National Citizen Service: the 10bn Ego Boost

(MoneyWatch) 
Today, the UK government announces its "National Citizen Service". If you want evidence to show just how dysfunctional all governments are, look no further.

The plan is simple: give all 16-year-olds a three week holiday (sorry "experience") where they do some combination of Outward Bound and community work.

In a pilot scheme, costing about ?£1,500 per youth, the kids said they really liked it. Well well...kids like a free holiday. It's an odd choice of freebie in this time of austerity.

Not that the holidays are free. Even the kids will find that they pay more VAT, that new school buildings will be cancelled and they will be charged more if they go to university.

The promoters of the scheme claim it will enhance self esteem. That is a feeble outcome for a government which is keen to promote "Pay by Results".

Is self esteem a result worth paying for? I promise the government that if they give me ?£1,500 for a three week holiday, my self esteem will go up. But will the holiday make me claim fewer benefits, get a job or make me less likely to become an offender?

So lets look at what will happen to the scheme in practice:

1. It starts with a great pilot scheme: put enough energy and resource behind anything and it will work. This is what has happened so far.
2. It scales up, which means that all sorts of dodgy organisations will start bidding for contracts to deliver the three week experience and make a buck. The quality will go down dramatically.
3. The scheme will start to fragment. Good experiences will be colonised by middle classes who want to give their offspring a nice and cheap experience. Poor experiences will just make things worse, and many kids will simply not attend (so will they be imprisoned for not going on their free holiday?).
4. The bureaucracy to "ensure quality" will grow like topsy: many schemes will become little more than box checking exercises which ensures the process complies with regulations and that the result is rubbish.
5. No politician will dare cancel the scheme, because by now the vested interests will be keen to keep the gravy train going. Any mention of cutbacks will be met with cries of "Cuts!" and "destroying the hopes of an entire a generation" and all the other emotional hand baggage which goes with good housekeeping.

So over the next 10 years, the scheme could blow ?£15bn, with nothing to show in terms of "results".

The real question is why such lunacy gets going in the first place, especially when money is tight. The answer is that when politicians have a "Big Idea", they create a vacuum which needs to be filled.

Someone needs to turn the idea into reality. This is either a private sector firm (think PPP disasters) or some bright spark from a think tank. National Citizen Service is an idea from policy wonks who have had no real world experience, and it shows.

You and I will be paying for this nonsense, and more besides, for years to come. Knighthoods and peerages all round for the imbeciles who dreamed up the idea.

(Image:Informatique, CC2.0)