Crown immunity needs to go when the Crown is providing the individual citizen or resident alien with a service. That leads to the idea of splitting the public sector into two: those who directly provide a service to the population, and the rest. On the service side, the whole organisation (and its contracts of employment) has to be re-jigged: administrative process re-engineering. Include in the re-jig is adoption of formal quality management principles. The civil servants will have to be more competent, getting it right, and ready to move fast when policy changes. Don’t get me wrong: there are many many competent civil servants, but it’s the management that’s the problem.

The origins of all this go back a long way. A long time ago, Ferranti Wythenshawe (near whose factory I lived in my teens) overcharged on the Bloodhound missile contract (and was eventually forced to repay a lot of money). For military procurement on smaller contracts involving technology development, there used to be a relatively cosy relationship between the military, a layer of agents, and the suppliers. The agents brokered the requirements of the military with suppliers who worked out how to make the requirement into reality. Work was of course shared out among the suppliers, and prices allowed a comfortable profit. 25 years ago Michael Heseltine decided to stop this, and that procurement should be truly competitive. Chaos for (at least) several years until the military learned how to specify what they really wanted in the light of what the technology could provide. Since the early 1990s the same principles have been applied to civil public procurement of significant areas of technology: chaos.

Separately, the military had quality management methods: standards, plus the right of military inspectors to go into the supplier’s factories and offices and check on progress (and call a halt if necessary). From that came the civil standard BS 5750 and then the international ISO 9000 series and derivatives – but without the right for the customer to monitor progress. Thus came the separate contractual provision for two contracts to be let: one to deliver, the other to provide in-process audit. The public sector doesn’t use the audit method, which is a big mistake.

Anonymous mentioned consumerism; I think we need to tie people’s lust for objects to the concept of relative affluence. Increasing affluence has not made British people happier because there is always someone with more money able to acquire more objects to feel envious about. Above a certain minimum affluence is not a factor in quality of life and happiness.

Neville Farmer referred to the stultifying grip of attitudes to health a safety issues. Whether it’s money, or health and safety, or traffic, there is so much about 21st Century life which puts us in prison. Who did decide to build motorway style roads in cities?

Scale is another issue which affects quality of life. 21st buildings are too big, roads are to wide, traffic is too fast. Whatever our thinking mind tells us our unconscious is more content in quiet, domestic environments.

Last night I was talking to a recently retired production manager. He had worked in a multi-national electronics and computer equipment manufacturing company. As manufacturing moved to the eastern hemisphere he became involved in consultancy, advising other companies. Introduced (like me) to first scientific discipline and then engineering discipline as he went through school, university and then into industry, he has been appalled at the lack of such discipline in younger decision makers in industry. We, however, were the products of a much smaller university population. So many of the people against whom we now rail have been to university instead of being trained through numerous business and industry pathways, and it seems that something has been lost along the way.

One sentence from my previous comment needs correcting: 2nd para, 4th sentence should be: When we fail to see targets as just one part of an overall assessment of outcomes,…

David Hughes makes me think: are not growing numbers of European towns doing their urban planning the way that he advocates?

Next could be something about the asymmetry of the relationship between citizen and government when service delivery is provided direct by govt (or by its direct contractor); the symmetry is actually better when we purchase a regulated service from the private sector. This leads us into the problem of Crown Immunity. But it may be that you would prefer to take this off line now – please indicate – or simply wrap it up.

To the extent that ‘unattainables’ are to do with personality and ability I don’t think any of us can do anything about them, we succeed or fail, achieve or underachieve, make mistakes or not, have aspirations beyond our talent or character, and must just accept it. These failures may make us less happy or content than we’d like, but they cannot be changed. What we can do, personally or politically, together or separately, is organise things in a way which maximises the chance that, personality and ability apart, we are as content as possible given our personal regrets.

I don’t think that what you are struggling to write about is anything to do with unattainables. If you want to live in the countryside but never make it your may have regrets, you may be less happy than you’d like, but hard luck you missed it. What can be done is for society to create an ambience, a background, which maximises the chance of quality of life. Worldwide our species, for all its talents, has been very bad at this, and in Britain especially bad, though perhaps not quite as bad as the States. And most unfortunately we’ve created some of the worst of the problems in striving for the things most people desire.

You mention street parties as a means of fostering community. I’m afraid that’s crying for the moon, because for street parties to work you need a community setting, rare these days for good reason.

Picture a Victorian/Edwardian residential street in Crouch End or in Southgate (where I live), anyway somewhere you know. What is the primary function of that street? Universally these days, government – national and local – most individuals in the area, think of streets as a conduits for traffic and a parking space for cars. If I were a planner I’d draw up a list of priority functions and top of my list would be the street as setting for homes, an extension of sitting rooms, a space for personal contacts, a place for the freedom of children. I’d lavish my love on it’s ambience, nice materials, plants, especially trees, active wildlife, seats to sit on and talk. Traffic could use my street, but steadily (20mph or less) giving equal priority to pedestrians and cyclists. Cars could park but not at the expense of front gardens.

My street would foster street parties as night follows day. There wouldn’t be a lot of knife crime in my street.

My street would be close to the shops, the post office would not be closed, the supermarkets would not have brought about the closure of local petrol stations as well as costermongers and pharmacies. The local hardware store would not be a victim of B&Q.

It’s cars who meet in supermarket and DIY shed car parks, not neighbours.

Big shops would be in cities not out of town, easily reached by public (where public meet public) transport. Cars would not be welcome there because they carve up the community and foul the air. If they come they would come steadily, and not on fast roads which consign people to dark and dangerous underpasses or make it hard to cross the road to meet a friend.

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This is not a full statement of the things I would do, but an example of how in a sense we have fouled our own nest.

There is research to show that in no and slow traffic streets people make more social contacts and friends, and business does better. There is also research to show that traffic pollution is more dangerous than an A-bomb.

Contact Living Streets (previously the Pedestrian Association) for better information.

I imagine you’ve read Bowling Alone, the American classic of community alienation.

Vote for the Sustainable Communities Bill.

I’m not very confident that government is really capable of this, so the default setting should be ‘don’t interfere’. Local councils encouraging street parties? The idea is risible. Most of them couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.

We are certainly lucky to be alive and here in Britain, as your article says. But perhaps part of the reason for our renowned misery is that we’ve got too cosy, relying on the government or some corporation who’s bought the rights from the government to run everything for us. And when their handling of some issue, as one of your respondents says, doesn’t suit our lifestyles or pockets, we start to complain, or worse, bottle it up and become miserable.

We don’t need government to make us happy. We need government to make it possible for us to make ourselves happy. Government is there to deal with the minimum – to protect us, to oil the wheels, to provide the essential services of education, health, policing, foreign relations etc and to let us fend for ourselves in every other way. We don’t need micro-management by government or its quangos or neo-monopolies.

Sadly, a case in point is happening in your beloved Regents Park. When I was at school and the teacher organised a five a side football competition, we’d lay down 4 shirts as goal posts in the nearest park and would play. Now, under the government’s sports plan, a sexy five-a-side plc is to be given the right to astro-turf and floodlight several acres of the north of Regents Park, build a cafe/changing room/club pavillion) and a carpark in return for handsome profits. A combination of over-weaning health and safety rules, government directives for kids to get fit and a need for the privatised Royal Parks to meet targets means 60 trees and a meadow that I thought belonged to me and my neighbours, will become a profit centre for city shareholders. Now that makes me miserable.

Good luck with the book, Lynn. Please join in our campaign to stop this nightmare.

Targets are just one part of an overall good management method. They are part of the necessary business of managing an organisation or service, and are particularly necessary when the service is to the public. 99.9% good, or maybe 95%, might be OK to some, but to anyone who doesn’t get the service it’s a disaster. When we fail to use targets within an overall assessment of outcomes, we denigrate the service delivery team. When we punish them on a target by target basis, we are grossly unfair to them. And then some of them cheat. Some friends of mine run TLO Ltd (www.tloltd.co.uk), a training organisation for proper management of education in schools – but don’t all rush to talk to them at once, please, because two of the principals are currently Down Under with their Aussie associates.

An organisation can go sour if just a few people in the managerial tree are not good enough, so you have to start at the top with that self-dedication to high standards, along with a determination to be open to performance assessment. Quality Management methods, which the UK pioneered, are a way to enable the dedication to flourish right down the tree – and they have to be accompanied by the right contracts of service. As for the relationship between govt Ministers and the civil service, that’s something different.

How do you turn this round to behavioural change then?

Also – my feeling is that this all feeds into a society that is becoming legal rather than social – and that to me is the crux of the issue.