Councils must be cut to save money
ONE of the last acts of direct rule ministers was to put in train a review of public administration, the only serious attempt there has been to make our notoriously unwieldy public sector more efficient.
The Review of Public Administration (RPA) has cost 90m so far, but if implanted, the public will see savings valued at many times that amount.
A key plank of the RPA is the reduction in the number of councils from 26 to 11. This is an eminently sensible proposal as we currently have far too many elected politicians than is necessary to govern 1.8 million people. It is also hoped that the new and enlarged councils will have the capability to take on greater responsibilities and deliver improved and more cost efficient local services.
RPA is a simple and obvious idea; it is a clear "win win" scenario if ever there was one. So much so that even democracy was suspended and council elections were deferred until 2011 when the bright shiny new super councils would be ready to go. Really, what could go wrong?
The whole RPA plan is a mere whisker away from being shot to pieces as the MLAs cannot agree the new boundaries. All that expensive work down the drain and the baby is disappearing down the plughole with the bathwater. We can say goodbye to the potential for 400m and more in savings to the public purse and improved public services. But good news for all those MLAs who top up their Stormont salaries with councillors' allowances.
Then there is the Bain Report on the relocation of public sector jobs, completed in 2008 at a cost of 200,000. Again it was a proposal of immense common sense that recommended shipping 5,000 public sector jobs out of high-priced offices in congested, tram-free, Belfast and into more cost-effective accommodation elsewhere. Did you know that last year the taxpayer forked out 1 million for public sector workers' car parking spaces?
What possible justification can there be for paying premium rents to enable people to do the sort of office bound bureaucratic jobs that could be done equally well 30 miles up the road where the rents are a fraction of the price?
Shifting Invest Northern Ireland to that abandoned business park site in Mallusk would save millions. Or why does the Probation Board not take a leaf out of the News Letter's book and shift its headquarters to Portadown while keeping a smaller office in city for the work that really has to be transacted there? SDLP leader Mark Durkan was absolutely spot on when he called for Water Service HQ to be shifted to Altnagelvin.
The Bain plan would help to regenerate the more disadvantaged corners of the Province, make space for a new generation of the sort of entrepreneurial private sector businesses that thrive in city centre locations and relocate civil servants to areas where housing is more affordable. Once again everyone is a winner.
The report indicated the relocations would cost around 40m to implement and a blind man on a galloping horse could see that it is a money saver. However the Assembly says no and Bain has been binned.
Facing the music
Music, whether it be classical, jazz, folk, pop, death metal or management, is big business. In Northern Ireland we flatter ourselves that we are famous for our musical traditions but the numbers just do not bear that out.
Across the UK 100,000 people are employed in the music business but only around 1,500 of them are in Northern Ireland. Last year the music industry contributed 3.2 billion to the UK economy but less than one per cent, just 60 million, of that was generated here. You do not need to be an economics professor to grasp that there is the potential for a thousand or so jobs and a sustainable economic boost going begging. The equivalent of the Seagate or Wright Group factories.
One organisation that has been working, increasingly successfully, to exploit that opportunity was the Northern Ireland Music Industry Commission (NIMIC). Until, that is, Invest Northern Ireland pulled its funding. An INI spokesperson said: “Invest NI has had a very productive relationship with the principals and NIMIC has made a considerable impact on the music sector… All projects undertaken by NIMIC to develop the Northern Ireland music industry that Invest NI has funded have been successfully delivered. Invest NI is unable to consider further funding to the organisation.”
In other words, NIMIC is very successful so we are closing it down!
Of course public spending must be reined in but while NIMIC gets around 200,000 a year the NI Commissioner for Children and Young People’s annual budget is nearly 2m. Which looks like better value to you?
Shocking stuff
In August of this year the Utility Regulator, which likes to think of itself as a government department, took to the pages of the local papers to promise “rigorous scrutiny” before setting electricity tariffs. (Which sort of made people wonder if that was not what should have been happening all along.) We were also assured that, “prices are closely regulated… more tightly than those in GB”. And that “The Utility Regulator exists to protect customers.”
Two months later and we saw the result of this scrutiny and regulation when business electricity prices shot up by up to 40 per cent at short notice. Business customers, facing ruinous price hikes, looked to the regulator for answers, but answer came there none; prompting Bryan Gray of Northern Ireland Manufacturing to say: “The regulator was not able to offer any rational explanation whatsoever as to why prices have gone up as much as they have.”
In the absence of action the regulator resorted to that tried and trusted public sector procedure for kicking the problem into the long grass and announced an inquiry “into how suppliers have communicated with and set charges for business electricity customers”. The inquiry will report next year.
The regulator also said: “This inquiry has been prompted following contact from the business community.”
In other words the promised “rigorous scrutiny” will now occur after the tariffs went up and nothing would have happened if the customers had not kicked up a fuss. And it is highly unlikely anything will be done until all the winter electricity bills have been paid. Not what I would call protecting customers.
Readers will remember a very similar set of circumstances occurred with domestic electricity prices last year. You have to begin to wonder just how many of its nine lives the Assembly has left.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Belfast
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 12 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 7 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 12 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: East
