Storyhearts Sunday UK Blog - The USA needs a Citizen's Charter

Do you get fed up when engineers, repairmen etc tell you they will be at your house to fix the TV/water/gas/electric/telephone at and then never turn up? Do get totally p'd off leaving messages and never getting a call back? Do you wish you knew more about the standard or education in your childrens school or had less issues returning faulty goods? Have you booked a holiday only to find it was not as advertised, and the "luxury log cabin" was a shack half a mile up what seemed to be the side of Mount Everest?


Nobody seems to be held responsible in America, just look at all the "fat cat" issues in the motoring business.

What the USA needs is a Citizen's charter.

In the UK in the late 1980, the country was suffering a recession, not on the global scale as of now, but still suffering. To many people and companies were just not being held responsible for what was going on.

In 1991 the then prime minister British Prime Minister John Major has launched a citizen's charter to improve public services.

Calling it "the central theme for public life" in the 1990s it is Mr Major's first attempt to re-define Conservatism after Mrs Thatcher stepped down last November.

Launching the White Paper at a press conference in Whitehall Mr Major admitted: "I don't pretend that I am offering a quick fix."

He said: "It is a programme for a decade. The charter programme will find better ways of converting money into better services. I want the people of the country to have services in which they can be confident, and in which public servants can take pride."

The principles underlying the prime minister's plans are to increase competition and privatization in the public sector and to improve standards with initiatives like performance related pay.

What Did it include?

League tables of examination results, truancy and leavers' destinations will be introduced in schools. So you can see where your childrens school relates to those in the rest of the country were produced.

Hospitals had to produce and keep guaranteed time limits for all consultations and some treatments.

Utilities - including gas and electricity - will were expected to offer and keep appointments for home visits, as part of the attempt to put consumers' rights first. If they failed to meet these appointments then some form of credit/subsidy had to be offered.

Compensation was to be available for delayed or canceled trains.

And so it went on.

While there have been some changes since the time this was produced the general idea of making public as well as private services accountable is still in place.

So the next time, you wait all day for the promised telephone repair person to arrive and they never show, just think... Who is being held accountable for their No Show?

President Barack Obama... Make those car companies ACCOUNTABLE!!!







Author of Young Adult Romance/Fiction book
Across the Pond
http://acrossthepond-storyheart.blogspot.com/
http://across-t-pond.com


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