I worked for Local Government for 36 yrs…and in 2010 the wotsit hit the fan…I remember my boss coming into my office and asking me to cancel as many standing orders, subcriptions and periodic payments from that day…then the cuts started to become obvious…and Local Government has never been the same since.
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Yeah. Did you thin down on staff during that period as well? And then farm out your obligations to contractors and consultants?
Yep…nearly all departments had ‘reorganisation reviews’…which ultimately mean’t job cuts…or as in my case…an office of 5…gradually reduced to 1…over 2 years…but no extra or additional pay…then various menial cuts, such as reduced use of ‘flexitime’…and Local Government has never recovered.
Sounds familiar, and yet your fault for not fixing the potholes as well I guess.
I worked with (not as an employee) a council that had a £10m maintenance backlog on its highway structures in 2005. That was the structures we knew about. There were a whole load of culverts and things we had naff all info on because we couldn’t get into them. Their combined capital and maintenance budget was £300k a year. Never stood a chance if denting that. Their whole highways dept. basically consisted of one person.
Yeah…because…you were proud of your job and how good you were at it…you tried to help everyone and do as much as possible…but in the end you were defeated by bosses who were frightened to lose their jobs.
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There was that but as a consultant we probably ate over a third of that money in fees. 40% of that was gross profit.
But for me it was how the system is basically broken. Staff were shed so the optics show a saving but in reality councils are delivering less and less each year as external costs were increasing as budgets were milked from outside. And of course the budgets never increased but liabilities and costs did. Councils then take flack for not filling potholes etc.
And this is where I gripe about the extra £70 that they are demanding from me this year…for Adult Social Care…but they have closed all the centres, care homes and help areas…and these people who used these defunct places now use libraries, which are already included in my Council Tax…so why the extra…because it’s easy money to take off people who pay full Council Tax, knowing that if they don’t pay, they will face Legal Action…(the centre’s, care homes and help areas, are gone , buildings pulled down and the land sold off for private housing to be built.)…but I’ll never see any of that profit…
Whereas if the government does it, 50% is wasted in lethargy and then 40% is wasted in fucking it up.
It’s important to keep in mind that in highways, there is always a significant lag of visible performance due to the 15-25 year (depending on where in the UK) service lives of roads. The chickens will really come home to roost for the Conservatives over the next 10 years. All those maintenance and staff cuts (capital spend really has taken a hit) that have been taking place since 2010 with Cameron’s austerity measures will start to be highlighted since they weren’t repaired or resurfaced on time.
I despair for Local government and the pressure they are going to come under in the near term for actions that they aren’t even responsible for.
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UK aside, having spoken to a neighbour, the road we live on here in France - a very quiet street about 150 metres long with the only traffic being the residents themselves - is in its third year of works. In the last 6 months they have recabled (all utilities including fibre) down the centre of the road, resealed, unearthed again 2 weeks later, and for the last 6 weeks has had just gravel sitting over the trenches, so its already potholed all over the place. I expect them to dig out the trenches and recable once again.
I suspect our street is being used for training apprentices.
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A stretch of the A52 near where I live has been the subject of a year long widening and resurfacing programme that’s was as far as I can see totally unnecessary. It has also cost more money than the entire active travel budget for the whole country.
Herein lies the issue. We are fixated on making life easier for drivers, when we need to be making it much harder. So more people drive and more journeys happen by car. And that then, ironically, is presented as justification for under investment in public transport, cycling and walking.
The basic truth is that there are too many cars on the road. We can’t keep making more space for more cars.
When @Klopptimist says he has no choice but to drive I tend to believe him. A lot of people are in this position. But a lot also feel they have to drive because there are no alternatives. Or the alternatives are shit (isn’t is funny how we pretty much accept late or cancelled trains as baked in, but anything that delays or inconveniences drivers is seen as a national policy failure).
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A sort of side issue to your comment about cycling routes that feeds into @Noo_Noo 's comments about capital expenditure with little planning for future maintenance, there were kms and kms of cycle lanes put in across London boroughs during lockdown. What plans were put in place to maintain them? How do you organise resurfacing works for kerb-segregated cycle lanes? How do you organise sweeping along these routes? Will traditional sweeping vehicles fit? How does maintenance of footway-side assets (lighting columns for example) take place with the additional carriageway offset? What operational cleaning cycles are needed knowing seasonal leaf fall? How do you coordinate modifications of cleaning regimes when neighbouring roads are restructured/resurfaced since the cycle lanes will likely become inundated with small stones which can be deadly to cyclists?
I agree btw that more cycle lanes, especially for a place like London where people only need to make only relatively short journeys, can only ever be a good thing. But we also need to factor in that although the cycle lane structure will last longer due to a lack of heavy vehicles, they also have IMO higher operational maintenance requirements than standard-vehicle roads. Putting in cycle lanes doesn’t come for free.
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Evidence? Glad you’ve been taken in by the scam.
Much is “wasted” as you put it because of things like procurement rules that the public sector has to abide by. It is broken and grossly inefficient but that’s what governments want the public sector to be. Especially in the last 13 years so they can farm more out to the private sector. Public sector takes the blame for being inefficient.
This is one big reason why ALL of our public services are failing.
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I can try to add some sense to this, from a highways structures perspective. All highway structures asset owners need to have a management system in place to manage the condition of their assets. There is a code of practice in place that gives guidance on this and includes items such as knowing the structural capacity of the asset and if course it’s condition. It gives guidance on the frequency of checking this stuff. It also requires asset owners to have a maintenance plan / programme in place. This is where the £10m backlog I mentioned above came from. Basically you develop what is called a “whole life plan” for each structure which describes things like joint replacement in years X, y, z. Concrete repairs in a, and b. New surfacing and waterproofing in year dot etc. That plan varies and can follow different overall strategies such as enhancement or managed deterioration.
Having plan and then following it are two different things sadly.
Another thing that happens is, if there’s a new development of some form that someone external to the council or highway authority puts in place something that modifies the highway, a calculation will be done of the whole life costs for managing that infrastructure. The cost is factored back based on a guess of interest and cost increases to a one off figure. The council then adopts this new infrastructure as theirs and they will receive a one off payment for the future management. The theory is they are supposed to bank that cash and draw on it for future maintenance. I never saw that happen.
Sorry, long post
Less people.
Experience dear boy.
That counts for nothing.
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Maybe in your world your experience counts for nothing. Personally I’d question the quality of your experiences or your powers of recognition / memory. But let’s not personal, eh?
I’ve only worked in (in no particular order) Hospitals, doctors, MOD (extensively), fire service and education (at length)
Other people’s money is VERY easy to waste. The criminal conduct across these governmental organisation (I suspect) is prevalent across all of government.
And I’d put town planners and the abortion that is our local road network right up there with Boris and Blair.
You’re getting better, but you’ve just thrown out an accusation that every public service is riddled with criminality. You’re going to have to back that up.
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… and I am assuming that you reported this criminal activity at the time?
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