Roger Mexico

But they must be really good leaders - they've got certificates and everything. Michaela Morris has even got an MSc in Leadership - that means she must be a really good leader, surely? There are a lot of problems with what you might call leadership culture in Britain and beyond generally and they're not restricted to the NHS or indeed to the public sector. Indeed many of the worst characteristics have been imported from the private sector over the last 40-50 years: There is the tendency for successful managers to manage 'up' rather than 'down' - that pleasing those above you is more important than getting the best out of those you manage. There is the belief in generalism - that you don't really need to know how the industry or field you work in operates - you just need to be a 'good manager'. There is the rise of Human Resources and the belief that dealing with people is a minor part of a manager's job to be outsourced, rather than the core of what they do. And HR also means that the recruitment and assessment of managers becomes a box-ticking exercise with what looks good on paper always being the priority (and a good excuse what things go wrong). And, maybe most important, there is the belief that management is all about words rather than actions. About producing reports rather than getting things done. Look at the way that plagiarised leaflet could magically be explained away by claiming that it wasn't a 'strategy' it was a 'vision'. So it could be held to any sort of account at all - and neither could its (non-) author.

With the added benefits of keeping the media and the Prospect Hill liggers happy and incurious.

Again we don't know the details, but as a general point, I think anyone under the age of 13 is deemed unable to give consent, so in such a case it's possible no force was involved, the charges would still be the same. But of course we don't know the age of the victim and hopefully it won't be given. One of the problems with the Courts and reporting on the Island is that it is sometimes possible to work out the identity of anonymous victims when the circumstances, details and age etc mean that it could only be one person.

I looked at some UK guidelines for whether the name would be released there and couldn't see anything against it, but that's probably because no such case ever appears to have been brought there. i did find a handful of examples where boys as young as 11 were charged with rape, but those were all detected and prosecute at the time of the offence and dealt with anonymously. Apart from anything else, justice would surely demand that you deal with an offender in the way appropriate to their age at the time - how could you do that in this case?

Well you'd assume that would be the default anyway, given that Svetlana Cameron did the most recent three portraits. It's a bit weird that they bother to put it out to tender at all, but maybe she's too busy or can't stand Watterson or whatever. She no longer seems to live on the Island, so maybe it's too inconvenient. I suppose if you're going to waste money on the vanity of politicians you might as well do so in a traditional manner rather than dreaming up new expensive ones. Maybe, now it's been put out to tender, they'll award it on price and it will be done by a five year old for a bag of Haribo or, more likely, they'll give it to someone who can't actually paint, but is very good at bullshitting (admittedly a core skill in contemporary art) and filling in forms. It's interesting (but not surprising) that Watterson has decided to get his portrait done so soon after becoming Speaker - they still don't seem to have one of Rodan 12 years after he first got the job.

We actually had some figures in a long series of Written Questions that Hooper asked for the September 'Tynwald', in particular #75. This showed a total (Full Time Equivalents) of three Directors, 31 Managers and 292 Non-Management Staff (NMS). Looking at the figures over years there looks to have been some reassignment of managers into NMS in recent times - presumably at no loss of salary etc[1]. Of the NMS, 205 were in the Mails Division, presumably both post and parcel deliverers. So the one in four managers doesn't apply generally, but it may be true of the Corporate Division which has 12 Managers to 43 NMS plus the three Directors (who are on just under £100k each and who all appear to be the CEO). As so often you wonder what all these people do for such a small island. That's 18% of the operation employed as head office and that doesn't include the IMS section (which is presumably where all the Development Managers are). [1] Interestingly, though Hooper asked for a breakdown by grade, they didn't give it which suggests some of the NMS may still be on quite a high grade.

Actually I feel slightly sorry for Thomas in this particular case. The whole Year of Our Island fiasco was originally dreamt up by Quayle (who did nothing about it) who then got Skelly to organise it (who did nothing about it) and the mess got dumped on Thomas at the last minute - as I explained in a comment at the start of last year: Some of those links will be superseded or dead, but you get the idea. I suspect the Cabinet Office had neither the budget nor the will to clear up DED's mess. The row about the cancelling of the commemorative coin, as shown in the Keys Hansard, is only noteworthy because it involved the "political board of the Year of Our Island" actually making a sensible decision - ie not wasting more money on this half-cocked Quayle vanity project by producing coins celebrating a complete non-event that even the most fanatical coin collector is not going to want at £17.50 each and which would barely make a profit at that price, even if they sold every one. For some reason this seems to have upset the Treasury, presumably because they think that wasting money is what IOMG is for.

Yes, according to Section 70 of the 2001 Children and Young Persons Act. (I think it was even lower at one stage 7?)

The latter I think. From her Linkedin she appears to have gone to school in Salisbury (though it was a private school, so she could have lived a way away) and most of her subsequent work was in the South of England. Never in the same post for long before she came here. As to Wigan, it seems to be being put forward as some sort of paradigm withing the integrated care field, though that could just mean that they produce the snazziest-looking documents. As usual there seems no willingness to look at a variety of different authorities or look anywhere outside England. Robertshaw kept on comparing us with systems on mainland Europe and it made Couch sound even more clueless. And it's all wrapped in the usual language of aspiration and 'vision', never anything concrete or achieved. Certainly nothing about outcomes or how well things worked. As Watterson said (lines 1454 on): Of course the reality of all this is that they have been busy producing reports while Couch has been cutting back on the things that actually do support people in the community, such as meals on wheels. Similarly there is much talk about working with voluntary organisations, while they are actually taking more and more in house - even stuff like adoption and fostering that has always been done by charities. But then these are the sort of people who nationalised the hospital sweet shop.

I don't think that is what Watterson is saying in this case. The Hansard is now available and this relates to something Morris said in lines 834 onwards: So she was clearly claiming it was nearly all her own work[1], when it very clearly wasn't. Of course the little word 'Wigan' hadn't actually appeared at this stage and I suspect the Committee were setting her up for pointing out that "Over half of this document is a copy, cut and paste, word for word what Wigan produced in 2014" later in the session (see p 30 on). So Watterson isn't saying that her 'authorship' should have been hidden, but that she shouldn't have claimed that she wrote most of it when she hadn't. But the whole PAC session is deeply depressing with both Couch and Morris clearly unable to do anything but spout jargon and having no more idea of what is going on and no proposals to fix things except by calling more meetings or commissioning more reports. [1] Someone at Manx Radio (young Gawne?) did a good job in picking up this story straight away, writing it up comprehensively, and not waiting for Hansard to appear, though the recording was available. It did mean the piece contains one mistake in implying that David Gawne was CE of Crossroads Care (it's Jackie Betteridge).

If you look at it, it appears to be the usual mixture of bullshit and throwing money at your mates (Chamber of Commerce, employment agencies). And of course the main purpose is to keep the ever-expanding management at Enterprise and Cabinet Office in the style to which they have become accustomed. I doubt £400k will go far.

Well you'd certainly hope it was. Because the purpose of burglary is to steal stuff and the purpose of that is to sell it and make some money - unless you're lucky and find some cash - but few people keep much at home nowadays. Professional burglars are going to want to steal in an area where there is a reliable market for their takings and that isn't here. You can try to move stuff off the Island with extra cost and danger of detection or flog stuff on e-bay and risk someone spotting it. But it's easier to exercise your talent in places where there are more opportunities and fewer risks. So any burglaries on the Island are likely to be done by the local incompetents, like the man with the toilet duck[1], people who the Police know all too well and are bound to make all sort of easily detected mistakes. So detection rates ought to be high. And of course you don't need a successful prosecution for a crime to 'solved' for the purposes of crime statistics. [1] Itself a rather odd case given that he appears to have served his (longish) sentence before he had his trial, which literally Alice in Wonderland stuff.

According to the BBC in November 2017 "Salaries for chief constables and deputy chief constables are determined by rank, the size of their force and the area's population". They linked to a dataset which gave to salaries for Chief Constables etc and £140k would be around the salary for a smaller force - though still many times that of the Island - Cumbria say (£138k) or Derbyshire (£143k)[1], which have populations of around half a million and a million respectively. So clearly someone thinks the Island is bigger than it is. But comparatively the Island does at least have a large police force. With 207 police for a population of about 84,000 that gives a figure of 246 police per 100,000 people. If you compare it with the list on page 8 of this recent publication from the House of Commons Library (downloads), it is the highest figure for any police force except the Met (352) and just ahead of Merseyside (244). [1] There's a big turnover in this roll so a lot of forces have it split over two entries for different people in post or acting up. These are two for the whole year.

They're like a lot of statistics. They may not give you a completely accurate figure of what the actual situation is for any particular period, but if you look at the movement over time, they're going to reflect that fairly well. So if Manx Radio's figures are shown to be consistently dropping, without RAJAR having changed their methodology, then that is probably what is happening. The graphs that parchedpeas linked to above will show what has been happening. In a partial defence of Manx Radio it's worth saying that 'live' listening is dropping at practically all radio stations, simply because there are so many more alternatives - not just in terms of stations available (especially digitally) but in other forms of listening: streaming, podcasts and so on. But 3fm seems to be doing OK, so it's not anything like a complete excuse.

I said a "bit more top-heavy" and you would expect it to simply because you can't have 0.7 of a Chief Constable or whatever. Whether the total numbers are justified and whether the salaries that go with the top jobs are, is another matter, but it wasn't the question I was answering, which about the ratios between the various lower ranks and the point is that those seem to be pretty standard. Now it may be that the structure in the UK is top-heavy as well, and they also have lots of people at the top with little to do except call meetings and write reports to keep themselves busy. But those figures show the Island isn't that much out of line.