Money wasted in the name of savings

It seems that there is one area of the Council budget where "tightening of belts" doesn't apply. This is in paying consultants and advisers. What do we actually get for our money? We get to decimate rainforests in order to produce mountains of reports, which are so badly written that only the committed believers (or the insane such as me) actually bother reading. The latest example is the Future shape report. This was lambasted by the plain English campaign. They say

From a plain English point of view, it is an awful document

Now the council is spending another £250,000 for the next phase. There is a very revealing interview in the Edgware Time (Click HERE for the full story)

Now Mr Grice (The program director of Future Shape) makes a few rather strange statements - lets have a look in detail

If we carry on the way we are, several million would have to be cut from the budget each year for the foreseeable future

So Mr Grice seems to be saying that the Privatisation will result in the budgets being maintained? What has the provider got to do with the budget?

He then says :-

The trade unions argue that jobs will be at risk. Jobs and services are at risk if we carry on doing what we’re doing now.

So according to Mr Grice, it's OK to destroy jobs, attack the living standards of transferred staff and line the pockets of Private shareholders because some jobs would have to be lost anyway.

Most bizarrely he says :-

It isn’t mass engagement with the private sector. It’s not huge job losses — this is a further stage of research.*

So the Director of Future Shape doesn't even know what he wants (apart from a massive budget to write reports). I personally think that giving consultants huge fees without a clear brief is obscene. Anyone who has read future shape knows exactly what they are proposing. Either the program director realises that the case is flawed or he is too dishonest to tell us the truth. In either scenario, I wouldn't give him a penny.

A little dicky bird at the Council tells me that our Glorious Leader Mike Freer dismissed a comment of mine as "someone who simply moans and never has anything constructive to say" (or words to that effect). Well Michael, I have a constructive suggestion for you. One which will save the Council a shedload of money. If you are going to pay expensive consultants, then pay them on the basis of all verifyable savings they identify. Give them 5% of any savings they identify. Don't pay them a penny otherwise. Give the same incentive to the Residents, Local Businesses, Staff and Trades Unions. No top limit on how much you get. I suspect that you might get rather more savings identified by people on the ground, who know the job than consultants in Ivory Towers. You make the Council more efficient you get a load of Cash. And Oh yes Mike, I want £12,500 (5% of £250,000) because I reckon I've just saved you £250,000 on rubbish reports. You are a Tory, turn us all into innovative Millionaires.

Grice says of Future Shape :-

The advantage is that we can free up the capacity in the council to look at the difficult challenges we’re going to have going over the hill in Barnet, and bring in the skill potentials from other sectors.

I think my scheme would bring in far more "Skill Potentials from Other Sectors"* and if they wrote reports in Gobbledygook, they wouldn't get a penny !!!!

* Indicates BARNETCOUNCILSPEAK - Used to make the sentence sound clever and disguise the true meaning.