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Welfare reform is high on the agenda and simplifying welfare is a key element of the Government's ambition. What is notable is about our benefits system is that so many of our benefits are set up to meet a particular purpose. In other words, conditional benefits, which are provided in response to an action, or in a limited capacity (can only be used in certain outlets) or where the recipient's spend is monitored. Here's a list of just a few of them: - Healthy Start Vouchers
- Education Maintenance Allowance
- Sure Start Maternity Grant
- Winter Fuel Allowance
- Independent Living Fund
- Carers allowance
- Disabled Facilities Grant
- Health in Pregnancy Grant
- Optical Vouchers
- Care to Learn
In each of these cases, Government is undertaking extensive work to develop mechanisms and networks to encourage individuals to restrict the use of the state's money responsibly, but this all comes at a cost. Healthy Start Vouchers are mailed to nearly a million people every month. Care to Learn payments are made directly to the providers on receipt of an invoice by the provider, passed from the client to the department after a strict eligibility assessment. The problem is that restricting payments makes work, it makes work for administrators, work for clients and work for suppliers, surely welfare reform needs also to look at the cost of managing payments as well as the delivery of payments? Today, delivering money to individuals is easier than it has ever been, controlling and monitoring that spend, isn't as easy as it looks and we should try to wean ourselves off the need to control spend quite so closely. |
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The announcement that Councils will be required to publish all transactions over £500 has been widely trailed by Eric Pickles and the Coalition Government, but what does this mean for Councils? Aside from the challenge of publishing data that does not contain individual's names or money placed nightly on the markets, what can Councils expect once they actually publish the data? We suspect that this data will create more heat than light. Users analysing the data will be presented with a long list of supplier names, dates and values. The problem is that this data really only has value when you know what the named supplier provides, if their name doesn't give you a clue then you're going to have to find out what each supplier does before you can estimate what was bought from the supplier. Without this context it is difficult to make sense of the data. This is bad news for large multinationals like Cap Gemini, Randstadt and British Gas, but not such bad news for suppliers with less famous names. There is a small opportunity available to people who want to make comparative estimates of spend based on common denominators; for example you could try to identify the spend per resident on temp staff between to London Boroughs. However this only works if you know that you've been certain to gather all of the spend on gas in both Boroughs, something that is very difficult to do using basic ledger data. Those that have most to gain are those of us who provide services to the public sector, we will be looking closely to see what our competitors are up to, who they work with, how much they charge and whether they are able to maintain their relationships with their customers. I hope our competitors will be looking closely at us too. Meanwhile shed a tear for all those multinationals that are going to have to explain why their charges differ so much between authorities. |
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Public Sector staff cuts will start in earnest in 2011. Organisations will be working to roll back the 600,000 of new public sector jobs that have been created since Labour took power, but how can public sector organisations prepare for redundancies?
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The challenge of budget cuts requires a robust, long-term response in order to make significant savings. However, whilst the long-term planning is underway, short-term, savings can be found to boost the bottom line. Below we outline some opportunities to implement low cost initiatives that deliver savings for an organisation within a financial year.
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Government
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