Council budget cuts

[turningright]

I get the feeling some folk may not understand politics fully, it is a weird science. So is finance and council structures.

 

did wikipedia tell you that too?

[shetlandpeat]

I get the feeling some folk may not understand politics fully, it is a weird science. So is finance and council structures.

 

did wikipedia tell you that too?

 

Explain please.....

 

edit'''''''

 

I did some checks and could not find any of what I have written explained in the same way on the website you have quoted.

 

Can you elaborate, or just stop being presumptuous.

[unlinkedstudent]

... perhaps putting it another way might be helpful:

 

Councillors delegate authority to Departmental Heads. Departmental Heads with their staff prepare report stating how much dosh they spend and will need per annum. Said Report goes off to Councillors/Cabinet/Leader for approval.

 

In other words, the Councillors are just approving annual budgets as they do every year but this year there are cuts.

[shetlandpeat]

I heard that the SIC employ someone to inspect all the skips throughout Shetland incase anyone dumps any hazardous waste or anything dangerous to the general public.

 

Do we really need this?

 

It didn't save my daughter and her friend from taking home a real gun that they found in the skip.

 

 

I think the reason for this would be the HUGE fine for dumping toxic waste.

 

And, anyone could have access to the skips. I am sure someone has salvaged stuff from a skip as they do at the dump, imagine someone pulling something from a skip and be covered in battery acid or another caustic or poisonous substance. Also, the folk who may have to sort through it would be at risk.

 

The fact the gun was found proves that there are some stuped folk out there who put it there.

[ArabiaTerra]

Staff numbers at the SIC are completely ridiculous we are employing more than a thousand folk (most of them managers) more than any comparable island group 25% of staff at the SIC could be cut without harming services just get those that are left to actually work for their wages for a change.

How many councils South have to run an inter-island ferry service out of their budget? And how many run all the old folks and special needs services in-house? If you take those parts of the council out of the equation then I think you'll find that the council is no worse than most others

 

If you privatised those parts of the council then the cost of the ferry service would kill the island communities, and the old folks services would end up being either much more expensive (due to the private company skimming off a profit), or provided at a much lower standard.

 

Are you advocating the privatisation of these services?

[shetlandpeat]

It does also worry me that those who demand these cuts and think they know it will be better would be quite wrong.

 

The work will still have to be done, the 25% of work will have to be split with the remaining 75%.

 

The way the process is run, you will not ket to keep just the efficient staff, some will have slower speeds due to some sort of physical difficulty.

GOV has not helped by passing the buck to the smaller councils. With the choice use of language they have started a process that has created more infighting for folk to keep their jobs than getting on with the jobs they were employed to do.

In every industry there are fiddlers, lazy folk and those that take advantage. It is the way of the Human, and at the lower pay JE has introduced, you may find standards drop.

Folk will suffer, as will local shops. Folk will not have the same money to spend, the council collect the cash, and the folk who have work with them spend it locally.

There will also be a huge dent in future growth, as the cash is not available for folk to expand their knowledge and strive for a better life.

The bankers have got off with a 800 million dimple, so as to lend 110 billion, to who? They will not want to lend to prop up a business if it is suffering unless it can get it back with profit. They gave out stuped loans b4, and here we are now.

I agree that savings have to be made, but why pick on those who rely on the system. The same system they paid into and hoped would help them through their twilight years.

[unlinkedstudent]

How many councils South have to run an inter-island ferry service out of their budget? And how many run all the old folks and special needs services in-house? If you take those parts of the council out of the equation then I think you'll find that the council is no worse than most others

 

If you privatised those parts of the council then the cost of the ferry service would kill the island communities, and the old folks services would end up being either much more expensive (due to the private company skimming off a profit), or provided at a much lower standard.

 

Are you advocating the privatisation of these services?

 

Re care homes - AT, that is a sweeping generalisation. Not all care homes run privately are on par with those outlined in TV documentaries. My mum lives in a care home and is extremely happy there. Whilst privately owned, she wants for nothing. The owner pops in weekly and whenever any repairs need doing, they are done; when furniture needs replacing, this too is done.

 

My dad lives on his own and has carers; he doesn't want to go into a home. Whilst his care package is organised through the LA, the carers are from an agency. When he had the flat refurbished, he went into a care home and loved it. It was one of those new modern "care villages" and he is now thinking of moving to one.

 

Many LAs tend to provide a list of care providers and then charge extra for organising the care with many individuals not realising they could contact the agency direct and get the care for on average £2 per hour less.

 

Yes, some care/nursing homes down sarf are terrible but please don't tarnish those people who work in the care sector and/or own care homes with the same brush. You don't know that standards would drop.

[paulb]

also at a third of the price up here.

[smeghead]

These council cuts are a joke, from what I hear every department has had to submit services/areas they can do without or cut back on. All these possible cutbacks are going to the full council and it'll be like a lottery.

 

Surely by cutting 7.5%[This Year]+7.5%[Next Year] across the board would end up in a more evenly balanced council. The way the toon hall is going about it could mean one department has every single proposition cut, and another department doesn't have anything cut.

 

E.G. cut winter roads maintenance / increase social care - so you employ more carers, who then cant get to thier work because the roads arent gritted.

 

And that gets me onto another point, did anyone else notice the mass of social care jobs in the paper before christmas? Bolster the numbers by 5-10% so any future cuts dont affect overall numbers of staff, they can cut and not renew posts and still have the same staffing levels they had before. I can see some service managers seemingly have thier heads screwed on by pre-empting these cuts.

 

As for cutting the black bags down from 100 to 52, this will only help in the short term. Why dont the council just scrap black bags in the toon and give everyone wheelie bins? Larger initial cost for the bins (£23), but you then dont have the recurring yearly cost of black bag supply and delivery (£15.50 per box + delivery costs). Keep the country areas with thier 100 bags/year until they get more areas up and running with wheelie bins and then apply the same to those areas.

 

As for the recycling collection in the town and no collection in the country. There are recycling points thoughout Shetland, surely if they put more recycling points across Shetland including within Lerwick those who want to recycle can just goto a collection point and dispose of thier items there. Then you wouldn't have the need for a kerbside collection of recycling (could you mollycoddle the public anymore?), just get the truck to go round and empty the bins at the recycling points instead. Another effect of this would be not having to purchase and deliver millions of plastic recycling bags, surely the idea of recycling is to minimise waste not to produce more, especially plastic.

 

As for management SIC have hundreds of managers, what do they all do? do we need such a large number of them? Other local authorities have cut from the top down, why is the SIC cutting from the bottom up? Less people out doing the work and more people planning it. These people are meant to be working for the public, by having a duty of care to run the best service possible for the least cost to the public. Seems to me that they are more interested in saving thier own skin by skimping on areas that are already heavily under scrutiny so they can ease financial hit to the areas that keep them in a job, all of which is just to appease the town hall mafia, which in turn keeps them in a job.

 

I heard once that for every person out working on the street there were seven sitting in an office, I've always wondered just how conservative of the truth that figure is.

 

/Rant

[shetlandpeat]

I'm not saying that the long term sick employees should have to lose out.

 

Just the skivers that have the odd day or two off .. because they can.

 

There is a system in place in most councils that monitors sickness. You can be sacked because of sickness.

 

You do not automatically get 6 months off with full pay, it depends on how long you have been employed.

 

The trouble is the more you want to monitor sickness, the more it will cost.

 

Most will give a back to work interview, here if you have been sick 3 times in a year or for 10 consecutive days would are on the first stage of sickness monitoring. A time scale is agreed and personal circumstances are looked at and considered.

Break that and you move to stage two, where you are told if you have x amount of days in x amount of time then you will go on to stage three, medicals and the such.

 

Those of you who think that sacking or not paying folk is the best way would instantly would break many terms and conditions. Some of which you could not break because they are part of employment laws.

You could also jepordise the welfare of your employee of which the employer was duty bound to maintain.

There would be a knock on to this, larger companies would follow suit.

The complications would far outweigh the original cost as well as turn the work force against eachother, but that is part of the big society being told to us by the Dads Army's Walker of bolitics.

 

Folks here have just started to loose their jobs, now the fear has grown, you cannot obtain credit because you work in the public sector, folks will loose their houses and the councils will have to put them up in hotels, guest houses and hostels. Folks will be forced to move into smaller and smaller properties. House prices will go down as their will be a surplus on the market.

 

Then to top it all, you need up to 25% of the value of a house once you do get back to work to hold your head up high.

 

Then to top that, there will be folk being victimised because of their status.

 

200 bn for PFI debt to come

 

25 bn lost in tax avoidance

 

70 bn lost in tax evasion by larger companies and individuals

 

26 bn not being collected.

 

12 bn benefit fraud

 

Poorest 20% will pay 39.9% taxes

 

Richest 20% will pay 35.1% taxes

 

Last year GOV spent 1.8 bn on private sector Consultants

 

PCS

[owre-weel]

You would reduce the sickness bill by half if employees were not paid for the first day off. A lot of "one day" sickness is due to hangovers or 'I can't be bothered to get out of bed today'. They would be more likely to get to work if they thought they wouldn't be paid.

 

Monitoring sickness levels is an important part of managing employees, it costs the council a fortune each year. Managers need to keep accurate records and follow procedures. Unfortunately some do this better than others.

 

When I worked for the council, there was a collegue who had at least three "one days off" each month, usually after a heavy night out, and his line manager just said "theres not much I can do about it"!

 

Eh! how about manage? Mind you the manager also had a lot of time off!!!

[shetlandpeat]

It can be a stressful job. Folk have this idea that there is no work done.

 

The sickness, why should folk come to work ill for fear of loosing a days pay. All this does is spread any sickness around the office/gang. Not really sensible that. And all that to catch a few, who should be reported, especially when there are so few numbers in the community, but, would you grass them up, and perhaps, why haven't they? Some tax payer knows this is going on.

 

It also allows single parents to budget incase of sickness.

 

There are two sides to the coin.

 

GOV want to remove some of the power local councils did misuse to be able to monitor this sorta thing.

 

Most folk do not choose to be ill, of have medical conditions that can require time off work. So to penalise them would not be fair.

The big society is supposed to be the fair one too.

 

I also think that folk should not be able to find out how much I personally earn. Producing wage stats is all fine and well, but to highlight someones earnings to a point is invasion. Some of the top jobs maybe.

My contract is between my employer and myself. Not Joe Public.

 

 

I have not seen the PM cut his lifetime payments for being PM, he will get half is wage for the rest of his life.

[Breiwick123]

Geopark.

£35,000 a year for somebody to look efter wir stones?.

As far as I'm aware Shetlands geology has for the last 50,000,000yrs or so managed to quite happily look after its self, and I'm quite sure it will manage for the next 50,000,000 with no assistance financially or otherwise from the fat cats at the SIC/Amenity Trust.

So in these financially constrained times to spend any of the money that we don't have on this project would seem like a p**s take of Geological proportions.

 

(*** Mod - moved to proper thread ***)

[shetlandpeat]

It may be the requirement to maintain the status given. Having the Geopark label may also bring in extra revenue, especially as the interconnection and windfarm debate seems to run and run.

 

And if folk do want to visit, it would need proper organising and someone to liaise with other departments.

So they would need to be at a certain level of management, perhaps have experience and be a professional at that as well. What would be the point of having the status and not capitalising on it.

Sounds like the run of the mill, we got it but cannot be asked to flaunt it.

 

It is quite plain to see.

[exciseman]

^

Absoloutely – lets save £35000 by getting rid of the Geopark status that brings tourists to Shetland and spend twice that on a communications advisor/spin doctor to cover Cluness, Simpson and Buchan every time they waste another few £million