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25% - 40% cuts coming to the transport budget?
tim..... wrote:
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) More than that in that there are fewer Permanent Secretaries and the like and systems are merged with economies of scale. However because two departments are rarely merged directly but rather responsibilities are constantly respread around it's hard to get clear figures. 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). One of the more ridiculous things we do in this country is to constantly reorganise government departments under new names such that the stationery gets out of date and everyone gets confused by the titles - once when lobbying a minister in another department we found even he didn't know for sure the snappy short title of the Department of Communities and Local Government. It had spent four years as the "Office of the Deputy Prime Minister" largely because the name had already existed and it was a face saving measure to cover up the fact that the Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions had been simply split. But it was then split from the DPM and so needed an actual name. When Eric Pickles was exploring the DCLG in 2010 he found it still had boxes upon boxes of unused biros from the days of the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1997-2001. In general the Cameron government has so far avoided renaming and reorganising government departments, bar changing the Department of Children, Schools and Families to the Department of Education *, but long term it might be better to go the route of other countries where many ministers have multiple titles for small portfolios, enabling them to be easily shifted around without having to restructure the back offices. -- My blog: http://adf.ly/4hi4c |
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