Isn't it great that George wants us to join the government of Britain and help him tackle the deficit? In this new spirit of all being in this together, I thought I might highlight a few little known 'essential public services' over the coming weeks that are hanging ripe!
Proposed cut number 1 - The 'Food Vision' Food Mapping Toolkit. Seriously I'm not joking folks, the following is taken word for word from their website!
What is Food Mapping?
Food mapping has been defined as the process of finding out where people can buy and eat food...
Why carry out food mapping?
Food mapping is an opportunity for policy makers at local and national levels to work with others to develop an evidence base for assessing need, developing action plans and monitoring progress. In doing so, food mapping could help bring about positive change and effectively tackle the interlinking barriers to healthy food access. Food mapping can help inform an appropriate, joined-up and supportive policy framework for improving food access over time.
Benefits?
Gather evidence which can be used in grant applications to secure funding for food projects.
Drawbacks?
Food mapping can be time-consuming and expensive and so it is important that it is properly resourced and that you have enough staff...
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Hmmmm, what can George cut?
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26 comments:
SL, top stuff.
And if we follow the links from their website to their 'partners' we find the names of a few more quangos ripe for culling, and the websites of each these yield a few more names etc.
Incredible is it not MW, that such a collection of numpties exists?
Suggestion for cut number 2: the present government & thereby dropping a cable stitch?
Cut number 3: EU membership?
Cut number 4: MP 'resettlement grants'?
I suppose we should be grateful they still consider '...time-consuming and expensive and so it is important that it is properly resourced and that you have enough staff...' a disadvantage.
On closer inspection, their web site features this gem under the heading 'What's New':
'Kirklees submit awards for award
Kirklees council has submitted thier [sic] Healthy choices award for a Food Champion award
The link is mine - Kirklees Council is an old friend...
Has anything been publicly announced on how we go about nominating these things?
I've been looking all day and I have a bloody long list.
WFW, that was S-L's post, not mine.
McH, to summarise, one branch of government has submitted its award for an award to be awarded by another branch of government (link here).
DP, get to the back of the queue, along with all the other members of 'the public'.
I'm sitting here with my mouth open, amazed that anyone under any circumstances could consider this a sensible way to spend money.
Actually, it is sensible - if you are in the business of supplying food and want to find new customers.
Nothing this organisation does (apart from waste money) is not already done by Spar, Londis and the CoOp who each have excellent records for siting small profitable shops in areas the supermarkets do not serve fully.
Anything with the word 'stakeholder' in the title.
Yes! And almost everything without the word 'stakeholder' in the title.
great spot, S-L
Food mapping - the science of identifying what's lying on the plate?
Macheath:
Contrary to what most bloggers think, bureaucrats hate spending money (well on anything other than their salaries anyway).
The default setting of a good bureaucrat is to sit around reading policy documents, writing policy documents and attending the odd meeting where they will complain they can't do anything because they aren't being given enough money.
Whitehall has to bribe them to do anything with grants, which they then use to hire more bureaucrats, who will do some 'food mapping' or something, then write more policy documents and complain they haven't got enough money to do anything about 'food access'.
We need a stakeholder to kill off this vampire state.
S-L, very true, but they also judge the importance of a project/quango etc by the size of its budget - 'Mine's bigger than yours!'.
'...properly resourced and you have enough staff' implies that their priority is, as you say, to hire more bureaucrats.
@Steven L
The private sector has its bureaucracies,When two previously competing firms merge,there is generally a rationalisation in which the equivalent of one whole management disappears,rather proving that two management bureaucracies were not necessary in the first place.
With Tesco towns,if you were to introduce another supermarket to compete,neither would stock up to provide for 100% of the potential customers: they would both settle for 50% each.They would not then be competeting in any real sense.
Private-sector competition does not arise except under exceptional circumstances.
DBC R
That's a rather "interesting" way of looking at it. Since a lot of mergers aren't a success it rather favours the fact that two competing companies are more optimal despite the bureaucratic overhead.
However when departments are merged in the extortion funded sector there just seems to be a duplication of the bureaucracy.
DBC, of course the private sector has admin departments (a large part of which is to deal with govt imposed red tape) and yes, many directors pay themselves exorbitant salaries, but this is not really a 'cost', it is their 'profit share' (OK, it is a cost to the shareholders because the directors are stealing their profits), and is certainly not a cost to their customers.
As to your contention that there is no competition in private sector, this is largely only the case where the govt has helpfully erected barriers to entry or indeed forces people to rely unnecessarily on their services.
PS, there are plenty of places where Tesco and Sainbury's are across the road from each other, both with a full range of stuff. Do you not remember the concept of 'agglomeration'? Tsk, tsk.
I couldn't believe this. Food mapping is identifying where certain types of food shop are situated. My wife knows where they all are in our village, surrounding villages (or not) and the two major towns 10 miles away. Hell fire, I know where there are a lot too. It's called going out and using your memory. Or failing that, the effing yellow pages! Ye Gods taxpayers cough up for this old bollocks!
Once it becomes clear that there will be no "Bonfire of the Quangoes" and that business is as usual once again, I really must get round to setting one up like this - I'll never have to work again!
@MW
I certainly did n't say there was no competition in the private sector: only that it was only achieved with a lot of regulatory effort.
My mate ran a mobile burger van.He used to turn up at big street events: if he saw another van he used to work the other end of the street.If too many vans turned up (perfect competition)he used to get very annoyed.This is how the Ice Cream Wars started in Glasgow.
NB Henry George said no two firms are gonna build parallel railway lines to compete with each other by serving the same stations.He believed in the concept of the natural monopoly and so it was best to nationalise the railways (like 70% of the British public want our railways re-nationalised).
Contrary to what John Redwood says ,to achieve competition in the water industry you would have to have about five different sets of pipes outside supplying five different taps inside to get a proper consumer choice.
This is customarily referred to as over-capacity .Tsk Tsk.
B, I'm going to set up the Cow Attack Foundation to liaise between DEFRA, Countryside Alliance, CPRE, Ramblers' Associaton, RSPCA, ABI, NFU, legal profession etc.
DBC, you've got to look at concept of 'economies and diseconomies of scale' and 'minimum and maximum efficient scale'.
We both know perfectly well that a monopoly is sometimes inevitable, in which case either auction off monopoly right to private sector for limited time periods**, or (in the case of railways) accept that there will be state involvement/regulation.
** For example, with burger vans, it may be better to auction off a limited number of burger van licences for the big day.
DBC, I've worked in both public and private sectors.
They both have their fair share of stupid managers making idiotic and counterproductive decisions.
The main difference is that in the private sector you get told off for being late for work and can't just surf the internet all day if you have a hangover.
@MW
Please be aware of the prior existence of my Animal Attack Federation which trains animals to attack people in order to collect grant funding to research how to stop it .Unfortunately,my trainees have gone completely feral and I can no longer approach their island training ground.I have therefore changed the
ownership with the Land Registry to read Cow Attack Federation.Look on the bright side: you now own some really violent ,newsworthy animal associates .(Just don't go near them).
Would go along with most of what you say about licensing
of private operators.(But not with pubs where HG was again right in calling for no licensing laws.)
@ Steven -L. I too have worked in public and private sectors.Your stereotype of public sector workers nursing hangovers and surfing the Net all day is patholically prejudiced.
It's a sterotype yes, I mean nurses and teachers don't just surf the net all day. Nor do policemen for that matter.
Mind you, these public school policy wonks that preach about policemen being snowed in their stations under mountains of paperwork make me laugh.
I can't help but get the impression none of them have actually spent even one day behind the scenes in a police station and seen what they really do!
Then these numpties talk about 'putting them on the beat' meaning they should walk around aimlessly all day on £30k a year until they either smell someone smoking a spliff or worse, some bored teenager tells them to eff off just to get a chase.
#9 To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
Peels Principles of Policing.
Ah, that was before PC, when a load of bald middle aged men had the perfect excuse to fill their offices with young blonde totty!
Anyway, police and regulators don't have that much control over how much 'crime' there is, lawmakers do.
Make drugs illiegal = more crime.
Allow people to restrict the price and distribution of scarce tickets resulting in a supply/demand imbalance and have a globalised free internet = online ticket fraud.
Don't give a toss about all the crooks in Europe flocking to Tenerife as long as they aren't in your back yard = perpetual timeshare fraud.
etc etc
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