"Tim Roll-Pickering" wrote in message
...
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

So there are "two" men at the top that you save.

OK I do fully appreciate that the number that you will save is greater than
that, but it's still barely into double figures and even though they will be
at the higher end of the pay scale the savings involved are still of the
relative order of "amount found down the back of the sofa".

and the like and systems are merged with economies of scale.

what systems can you merge with "economies of scale?

and if you can, why are they not already merged across the whole of
government anyway (my example of IT support really being one that I expect
HMG to have got expensively wrong here).

tim

"tim....." wrote in message
...

what systems can you merge with "economies of scale?

Lots of functions that are common to any business - e.g. procurement, HR,
finance.

and if you can, why are they not already merged across the whole of
government anyway (my example of IT support really being one that I expect
HMG to have got expensively wrong here).

A colleague of mine was telling me of a business tranformation project he
worked on at a large local authority. The savings identified by merging
common business functions across the LA were huge, to the extent that the
consultants (of which he was one) were happy to share the risk by providing
a loan to fund their fees that would be paid off from the savings after
project implementation.

The project was cancelled when the unions called a strike over the loss of
their member's jobs that would result from the project: the politicians
responded by cancelling the project.

--
DAS