"Recliner" wrote in message
...
"tim....." wrote:
"Recliner" wrote in message
...
"tim....." wrote:
"Recliner" wrote in message
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Mizter T wrote:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/george-osborne-sharpens-axe-40-6111425

"Schools, health, international development and defence are protected
so
local government, Home Office, transport, environment, justice and
the
courts, arts and sports will be hammered by 25% and 40% cuts in
November’s Spending Review."


http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/592816/Budget-spending-cuts-George-Osborne-welfare-Whitehall

"Councils, police, prisons, the courts and the transport network are
expected to bear the brunt of the swingeing spending reductions."


Some broader thoughts from R. Peston:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33609662

The Express headline grossly overstates the cuts. There will be cuts,
but
the 25% and 40% figures aren't those cuts; they're the menu of all
possible
cuts each department is expected to come up with. Many will be
politically
impossible, but the idea is to give the Treasury a long list of
options
from which to k select. This happens after every election, and is a
form of
zero-based budgeting (ie, start with 100% cuts, and departments have
to
justify everything that is added back).

"Letters will be sent to the head of every department that does not
have
ringfenced funding, asking them to model two scenarios of 25% and 40%
of
real-terms savings by 2019-20, the same levels of reduction requested
before the 2010 spending review."

From
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2...-clear-deficit

The idea is to force departments seriously to look at radical options,
such
as of doing business in a completely different way, or simply not
doing
some things at all, rather than adopting the easy "10% cuts all round"
solution. One likely consequence is that some Departments may be
abolished
or merged. For example, on Newsnight, it was suggested that DEFRA and
DCMS
didn't really need to exist as separate departments at all, and a lot
could
be saved by abolishing them,

Really?

Does abolishing a ministry, but still performing all of its
functionally, save a lot?

I think you missed the bit that said, "or simply not doing some things
at
all".

No I didn't

I was specifically asking about the claim that abolishing ministries
whilst moving their functionality elsewhere saves money

The reason for abolishing them is that many of their functions are
redundant

perhaps, but that wasn't the claim made, nor the point I was asking about

I wasn't just referring to the example in this thread when I asked. There
have been several suggestions over the years (obvious elsewhere) of
departments that can be merged to "save money", and I really can't
understand where the mega savings are.

Savings usually appear to be the reduce costs of procurement that a larger
department can achieve (whether that be of paper clips, photo copiers, cars,
or billion pound bespoke computer solutions), but if that's where the
savings are then merging departments isn't the solution. The real solution
to the inability of a small department to negotiate, or even "recognise" the
"best" deal is to not to let individual departments do the negotiating in
the first place but provide it as a central service across the whole of
government (including local authorities)


(do we really need a separate agriculture department,

we don't have one

when it's a
tiny part of the economy, and most of the regulations come from the EU?).
Bureaucrats create work to fill their time. Much of that work is pointless
and consumes not just their own time, but that of other government
departments and private industry. Is farming made more productive by
farmers filling in lengthy forms for DEFRA?

When you abolish departments, you also drop those redundant functions and
the people who did them. The whole idea is for the government to do
significantly less, via fewer departments, not do all the same things
slightly more efficiently. It's only by asking for drastic 25% and 40%
cutback options that such opportunities are uncovered. No-one expects
overall savings of that magnitude, but there's still plenty to save.

So, to return to your question, there is no "claim that abolishing
ministries whilst moving their functionality elsewhere saves money".

not from you perhaps, but there has been from "others"

"Tim Roll-Pickering" wrote in message
...
tim..... wrote:

One likely consequence is that some Departments may be abolished
or merged. For example, on Newsnight, it was suggested that DEFRA and
DCMS
didn't really need to exist as separate departments at all, and a lot
could be saved by abolishing hem,

Really?

Does abolishing a ministry, but still performing all of its functionally,
save a lot?

If you still need all of the "customer facing" people you still need all
of the buildings that they work in, and you still need most of the
management chain to manage them.

All you save is the single guy at the top (and the office that (s)he sits
in)

More than that in that there are fewer Permanent Secretaries

So there are "two" men at the top that you save.

OK I do fully appreciate that the number that you will save is greater than
that, but it's still barely into double figures and even though they will be
at the higher end of the pay scale the savings involved are still of the
relative order of "amount found down the back of the sofa".

and the like and systems are merged with economies of scale.

what systems can you merge with "economies of scale?

and if you can, why are they not already merged across the whole of
government anyway (my example of IT support really being one that I expect
HMG to have got expensively wrong here).

tim

"tim....." wrote in message
...

what systems can you merge with "economies of scale?

Lots of functions that are common to any business - e.g. procurement, HR,
finance.

and if you can, why are they not already merged across the whole of
government anyway (my example of IT support really being one that I expect
HMG to have got expensively wrong here).

A colleague of mine was telling me of a business tranformation project he
worked on at a large local authority. The savings identified by merging
common business functions across the LA were huge, to the extent that the
consultants (of which he was one) were happy to share the risk by providing
a loan to fund their fees that would be paid off from the savings after
project implementation.

The project was cancelled when the unions called a strike over the loss of
their member's jobs that would result from the project: the politicians
responded by cancelling the project.

--
DAS