HOW do you save money if you are a large institution with an annual budget of £350 million and are facing a financial black-hole of £10 million?
Do you trim the staff knowing that quite a few desk jobs are superfluous?
Do you turn your eyes towards top managers skimming the cream and decide to point them towards the exit?
Or do you decide to go cap in hand to Whitehall for more – and show good faith by penny-pinching on little perks for the staff such as free cups of tea and coffee?
Guess which institution I am writing about?
The National Health Service or more, precisely, the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead.
While Gordon Brown has poured billions into the NHS, much of it, say critics, has helped self-serving managers to empire build thick layers of top management, many of whom earn considerably more than the most senior doctors who save lives.
Faced with a deficit, the Royal Free has decided to go into a “range of cost saving measures’, according to a leaked memo to staff sent by a senior manager called Helen Flynn, Divisional Director of Operations.
It’s ‘importance’ was listed as ‘high’ and its subject is described as ‘Functions, hospitality catering and food issues to staff.’
The punch-line in the memo reads: “A small number of departments currently receive a supply of milk, coffee, tea etc for staff use and this will also cease from February 14.”
Translated this means, for instance, that doctors and nurses who arrive for important – often life-saving operations – at around 7am, now have to pay for a cup of tea, with a piece of toast, to start the day. Some of them, who live in the outer suburbs, arrive at the operating theatre after a 30-40 mile journey.
Before they were welcomed – by tradition – with a cuppa to start the day. Now, they have to pay 40p a cup which, itself, will provide the Free with a tidy profit considering the cost of a tea bag.
Here the Free is clearly applying the first lesson on how to keep the staff happy! The savings cannot amount to more than a few thousand pounds a year but the damage they will do to good management-staff relations is incalculable.
Do not think either this decision was taken lightly. On the contrary, a great deal of management thought went into it. The giveaway is the date of introduction – February 14.
Most of the junior doctors rotate between hospitals in north London – the Free, University London College Hospital, Whittington etc – on a six monthly basis. And the first newly rotated staff arrive early February. So, the newcomers would not necessarily have been aware that previously tea and coffee in the operating wing were free of charge.
Clever, these managers at the Free. But at what cost?

Open door policy at the Town Hall?

THIS picture was taken inside the rear yard of a former Camden Town community centre by a colleague.
He pushed open the back door of the building at the corner of Greenland Road and Carol Street – and walked into the yard. But he should not have been able to.
For the Town Hall is paying a princely sum of £45,000 a year to a security firm to stop anyone breaking into the building. Both the Town Hall and the company, Ambika, do such a good job of protecting the building that they have allowed it to become a haven for thieves, junkies and street drinkers. Neighbours say the back door has been open for weeks. Last week a neighbour reported it to the police. A council official later turned up to inspect the property but found nothing wrong.
Obviously the sharp eyed official didn’t bother to look at the back door. I understand a security guard employed by Ambika reported the broken back door to the council this week.
A week ago I reported this crazy state of affairs in this column. You would think council officials – always keen to husband the cash we taxpayers contribute to their coffers – would take notice, and repair the back door. Not at all.
This picture was taken last night (Wednesday). If the Town Hall do not care whether they waste public money, this column does.
We shall be back next week to see whether the Town Hall has woken up to the fiasco at the ex-Greenland Road Neighbourhood Centre closed down 18 months ago by a council keen to save money!

Time marches on

CHANGE is normally measured in generations rather than years at dyed-in-the-wool public schools, where parents pay to ensure their children study a traditional curriculum. But big shifts seem to be the order of the day at Highgate School lately.
First the school in North Road – for nearly 450 years a boys-only club – moved to admit girls. Then long-serving headmaster Richard Kennedy announced his plans to move on.
Now there’s a shake-up at the Old Cholmeleian, the school’s much-loved magazine for former pupils, I hear. It seems celebrity biographer and journalist William Hall, (pictured) an old-boy who’s edited the mag for a decade, is stepping down. William, who lives a stone’s throw from his alma mater in Hampstead Lane, is best known recently for writing up former Scotland Yard detective Duncan McLaughlin’s claim that Lord Lucan lived out his days up in an Indian hippy commune.
Writing in his final editorial he admits to “mixed feelings” about leaving and apologises “to all those people we inadvertently killed off before their time”.
Old Cholmeleian Society president John Northam laughed as he told me: “There were a few obituaries for people who hadn’t actually died, but I think they’re all dead now.”
Incoming editors PR whizz Brian Aherne and English master Simon Middleton hope to appeal to a slightly younger audience by moving to colour and increasing the size of the magazine. I’m told it will be mailed to existing students with the school’s own newsletter in the future – one of the headmaster’s last acts before he moves on.

Gangster and his moll snapped

POLICE have finally caught up with the ring leader of a Somers Town mafia gang – but when the long arm of the law came to feel the collar of the Camden’s crime king-pin, they were surprised to discover it was none other than veteran Labour councillor Roger Robinson, with his wife, the former mayor and governor of Brookfield school, Maureen (pictured).
The Al Capone get-up was simply his costume for a fancy dress party to celebrate the 30th birthday of his son Ben, a film maker.