)”, £5million labelled “consultant”, £812,000 on “agency staff” and £42,000 on “planning consultancy”.

The figures were released to trade magazine PPP Bulletin under freedom of information laws. They showed that Haringey’s consultancy bill was far higher than any of the 15 other London boroughs that released information.

At least £100 million pounds has been spent or earmarked for procurement costs across the 16 councils – Waltham Forest, Southwark, Westminster, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Lewisham, Newham, Lambeth, Islington, Barking and Dagenham,Kensington and Chelsea, Ealing, Camden, Hillingdon and Hammersmith and Fulham.

The Prime Minister has promised to rebuild or renovate every secondary school in the country at an estimated cost of £55 billion. The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) plan has been hit by delays although 87 new schools are now open with six more opening in London this month.

A Haringey council spokeswoman claimed the £23.8million figure, which the borough itself provided in a file marked “BSF consultancy costs”, was “misleading”. She said the bill was paid from the Government’s school building grant, and was not diverted from other council services.

“£18million of that figure represents the overall costs of project design and development, such as architects, quantity surveyors, project managers and other professionals involved in a large-scale building project,” she said.

“Around £6million represents external BSF programme management costs over a five-year period. This is well within the expected consultancy costs for a programme of this size. Haringey’s BSF programme has been carefully, independently audited and is on track to deliver significant school modernisation on budget.”

A spokeswoman for Partnerships for Schools, the Government agency that runs the BSF programme, said: “It is important to not get confused between government capital investment and how much local authorities spend on their costs such as on direct staffing and external advisers.

“Councils should expect to spend around 3 per cent of the total value of their BSF scheme to ensure successful delivery, but it is not for us to dictate the precise amount that each authority should spend.”

 Written with Tom Ross and first published in The London Evening Standard

The costs of planning and setting up new schools have soared by 50% under the government’s rebuilding programme, with one council paying consultants £24m before a single building had even been constructed.

The massive rises in the cost of new privately financed schools – obtained under the Freedom of Information Act – have contributed to the bill for the government’s flagship school rebuilding programme spiralling from £45bn to £55bn.

A pledge made five years ago by ministers, to be fulfilled by 2020, promised the “biggest school-building programme for generations”. The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) scheme would see the rebuilding or refurbishing of almost every secondary school in England.

However, new research reveals that authorities in the later stages of the scheme have seen costs rise by an average of 50% just to set up a school building deal. The costs include spending on outside consultants to develop building plans and draw up contracts before any deal is signed with a construction firm.

The 31 councils surveyed had originally expected to spend £122m on setting up their schemes, covering the period from advertising it in the European Union’s official journal to reaching financial close with a private consortium. However, they now anticipate spending £161m, or 32% more. Half of all councils admitted that they had already seen costs rise, with councils more than 18 months into the programme expecting to spend £36m more than the £78m they first budgeted, an increase of 46%.

Haringey council in north London spent £23.8m – the cost of a new school and nearly four times the government’s recommended amount – on consultants before any schools had been built. A spokeswoman for the council said the figure was so high because it was accounting for its costs “upfront”, while other authorities “hid” them by spreading them out over a longer period.

Critics have long claimed that BSF is too complex and imposes unnecessary delays and costs on councils. The programme began in 2004 with the aim of rebuilding half of all secondary schools, remodeling just over a third and refurbishing the rest. But just 42 of the planned 200 schools were rebuilt in the first four years of the scheme, putting it three years behind schedule.

The research by the PPP Bulletin reveals the extent of councils’ problems and raises fresh concerns over BSF. Ty Goddard, head of the British Council for School Environments, said the figures were “an important contribution to the debate about how we can sharpen up the process of investing in our schools.

“In fragile economic times, it is vital that we match this present government’s commitment to schools capital with an honesty and frankness about how the money is invested and some of the big challenges on the ground,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Partnerships for Schools, the agency in charge of BSF, said it was “looking at the issue of capacity within local government” and continued to share best practice and lessons learned.

Written with Amelia Hill and first published in The Observer