A blog by Clive Parry, ARC England Director
A balanced analysis of the Afzal report into the ongoing challenges at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) would, of course, recognise the positive responses obtained from some of the interviews that were recorded with the people who work for, manage and lead this regulator.
However these don’t, sadly, change the harrowing statements that confirm that, despite the organisation saying for years that it is ‘learning lessons’, the report demonstrates that the toxic nature of the culture at NMC remains a significant problem and shows us that, as is so often the case, lessons are not in fact being learned, despite the seriousness of them.
A year after head teacher Ruth Perry took her own life, Ofsted had not chosen to take responsibility for its role in relation to her sad death. It wasn’t until after the coroner warned of the likelihood of its inspection approach contributing to further tragic deaths that in January 2024, Ofsted finally offered an apology for its role.
Ofwat, the regulator on which we all depend for clean water and healthy rivers and oceans is doing no better because the key contributors to the poor ecological condition of many of England’s rivers are legal and illegal sewage discharges. These are not being challenged because of the “significant weaknesses in monitoring, enforcement and assessment processes“. (Ofwat was also clearly behind the eight ball when investment banks and hedge funds cranked up the gearing ratios, created layer upon layer of ownership and engaged in whole business securitisation of water companies which suggests that regulators can fail in multiple ways).
Yet another example of the failure of regulation can be seen with the Financial Conduct Authority, which, rather than pay the compensation it should have paid to investors who lost their money as a result of the collapse of London Capital and Finance, chose to change the rules governing such compensatory payments “by the back door”.
In an ignominious thumbing of the nose to the citizens who depend on these regulators to protect them (and similarly Thames Water), the people ‘managing’ and ‘leading’ the FCA decided that despite their well-documented and abject failure to do their jobs properly, they nevertheless deserved to be paid massive bonuses
The list goes on and in recent weeks, we have seen the regulator of health and social care, the Care Quality Commission admit that it is ‘failing to keep patients safe’.
ARC England members won’t be surprised at this admission from Interim Chief Executive, Kate Terroni, and neither will be they surprised to hear that the CQC is ‘losing the confidence of Ministers’ or that it has an ‘organisational structure, flow of decision making, roles, internal and external relationships [that] do not promote a productive and credible way of working’.
This is because members have been reporting to us for some time that the inspection and registration functions of the regulator are not working properly and fairly and are, in some instances, harming their ability to support people with a learning disability and autistic people.
So, what’s up with regulation in the UK?
Is it as simple as saying that regulators are not properly resourced and given enough money, they could and would solve the internal challenges that are leading to these catastrophic failures?
Is it that we have been worshipping at the altar of free / unregulated market economics for so long, including that we have shoe-horned this ideology into the realm of public service delivery where many always believed that it has no place, that we are unable to see that the free market model is failing the majority of us and has been failing us for quite some time?
A quick word about language – I am not measuring failure here in terms of the failures that allow enrichment (whether this be from plundering the public purse or from what they cream off from the bills their customers have no choice but to pay or redirect from borrowing) of unscrupulous board members and executives of those companies that are making the most of the inability of regulators to hold them to account. Neither am I describing failure in terms of the continued survival in their roles of the directors and senior leaders of regulators, although both these examples are indicators of the disastrous belief, spoken out loud or quietly embedded in public service structures and systems, that markets work best when they are either regulated very lightly or not regulated at all.
The failure I refer to is in relation to regulators that have not protected the public or the particular groups of people who depend on the proper and effective regulation of the services that they need in order to live their lives; the failure to speak up for and to protect the environments on which we all depend and the failure to ensure that markets work for everyone, not just a small number of people who are happy with the grotesquely unequal society we have created for ourselves. Yes, not only does society exist, it is actually really important for all our futures that we acknowledge this and develop policies that respect our dependency on each other so can we please finally stop saying that there is ‘no such thing as society’?
The role of the regulator has sometimes been described in terms of the multi-headed mythological dog, Cerberus who is able to look in several directions at once.
This can mean attending to consumer protection at the same time as ensuring that there is integrity in the market that the regulator has oversight of or it could mean simultaneously watching over innovation and stability in that market. Either way, the idea is that the regulator is attending to and balancing competing demands and perhaps the challenges that UK regulators are currently facing and the appalling consequences of their failure to do what they are meant to do is because they have either never understood this aspect of their role or they have stopped seeing it this way.
Perhaps the reason our regulators are letting us down is because the approach we have adopted in relation to regulation assumes that whatever the question we ask, the market will always be able to supply us with the answer, that it must be entirely unfettered in order to function well and that whatever the answer it comes up with, it is okay that some will derive extraordinary personal benefit from the way the market delivers the solution whilst others will go without and suffer harm and our environment will be degraded to the point where we can no longer live healthy lives.
What are your thoughts? Email: [email protected]