ON Tuesday, it was with great pleasure that I was a member of a panel
assembled by the Institute of Ideas and PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers, as was) to
debate in front of an invited audience at the Charing Cross Hotel, London, the
question: 'Are the professions over-regulated?'
As with the traditional best man's speech having to pay tribute to the
extraordinary beauty of the bridesmaids, so it is customary for one in my
position to express wonderment at the intellectual brilliance of one's fellow
panellists. But this was a genuinely impressive bunch (the present writer
excluded): occupational psychologist John Seddon, GP and author Dr Michael
Fitzpatrick, Anton Colella, chief executive of the Institute of Chartered
Accountants of Scotland, and PwC partner Paul Davis.
Claire Fox, the institute's director, was in the chair and quite properly
limited panellists' opening remarks to six minutes each. My first stab, timed by
my wife in our kitchen, ran over time and had to be cut. But for anyone
interested, here is the full version.
Thank you and thank you for inviting me.
Are the professions over-regulated? I believe the answer is yes, and furthermore
that the professions are simultaneously being over de-regulated. As I hope to
show, that paradox is not quite as barmy as it sounds.
First, however, what is a professional?
Many years ago, at a time of great strife on the
railways, a short-lived breakaway union appeared, promising to represent all
rail employees in a new, constructive relationship with the management. A
spokesman took to the airwaves to explain the philosophy behind this new
association:
‘We are all professionals. A driver is a professional. A
cleaner is a professional. Sir Peter [Parker – then chairman of the British
Railways Board] is a professional.’
Used in this context, the word implies a position the
holder of which is (a) paid for what they do, in contrast to amateur status,
and (b) competent and trustworthy in the performance of their duties. It is in
this context that one hears of photographers, actors, actresses and
sportspeople described as ‘superb professionals’.
With all due respect to those mentioned, I do not think
this definition is going to get us very far this afternoon. So here is my own
definition of ‘a profession’, whose members can be said to be ‘professionals’.
Feel free to disagree with or amend it – I do not claim my pronouncements come
with the status of those of Pope Francis!
I believe a profession exhibits four features.
First, that its members owe a duty not only to their
clients or patients but a wider duty to society at large that goes beyond
simply obeying the law as do the rest of us.
Second, that because of this there are restrictions on
the use of the professional title. These do not have to be blanket bans – our
audience today will know better than I do that there is no closure of title on
the word ‘accountant’ (although ‘chartered accountant’ is another matter) and
for many years the Bank of England was unable to stop people calling themselves
‘bankers’, although somebody would be for the high jump if they used the word
‘bank’ without having taken the precaution of obtaining a banking licence. The
general principle holds, however.
Third, that in order to be permitted to use the
professional title, the would-be professional is required to undergo certain
types of training or education, to conform to codes or standards and to submit
to the oversight of a professional body.
Finally, I would suggest that a professional is
distinguished from other employees in that they retain their status even when
not practising. I recall as a schoolboy Army cadet being told that a
paratrooper’s ‘wings’ could never be taken away, even were he to commit murder
or treason.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. I took his word for
it. You don’t argue with those chaps!
But this, in extreme form, is the principle I am talking
about. A lawyer is always a lawyer, a doctor always a doctor. The same is
patently not true of bartenders, trawler fishermen, millionaire footballers,
Cabinet Ministers, novelists, waitresses or historians.
There are purists who would add a fifth criterion. The
professional, they may argue, is in a direct fee-earning relationship with
clients even when, as with NHS GPs, the fee is paid by a third party, the State,
in this case. All those white-collar occupations that involve services that are
intermediated in some way through an institutional structure – nursing,
journalism, school teaching and so forth – are properly not professions at all,
but trades or vocations.
I have some sympathy with this view, given that have always rather relished journalism’s
position at the scruffy end of the middle class, along with social workers and
local government officers. But this additional definition would, for example,
put tattooists inside the charmed circle while excluding the Government’s Chief
Medical Officer.
Amusing perhaps, but not overly helpful for our purposes.
My contention that the professions, as defined, are
increasingly over-regulated and subjected to political interference rests on a
view of British society in our time and on their place within it. Or rather,
this is the view of the powers that be, the political class.
The people at the top of all the main parties have
created a de facto alliance between
themselves and an heroic yeoman class, known variously as ‘the strivers’ and
‘hard-working families’.
As with the ‘shock workers’ of the old Communist bloc, officialdom
defines ‘the strivers’ against their class enemies.
These include ‘the skivers’ – it even rhymes – the
workshy, against whom no official measures can be too severe.
They include also, of course, caricature chinless
wonders, junky peers who prang expensive cars, and other surviving decadent
aristocrats.
But at the bulls’-eye of this undeclared class war is the
independent, professional middle class. Cast in the role familiar from 20th
Century dictatorships, they are the anti-social parasites who deny the children
of the strivers their rightful places at top universities, who avoid using
State-provided services whenever possible and when they do use them abuse their
articulacy to get the best deal.
And it goes without saying that they deny the strivers or
their offspring the chance to join the ranks of the professional classes by
ensuring that work experience and similar opportunities are reserved for their
own kind.
This, I would argue, put the professions in a perilous
position. It is not helped in any way by the fact that the new class of career
politicians springs almost exclusively from the ranks of those they criticise.
The professions, whether law, medicine, accountancy, journalism or whatever, are
accused of self-interest, of having sheltered behind a system of
self-regulation that has provided no regulation at all.
A frontal assault of this type could, perhaps, have been
resisted . But the senior professions – the bar, the law and accountancy – have
been targeted by a Trojan horse in the shape of regulation disguised as
deregulation.
Put simply, the self-denying ordinances under which the
senior professions used to operate, chiefly the mandatory partnership system,
the prohibition of multi-disciplinary firms and a ban on outside capital and
ownership, will be swept away. This happened in the City in 1986 and that
turned out really well, didn’t it?
In return for being able to sell shares in themselves and
perhaps make a lot of money, the professions have, of course, had to abandon
their ‘cosy’ system of self-regulation and submit to supervision by the
official and political classes.
This, I would suggest, is very much a win for the
governing class, and a sad day for the rest of us. The true value of the
professions lay in their dual independence, independence from government and
independence from corporate control.
The prospect before us now is of wage slaves supervised by State quango-crats. A bleak vista.
The professions were the true ‘third sector’. But not, I fear, for much longer.