Working 9 to 1

A survey has found that 97% feel that the opening hours for public services should be extended. That is 97% of citizens in the Balearics. Not a bunch of moaning foreigners but everyone. It is a heartening statistic.

It is an absurdity that offices operate such short hours. Try this one - the Trafico place in Palma. It deals with everything to do with cars and vehicles. It is one office. There are no others. It is open Monday to Friday from nine in the morning till one in the afternoon for "customer" service. Four hours for everyone on the island. Go past Trafico at around half eight in the morning and you will see them starting to queue. By nine, that queue stretches well down the street. It's a nonsense. Try also the office for foreign matters not far from Trafico. Go stand in the baking sun in the queue there and then wait for three hours or so inside. If you arrive too late you won't get a ticket for that day and will have to go back the next day. They close at two. Imagine you've schlepped down to Palma from Alcúdia only to be told that you have to do it all over again tomorrow. It is not just foreigners who are treated like something unpleasant on the sole of a shoe; public service here practises little discrimination. There is a tired excuse of "oh that's Spain". It no longer washes. Spain, and therefore Mallorca, joined the grown-ups' party long ago, but much of its administration is still in the kindergarten. It is not just individuals that are impacted; a cruddy system of public administration affects general productivity and efficiency of the economy. I stress again, it is not just foreigners who are dissatisfied; the survey bears that out.

Cliched I know it is to say it, but life and society have changed. People expect convenience. Public offices' opening hours are like shop opening hours - inconvenient. They are, as with much of the tortuous bureaucracy and red tape that they peddle, an up-yours vestige, one of self-interest, union clout and a refusal to countenance a culture that is anything other than that determined by archaic working practices and attitudes. The other day I was griping to my gestor (accountant if you like) about all this and telling him that he and my lawyer (they share a practice) are precisely the people who should be pressurising for change. He told me that the professional associations are not unaware, and that there is some such pressure, but there is also self-interest in these groups and a prevalence of something he demonstrated by raising and lowering a fist - stamping papers in other words. The status quo quite satisfies not only the public services but also the professionals who feed off them.

Hours of opening and bureaucracy apart, there are aspects of one's dealings with the public service and authorities that make no sense. Whose bright idea was it to scrap residency cards for foreigners? I am no lover of ID cards, but if there is a system in place whereby they are obligatory for all Spaniards why not retain a card system for all (albeit that it was not obligatory for foreigners to have one)? The certificate that has replaced the card is of no use as a form of identity. The centralisation of this "service" is also open to question. Perhaps it is still a hangover from the old days of an authoritarian regime; it is not so long ago that everything was centred on Palma when there were no municipal administrations. But another country that had such a regime has managed to decentralise. Germany. Go there to live or work and you can turn up at the local town hall, in places of equivalent size to somewhere like Alcúdia, do the form, give them the photos and the passport and walk out with your residency permit. This sort of thing does not have to be centralised. Except it does if self-preservation is the motive and the "customer" an inconvenience.

The government councillor for "quality of services" seems to accept that there need to be improvements in terms of opening hours, waiting times and bureaucracy. He says that certain moves are already afoot - simplification, the use of the internet for example. Good for him. The Partido Popular locally is calling for a cut in jobs in the Balearic Government as part of an austerity package to deal with the current economic difficulties. It is a political posture, though it may not be without some sense. But it probably misses the point, which is the degree to which the government and the entire system of public administration is subject to scrutiny. That is a pertinent word. It was the one that underpinned the examination of the civil service in the UK by Derek Rayner during the first Thatcher administration. Bloated public services are immune to cultures of service. Perhaps the local public services are staffed at optimum levels, or perhaps they are not, and if not how much will is there to change them and their working practices? When we talk of tourism and construction being the main industries, we forget about the public services and the employment they create. But unlike tourism and construction they don't create value, only take it away or obstruct it through their systems of operation. That 97% might have a long wait and not just in the queues.


Following on from yesterday and the all-important issue of beach cricket, I am very grateful to Colin for a link to the site of a pub in Scotland which has taken the sport to almost Lord's-like heights (well that may be overdoing it). It occurred to me - do they roll the pitch? And lo and behold in the photo for the cricket team, there - in the background - is a roller. Serious boys these. Anyway, here it is - the Ship Inn in Elie and its beach cricket - http://www.ship-elie.com/cricket.php.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Bobby Vee. Don't know when the youtube comes from, certainly quite a few years on from his heyday and, er, it's not that good - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJp_EO2C220. Today's title - it has lost four hours; who was it?

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