What would you Cut in your Council?

Guitar

My council compulsory purchased hundreds of flats and houses, evicting the residents with the plan to demolish everything and replace it with fewer, more expensive housing.

Instead they part demolished some of the properties but have left the rest sitting empty and boarded up for years. I walk through entire streets of empty houses.

In some of the more public facing areas the council has paid for special boarding with painted on curtains and doors in a bizarre attempt to hide all these empty boarded up properties.

[FONT=&quot]I'd love to know if the muppets in charge of this still have a job. All this cost and disruption and the only thing they've achieved is comicbook villainy.[/FONT]

The_White_Horse

cut the cost of translating anything. council produced literature and websites should be in ENGLISH only.

I would also sack 30% and make 45k the maximum wage.

useless public sector scum.

Wookster

I would put all staff on 2 year contracts as I think anymore than 2 years in one job and you're stale. Staff to reapply for same job or different one thereafter.

Review and renegotiate all external contracts looking for cost savings.

In central government, I'd set up a team of highly commercial accountants to go from council to council reviewing business processes and expenditure for efficiency.

lostinrates

Heyman wrote: »

Oh you all make it sound so easy! In reality, it's a very tough proposition as Manchester City Council have just been discovering.

Do we? I thought all the rows were because its hard. That said, my repeated involvement with the Waste and Recylcling dept at my council taught me the first four tier of management were managing nowt ...and the woman at the top is trying...but not very well. I don't think their complaints proceedure (''I think you should go to the local paper about this, because its the only way it will get solved and it IS awful'') is terribly cost efficient either!

worldtraveller

Get rid of final salary pensions for all employees, not just new recruits, increase employee contributions & reduce employer contributions.

Pennywise

Sell off the valuable publicly owned city centre buildings that are currently used for council offices, libraries, etc. Move into cheaper and more usable premises - possibly converting empty shops etc. Failing that, make better use of the buildings they have, i.e. make different departments share buildings. In our town, we have a virtually empty large council building and yet social services have been struggling with a tiny building and have just moved into a bigger office block - why couldn't they move into the empty council building? I'd like to know if anyone actually bothered to think of the logistics of it - probably not as there's no joined up thinking.

Re public toilets - again, easy solution would be to make existing toilets in public buildings open to all - i.e. libraries, town halls, council offices, leisure centres, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries etc. Yes, I know they're all run independently, but in the big scheme of things, the money comes from the government and/or taxpayers and it's time the decision makers looked at the big picture.

B33fy

Why not instead of reducing staff numbers by say 20%, reduce everyone's salary by 20% then those at the top who make the decisions can "share" the pain

lostinrates

Pennywise wrote: »

Re public toilets - again, easy solution would be to make existing toilets in public buildings open to all - i.e. libraries, town halls, council offices, leisure centres, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries etc. Yes, I know they're all run independently, but in the big scheme of things, the money comes from the government and/or taxpayers and it's time the decision makers looked at the big picture.

its a culture shift when you um...go...elsewhere. When living in Milan, apart from doing just this you get used to buying a 90 cent coffee in order to use the loo. People are employed essentially because a lot of people drink coffee to have a piddle.

At £3 plus for star-big-bucks I don't think I'd stay as well hydrated.

ILW

Pubs are open all day now and thety all have loos.

zappahey

Cleaver wrote: »

Can anyone pinpoint the exact time and date when we started using the Prime Minister's salary as the ulltimate yardstick of what people should earn?

Did you miss the announcement about the new SI units of measurement?

Everything has to be measured in terms of football pitches, olympic swimming pools, double decker buses or Wales (Belgium if we're talking about international measurements).

I guess we're all too thick to understand scale for ourselves.