How can we re-think government to deliver more for less? - HM Treasury SPENDING CHALLENGE - Consultation
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Today, George Osborne called on the public to send him their very best ideas on how to get more for less from our public services.
From today, anyone can go to the new Spending Challenge Public engagement website and submit their ideas.
The Government believes that the people who use our schools, hospitals, transport systems and other public services are the best people to comment on how to get more out of our services, while tackling the country’s record deficit.
This year Britain had the highest annual borrowing of any country in the G20. The Government believes urgent action is needed to tackle the deficit. Last month’s Budget set out a plan to balance the books by 2014-15, including substantial reductions in public spending.
It is going to require tough decisions, and that means approaching the Spending Review in a completely different way in order to re-shape how we all benefit from and use public services.
In a period of just two weeks, the workers who deliver our public services have sent in more than 60,000 suggestions.
From today, the whole country is being asked to send in ideas during July and August, and to tell the Government what they think about the ideas that are put forward.
Alongside the website, the Chancellor and other Ministers will be taking part in seminars and visits across the country. They will be listening to the public’s ideas in person and seeking views on how public spending should be cut, while protecting the vulnerable in our society.
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said:
‘We are facing the challenge of a lifetime. After years of Labour waste, there is now simply not enough money to go round.
That’s why I’m asking everyone across the country to send in their ideas. We need to tackle this huge national debt and make our economy stronger, and it’s your ideas that will help us do that by improving public services and saving money. ‘
Notes for editors
- The link to the Spending Challenge website is : http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk/.
- The Chancellor launched the Spending Challenge website on 24 June 2010. The first phase was aimed at the public sector and had received 61,888 ideas (as of 08 July). A sample of the ideas submitted are available on the HM Treasury website.
- The Spending Review Framework can be found on the Spending Review section of the HM Treasury website .
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The Spending Review will be a complete re-evaluation of the Government’s roles in providing public services. It will do this by:
- thinking innovatively about the role of the Government in society
- taking the difficult decisions to reduce the deficit collectively as a Government; and
- consulting widely using all talents to deliver a stronger society and a smaller state.
- The ideas generated throughout the summer will inform the decisions taken on the allocation of money between Government departments over the next 4 years. The Spending Review, which will set out how much each department will have to spend will be published on 20 October.
- People will also be able to get in touch via the democracy UK section on facebook where they can discuss and debate spending priorities and submit ideas for where cuts can be made.
RADAR to Osborne and Treasury: Stop your "Spending Challenge" website spreading prejudice
Also an email was sent to the Government Equalities Office.
Dear GEO,
I forward this enquiry to yourselves to see if you look at the responses being quoted to HM Treasury consultations with the view of discrimination, derogatory remarks etc. with the view to separate these comments, analysis and offer solutions to help address these.
Sterilise claimants urges racist treasury website
12 July 2010
Dear Subscriber
This is a single issue newsletter asking for your urgent help in getting a government website closed down. The site, set up by the treasury to allow people to suggest ways to cut government spending, is full of hate-filled racist and disablist suggestions, including the sterilisation of benefits claimants, the return of the workhouse and the forced repatriation of asylum seekers and migrants. Some of the site’s content is so extreme it may even constitute a criminal offence.
The Spending Challenge website at
http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk/
was set up on Friday by the coalition government and features an introduction and video on its home page by chancellor George Osborne.
In his video Osborne tells visitors that “Your government needs you, please get in touch” and the introduction assures visitors that:
“A team has been put together right at the heart of government and their job is to make sure that your ideas and comments are taken seriously - and that the best ideas are taken forward as part of the Spending Review.”
Yet these ideas and comments clearly demonstrate how the demonisation of claimants by successive governments has succeeded in promoting open and widespread hatred. One suggestion is to “Re-open the workhouses” for the unemployed, the elderly and asylum seekers. The poster goes on to suggest that:
“To prevent the problem of generations of poor people, release could be conditional on getting sterilised.”
Another idea entitled “Discouraging those who do not work from starting a family” goes on to say that:
“Where NHS staff have identified that a couple or single mother isn't in a position to support themselves and a child financially, they should be advised to terminate the pregnancy (if very early on), or be recommended to give the child up for adoption.”
Other ideas include:
“Benefits claimants to work in sweatshops” which urges the government to also send the unemployed to Afghanistan as cannon fodder;
“Let The Disabled Community Forge A New Industry” which suggests that disabled claimants should grow and sell cannabis for a living;
“Employ Crocodiles in Benefits Offices” to discourage claims;
the self-explanatory “Stop paying JSA etc to drunks, druggies & wastrels”; and
“Stop handing out free laptops and internet connections to the unemployed” in which the poster goes on to say that “I worked fifteen years before I could afford to buy myself a laptop, some toerag who's never worked a day in his life gets it courtesy of the State.”
Even where the initial post appears to be an attempt at humour or irony, the baying mob of supportive posters demonstrates that many others take the ideas seriously.
Equally disturbing and possibly criminal are the huge number of racist rants being published by the treasury.
In one suggestion “Move immigrants in council houses out of cities”, the original poster wants the coalition government to “Tell immigrants that they are being moved to less expensive areas. If they don't want to, they can leave the country.”
However, in a subsequent comment, another poster responds with “I'm not sure that I want to see immigrants living in our villages - keep them in the ghetto's until such time as they can all be deported.”
Many of the suggestions target specific groups such as Somalis and the site is littered with the most ugly and examples of ignorance and prejudice, many so extreme that we are not prepared to reproduce them,
The Public Order Act 1986 makes it an offence to publish material which is likely to stir up racial hatred. Benefits and Work believes that this is exactly the effect that the treasury website will have. The content may also be in breach of discrimination and harassment legislation. Whilst we do not have the legal knowledge to pursue this matter further, and don’t want to be accused of a publicity stunt, we hope that there are readers of this newsletter who will have both the knowledge and the sense of outrage to do so and that they will involve the police in investigating this site.
The site has a ‘Report to the moderator’ feature, but appears to be otherwise unmoderated. To leave the responsibility for policing a government website to members of the public instead of checking each submission before publishing it is, at best, inexcusably negligent and, at worst, criminally irresponsible. There are, in any case, so many vile sentiments being posted there, that it would be a full-time job to keep reporting them all.
If you are as revolted as we are by the use of taxpayers money to encourage racism and hatred of claimants, please consider doing the following:
Contact your MP today and ask them to tell the chancellor to close down this vile site, clean it up and don’t reopen it until it is properly policed;
Make a complaint to the Equalities and human Rights Commission at
Spending Challenge: ideas
These examples show some of the main themes and ideas that have been put forward via the public sector Spending Challenge website.
They are not ideas that have been shortlisted for further work or implementation but they will all be considered individually alongside the other 60,000 ideas that have been put forward.
1. Each public sector organisation has its own support functions, such as HR, Information services, Facilities, Finance etc. This means there is huge duplication of functions and costs. The spending review team should look into whether any economy of scale can be achieved through departments sharing these support functions, such as one HR department for all local authorities etc
2. Office stationery orders should be centralised in each Government Department, this will be more cost effective and well managed. At the moment each unit/divisions place their orders through their divisional budget. There are surplus items such as envelopes, staples, pens etc through out the department. For a start we can use the departmental intranet site to inform and redistribute surplus stationery items that we currently hold - a good housekeeping exercise. Second point, there should be more communication lines open and knowledge sharing across all central government departments, this will cut down the cost of using outside contractors/consultants for specialised areas of work. Savings can be made if we stop working in isolation, this working culture must change. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to make a contribution in a small way.
3. My focus for attention relates to IT. There should be a renegotiation of IT contracts across the board in government - as these contracts are poor with regards to their costings matrix and the rates charged. I know of an instance where a contract was negotiated (which was managed by a policy team) where the supplier charged over £12,000 to make textual changes - which they then inputted incorrectly and then recharged again. Amends should be inbuilt into contracts so they do not get charged for in this way. Similarly [other places have contracts] where they charge to give quotes - this process should be scrapped so we can get a better service from suppliers. Procurement processes should also be made easier so more suppliers can get on to the rostas and fairer competition can be put into play. Currently the process is incredibly laborious and Government is not getting the best IT suppliers coming through. IT is a very fluid industry and suppliers and their abilities change all the time - so an easier process would insure new blood comes into the system who would be more cost effective and bring better ideas into the IT world. The Government gateway contract also needs to be renegotiated so that amends can be put through at any stage, rather than within cycles. At present there are broken links on government gateway - which cant be changed until September. Additionally I would also collate all citizen research from COI in a central depository so that customer information profiles could be built up. Government departments commissioning information from COI can end up commissioning the same work twice and there is no way of knowing what has gone before or is going on across the piece.
4. Lots of ill considered new initiatives have been introduced with little or no consultation from those of us on the front line. Money has been wasted producing thousands of glossy folders for reference - (one for each teacher in my school) We have been given too many targets which has resulted, in some schools, the child becoming a secondary consideration. Schools need staff - good teachers and TAs NOT glossy folders, cds modelling ideal lessons (which are often obviously staged) and time consuming unnecessary paperwork.
5. All PC's are left switched on overnight and at weekends so that they can accept updates to software such as anti virus. If we install wake on LAN hardware then PC's could be turned off when not in use and still receive updates it would also reduce the manpower required for updates as no one would have to go to each pc that had been switched off and boot it up. This would save around 200KWh/year per PC based on 8 hours on per day use. 150 euros saving per pc per year according to http://www.eu-energystar.org There are a lot of PCs in the armed forces and no doubt this practice occurs in other departments too. It is my opinion that the conversion to wake on LAN would pay for its self within a single year even if it were to be contracted out to a civilian company and would provide a significant saving in all following years.
6. Every NHS employee is required to have a CRB clearance each time they start work in a new NHS trust as they are not portable between NHS trusts. This is fine. However, as junior doctors, we move between hospitals every 6 months. And hence, I have had to have (the same kind of) CRB clearance thrice in the last year. This is absurd, expensive and bureaucratic hurdle for the trainees and trusts. Surely the CRB clearance should be valid for a fixed time or there shouldn’t be a need to repeat them so often. Even more absurd is the fact that a nurse or employee needs to have another additional (same kind of) CRB check, if she wants to do the same job in the same NHS trust as a bank nurse in addition to being a regular nurse even if she has already had one 15 days ago! Every CRB costs around £50 I am told. You could save a few million pounds if the rules are more sensible.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/spend_challenge_ideas_1.htm