If they are neither, abolish them.

Departments will fight like hell if they are given simple targets which make success or failure self evident.

e.g.” Defra will process and pay 95% of claims within x weeks with a maximum error rate of y%.”

“The planning system must be able to grant or reject applications for nuclear power stations within six months.”

Failure should cause real pain to those at the top who are responsible for delivery and who get paid high salaries “because of their responsibilities”.

How many times has something gone wrong and an enquiry has revealed that the person who gets paid a huge salary for their responsibilities as head of department, isn’t responsible?.

Credit always passes upwards through the management, blame always passes downwards to the lowest plausible level.

The website is only too anxious to promote the names and contact information for the elected councillors, which is fair enough, and there is oodles of information about the plans, sorry strategies, they have and the services they provide. The senior officers are named, but there are no names provided for anyone else and there seems to be no information about the departmental structure and how many people are employed in each department. There aren’t any job titles and, as it’s August, the situations vacant page is unforthcoming.

The accounts are there of course, but if you want to use the webpage to hold your council to account, it is very difficult to so. I think councils should be compelled to provide far more information about their activities.

– Too many noughts perhaps? I know government is wasteful and can’t add up, but more than the entire notional budget for the department seems unlikely.

Reply: Yes, thanks for pointing out the error.

Violent yobs are even allowed to choose their own toilet seat covers at a young offenders’ centre so cushy it has been labelled a “holiday camp” by a former worker.

Warren Hill houses some of the country’s toughest young thugs, including members of knife gangs.

But Helen Stanmore, 52, a former drug misuse worker there, revealed that they have the right to order anything they want from Argos catalogues.

Jack Straws vision of justice

Prisoners get anything they want from the Argos catalogue but Ministers, being that much higher grade of criminal than common rapist and murderer, get anything they want from the John Lewis catalogue.
Meanwhile fees for those who want to go to uni will jump 10,000 a year.
The deliberate destruction of society continues

There seems to be a common theme running through all of the Departments you ahve posted on so far, and that is the huge amount spent on outside Consultants.

From my experience Management Consultants simply tell you what any worker at the coalface will tell you, only in a different language. Rarely do Management Consultants come up with new ideas which will make any organisation more competitive.

Most workers at the sharpe end know what the problem is with any Company or organisation, but they are never encouraged to report such through the management structure.

Senior managers need to get their hands dirty on occassion and get into/onto the coal face, they may then learn a lot more about how their organisation works and what needs to be done to improve it, first hand.

Local Government grants from Central Government seem to have got us in a lot of trouble over the years, with claims that Labour favour Labour Councils, and Conservatives favour Conservative Councils.

We need a rethink, and I am slowly (but not yet convinced) getting the feeling that all local Authorities should be able to raise their own funds with a local sales tax, like they do in The US.
Local Government/Councils then would then not have to beg for a better deal from Central Government without being blackmailed on policy.

They seem to have been set up to force Councils to spend money bidding for funds. Funds that are depleted by the very same regional government taking a cut to pay for themselves.

Wokingham Council has a “General Manager of Policy and Partnerships”.

As an exercise I have just visited GuardianJobs (so you dont have to: because it is enraging):

The largest “sectors” are in overwhelming order: Education (1271) Media (750) and Charities (698).

Keying in the word Strategic recovers 540 jobs with this word in their description.

Including the Strategic Director (Childrens Services) in Darwen (Lancashire) a mere £115k – £125k pa. Or the Director of Strategic Development at something called the University of Creative Arts who has to struggle by on a modest £67k-£75k pa.

An NHS cardiac surgeon expected to perform usually two by-pass operations a day earns less than £80k pa (much less than a GP – another ludicrously over-privileged group who will have to be taken on, and wont like it!).

The answer should actually be quite simple. Start bunging in huge provisions. Provide for future re-structuring. Provide for people getting older. Provide for future tax receipts falling. Provide for future welfare benefits. Provide as much as you can find in cuts.

You can even provide for additional spending in future years – “we are moving the spending to next year. This is not a cut, but an increase in next year’s budget – a simple delay which helps to spend money more effectively”.

The NAO might have a thing or two to say about it, but they refused to sign off a bunch of budgets this year, so in a sense – who cares?

Net result: Public spending appears to stay high. Debt falls. We square the circle Brown style.