Professor John Seddon gives evidence Communities & Local Government Committee his appearances begins at 17:34:46.   

Watch it here (move the dial to 17:34:46)

Some highlights

On accusation that Seddon is all about “making money”

“No, I am a very lucky man. Work comes to me. My purpose is to change management thinking. My life is not about making money. My purpose in life is to change management thinking” and later “If I wanted to make money, I would have set up a benchmarking service. I would have done a ‘prepare yourself for the Audit Commission coming’ service. That’s how you make money in this sector, not by encouraging people to change the way they think”.

On Chief Executives

“I can identify chief executives who I regard to be targets and star junkies who will do anything to get the ratings. This is not the same as improvement”

On inspection

“In every case I have investigated, inspection makes service worse”. “We’ve known since the 1950’s that you can’t inspect quality in. We’ve known since the 1950’s that inspection doesn’t improve performance”.

On why the LGA are more positive about inspection

“I’m a psychologist and we understand this phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. If I spend an awful long time doing something [as local authorities have on inspection], I am unlikely to say it’s of no value whatsoever”.

On Value for Money

“If you follow the Audit Commission’s Value for Money, you get high cost poor services”

On publishing expenditure

“I think the requirement to publish all expenditure over £500 is a gimmick, frankly. It’s an irrelevance”.

On the armchair auditor

“Well, I don’t know about you Mr Clapham, but I’ve never met anybody who spends their time comparing their local authority to another. What I find out is that people in our communities want local services that work. Full stop”.

On whether the Audit Commission’s existence has led to improvement

“My answer is no, but the good news is that there is massive scope for improvement. In local government and housing services in the last 10 years we have doubled our expenditure and we haven’t seen improvement commensurate with that. The Audit Commission has been an instrument in Whitehall coercion. I became so angry about this I wrote a whole book in 2008 about how adherence to central specifications was driving costs up and worsening services. And it’s true for every service I have studied for local authorities and housing.