WEEK ENDING

PERHAPS YOU enjoy hearing the gentle plop of envelopes on your doormat in the morning. I’m sure I would, too, if I thought they might contain something interesting.

But I can predict now what will be in the mail when it finally arrives this lunchtime: the promise of free Nectar points if I return my custom to Sainsbury’s, and a reminder that the guarantee on my boiler expired five years ago. If I were Heath Robinson, I would have built a conveyor belt from the letterbox to the recycling bin long since.

The NHS is among my regular correspondents. I don’t ask them to write; they just do. Usually it is to advise me that gentlemen of a certain age would be wise to have their organs and appendages checked and counted, lest any have gone missing since the last time.

Are these letters really necessary? Not according to many in the health service itself.

Every time the NHS sends a letter, it spends a pound, says Prof Joe Harrison, the chief executive of one hospital trust, who goes on to say that as much as £100m a year is being squandered on unnecessary stamps, stationery and someone’s time to communicate with all of us on everything from outpatient appointments to cancellations.

“It’s absolute madness,” he says. “We have this situation in this country where we are so arrogant as humans that we believe anybody over the age of 50 can’t use a computer.”

He is completely right. My 50s are behind me – I don’t think anyone has noticed – and it is for precisely that reason that I have 30 years’ experience in opening and reading emails. They are as native to me as the escalators in Debenhams. I don’t think any more bits of me than before would drop off if the NHS were to nag me electronically instead of on sheets of A4.

Besides, people of my age and well beyond have had to embrace technology to communicate with our families. We talk and text all the time on Facebook, Skype and a dozen other platforms; it’s the telephone we’ve stopped using. Don’t forget to FaceTime your mum once in a while – I’ve said it until I’m blue in the face.

It’s not just the NHS that needs to be dragged into the 21st century, and I’m not alone in thinking so. The TaxPayers’ Alliance which exposes waste and excess in the public sector wherever it can find it – and it doesn’t have to look far – concluded this week that automating paperwork, and other routine tasks, could save £17bn a year by 2030. That, it says, is equivalent to a £700 annual tax cut for every household in the UK.

It puts another of the week’s reports into perspective. A survey of 21,000 council workers by their union found that spending cuts had left four out of five with no confidence in the future of local services.

How is it possible for the public sector to be as wasteful as it is while it simultaneously pares its budgets to the bone? Could it be that is looking for savings in the wrong places?

The evidence suggests exactly that. Compare, for example, our system of Universal Credit for benefits claimants – which the National Audit Office doubts will ever deliver value for money – with that of Norway, where two thirds of claims are now processed automatically, sweeping away many thousands of paper forms.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not only paperwork that is being discarded. The TaxPayers’ Alliance acknowledges that introducing automation on the scale it proposes would come at the cost of “releasing”, as it euphemistically puts it, about 850,000 public-sector workers into the private sector.

There is, it says, a skills shortage among private firms, with whom, the newly free staff could command new, more rewarding jobs.

This is where the argument goes off the rails. Skills shortage or not, no one is recruiting people whose working life has been spent administering processes that no longer exist.

So, the dilemma for our public services appears to be whether to cling to outdated practices or to put people out on the street – an exercise that would cost the country far more in benefits than anything it saves on stationery and stamps.

It would be ironic, too… we’d be sacrificing people to technology, only to send them home to get on with the even more technical task of keeping track of their grandchildren.