Too big to manage

How many people are employed in state education and the Nationalised Health Service?

The number of staff in state schools was 740,400. In the NHS the headcount was 1.34m.

Both organisations are so huge as to be unmanageable even by hugely talented managers, let alone by preening politicians catapulted into responsibilities for which they're unfitted by training or experience, let alone ability.

Forget political doctrine. Such huge organisations will always produce inefficiency and waste.

And a good manager understands the limits of what they can achieve. Politicians are more interested in headlines and looking good.

Even the employment numbers are challenged at the margin, and they should be the easiest numbers to collect. For instance

Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: "When you dig below the surface even further, an estimated 17 per cent of the headline increase in nurse numbers [since 1997] is made up of double-counting existing nurses working extra shifts.

Meanwhile, the union Unison claimed that

health workers' jobs are now being lost because welcome extra cash is often being sucked into an endless black hole of 'strategic' reforms, which don't appear to be linked to many meaningful front-line patient care outcomes.

Sometimes managers just have to concentrate on boring day to day stuff, rather than repeated strategic reorganisations which are undone later at great cost.