The particular problem being that government isn’t very good at it. Nesrine Malik, in the usual Guardianista complaint about it all being racism and money, does make one good point:
…. a limited number of university places to study medicine
Well, yes. It’s been obvious for some decades now that medicine - especially GP services - is becoming (sorry, has become) a majority female occupation. Nothing wrong with that, the flowering of individual talent is to be welcomed in fact. Except there are obvious changes that also have to be made. Given maternity leaves, choices about part time working while children are young and so on, it’s necessary to train more doctors in order to have the same number of hours and days of doctoring being done.
Nothing wrong with those choices either - it’s just that whoever it is that plans the training system for doctoring needs to adapt that system for the changes. Government does that planning and government didn’t. So much for the efficiency of government planning then.
It’s also possible to note bad planning the other way:
Plans to overhaul NHS pension rules have been set out by the government in an attempt to retain more senior doctors in the health service.
The problem is the limitation on the size of lifetime pension pots. Save enough from a working life to breach this limit and pay for additional work can be taxed at vast rates, 80% easily and for some unfortunates over 100%. This particularly bites on doctors for three reasons - generous pensions, high rates of pay while working and the third, well the third is that we actually notice a shortage of doctors in a manner we don’t some and many other professions who might be in the same situations.
That root problem is the lifetime limit on pensions pot sizes. But government management is, as evidenced here, to fiddle around with the rules for doctors only. Instead of the obvious solution, to lift the limits on lifetime pensions pots. For there are other professions and working lives which are affected, in exactly the same way, by those same rules. So, planning would be to change the rules causing the problem, not fiddling at the edges with special rules for the one manner of earning a living.
As we can all note, that’s not what is being done. The root problem is not being addressed.
So, the problem with govenment planning? That government planning isn’t very good both in what it doesn’t take into account in its plans and also in what it does do when it does plan.
Not exactly grand recommendations for a system there. Perhaps we should stop using it?