2014 September 16 « Dr Alf's Blog

Metropolitan boroughs, London boroughs and non-metropolitan unitary authorities are shown (the remaining areas are shire counties) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf is right to worry about the risks of Local Authority shared services centres because the real problem of lack of local authority worker productivity (32%) and the number of local authorities, constabularies and fire commands is not being addressed.

Nor is the problem of too many local authority layers of Government being addressed, nor the burgeoning problem of Adult Social Care, which now consumes 55% of county council, unitary authority, metropolitan borough council and London Borough Council budgets.

The steps needed are clear:

1) Abolish districts and boroughs and outsource all their functions to a rotating panel of providers

2) Reduce UK county councils, unitary authorities, metropolitan borough councils, London Borough Councils and City Councils to 15 (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland)

3) Reduce layers to five, and impose headcount restrictions to stop bogus grades re-emerging as happens now

4) Apply Lean EFQM to all services, recalculate headcount required fire all those surplus to requirements staring at the top with the 4000 or so council chief executives who are essentially not needed. In practical terms, this will mean firing 55% of all local authority workers

5) Reduce constabularies and fire commands to 15 and repeat the process but in the case of the police keeping the overall budget intact and using layering and procurement savings to fund cleverer detectives and more bobbies

6) Merge Adult Social Care into the NHS and get rid of Adult Social Care directorates in councils

7) Centralise all purchasing with a rotating panel of auditable providers changed once a year

8) Bring in random spot checking of all local authority workers bank accounts and in the case of senior officials, Chief Executives etc audit the accounts of their wives, girlfriends, partners, mistresses, children and relatives, forbid them from setting up foreign trusts

Catch and bring to justice two or three of the worst examples of corruption (there could well be many) and make sure that the sentences on conviction are draconian and that all monies are recovered in the full glare of publicity and with Dominic Littlewood the bald headed presenter given full scope to pontificate on the matter in a television programme

9) Bring in variable tax on foods, identify Adult Social Care recipients early, insist that people lose weight and stop smoking before they are given Adult Social Care or NHS operations.

Aggressively re-enable all Adult Social Care recipients so that only those truly in need of such help actually get it.

Apply gastric band and stomach stapling to the morbidly obese and prescribe Tai Chi for them once they are thinner

10) Merge all call centres and dispatching centres into CRM driven,web enabled shared services centres

11) Outsource whatever is left over

John Gelmini

The legislative triangle of the European Union (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf is over optimistic if he expects to get a strategy on energy that is clear from the EU.

This is the same EU that has member states who want to get more tourists to visit the place and wants more free movement of goods services and people.

We have not yet managed the technology of the Starship Enterprise’s “Transporter room” and Singlepoint Energy (extracting free energy from the earth’s magnetic field) which was originally suppressed by Robber Baron JP Morgan before Nikola Tesla’s death, still remains under lock and key.

Therefore, we are left with fossil fuels to power vehicles, transport food and generate power unless we build more nuclear power stations.

Moving to electric cars means mining lithium in places like Aynak in Afghanistan, where 350,000 Chinese mine-workers are hard at it. They first had to get there from China, then they had to be housed, fed, guarded by the Americans and that is before engaging in any mining. The mining requires heavy machinery and uses vast amounts of energy and then the lithium, all 3 trillion tons of it, has to be transported back to China turned into batteries and then transported again by ships (diesel powered) to car manufacturers in Asia, Brazil, China, India, Japan and Europe.

The IPCC Report, in its latest version, acknowledges that there has been no nett warming of the planet since 1998 but explains this away by saying that this gross temperature rise is being absorbed by the oceans by a process they have yet to fully understand and will then re-emerge in 25 years time with a vengeance.

People within the EU Commission actually believe this explanation despite the fact that shipping movements and emissions from ships were never in the IPCC reports and the fact that satellite photographs from NASA show that both the Arctic and Antarctic icecaps are 25% thicker and 25% larger in square kilometers than they used to be in recent times.

We are now up to 7 billion people, are flying more than ever, have growing rates of car ownership and yet the earth has seen no more than 1 degree of warming on a nett basis in 120 years.

The IPCC reports, straight out of the Club of Rome website and think tank are all based on the idea of catastrophe happening if the globe gets 4 to 6 degrees warmer.

I am no mathematician but 1 degree in 120 years does not equal 4 degrees so the entire strategy of reducing carbon emissions to “save the planet” is based on false numbers.

Yet despite this the EU seems hellbent on destroying perfectly good economies to the point where they cannot recover for bogus reasons.

The new man Miguel Arias Canete will I am sure do his best but I would have to say at what?

Strategies to solve non existent problems are a waste of time, employing vast armies of people to talk whilst creating no nett new jobs in 30 years is criminal yet this goes on year after year after year.

Dr Alf’s 3rd wish is to see the EU outsourcing non core things.

This will not happen either.

What we have is the meddlers and the misleaders in ever larger numbers, meddling with people’s lives, telling us things which it knows are untrue and wasting money on solving nonexistent problems whilst doing nothing about the real one which is adapting to global cooling,creating jobs and prosperity, improving energy security and being able to attract inward investment.

John Gelmini