Effect of central on local

September 2, 2009

New academic review of government policy by the team at Birmingham INLOGOV for the CLG.  It’s rather dry but for this e-government researcher the main interest comes at page 38, when they state that:

“Four of the Departments policies were seen as having had a particularly significant impact on improvement: CPA, the e-government startegy, LPSA’s and the best value regime.”

I’d be surprised if they hadn’t had a big effect being the focus of the inspection regime for years, but were the improvements the ones the citizen wanted? The views expressed in studies within this report will be from those high up the ‘food chain’ in local government and would only see the tip of the service iceberg, at a policy level.

I’d like to see a similar report from street level…now what do the citizens think of duCkLeG?

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Channel accounting

July 9, 2009

I’d been asked a question off blog about how the various figures apparently showing the incrementally lesser costs of face-to-face, to telephone, to web, that keep cropping up, were calculated.  Since this discussion is becoming more common and seems to rely upon mythology as much as science, I thought I’d try to briefly fill out some of the blanks.

 I did a quick survey of some of the figures being quoted:

  NWEGG Lambeth Socitm (min) Socitm (max)
Face-to-face £7.81 £1.66 £4.83 £9.56
Telephone £4.00 £0.85 £1.28 £5.57
Touchtone   £0.09    
Web £0.17 £0.09 £0.22 £0.56
Payment network   £0.50    
Direct debit   £0.02    

 The methodology used by NWEGG in association with CIPFA was documented and published by the CLG in March 2008 and entitled –

Delivering Efficiency: Understanding the Cost of Local Government Services

 and can be found here:

 http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/localgovernment/pdf/730431.pdf

 Socitm employ CIPFA Accounting Code for Best Value as the basis for collecting costs, which should mean that the NWEGG and Socitm figures are on a par. CIPFA charge £850 for a copy – http://secure.cipfa.org.uk/cgi-bin/CIPFA.storefront/EN/product/AC073_

– must be a best seller at that price!

 I do have a slide with the Lambeth calculation and I would say that looks like common sense, too.

 So, why the differences? As was discussed at a meeting I attended with Socitm a while ago, an authority who had done their own sums found vast differences between services. This does make sense. Not all services are equal, displaying planning information on the web is easier than displaying benefits information and is likely to be accessed more often, too. So it probably depends which services one chooses to account for.

 My conclusion – get everyone to pay by direct debit wherever possible!

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