Short changing wrexham
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@99DylanJones 17749 wrote:
A 10:1 saving means that on £50 million you need to identify £55 million of cuts to arrive at your £50 million
You’ve lost me!
I think that your logic has gone somewhat awry!Sorry–
If the Council need a £50 million saving and the consultants get £1 million fee for every £10 million saved the overall saving will have to be £55 million so that the council give the fee of £5 million and still end up with their £50 million saving originally set as a target.Flintsham- not my conjured up word but one created by Unison for the agenda of their forthcoming AGM.
Would be really interesting to see what Unison will tell their members about all the staff cuts and those to come so far they are remaining tight lipped as there are no comments forthcoming when announcements of 1200 job cuts are made by the Council Leader.@99DylanJones 17749 wrote:
Pill as you seem to be genuine in your approach on this thread could you provide us with the following–
1. How much money have the consultants said they will save WCBC?
2. ow much of this total had already been identified by WCBC Managers – prior to the consultants starting work?
3. Will the consultants be paid on the total amount of savings implemented or just on the element that they have actually identified themselves?This is a vital piece of the jigsaw as there is a massive risk that you will pay twice for work alredy identified by internal staff.. why was this info mising from the report to the Executive.
A 10:1 saving means that on £50 million you need to identify £55 million of cuts to arrive at your £50 million.
The largest level of cuts will come from staff reduction yet non of the information yet has included redundancy costs even though the Leader of the Council has said 1200 jobs to go — another major falling in your Executive officers and Lead Member…
This all smacks of the same gross incompetence that existed wit the development of the ‘Super schools’ wen Wrexham lost more than £20 million due to Letters of Intent being issued to contractors– the Cunci was warned tgen by the Wales Audit Office and this is going the same way.
Dylan
Made the mistake of coming on wrexham.com just as I was calling it a day. Your questions are all valid and deserve answering, which I believe were at yesterday’s Executive Board meeting.
It has been explained to me that any already ear-marked savings will not add to the fee earning opportunities for PWC, assuming a contract is entered into with them as this has yet to be finalised and signed. An example is the council have just gone out to consultation on the discretionary provision of free bus travel for those of our young residents who attend post 16 education. If this saving is made then this is not a PWC saving.
Their fee will is dependent on savings banked not savings proposed but not taken up because of a lack of political backing.
The savings PWC are proposing to make relate to them coming in and delivering methods of working which will deliver efficiency savings. They are confident that this piece of work will deliver savings in the region of £22.8m.
To deliver the efficiency savings will require expenditure in the region of £9 to £11m which will be spent on IT systems, retraining etc.
If you view the webcam coverage of the EB and check out what was said by our Lead Finance Officer then you will learn that the significant savings to be made in 2015/16 do not include a line for redundancy costs, as these are borne by the various departments in year budget ie are self financing.
Time will tell if these efficiency savings are there to be made but for me it is a great shame rather than sitting on our laurels back in 2012, we ought to of bitten the bullet and got on with it. If this had happened then we might well been well along on the journey, with “efficiency” savings having been delivered in 2013/14 and 2014/15 along side those saving already delivered by officers.
As many of my fellow councillors have stated, none entered public life to bring about such savage cuts to the services we provide our communities, which has the double whammy of reducing money in local circulation. That said if we do not deliver a balanced budget (unlike Health Boards) then we will be declared bankrupt as an authority. We will then be run from Cardiff Bay by our Welsh Government. We seem to be damned if we do and damned if we don’t .
Cllr Phil Wynn
So PwC are aiming to achieve savings of £22.8 million which are not including what Council Managers have already identified- if that is the case then we will see £30 million plus in 2015/6 as Managers had already identified savings of £10 million which are stated in the budget that was approved this week.
If such a large amount is needed to invest in IT then the scale of the project clearly will not deliver savings of any significance in year one. The physical installation is one element but the whole mind set change within a workforce is significant.
Are we to assume for instance that the staff in the CONTACT Centre will not be required as all of this public contact will be carried out by some national contact centre.
So little of the savings will come from efficiencies this is all about service cuts- which surely your senor management team are already paid to do this as their day job- WASTE, WASTE and more WASTE is all I can say- get the people who should do their job or get rid of themSo according to the Wrexham Leader today Clr Pritchard Leader of Wrexham Council has issued a challenge to AMs and MPS to debate the merger with Flintshire — he still has not said he would even have a discussion with Aaron Shotton Leader of Flintshire CC-
Why will he not meet with Aaron, what is he sacred of? Surely the starting point is a discussion with the other County that is the named partner in the WG documents.
I am also astonished how so many of those that have been polled on the Leader website have opted to stay separate when the facts have not even been put in the public domain– there is a real danger that this issue will be determined by emotion rather than facts.I just took that as a failed attempt to drive traffic to their site – only 700 votes after what was pushed on and offline and effectively a frontpage advert :)
Social media wise interaction + numbers have not really changed, so whatever happened to get a record breaking (locally) 3000ish Facebook ‘likes’ in a week a month or two back is probably better for them than this.
If the Leader newspaper had massive circulation in their separate Wrexham and Flintshire editions they could be worried if they only needed to produce one paper– the current circulation is dropping year on year and the content of the Wrexham edition is already made up of 30% Flintshire and 30% Chester and England content– North Wales News should be reported to trading standards for misrepresenting the content by calling it The Wrexham Leader.
Of the 700 who have voted how many are from people in Flintshire who are reading all the negative press about Wrexham Council and decided that they would not want to be part of Wrexham rather than Wrexham people not wanting to merge with Flintshire.
The population of the two counties are 291,000 — 700 are less than 0.25% not what you could call a statistical sample. Come on North Wales News you need to do better — we complain about the Council not communicating your own Poll figures now confirm you are in the same position.@DerekJackson 17782 wrote:
So according to the Wrexham Leader today Clr Pritchard Leader of Wrexham Council has issued a challenge to AMs and MPS to debate the merger with Flintshire — he still has not said he would even have a discussion with Aaron Shotton Leader of Flintshire CC-
Why will he not meet with Aaron, what is he sacred of? Surely the starting point is a discussion with the other County that is the named partner in the WG documents.
I am also astonished how so many of those that have been polled on the Leader website have opted to stay separate when the facts have not even been put in the public domain– there is a real danger that this issue will be determined by emotion rather than facts.Derek- you have to realise that Leighton Andrews AM has been brought in by the Leader of our Country to bulldoze through the agenda of changing the fabric of local democracy, otherwise Lesley Griffith would I suggest still be the Minister for Local Government.
The Welsh Labour Party do not currently hold a mandate from the citizens of Wales to do so. As such to move their political agenda on the idea of voluntary mergers was put forward.
However the WLP have conveniently overlooked the fact that we County Councillors do not hold a democratic mandate either.
You also have to realise that Aaron Shotton is a member of the WLP, with possible aspirations to serve his Party as a AM one day. As such is he truly impartial in his motives? I would argue he is leaving himself open to the criticism that he may be putting his Party interests above those of the people of Flintshire. I would also argue that Leighton Andrews political career now hinges on delivering council mergers come what may and to do so he needs Aaron Shotton’s support.
As an Independant Councillor and Leader Mark Pritchard has no such ties and can therefore put the interests of Wrexham folk first and last, with out the interference of national political parties. His stance on this issue has been endorsed by full Council back in October, so I would argue he is the only one who holds a democratic mandate, be it of his peers.
I have no objection to Wrexham/Flintshire continuing with their joint working arrangements, possibly extending such arrangements, as a way of reducing costs, but not at the cost of losing our individual identities.
A lot has been said about Mark Pritchard and Leighton Andrews meeting but you need to know that it was the Minister who left the building in a huff, even before he was handed his cuppa, I guess he didn’t like some home truths on Welsh democracy.
Out of interest would you welcome a public debate which will allow our local AM’s and MP’s the opportunity to explain where they stand on the issues of a forced merger? I know Ian Lucas is in favour of a merger, as that is what he was advocating at the Wrexham Town Centre Forum meeting in December. Maybe he would like to contribute to a public forum such as wrexham.com and put himself up to public scrutiny on the matter.
Cllr Phil Wynn
@99DylanJones 17771 wrote:
Flintsham- not my conjured up word but one created by Unison for the agenda of their forthcoming AGM.
Would be really interesting to see what Unison will tell their members about all the staff cuts and those to come so far they are remaining tight lipped as there are no comments forthcoming when announcements of 1200 job cuts are made by the Council Leader.As the Paymasters for the Labour Party I guess they are bound to know more about the future of our town and County than the rest of us.
Cllr Phil Wynn
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