Cuts Traps Potential

 

Back in march I wrote about Cuts and Bad Behaviour:

Some local authority leaders are designing and planting Taliban style I.E.D’s timed to explode in the summer and the autumn.  They cut lollipop ladies on £70 a week, preserve Directors on £2000 a week and appoint Special Advisers on £4000 a week.

George Osborne and others, you are now falling into the heffalump traps that your enemies have dug for you all over the country.

It is very easy to cut costs.  It is even easier to trip up the boss who has told you to make efficiency savings.  It is extremely hard to develop and implement changes to work practices and systems that will both reduce costs and increase the value of the goods or services delivered.

George, your logic and your response must be tough.

Work through an example.  You have required productivity savings of 20% to be achieved at a rate of 6% a year over three years.  A department, a quango, or a local authority responds by cutting by 40%, either its lollipop lady workforce, or a contract for services awarded to a supplier, very possibly a charity. 

Ask the questions:

1. If 40% of the function or service contract can be dispensed with, just like that, in a day, why has it been tolerated for so long?
2. Who approved, and then year by year, re-approved the budget?
3. Who negotiated, approved, and renewed the contract?
4. If the function, or contract, is really no longer relevant, why has it been cut by only 40% and not by 100%?
5. Have senior management costs been cut by 40% or more?
6. Is there cronyism or corruption?  Or is it just political opportunism?

There are protests in London, New York and other financial centres.  Protesters are asking good questions:

How many bankers are in court for negligent, careless or corrupt acts and omissions?

Where are the equivalent questions and protests outside the Shire Halls, the Guildhalls and Whitehall?

Paws4Now

Jock

A Way through the Woods

Shire Halls, Guildhalls and Whitehall please note:

To save £350,000 a year in wage costs, you can make 100 lollipop ladies redundant.  Perhaps seventy families will then be tipped into a costly vicious spiral of benefit dependency.

Alternatively the redundancy of only seven middle managers will also save £350,000 a year.  It is likely that one of the seven has for years wanted to play more golf and do more gardening.  Another has had a health problem and has been carried by caring colleagues.  He or she has needed and now needs help.  Leaving them abandoned in a costly forgotten corner is bad management and wrong behaviour. 

Of the other five, two will find productive jobs and three start their own businesses.

Jock.

Ripple Effect