Council tax rises get go-ahead
Discussion
markcoznottz said:
Usual one is constantly moving staff/offices around.
When I was a civil servant a good few years ago the orintvroom was moved about thirty metres down a corridor at a cost of ten million pounds to save a few tens of thousands a year.The moving budget was seperate to the operating budget, and the person with authority to move it had the operating budget under him but not the moving budget.
This was in my first year in the job and is one of the reasons that I didn’t stay around for a second.
markcoznottz said:
Rovinghawk said:
Guvernator said:
I can tell you where quite a bit of the money goes and it isn't on front-line services.
Please flesh this out with a few details.
Burwood said:
It’s 40% in pensions I think. I pay 350 a month and gets bins emptied twice a month and pay extra for a garden bin. My council purchased 400m worth of commercial property last year. They are skint
Are you able to say which Council it is? Their Annual Accounts will shows what the Employer Pensions Contributions rate is and I will slap myself around the face with a frozen haddock if it's anywhere near 40% of their total budget. The Annual Accounts will also show how they managed to fund the £400m property purchase if they are skint. On a general note it's fascinating how well informed people are about Council finances when they don't even work for the Council (let alone in the Finance Department of the Council). e.g.
(i) Who manages which budget
(ii) How much budget they have delegated responsibility for
(iii) How much certain members of staff get paid.
(iv) How much it cost to move a print room from Location A to Location B
Countdown said:
On a general note it's fascinating how well informed people are about Council finances when they don't even work for the Council
If you read some of the previous posts you'll see some bits which say "When I worked there"- this suggests to me that they did actually work there.This is an old article but I doubt the situation has become any better in the interim:
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-3...
Edited by Rovinghawk on Wednesday 5th December 09:11
Countdown said:
V8 Fettler said:
Highest tax burden for nearly 50 years.
https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/highest_tax_burd...
There is a general lack of detailed info re: where does the money go?
Your Council will prepare detailed Annual Accounts. The info is all in there.https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/highest_tax_burd...
There is a general lack of detailed info re: where does the money go?
There will also be roughly 3/4 meeting of the Audit Committee each year at which the public can go and ask questions.
IIRC the Audit Commission Act also allows voters to go into the Council's offices and go through their invoices to see who the Council is paying. Councils also have to publish any items of expenditure over £500 on their website.
V8 Fettler said:
Thanks. Can you please provide an example online of where a council's detailed Annual Accounts show the breakdown for social care costs on a per hour basis, with costs allocated to individual elements, I've checked a couple of council websites, statements of accounts are generally available, as are finance, resource and performance reports, but the vital detail is lacking.
They won't do, because they don't pay for it on a per-hour basis. There will be also be direct costs, indirect costs and overheads which may or may not be pro-rata'd across individual directorates/departments.It would be a bit like asking what the hourly cost of raising a child is. I'm sure you/I could work it out but we don't tend to pay these on an hourly basis (and nobody asks us to report these on an hourly basis).
Having said that, you could quite easily FOI the March Management Accounts report for the Social Care Directorate (which will give you a breakdown of the costs) and then you could ask for a GL Trial balance of any/all the different expense types that are on the report. As a local elector you are fully entitled to do this.
Countdown said:
On a general note it's fascinating how well informed people are about Council finances when they don't even work for the Council (let alone in the Finance Department of the Council). e.g.
I worked at a council, information is not hard to come by, in fact people openly talk about the various f
k-ups. Everyone knows the issues but very few want to do something about it as the incentives just aren't there, i.e. the company won't actually fail and people won't lose their jobs, at most you'll just ps off a few tax payers.Countdown said:
V8 Fettler said:
Thanks. Can you please provide an example online of where a council's detailed Annual Accounts show the breakdown for social care costs on a per hour basis, with costs allocated to individual elements, I've checked a couple of council websites, statements of accounts are generally available, as are finance, resource and performance reports, but the vital detail is lacking.
They won't do, because they don't pay for it on a per-hour basis. There will be also be direct costs, indirect costs and overheads which may or may not be pro-rata'd across individual directorates/departments.It would be a bit like asking what the hourly cost of raising a child is. I'm sure you/I could work it out but we don't tend to pay these on an hourly basis (and nobody asks us to report these on an hourly basis).
Having said that, you could quite easily FOI the March Management Accounts report for the Social Care Directorate (which will give you a breakdown of the costs) and then you could ask for a GL Trial balance of any/all the different expense types that are on the report. As a local elector you are fully entitled to do this.
The element that's not readily available is the council's on-cost per hour, perhaps representing strategic management (by the council) etc.
This level of detail could be applied to other services funded by the taxpayer, but very rarely is, perhaps because it would highlight squandering and incompetence within councils and other public sector organisations.
Guvernator said:
I worked at a council, information is not hard to come by, in fact people openly talk about the various fk-ups. Everyone knows the issues but very few want to do something about it as the incentives just aren't there, i.e. the company won't actually fail and people won't lose their jobs, at most you'll just ps off a few tax payers.
I'll admit I'm a cynical person at the best of times but I am stunned at how anybody could know that Person A spent all day solely waiting for a service to go down and the report it (unless this service was failing constantly) and even more stunned that they can estimate what the salary of a complete stranger is.k-ups. Everyone knows the issues but very few want to do something about it as the incentives just aren't there, i.e. the company won't actually fail and people won't lose their jobs, at most you'll just ps off a few tax payers.Guvernator said:
I'll give an example of one I saw first hand, one guys job was literally to run over to us whenever a service was down, that was it, no fault finding, no investigation, just run over to tell us and then go and sit back down, he was probably on around £40k a year and could have been replaced with an automated email alert.
Apologies if it comes across as being argumentative but, in my experience, outside of Finance and HR, very few people in most organisations will know exactly what everybody else earns. In a Council other employees may know what payband somebody is in but even then they won't know where on the payspine that person is, what other allowances they get and so forth. So I;m not sure how you worked out that he was probably on £40k a year.V8 Fettler said:
There's certainly reference to hourly rates in various documents dealing with procurement of social care e.g. pdf http://tameside.moderngov.co.uk/documents/s7488/IT...
The element that's not readily available is the council's on-cost per hour, perhaps representing strategic management (by the council) etc.
This level of detail could be applied to other services funded by the taxpayer, but very rarely is, perhaps because it would highlight squandering and incompetence within councils and other public sector organisations.
There's also the definition of "Social Care". I assumed from your initial post that you were referring to the cost of payments to care Homes for looking after old people. Re: oncosts it wont just be strategic management. It will be all back-office staff (Finance, HR, payroll, Legal, Insurance, Estates, IT).The element that's not readily available is the council's on-cost per hour, perhaps representing strategic management (by the council) etc.
This level of detail could be applied to other services funded by the taxpayer, but very rarely is, perhaps because it would highlight squandering and incompetence within councils and other public sector organisations.
With regards to squandering and incompetence - as i said earlier, more and more stuff is being outsourced, to the likes of Capita, Serco, G4S, Interserve, Mitie. Hopefully this will generate real tangible savings for the Public Purse.........Sodexho do a lot of work which was previously done by Probation Services. have a google of them if you want to see squandering and incompetence.
Countdown said:
Apologies if it comes across as being argumentative but, in my experience, outside of Finance and HR, very few people in most organisations will know exactly what everybody else earns. In a Council other employees may know what payband somebody is in but even then they won't know where on the payspine that person is, what other allowances they get and so forth. So I;m not sure how you worked out that he was probably on £40k a year.
OK I admit I made it all up to sound clever on the internet. 
Do you work for a council by any chance?
Guvernator said:
Do you work for a council by any chance?
I did a long time ago in a relatively junior role. Now I'm an Independent member of our local Council's Audit Commitee (so I get to see the Accounts and ask questions and stuff).I'm not disputing they can be wasteful and incompetent. However
(a) That's common in any massive organisation. The more layers there are between the person paying the bills (whether that's the shareholder or the taxpayer) the more scope for waste and incompetence there is.
(b) Councils (or any Public Sector organisations) are massively risk averse, partly because of the nature of the services they are required to provide, and partly because they don't personally get any benefit from taking personal risks in the interest of taxpayer efficiency,
What taxpayers need to be doing is holding their Councils and Councillors to account. There are plenty of ways of doing this but very few can be bothered. At our quarterly meetings it's normally the same 2/3 people turning up and asking awkward questions
chunder27 said:
I do find it rather odd that councils are more and more buying property?
Who runs these things? Council leaders or businessmen?
Councils can borrow money to buy commercial propertyWho runs these things? Council leaders or businessmen?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/17/co...
Whether they will earn more than they have borrowed is another matter.
Countdown said:
I did a long time ago in a relatively junior role. Now I'm an Independent member of our local Council's Audit Commitee (so I get to see the Accounts and ask questions and stuff).
I'm not disputing they can be wasteful and incompetent. However
(a) That's common in any massive organisation. The more layers there are between the person paying the bills (whether that's the shareholder or the taxpayer) the more scope for waste and incompetence there is.
(b) Councils (or any Public Sector organisations) are massively risk averse, partly because of the nature of the services they are required to provide, and partly because they don't personally get any benefit from taking personal risks in the interest of taxpayer efficiency,
What taxpayers need to be doing is holding their Councils and Councillors to account. There are plenty of ways of doing this but very few can be bothered. At our quarterly meetings it's normally the same 2/3 people turning up and asking awkward questions
I do agree there is a certain amount of waste in any large organisation but as previously stated, I've worked at quite a few places over my career and I can say without a doubt the LA was the worst. They just don't have the same pressures as you do in private industries to do things better as there effectively is no bottom line. Now obviously this was only one LA but I have had these discussions with other friends in my line of work who have said they have seen the same at other LA's and local government departments too. Now you could argue that it's all "anecdotal" but when you hear so many people saying the same thing it does make you think there is something to it.I'm not disputing they can be wasteful and incompetent. However
(a) That's common in any massive organisation. The more layers there are between the person paying the bills (whether that's the shareholder or the taxpayer) the more scope for waste and incompetence there is.
(b) Councils (or any Public Sector organisations) are massively risk averse, partly because of the nature of the services they are required to provide, and partly because they don't personally get any benefit from taking personal risks in the interest of taxpayer efficiency,
What taxpayers need to be doing is holding their Councils and Councillors to account. There are plenty of ways of doing this but very few can be bothered. At our quarterly meetings it's normally the same 2/3 people turning up and asking awkward questions
I do agree that not enough people get involved to try to change things though, I have attended a couple of my local councils meetings and forums and turnout is always very poor. However one problem as I see it is that concerns are raised but nothing seems to change, I've met with several Councillors before who all sound sympathetic at the time but it never seems to go anywhere. You just get the usual politicians procrastinating and flim-flam that seems to be par for the course at any level of government. Perhaps it's simply down to not enough people getting involved but it also always feels like there is a massive resistance to change things by the powers that be too.
Edited by Guvernator on Wednesday 5th December 12:56
Countdown said:
V8 Fettler said:
There's certainly reference to hourly rates in various documents dealing with procurement of social care e.g. pdf http://tameside.moderngov.co.uk/documents/s7488/IT...
The element that's not readily available is the council's on-cost per hour, perhaps representing strategic management (by the council) etc.
This level of detail could be applied to other services funded by the taxpayer, but very rarely is, perhaps because it would highlight squandering and incompetence within councils and other public sector organisations.
There's also the definition of "Social Care". I assumed from your initial post that you were referring to the cost of payments to care Homes for looking after old people. Re: oncosts it wont just be strategic management. It will be all back-office staff (Finance, HR, payroll, Legal, Insurance, Estates, IT).The element that's not readily available is the council's on-cost per hour, perhaps representing strategic management (by the council) etc.
This level of detail could be applied to other services funded by the taxpayer, but very rarely is, perhaps because it would highlight squandering and incompetence within councils and other public sector organisations.
With regards to squandering and incompetence - as i said earlier, more and more stuff is being outsourced, to the likes of Capita, Serco, G4S, Interserve, Mitie. Hopefully this will generate real tangible savings for the Public Purse.........Sodexho do a lot of work which was previously done by Probation Services. have a google of them if you want to see squandering and incompetence.
V8 Fettler said:
Within the context of the Tameside report, social care = “helping people live at home” i.e. where the recipient of the care continues to live in their own home. All "on site" duties are contracted out at around £13 per hour, so no involvement from council HR, payroll or estates. Minimum involvement from IT, Legal or Insurance. The bit of the jigsaw that's missing is the council's on-cost.
Re: the bit in bold - how much time will have been spent tendering the Contract? How much time will have been spent checking to make sure the service is being delivered? How much time will have been spent in processing the invoices for the agency? They are all part of the Council's on-cost.Countdown said:
V8 Fettler said:
Within the context of the Tameside report, social care = “helping people live at home” i.e. where the recipient of the care continues to live in their own home. All "on site" duties are contracted out at around £13 per hour, so no involvement from council HR, payroll or estates. Minimum involvement from IT, Legal or Insurance. The bit of the jigsaw that's missing is the council's on-cost.
Re: the bit in bold - how much time will have been spent tendering the Contract? How much time will have been spent checking to make sure the service is being delivered? How much time will have been spent in processing the invoices for the agency? They are all part of the Council's on-cost.Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff