One of today's lead stories on TV and Radio is that Britain's official Commission for Health Improvement is to poll everyone who works in the National Health Service (that's about a million people), asking about the state of their morale and what they think about their conditions of work.

I think it's headline news because nothing like it has ever happened before in the 50-plus years the NHS has existed.

Frankly, if the Human Resources department of any big private-sector company didn't know the mind of its employees - not just from half-century to half-century, but from year to year, month to month and even day to day - they'd quickly find themselves overtaken by competitors who did.

It just shows how lax this public monopoly has become. And it's why the NHS spends so much money buying in temporary 'agency' nurses - because it can't organize its work schedules to fit in with the needs of nurses with families, who can only work odd part-time schedules. The organization is too lumbering to think about the needs of its main asset - its personnel.

It's the same in state education. I know a company who took over the management of a failing state school. The first thing they did was to interview all the teachers, to ask what their hopes, ambitions, and career goals were. Some started weeping: they'd never been asked that before!