Vibrant and Viable Places regeneration funding
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Posts
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More money being leached from the Council budget to consultants. The Council have highly paid Officers and Councillors don’t they have the ability to put forward appropriate solutions ? Double the size of every Council Ward and therefore half the number of Councillors save £500,000. Probably not as bonkers as some of the money saving ideas that Price Waterhouse will be paid to come up with ?
The cynic in me see the use of a consultants report as Council Members and Officers ‘hiding’ behind solutions and they can then blame the consultants for cuts instead of shouldering the responsibility themselves.
As for the ability of Councilors and Officers at senior level having the ability to carry out the function of the consultants they are far to close to the issues as many of the problems have been their own doing i the first place.
Look at the profile of the Executive — how many of them have had jobs in the private sector managing £100millions (you don’t need to look because the answer is zero).Why do you keep shooting yourself in the foot Dylan?
First you state that Councillors and Officers are far too close to the issues to carry out the function of the consultants and when consultants are brought in, to your mind it is not to sort out problems, but to provide a shield from blame for Officers and Elected Members.
Are you totally ignorant of the fact that the monies that Council’s receive has been drastically cut by both central government and the Welsh Assembly?
I don’t think that ‘cynic’ is the appropriate term to use to describe your mindset, I would tend to favour the word ‘crass’.The Welsh Assembly is part of the problem they give some money to the Council with strings attached , just like the £40,000 for live streaming of Council Meetings as an example, over £800,000 across the twenty-two Councils in Wales. The Assembly complain about the lack of funding then waste money on pet projects before making sure they fully fund Council essential services.
I’m sorry Benjamin seems to assume a personal attack is better than debating the issue.
1. Council Members have very limited business background so over the years they have not comprehended the fact that staff who are employed on time limited funding cannot be given perpetual contracts revolving from job to job to void the unpleasant policy of redundancies– no redundancies has been the policy of the council up to 2 years ago.
2. Targeted funding from WG should at times be refused unless there is a very clear exit which does not incur large costs.
3. I did not say consultants will not sort out problems — they will present professional judgement on actions that should be taken to people who in most instances wont understand –if they could understand the judgement then surely they (the Officers and Members) should have identified them already without external assistance.
4. I support the use of consultants if an organisation does not have the internal expertise – in the case of the Council with the size of management team that they have you would expect the expertise to be there already — if it isn’t then managers with obsolete skills should be replaced with those with the right knowledge.
5. The issue over WG doing massive funding cuts potentially is for two reasons — yes Westminster have made cuts but how much money is being held back by WG ready for the Council mergers to oil the wheels to pay for redundancies and ease the cost burdens of mergers.
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