One of the very worst aspects of returning to the UK after many years abroad is the sense of a serious loss of respect for the quality of public spaces. 

Plenty has been written about the dirty disorganised WCs at some of our airports. When I left my posting in Warsaw in September I arrived back here on the overnight Dieppe/Newhaven ferry. The desolation and decay of the first buildings a visitor to this country sees after disembarking there were as remarkable as they were depressing.

Or try the public car parks in Oxford, or Faringdon, or Hemel Hempstead which suck in alarming sums of money in parking fees every day, yet are neglected and dirty – where is all that money going?

Or try Didcot station. The approach road to the station from the A34 is lined for a couple of miles with serious litter. One gets to the station via the dirty car park and its unreliable ticket machines: another huge daily earner for some or other official body, not kept to a decent standard.

At the station there has been for some weeks a big fancy sign announcing a "What Do You Think of Didcot Station?" initiative? No doubt some friendly PR firm has done well from this nice ‘public information’ contract. Yet this money would have been better spent on simply tidying the place up. 

Two FCO examples.

As FCO Deputy Political Director in 1999/2000 I had a good office along from the Foreign Secretary’s suite. The elaborate Victorian tiled floors along the long corridors are impressive, but noisy. Many documents still need to be circulated via messengers pushing trolleys.

One day I heard an appallingly loud squeaking noise from an unoiled trolley trundling in my general direction. When it got close to my door I called out in my cheeriest tone of voice "Can someone please fix that squeaking?"

Imagine my surprise when an angry trolley-pusher head looked into my room and proclaimed: "It’s not my bloody job to oil the wheels!" I politely indictated that if someone procured a can of WD40 I’d do it myself.

When Ambassador in Belgrade I came back to London for meetings at the FCO. The Main Courtyard in an appalling state – unswept, litter and cigarette butts strewn everywhere. Not to mention litter all along King Charles St in the various alcoves of the building.

Here was the Foreign Ministry of one of the world’s most influential countries, pushing away at all sorts of global agenda issues yet unable to keep its front door clean.

On returning to Post I send a vexed email to the Senior Management pointing out that the Foreign Ministry in Belgrade was better kept than ours in London. This seems to have led to a determined clean-up, and eventually even some window-boxes of flowers. 

But the interesting question is, how it was allowed to get into this state in the first place? Hundreds of senior British diplomats every day were walking across the Courtyard, a showpiece for high-level visitors to our country, and did nothing about the evident mess.

Existential management challenge. How exactly does an organisation maintain a sense of its own self-respect and so keep up at all levels pride in how the work is done?

Why are so many public facilities in this country dirty and revolting, not that mass-use privately owned facilities such as supermarket car-parks are necessarily much better?

One problem is that for some twenty years we have seen restless attempts to set grand Government Targets, which really miss subjects such as this. If an activity can’t be measured, it either does not exist or is not that important, hence ‘cuts’ can be made there.

So standards of care and maintenance drift inexorably downwards, both for lack of money and because top management is much too busy being ‘strategic’ to make sure that the basics are being done well. 

Are our Ministries and local authorities incentivised to have measurable piles of ‘health and safety’ circulars and public information campaigns about cleanliness, rather than unmeasurably smart, clean and businesslike premises?

Is keeping roadside verges clean seen as a dreary cost, rather than an end in itself? 

Memo to next Government: call in the nation’s two top experts to sort all this out.