[Stuart]

Originally Posted by ntluser

Local council money tends to be used on the favoured projects of councillors. Quite a bit of it goes on their expenses even if that means a fact-finding tour to the Bahamas. To be fair some councillors and councils do try to keep expenses to a minimum.

That's true. One council I know of spent thousands sending councillors to Germany to look at a Road system, when a similar system was in use in the next borough in England. That sort of wastage is disgusting and should be stopped.

Council overheads have increased in line with wage and salary increases. In effect councils have to spend more because of the pay of people employed by them and we foot the bill. Local councils are notorious for overstaffing, instead of looking at more effective and more efficient ways of getting jobs done. The same thing can be said about national government too and a lot of publicly owned organisations.

Actually, local councils are now required to put most of the services they offer out to tender. In a lot of cases, overstaffing is not the problem. Inadequate controls on contractors is. Having dealt with contractors in the NHS, I can categorically state that a lot of contractors overcharge for their services. This is also a problem in Central Government

It's also true to say that there is a massive lack of common sense and creativity in the thinking at all levels of these organisations. My local council redeveloped the town hall putting in lots of extra features except of course a multi-storey car park to deal with increased demand for car-parking caused by the development in an area where existing parking facilities are inadequate.

Not all local councils are that bad. My local council had a new Civic Centre built complete with various meeting halls etc, & a multi storey car park. It's rumoured it was built for free in return for them giving land and planning permission to a developer so he could build a housing estate. Of course, that is only a rumour and I don't know if it is true.

The problem in this country is that we are pricing ourselves out of the market with the result that employers are taking their business overseas. Look at the new call centres in India and at the international companies who close down factories in the UK and transfer the work abroad.

Sadly, this government has concentrated on getting pay UP instead of going for getting prices DOWN. It hasn't focused on increasing efficiency by looking at better, cheaper methods of getting things done. Instead more staff are taken on to do work that could be done by fewer people using improved methods at cheaper cost and if you follow that to its logical conclusion we will have an endless pattern of increased tax bills both locally and nationally.

As I understand it, the main cost for most people is simply having a roof over their heads. Maybe if (and I know I will get flamed for this) house prices weren't rising so fast, the main reason for pay & price rises would disappear..