Nov 17 2009
Waste not ,want not – the Hammersmith and Fulham way
In each of the last three years the Conservative group on Fulham and Hammersmith have cut their Council Tax by 3%. That means the tax is now down by almost 9% compared with their starting point. According to Labour this must lead to lower quality and less service. On the contrary, there are better services and a happier public. In 2006 the Council was average amongst London Boroughs in resident satisfaction. By 2009 they had leapt to 5th place.
So how did they do it? One good example is the Council newsletter. They inherited a forthnightly glossy magazine which cost £400,000 a year to taxpayers. They now have a fortnightly newspaper which costs taxpayers zero. They cut the costs of printing and production, and took in advertising to provide some revenue. No worse service. Big saving.
They cut the debt by £20 million, saving £1.7m a year in debt interest payments. They put £90 million of work out to tender to cut costs and improve efficiency. They have cut the number of people needed to deliver H and F Direct from 227 to 149. They are already saving £10 million on their IT budget through a new approach with their partner business, and aim to save more than the same again.
In dozens of individual areas they are showing you can do more for less. What they have been doing in tjhe last three years, many more parts of the public sector have to do in the next couple of years. The good news is you don’t have to undermine schools or damage care for the elderly to bring in big savings.
Stop press: Further Council Tax cut planned for next year, fourth in a row.
17 Responses to “Waste not ,want not – the Hammersmith and Fulham way”
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
The Labour party don’t understand efficiency. They assume that to have more you must pay more. The idea that any of their pet social engineering schemes actually stifles things in the real world is completely incomprehensible to them.
However, to precis the disclaimer, history does not necessarily indicate future performance. One shining beacon of success in West London, although welcome, doesn’t prove that a national government of the same colour will have the same effect.
Are all the other councils that the Conservatives won from other parties managing similar improvements? Even if they are it’s not enough, because the country as a whole needs savings at ten times this level if the UK is to avoid bancruptcy.
I’m happy for the residents of Hammersmith and Fulham. It’s just that after a decade of disappointment, I’m going to need an ocean of good indicators before I start to trust the overall picture being shown to me.
The Labour advertising machine has instilled in the public mind that cuts in funding MUST equal cuts in front line services. The task for the Conservatives is to persuade the public that there need be NO connection between funding cuts and quality of service. The NHS would be a good start where half of the 1.3 million employees never see the patient.
What they are doing at H&F is great, but for the public sector as a whole, the requirement is not to do more with less: it’s to do much less with much much less.
I don’t think the message has got through yet.
JR: “The good news is you don’t have to undermine schools or damage care for the elderly to bring in big savings.”
Most readers of this blog already know this. What is a mystery is why your party’s leadership is so shy of explaining this to the wider electorate. Labour will always use the same old negative mantra and, as I have said several times before, your leaders should be able to counter that charge after all the time they have had to prepare. Their timidity simply encourages doubt in the minds of voters. Or is keeping quiet about what they plan to do, what Balls would say politics is all about? Most of us are interested in what good governance is about, not politicians’ self-serving games!
Just shows its not difficult, if you have the mindset.
All they are doing is applying simple Business logic to the task.
Always a good mantra:
“If it was my money would I spend this much, this way, or at all.”
Let us hope many more Local Authorites can grasp the nettle, and that Government can do likewise.
This is fine at local level, but at national level there have been substantial increases in public expenditure since FYR 1996/97, and 70% of the increase has been in health, education and social expenditure. Do we really feel that we have got 70% of extra value in these areas?
Has it affected their rate support grant yet? The RSG accounts for nearly 80% of council spending. That means that if the RSG was handed out strictly according to population or even current spending rather than being increased or held constant depending on what the councils choose to spend any council which could make 20% cuts (corrected for inflation & economic growth) would have zero council tax. That would be both prudent & popular & provide an incentive for people to elect competent councils.
The BBC have been peddling the “cuts equals lower services/benefits” lies again – http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/stephanieflanders/.
They commissoned a survey about where people thought the cuts should fall. Some of their questions were gems: “64% agreed that Britain “… should keep its promises and protect the aid budget.” Only 32% sided with the view that “helping others is a luxury we can’t afford. Development aid should have no special protection.” The amazing thing about that is that even given the heavily biassed wording of the question, 32% wanted the aid cut!
THE ESSEX BOYS Reply:
November 18th, 2009 at 12:20 am
…and what a waste of space that Stephanie Flanders is.
Off with her head!
Even more seriously..we’ve kept a close eye on H&F and rejoiced in their common sense and businesslike approach.
Surely this is a terrific story for the party to promote to counter Labour’s daft assertions that more expenditure automatically equals better service and an expanding economy.
We wrote to CCHQ with no response.
Less is very often more, has been a family mantra of ours for many years. Due to my Wife’s illness we cannot afford to own or run a car. Has this restricted us, well in some respects yes, but in many others no. We tend to have a great deal of fun when we venture out on the bus service, which in the area is very good indeed. I also walk many miles a week, which keeps me fit and young at heart. We do not as a result have a very large weekly bill for fuel, and we do not have a large loan to service. I am not suggesting for one moment that we all abandon our cars but clearly some of us can do that and benefit from it.
I used to work for Nationwide Anglia a very decent and well run company, I am very willing to confirm. Instead of every manager having a company car, they operated a car pool, so that one car could serve many managers. Again not for all companies but it can be done.
A great deal of money can be saved from budgets by switching from expensive Microsoft Software to open source Linux. As far as office tasks go open source programs offer all of the bells and whistles at a fraction of the cost and are far more secure into the bargain.
A great deal of money can be trimmed off , by ensuring that only legitimate expenses are repaid, and that Business dinners are not an excuse to waste tax payers money.
The Glossy Magazine example is a good one, and I note that Boris saved London millions by ended the Londoner. Had he wished he could have insisted it become a conservative magazine, but no the bottom line was saving the capitals tax payers money. How often do we visit a local council building to find that many of the leaflets have been read and discarded, often torn up or defaced. Simply by placing such leaflets in a position where they must be requested we can trim off a little of the printing costs, making each run last longer.
Power saving seems a no brainier, but how often do we find government and local council offices burning lights all day every day. A simple ambient light circuit could be installed to sense when the lights need to be on and when they are unneeded.
I could go on and on, but I think that I would only become boring after a short time.
If such measures are clear to me, the dullest and slowest of the brethren it must be obvious that indeed, there are simply thousands of ways of reducing the costs associated with the public sector. Less can indeed be more, as less waste will mean more room for tax cuts, something I think all conservatives really want to see.
Dear John. Connecting this post with the Sun’s expose of council tax rises, is there a correlation between locally raised tax, efficiency savings and central grants which adversely affects the headline figure in non-labour councils and benefits labour-controlled boroughs?
Here in the Fens we have a strongly Conservative County and local government. In such matters as Council Tax and bin collection, I notice that we are exemplary too. We are much greener, for instance, than my daughter in Australia who sees Global Warming almost as her religion.
In Education, however, we are still firmly in the dark ages with huge unworkable and inefficient Comprehensives, compared to nearby Lincolnshire with traditional Grammar Schools and Secondary moderns.
That is why I am so pleased that Michael Gove has appointed Rachel Wolf to support the Swedish Schools idea and with her own website and lots of letters in support.
Mr Tomkinson is right, there is a lot of talk about doubts in David Camerons honesty, and a lot of suggestions about his future behaviour as Prime Minister which need scotching before the smoke becomes a fire. I am one of the many who are worried that he is only going to have a small majority at best, any lingering doubts about, Europe, tax etc etc is going to frighten away the votes he needs for security.
I do enjoy reading your blog. However it does leave me frustrated at times because I would really like to see the clarity of your arguments receive more exposure.
One of the keys to this was to restrain the growth of spending.
Under the previous Labour administration spending had grown at 6-7% per annum. By restraining this to 1-2% per annum this set a culture of efficiency. Yes, some services then had reductions in budgets, but services improved.
The national parallel is the planned spending increases through 2010-11 to 2013-14. From £702bn next year to £758 billion a cumulative additional spend of just over £100bn. Fixing the “steady state” spend figure at £702bn for the whole of those four years would “save” £102bn without a single “cut”.
Changes which then produced savings would reduce the total further, helping to eliminate the defict and return to surplus and begin to pay down Brown’s debt mountain.
As a resident of H&F i agree with what you write.
It is not perfect, but overall it’s a decent borough to live in, and the council just seem more sensible than the last lot. I hope this is replicated nationwide after the next election.
This shows that you can deliver a smaller government and lower taxes while not neglecting the least well off. It is modern compassionate conservatism in action at the local level and deserves much praise.I admire the great degree of efficiency and common-sense waste cutting.
At a time of austerity we need to consider just how to provide decent services as resources are scarce.We should provide basic services but if people want extra then there should be means-tested charges so those who can afford to pay do pay.
In hospitals if people want a private room & Sky TV and M&S style food then they should pay if they can afford it.In schools if people can afford to pay for meals and one to one tuition then they should pay.If people want new roads then they should be privately built and funded by tolls.If people want extra services on the BBC then they should pay while getting a basic service free and if people want admission to an art gallery or museum then they should pay a minimum charge.Extras should cost extra.On recycling if people want to avoid sorting their household waste then they should pay an extra charge to avoid getting fined for not separating their rubbish.Universities should charge what they want for courses as they lack money compared to say Yale & Havard and we need better high education.Taxation cannot fund repairing our universities and more top up fees mean more an incentive for courses to improve.The more students pay the stronger the position they are in to demand better standards of tuition.Market forces and more responsibility of the part of the service user to fund their higher education can improve our universities.
We need resources for public services that should come from those who use them so that people are more in touch with what these services cost.That will make people more demanding and so state providers will be under pressure to raise their game.This will put less pressure on the taxpayer to fund everything as people would be more responsible for the cost of the public service that they where using.It would be a progressive measure as some of the charges would be means-tested so the rich would be paying their way.That would be redistribution as the poor would not be paying all these chances.With QUANGO’s you could just withdraw public funding and just let them sink or swim on the basis of charging for their services i.e. if you wanted to use that QUANGO then you paid a fee.Market forces could thus sink the QUANGO state.
People in a consumerist society have high expectations and are used to paying extra for using extra services as in hotels or Sky TV .Why not apply this logic to our public services ? That would personalize things and mold them according to what people want. Reduced pressure on the taxpayer is right as government needs to be made smaller as the budget deficit needs to fall & private spending & investment must not be crowded out if a recovery is to be facilitated.
I love what local Tory councils are doing – lets hope that it is an inspiration to David Cameron as PM when cutting public spending waste.