Question the unquestionable

Deep in the bowels of the government savings programme I am starting to see the first wall that government is going to hit on its marathon journey to rid itself of the deficit. Savings is all the focus now. Everything is about the bottom line, sofas are being decushioned looking for spare change, matresses ripped open looking for that bunch of fivers someone may have hidden down there years ago.

Papers are being written, savings ideas generated, finger in the air numbers being fed into the machine. But numbers gain a life of their own. When they are born and find their way onto paper they can become fact. The rush for ideas is incredible.

But in the haste, good old fashioned thinking seems to have gone out of the window. Pointing out the king has no clothes regarding numbers makes you as popular as burning the flag of St George on St Georges day.

But burn I must.

The activity (and boy is there a lot of activity) going on at the moment is all about writing papers with the word radical in it as if salami slicing an organisation or its services using the word radical is somehow going to make all the difference. It ain't. The words 'think the unthinkable' makes it in regulalry as does the word 'transformation'. All good stuff. But no content. 'We should seek radical solutions to transform and think the unthinkable' they all cry (or write). So what? Who is doing the thinking? Nobody really. 'We will save £20 gzillion pounds in the next 4 years by radically transforming the way we work'. Really? How?

Of course, money will be saved. No doubt. But the consequnces will be far worse due to lack of thinking.

So how should it proceed? That is hard. What we need is a radical approach to transforming the services provided. LOL. Only kidding.

While government goes out and tries to find solutions to problems they have yet to understand they should be looking at it from a different angle. The issue is that the right questions are not being asked. Stop looking for answers and start looking at the questions.

Where do you start? Well, for most of us we earn an amount of money each month and we decide, based upon that, how much we want to spend on housing, on clothes etc etc. Few (but not none) start by deciding upon their lifestyle and then worry about how they will fund it. Yes they can borrow but not forever. Of course they have the bankruptcy option but that is no good for Gov (or is it?). They lose credit worthiness for a few years and then start again.

Gov of course decided what it wants to do and then worries about the money.

Question 1.
How much money has the government got/want to raise from taxes?

Question 2.
With that money, what services can it afford to offer?

And these questions are the key to the approach to savings. we are currently running around with a view to seeing how much we could shave off of service provision. Savings must be reworked along the lines of:

1) We will spend this much money on IT. What can we get for it?
2) We will spend this much money on estates. If thats not enough, how do we accomodate our staff?
3) We will spend this much money on people. What can we do with this many people.

etc etc.

There is of course a balance between each of those to be looked at. But its an approach that will work from top to bottom.

1) We have this much money what services should gov supply. How much will we spend on delivering each of those.
2) For that money, what do we get?

It works all the way down the line.

1) I have £100 for departmental stationary. How best to spend it. If we cant buy pencils why not ban use of paper? etc.

If they continue to look at it the other way around savings will not be achieved and worse still, the services will suffer (as well).