There is hot debate this week here in Shropshire about the proposed loss of the Shropshire Link bus service, it seems that in their wisdom Councillors have decided the running costs are too high to let it continue after they were faced with a barrage of cuts from Central office. This somehow doesn't ring true for me as if it is too expensive now why was it deemed efficient when first set up? or are we seeing the same old "there's loads of money in the pot so spend it" mentality that has dogged the public service sector for years?.
Allow me to give you an example of this budget stupidity if I may, for I believe that most of the general public at large would be astonished and annoyed to hear just how these so called managers have operated over the years. I used to sell equipment many years ago to councils and public sector operations, from public owned golf courses to full blown highways departments and every year they were each given a budget for spending on machinery, that in itself was no great surprise and it meant everyone knew where they were. The stupidity of this system however was in the way the money was spent. If the chief buyer shopped around and got good deals off the suppliers and saved the council a whole heap of money and had say for instance ten thousand pounds over at the end of that financial year then instead of getting a pat on the back and a nice positive balance to go into the next year that ten thousand was actually taken off his budget for the following year, so in effect he was penalised for being frugal.
So what happened is that towards the end of the season the buyer would see what budget he had left and try and spend it, on absolutely anything, even if it wasn't needed just to ensure that his budget wasn't cut for the following year. You may wonder what I am getting at here and you have a point, but just suppose these departments actually talked to one another and instead of being penalised for saving money that season the buyer was praised for being so frugal, his budget not affected for next year and the excess money he had saved spent on much needed bus services? Surely that would be better than seeing public money spent on machinery that was sometimes never ever used worth thousands of pounds sat as a "back up" in case one machine went down? Because that is what happened, I have seen it time and time again and believe me it still happens.
The above is one of the idiosyncrasies that emerge only in the public sector, it would never be allowed to happen in a privately run company unless it was also too big to control it's own house in an appropriate manner. The fact that this would solve the current travel crisis will be lost on the powers that be because like many people they are afraid of change and change is most definitely needed, because the money is slowly running out, the same applies in the health service, we no longer have bottomless pits and if the government want to put their public sector businesses in order they need do no more than use the private sector as a role model, it would save millions in the first week.
Allow me to give you an example of this budget stupidity if I may, for I believe that most of the general public at large would be astonished and annoyed to hear just how these so called managers have operated over the years. I used to sell equipment many years ago to councils and public sector operations, from public owned golf courses to full blown highways departments and every year they were each given a budget for spending on machinery, that in itself was no great surprise and it meant everyone knew where they were. The stupidity of this system however was in the way the money was spent. If the chief buyer shopped around and got good deals off the suppliers and saved the council a whole heap of money and had say for instance ten thousand pounds over at the end of that financial year then instead of getting a pat on the back and a nice positive balance to go into the next year that ten thousand was actually taken off his budget for the following year, so in effect he was penalised for being frugal.
So what happened is that towards the end of the season the buyer would see what budget he had left and try and spend it, on absolutely anything, even if it wasn't needed just to ensure that his budget wasn't cut for the following year. You may wonder what I am getting at here and you have a point, but just suppose these departments actually talked to one another and instead of being penalised for saving money that season the buyer was praised for being so frugal, his budget not affected for next year and the excess money he had saved spent on much needed bus services? Surely that would be better than seeing public money spent on machinery that was sometimes never ever used worth thousands of pounds sat as a "back up" in case one machine went down? Because that is what happened, I have seen it time and time again and believe me it still happens.
The above is one of the idiosyncrasies that emerge only in the public sector, it would never be allowed to happen in a privately run company unless it was also too big to control it's own house in an appropriate manner. The fact that this would solve the current travel crisis will be lost on the powers that be because like many people they are afraid of change and change is most definitely needed, because the money is slowly running out, the same applies in the health service, we no longer have bottomless pits and if the government want to put their public sector businesses in order they need do no more than use the private sector as a role model, it would save millions in the first week.
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