Bill Midgley column

Apr 27 2005 By Bill Midgley, The Journal

Seated in the depths of the headquarters of one of our Government agencies recently, and as ever with my mind wandering from the rather turgid debate around the table, I was impressed with the high quality of staff employed by the agency itself.

It was not necessarily their contribution to the debate that was gradually sending me to sleep, but more the various delegates from around the country who perhaps felt they had to speak on each issue, irrespective of whether their words were of any substance or not.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of that brief moment of reflection was that it is the best brains from our universities that are now going into the public sector, rather than into industry and commerce, or perhaps to use an outmoded term, "trade".

There is, of course, a strong tradition that some of the best brains from our more senior universities have always been attracted to the civil service, which has no doubt made a great play for such individuals and offered them a glittering career. However, what now appears to be happening is that at all levels within Government employment, the best of our skills are now attracted to what might seem a reasonably well paid but more importantly a secure future, rather than risking the vagaries of the broader world of the private sector.

Business has to reverse this process. It needs the best brains, but more importantly it needs to inform and educate those highly talented individuals that they will be best served by devoting their working lives to developing entrepreneurial skills and running our major institutions rather than moving to the often more stifling areas of Government employment.

It may be the pensions debacle has started to concentrate minds amongst the young, in that a guarantee of an index-linked pension paid, of course, by the tax payer, and perhaps a guarantee of continuing employment in addition, is far more attractive than the potential higher salary rewards and uncertainty that come from managing a business.

Certainly the protection afforded by employment in the public sector is far more attractive at the current time than business start-ups.

Yet we need as a nation, and particularly in the North-East, to see an acceleration of such new businesses if we are to see any real long-term sustainment of our economic regeneration.