A.O.B.
Holed beneath the Hull?
Published: 22 October 2008
I retain a deep affection for the fair city of Kingston upon Hull. My career began on the city’s evening newspaper, the Hull Daily Mail; I played rugby for Hull & East Riding RUFC; a teenage memory of watching an Everly Brothers gig at Hull is still fresh.
So when I read that Hull’s Primary Care Trust (PCT) proposes to spend the best part of half a million quid – yes, that’s right, almost £500,000 – to buy a 72 ft long ocean-racing yacht, I had to give my eyes a vigorous rub.
Hull’s PCT has half a million to spare – not on meeting the urgent needs of cash-strapped surgeries and the NHS patients who depend upon them – but on a state-of-the-art racing yacht. The PCT wants the craft to be the centrepiece of a new ‘Wilberforce Sailing Academy’. This ‘academy’ will be committed to giving unemployed 17-19 year olds ‘a healthier lifestyle and something to do’.
Step forward, Chris Long, chief executive of the PCT, who explains to those who care to listen that unemployed youths will combine trips on the yacht with learning skills such as plumbing, electronics and carpentry. Presumably these skills will be learned ashore rather than out in the North Sea in the teeth of a gale.
The PCT’s Long says that the landlubbers will be taught how to apply for jobs, to write CVs and handle job interviews, adding. ‘It doesn’t just finish when they get off the boat, there’s almost a year-long package.”
The justification for this proposal seems to be that if you can wean the young unemployed off a diet of burgers and deep-fried Mars bars they grow up to be less of a burden upon the dear old National Health Service (and Hull PCT).
What Hull’s famous son, William Wilberforce, champion of the abolition of slavery, would have made of the PCT’s crassness beggars belief. But there’s more.
The PCT is not alone in this nautical nonsense, for there is also a local quango, One Hull, which is reported as likely to back the yacht and ‘academy’ with another £1 million-plus of public money.
In the way of quangoes, One Hull’s website boasts of bringing together the public, private, voluntary and community sectors to build a better city. One community leader One Hull is not bringing together is Councillor Steve Brady, the opposition leader on Hull City Council. He says it would be a ‘disgraceful’ misuse of public money for the PCT to splash out on a yacht.
I find it hard to disagree with Cllr Brady’s assessment of the proposal, due to be discussed next month. My gripe, however, is not with the PCT and One Hull, so much as with the communications professionals at both bodies. They must have been asleep on their watch when the yacht idea first surfaced.
The professionals should have recognised the huge downsides of this plan, counselled strongly against its cruising any further through the bureaucracy and for it to be consigned it to Davy Jones’ locker.
Maybe they did. Some clients can be like that.
Peter Hill is a partner in The Governance Partnership.