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Council Tax - "Efficiency Savings"

andyandy
edited March 2010 in Local discussion
I got my council tax bill today. In it, it makes great claims about 'efficiency savings'. But when you read it, it doesn't really make any sense at all. An *'efficiency saving occurs when the cost of an activity falls, buts its effectiveness is not reduced'*. The saving has been worked out as over £300m in the Met and £37m in Islington Council. It claims £540 of "benefit" per household. This is half of your council tax bill. Surely, with all this effectiveness and efficiency, some of this money should result in lower council tax. If only 10% of the benefit is passed on to taxpayers, that's £50 off. At the extreme, we could have all the services we had last year, for half the cost. In the annual accounts, it then says "efficiency and other savings" are worth only £9.5m (which coincidentally is more or less the amount that other costs have gone up by) leaving everything else about the same. An "other saving", presumably, is a cut. Or non-efficient saving. Or something. Despite these efficiencies worth half of a bill, council tax itself hasn't gone down at all. Rather, Islington has congratulated itself on freezing council tax. I'd love to know how these 'efficiencies' were calculated. Is it publically available? Twenty quid says the whole exercise is nonsense on stilts - completely made up and meaningless numbers used to plug a gap in a form somewhere. I'd love to find the data that proves me wrong and shows we actually have £540 more value than before. Can any local government types point me in the right direction?
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Comments

  • CatCat
    edited 11:02PM
    For those paying by direct debit the council tax has gone up not frozen as we no longer get the £20 discount.
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  • MirandolaMirandola
    edited 11:02PM
    I thought council tax accounted for less than a quarter of local government funding. Councillor Watts?
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  • tamsintamsin
    edited 11:02PM
    That's true, the other 75% of money spent by the council comes from central government.
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  • andyandy
    edited 11:02PM
    Right, but what are the efficiency savings?
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  • tamsintamsin
    edited 11:02PM
    If you search for 'islington council efficiency savings' on google, this page comes up as number 2 in the list!  This alone might indicate a lack of public accountability for such claims.  However, I don't really understand google - is it possible that it knows I am a member of this web-site and picked it for that reason?
     
    On my lunchbreak I tried and failed to locate a document which explained Islington's efficiency savings.
     
    In the absence of that (I will keep looking later) the definition of efficiency is an increase in the ratio of outputs to inputs - it has nothing to do with effectiveness (which measures outcomes not outputs). 
     
    So a saving could be made by spending less, but achieving the same.  Or spending the same by achieving more output.  Or spending more but achieving proportionally more output!  In many cases therefore an efficiency saving does not turn into a reduction in costs.
     
    This is particularly true in the public sector where efficiency savings almost never = cuts in budget!
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  • poxypoxy
    edited 11:02PM
    Efficiency savings? Of course not. We have to pay for profligacy such as <a href="
    http://www.islingtontribune.com/news/2010/mar/chief-exec-john-foster-i-don’t-need-justify-pay" target="wasteful">this</a>.
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  • katiejanekatiejane
    edited 11:02PM
    How about a FOI request?
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