Leading Article: Insecurity in the faceless culture

IT IS EASY to mount a conventional defence to the ease with which one of our reporters made her way unchallenged into any number of dispensaries, classrooms and laboratories last week. There are limits, this argument runs, to the control you can keep on the public in public places; it would be impossible, as well as wrong, to make a busy hospital as secure as the Bank of England or as impenetrable as the office block in Leeds that houses the nervous bureaucrats of the Department of Health.

But there are other confusing factors at play here, demonstrated best by the reception in St Thomas's Hospital, London, where Alexandra Griffiths was snatched in January 1990, and where security guards and banks of television monitors now operate beneath a large banner which reads, 'We're here to help you'. The banner symbolises the well-meaning attempt to change the 'culture' of public services, to make hospitals less intimidating, more 'client- friendly'. Discipline, order, efficiency - these are words with Victorian, military and sometimes fascist overtones (who was it, after all, who made the trains run on time?). And so authority is concealed, the regimentation of beds abandoned, visitors can drop in at any time. It will be more relaxing, less 'stressful'.

Add these liberal thoughts to John Major's concern for the 'customer' - manifested in citizens' charters, money-back guarantees and traffic-cone hotlines - and the result is too often managerial gloss without managerial content. This fusion of cultures, with its nods both to 1960s egalitarianism and 1980s consumerism, can sometimes make a vital public institution seem like a badly-run Woolworth's. The old tyranny of matron may not be much mourned, but it probably made a baby-snatcher think twice.

(Photograph omitted)