In parts 1 & 2, we identified a problem and came up with a workable solution. As with everything in life, though, it’s not perfect. Some might already be thinking, how much might this cost? Well, this will cost, and that’s for sure, but we are seeing quite a return. We looked at the different benefits of having such a role, and how it might help organisations function better.
A further benefit as a direct result of doing this is that senior peoples’ skill sets will improve. In the book, I write about the benefits of going out and about to learn in different environments, with different people and their skill sets. This will help our ethical leaders when they return to their own sectors. Additionally, if you do this, then within about ten years or so, you will have public sector leaders who will have been ethical leaders for a two-year period on their own journey to the top, and that is good news.
Those are significant benefits, but the biggest benefit of all is what we are trying to prevent. The Post Office scandal is still being looked at, but only recently, a journalist commented the taxpayer was on the hook for over one billion pounds for what happened there. Or look at any of those multi-year inquiries. What do they cost? The total cost for some of those may be impossible to calculate. How much is spent on the legal costs for those public bodies submitting and attending to give evidence? How many staff are being taken away from their day-to-day jobs, which is serving the public, to deal instead with the enormous picking up the pieces exercise that goes on afterwards? Or the damage caused to those professions caught up in the mess? Then you have the incalculable costs to those victims and their loved ones. How many lives were lost? How many loved ones could not continue working, or have needed help, or have gone into hospitals themselves, or the breakdowns, or the suicides, all because of these scandals?
If anyone can work out the cost of these scandals, which continue to happen, then you are a better person than me. I don’t think I would even come within a few hundred million, and that is just the financial side. The human suffering is incalculable.
If someone senior enough to probe, ask, and challenge had intervened earlier, the impact of every public sector disaster could have been reduced, and in some cases, massively reduced. Each and every one of them.
It is an organisational safety valve, and one that can save lives, so the question for me is not can we afford it. It is, can we afford not to do this?
Why did nobody listen?
I do not know why Alan Bates couldn’t make himself heard, and it would be wrong to second guess what the inquiry might find. I do know, though, why no one listened to Julie Bailey (Mid Staffs), to Maggie Oliver (Rochdale Grooming scandal), to Stephen Bolsin (Bristol Royal Infirmary scandal), and to many others.
The reason is that nobody had to listen, and people knew no one would, or could, hold them accountable for that. As a direct result of this, issues and incidents morphed into full-blown scandals. The suffering continued, and often the deaths, too.
