Passing the buck

Press, 30 August 1989, Page 17

Passing the buck

KATHARINE WHITEHORN

I find it encouraging that Chief Constable Wright should have offered his resignation after the highly critical report on the Hillsborough disaster before there was any talk of indicting his people — even is it did take his controlling committee only 45 minutes to decide to refuse it.

People in charge who take responsibility seem to be a bit thin on the ground these days.

Two trivial incidents brought this home to me recently. The first concerned the bank.

. When I complained that they had twice promised Eurocheques and twice never ordered them, the Natwest manager asked if I knew who had done the promising. Without the name, he said, he could do nothing — as if it was my job to watch out for slackers.

Similarly, the garage, having actually rung me to offer to repair the sunshine roof, told me when I came to collect it: “Oh we can’t do the roof." The manager said

if he didn’t know who had rung me, he couldn’t chase him up. They both washed their hands of the matter, and neither seemed to feel ashamed that they ran such inefficient outfits. If they couldn’t keep their staff up to scratch, who could? If Wright was not the man responsible for seeing that the police sent out to do crowd control actually had some idea how to control crowds, who was? Keith Bright rightly resigned from London Regional Transport after the Kings Cross fire; no-one suggested that he personally had told the workforce not to bother with the filth below stairs; but if his policy was that you watch every penny, rather than that you go for safety at all costs, then blameless he could not be.

They are now indicting some of the peoole involved in the Zeebrugge disaster; it remains to be seen whether they’re seeking out all the right ones.

The first inquiry said of the man who failed to close the sea doors: “he knew his job was important though no-one had told him so.”

That certainly points the finger at the captain, who might have mentioned it. But if the chairman of P&O ran the kind of empire where no-one bothers to motivate the people who actually do the work, should not he too be blushing somewhat, instead of still enjoying privileged status as an adviser to the DTI? (Sir Jeffrey Sterling claimed, of course, that he’d only had Townsend Thoresen for a few days when the disaster happened; but he had sat on the board of European Ferries, the previous owners, since 1984 — alongside the directors he was so quick to criticise.) The Civil Service has

always worked on the principle of responsibility at the top; if you make the Minister resign if something goes wrong, it is supposed to concentrate his mind wonderfully on what is going on beneath him.

It’s a noble theory; what makes it ridiculous, of course, is that if a minister who had absolutely nothing to do with the original decision resigns, then he isn’t really blamed — and nor is anyone else.

At least with the military, you can assume that if there’s a cock-up, someone will carry the can; as they said of the captain of the U.S. spy ship captured by the North Koreans, ‘whatever the verdict says, that guy will wind up counting blankets in the Aleutians.’

The notion that if you hold someone responsible, they will then become responsible is presumably behind the latest wheeze, to stick parents for the cost of the damage done by their offspring.

I wonder whether, in practice, it won’t need to be hedged about with so many exceptions and caveats as to render it unworkable.

Perhaps it’s not fair to hold people responsible for that which they cannot handle; and one has a certain sympathy for responsible people whose authority is incomplete. A prison governor may be fired or retired if his nick’s in perpetual ferment; but he may be just a wretched nut, squeezed between the mean old Home Office and the Prison Officers’ Association.

The perpetual moan about running a hospital is the problem of separate hierarchies: doctors to doctors, nurses to the Royal College, porters to the union.

“The buck stops here” is an admirable slogan, but sometimes the buck scarcely gets there. There may be cases where the people at the top have their hands tied, or they may be simply unaware how their policies might impinge on the public. But I’d be more inclined to offer them sympathy than the benefit of the doubt.

As the Scottish ministersaid to his congregation: ‘Ye’ll be burning in hell and ye’ll look up and say ‘Lord, lord, we didnae ken!’ and the Lord in his infinte maircy will look down at ye in the flames and say “Well, ye ken noo”.’