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linda
Occasional Contributor
28 Posts |
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Roland Ratrunner
Occasional Contributor
68 Posts |
 Posted - 13 Jul 2010 : 09:29:40
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| Are'nt we paying the council to make these decisions or is it a case of 'We'll ask the people for their opinion then we can blame them when things go wrong'. |
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Christine Blakey
Frequent Contributor
1206 Posts |
Posted - 13 Jul 2010 : 11:29:10
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My main issue with this consultation is that we are being directed as to which spending should be cut. It does not give the opportunity to consider the salaries and number of posts which may be the most sensible way to create savings.
I agree with Roland in wondering if this consultation will simply divert blame for anything that goes wrong. |
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snowy
Frequent Contributor
161 Posts |
Posted - 13 Jul 2010 : 13:16:11
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It's the usual thing. offer as sacrificial lambs the sort of services you just aren't going to cut, sit back and wait for the statistics to show the public are against cuts.
All services should be offered for review, not just a selection selection hand picked by those with the most to lose. |
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Christine Blakey
Frequent Contributor
1206 Posts |
Posted - 13 Jul 2010 : 13:34:00
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Absolutely snowy!
Not just all services to be up for consultation but also all spending and salaries across the board.
Simple: Tell us what HBC gets, what HBC spends,and for true impartial consultation (and note they are saying that they want it to be impartial so they have allocated thousands of pounds for a consultant in another area of the country) then consider what should be cut.
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Boris de Pheffel
Occasional Contributor
44 Posts |
Posted - 13 Jul 2010 : 21:02:48
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| That is the most pathetic consultation I've been apart of. I was waiting for the questions "Would You Like Us To Kill Puppies?", "Should We Drown The Elderly". Ridiculous. |
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Christine Blakey
Frequent Contributor
1206 Posts |
Posted - 13 Jul 2010 : 21:38:44
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What an graphic but informative description Boris!
I really think the council should be given this feedback.
It should be classed as an invalid consultation procedure. |
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steveL
Frequent Contributor
565 Posts |
Posted - 14 Jul 2010 : 00:32:55
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bugger...I wish I'd said that Boris, Succinct and effective 
This 'Jewel in the Crown' of a posting was completed In Time for the Tall Ships |
Edited by - steveL on 14 Jul 2010 00:33:29 |
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Sheena McGibbon
Occasional Contributor
10 Posts |
Posted - 14 Jul 2010 : 01:21:47
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| They could have saved money by not printing thousands of questionaires and supplying them all with freepost envelopes. |
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Mate_of_Wilf
Frequent Contributor
401 Posts |
Posted - 17 Jul 2010 : 08:11:11
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Several years ago the council had a consultation where they gave people a list of services and their "points" cost to run. Everyone then had 100 points to allocate to the services of their choice. If Social services for example needed three points to provide statutory minimum services and eight pouints to provide current levels and ten points to improve services then the three were pre-allocated and it was up to the public to spend some of their 100 points if they wanted to.
Unfortunately the public showed a marked tendency to prioritise things like emptying the bins, cleaning the streets and cutting the grass. There was very little support for diversity co-ordination, street art, after-school pottery clubs, gender outreach facilitators or all the other pet projects of the trendy and "right on" special interest groups. Even libraries and museums were lower down the priority than a good pest control service or free removal of bulky items to the tip.
The entire exercise was quietly buried and it was agreed the public couldn't be trusted with this type of thing as they didn't understand the complexity of local government.
I think the public understand very well! There are not unlimited funds and if you chose to spend them on AIDS Awareness campaigns then that is all very worthy but it means something else has to give, like weekly bin collections for example. Unfortunately by mentioning AIDS Awareness campaigns I am now immediately open to allegations of homophobia, just as if I question the value of producing council publications in 40 different languages I am doubtless going to be accused of being a racist! Sad state of affairs but then people get the government they vote for, unusually anyway!
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steveL
Frequent Contributor
565 Posts |
Posted - 17 Jul 2010 : 09:48:36
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It's quite common to hear of large businesses, usually when faced with some kind of financial or takepover crisis, to restructure themselves around their 'core business'. They do this when it is thought that they have become so complex and diverse that the core business has started to become neglected and suffering because of that neglect. The same logic could and perhaps should be applied to local Government.
The natural state of Government, whether national or local, is expansion and that expansion happens automatically unless there are checks and balances in place to make sure that it doesn't.
The growth in local Government that took place under the last Government had all the appearance of being uncontrolled growth. However, much of that growth ocurred in areas away from what you would normally describe as 'core areas'. Consequently, while there was rapid growth in spending, and staff numbers, at the same time basic services seemed to be reduced. The loss of weekly bin collections being a case in point, but you could equally point to pot-holes, street cleaning,street lighting, grass verge maintenance, parks etc.
The public pay primarily for those basic services that it wants; they will then consider paying for other, frothier services once the demand for basic services has been met.
Somewhere along the way focus has been lost and we now find ourselves paying for the most peripheral services while at the same time being told there is no money to fill pot holes.
Taking your two examples, I happen to think that AIDS awareness is important but it falls within the scope of the local PCT; not the Council. What happens at the moment is that you end up with several organisations running parallel campaigns for the same thing.
Diversity is another overblown committment. The last time I looked, the ethnic constituent of the Hartlepool population was around 1.7% and most of those people seem to speak perfectly good english.
In fact, the english literacy standard amongst some ethnic groups is far superior to that of the local people. To me, the justification for spending large amounts of money on multi-lingual forms is, at best, extremely thin simply because the demand for it is extremely low. Money would be far better spent improving the level of literacy in the local population which in 2010 is a bloody disgrace.
This 'Jewel in the Crown' of a posting was completed In Time for the Tall Ships |
Edited by - steveL on 17 Jul 2010 10:04:58 |
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rabbit
Occasional Contributor
84 Posts |
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Christine Blakey
Frequent Contributor
1206 Posts |
Posted - 17 Jul 2010 : 19:27:44
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MoW, I see your point but what I think is missing is that the 'pet' projects are simply tokens that make them look good. For example, stamping out homophobic hate crime ...they fly the flag, support bids for money into the area but then two senior officials in HBC mocks 'gay choices' or is plain homophobic.
This cost us at least £400,000 I would think based on one example. If HBC were really supporting the fight against hate crime, they would not have paid out a compromise agreement then carried on the behaviour that led to it!
Lessons learned...no...evidence concealed! |
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snowy
Frequent Contributor
161 Posts |
Posted - 17 Jul 2010 : 23:54:43
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| When it comes to council services, they give us what they want to give us and not what we want, the two things are usually poles apart. If councils were the Titanic, the moment they hit the iceberg, they'd organise a Polar Bear homelesness relocation fund and an enquiry into the effects of the vessel sinking from a pollution standpoint ... and it's contribution to global warming. Meanwhile, they'd have discovered as they'd spent no money on maintaining the vessel, these things tend to happen ... and everyone with half a brain headed for the lifeboats.... which also hadn't been maimtained.......oops! |
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Christine Blakey
Frequent Contributor
1206 Posts |
Posted - 23 Jul 2010 : 09:14:22
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Just thought I would ask opinion on some spending that is going on at the moment. I received a few days ago a glossy pamphlet (ring binder) through the post with details of the top people in HBC.
I was actually appalled that this was posted and even produced as it did not give any other details that would be necessary. Photographs of each person was included meaning full colour print was needed.
I received this as a resident representative and I just wondered if anyone else had received it?
I would like to justify such extravagance when spending cuts are required as I find it 'morally offensive' that this will be paid for out of much needed and diminishing funds. |
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testing times
Frequent Contributor
156 Posts |
Posted - 23 Jul 2010 : 10:15:09
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| I would have expected something like that to appear in Hartbeat not as a seperate publication. It just goes to show that, to use a well used saying of 2009, they 'just don't get it.' |
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