"Recliner" wrote in message
...
Mizter T wrote:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/george-osborne-sharpens-axe-40-6111425

"Schools, health, international development and defence are protected so
local government, Home Office, transport, environment, justice and the
courts, arts and sports will be hammered by 25% and 40% cuts in
November’s Spending Review."


http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/592816/Budget-spending-cuts-George-Osborne-welfare-Whitehall

"Councils, police, prisons, the courts and the transport network are
expected to bear the brunt of the swingeing spending reductions."


Some broader thoughts from R. Peston:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33609662

The Express headline grossly overstates the cuts. There will be cuts, but
the 25% and 40% figures aren't those cuts; they're the menu of all
possible
cuts each department is expected to come up with. Many will be politically
impossible, but the idea is to give the Treasury a long list of options
from which to k select. This happens after every election, and is a form
of
zero-based budgeting (ie, start with 100% cuts, and departments have to
justify everything that is added back).

"Letters will be sent to the head of every department that does not have
ringfenced funding, asking them to model two scenarios of 25% and 40% of
real-terms savings by 2019-20, the same levels of reduction requested
before the 2010 spending review."

From
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2...-clear-deficit

The idea is to force departments seriously to look at radical options,
such
as of doing business in a completely different way, or simply not doing
some things at all, rather than adopting the easy "10% cuts all round"
solution. One likely consequence is that some Departments may be abolished
or merged. For example, on Newsnight, it was suggested that DEFRA and DCMS
didn't really need to exist as separate departments at all, and a lot
could
be saved by abolishing hem,

Really?

Does abolishing a ministry, but still performing all of its functionally,
save a lot?

If you still need all of the "customer facing" people you still need all of
the buildings that they work in, and you still need most of the management
chain to manage them.

All you save is the single guy at the top (and the office that (s)he sits
in)

Oh and you save a little bit in your stationary budget by not having to keep
backup stocks of headed-notepaper (measured against the extra cost of
throwing away the old stock that you now can't use).

If you're saving in other areas (such as IT support/car pool) then your IT
support/car pool was being sourced wrongly in the first place.

tim