OH! If only the world was as simple as some of our leading business figures seem to think it is.

In Monday’s JEP we had one of the most respected of their number relate in detail his sad tale of trying to find out where, in his words, ‘the money, our money, goes’. He was, of course, referring to the growth in States spending and specifically the increase in the number of administrators and non-front-line staff. This is a hoary old chestnut. Business leaders have stopped criticising spending money on essential employees, such as nurses, policemen and doctors, because the argument was simply untenable.

So they had to switch emphasis to ‘non-essential’ staff, otherwise known as administrators or pen pushers, as the cause of untold waste of taxpayers’ money. The fact-finding exercise conducted by this particular businessman may therefore have been motivated by a genuine desire to get at the truth, or it may have been an attempt to confirm his prejudices.

Whichever it was he wrote to some of the biggest spending States departments to ask them what, he claims, is a simple question. In the case of Education, Sport and Culture, he wanted to know how many teachers and how many non-teaching employees are employed in the department compared with a previous time. To summarise the results of his efforts, he didn’t get an answer that satisfied him, and so the question was left hanging with the obvious implications that either the department doesn’t know the answer or was scared to divulge the truth because it would reveal a large proportion of non-teaching staff. That, of course, would be a clear indication of waste of money, at least according to businessmen who have a deep suspicion of the public sector.

However, there is another explanation which, to my mind, is much more plausible. Perhaps the question he asked cannot be answered in any meaningful way. It’s obviously perfectly possible to find out how many teachers there are – the writer didn’t need to invoke the Code of Practice on Access to States Information because the figures are published regularly. So it’s also easy to find out how many non-teachers are employed by Education simply by deducting the number of teachers from the department’s total headcount.

But what great insight does that provide us with? It tells us absolutely nothing, unless the writer contends that an education department only needs teachers and doesn’t require assistants, technicians, other support staff, managers to check that the teachers are doing their job, a couple of people trying to expand and improve the curriculum, someone to unlock the doors of the schools, someone to actually pay the teachers, and even someone to make the tea. Perhaps they are all supposed to be expendable at a time of recession.

A more pertinent question might have been to ask how many teachers there are compared to the number of pupils. In some areas this would indeed show that teacher numbers are increasing or have stayed the same while the number of pupils is falling. But even that doesn’t tell us anything worthwhile about the potential for reducing waste. A higher teacher-pupil ratio could be simply because of improving standards, which presumably even businessmen would like to see in education, or it could mean that no further savings can be made in staff numbers.

For example, if a teacher had 30 pupils in a maths class a couple of years ago, and the number of pupils has fallen to 25, that doesn’t look good to the calculator-toting investigator. So what do you do? Close a class, or amalgamate it with another one, so that money is saved but standards fall?

A similar nonsense answer would come from the question put by the JEP contributor to the Health & Social Services department. He wanted to know what was the ratio between clinical and non-clinical staff compared to a time in the past. Even the way such a simple question is posed indicates what the writer hoped to prove – that expendable, non-front-line staff were growing at a faster rate than the indispensible clinical staff. He failed to get an answer that satisfied him, because there is no simple answer. Producing two sets of figures as an answer would have been meaningless.

For example, has the JEP correspondent not heard of technology? Does he not know that there’s an awful lot of very complex equipment that has to be operated and maintained in the Health department? Who does he think does it – the clinical staff?

Doesn’t he not know that there are laboratories that have to be manned, patients that have to be fed, patients that also have to be moved from their ward to an operating theatre or even another hospital, the staff have to be managed and paid, and someone has to answer silly questions from JEP correspondents.

Then, of course, there are the accountants. Now perhaps it had slipped this particular businessman’s mind, that accurate, comprehensive figures are required for the smooth running of any organisation, even one that isn’t a business. Well, the States has taken this on board with a vengeance. There are accountants in all departments, although not enough according to the Treasury Minister, who intends to do something about that.

Indeed I suspect that this is one of the areas of real growth in the public sector, along with governance and standard setting. In fact, had the JEP contributor complained that there were too many accountants he would have probably received the support of front-line staff in many departments whose job is made more difficult by having to meet targets and be extremely careful with taxpayers’ money. But presumably this is one area of public sector growth that the business community does not object to.

So the JEP contributor was so disheartened by the lack of evidence he was able to produce to support his bias that he gave up on his fact-finding mission and said it should be politicians asking these questions. Well, they do time and time again, thus helping to waste more hours of expensive public service time.

But perhaps the fact that they can’t come up with evidence of massive waste is due to one simple fact. There’s isn’t any. But that would be too much for some businessmen to take.

Peter Body is editor of Business Brief magazine