Who gets to be in charge of the red telephone?

I have been scratching my brains as to why there is so little information on the newly created police commissioners, especially since the elections are in November which is a lot closer than you think.  Nobody as far as I know has stepped up for the Thames Valley vacancy. I thought it might be the outgoing leader of OCC but Keith has ruled himself out.  It is a hugely important job, The Thames Valley police authority covers Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire which between them have a combined population of around 2.2 million and the force has 8065 employees. The candidate will be on a salary of around 80k and I presume will have a four year term of office. 


Since there was so little information and nobody has announced they were running yet I fired off a email to the electoral commission who I'm delighted to say emailed back the next day with some information which I have pasted below:

The Government has not yet confirmed the rules that will apply to standing for election, or campaign spending and donations at the Police and Crime Commissioner elections. The Electoral Commission anticipates that there will be: 

• Rules about who can stand for election and the nomination process
• Limits on spending by individual candidates
• Limits on spending by people and organisations who campaign for or against individual candidates (non-party campaigners), in the run-up to the elections
• Rules about who candidates can accept donations from to support their campaigns in the run-up to the elections
• There may also be rules for political parties and non-party campaigners who support or oppose groups of candidates. 

We will produce guidance for candidates and agents, as soon as we can, currently we are waiting for rules to be finalised and agreed by Parliament. 


The most interesting thing is they don't have the confirmed rules yet. The police reform and social responsibility act received royal assent on the 15 September 2011 so I have no idea why the electoral commission is still waiting on the home office for this. It hardly smacks of great government though.


Having had a quick skim of the bill the role will be elected under the simple majority system, unless there are three or more candidates then the voting switches to supplementary vote which allows a first and second preference vote. All seems a bit odd.


I used to be all for more democratic accountability with elector mayors etc but having watched the antics of Boris and Ken and the frankly dreadful mayor of Doncaster I'm not so sure anymore. The big risk is the police commissioner will be too political and too populist when really for policing a more measured and impartial view should be taken on such things. On the plus side it does mean people will know where the buck stops but we shall see how it pans out. My only experience of commissioners is from The Wire where they are all corrupt or Commissioner Gordon who was useless and relied too much on the dark knight to sort out Gotham. 




Below is a link to the bill if you have insomnia or are like me interested in these sorts of things:


http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/13/pdfs/ukpga_20110013_en.pdf 


A link to the home office page where the person who came up with that orange colour should be sacked:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/police/police-crime-commissioners/

A thing in the indy from a couple of months ago, about the Thames Valley role:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/diary/diary-will-nobody-step-up-and-be-camerons-local-copper-6293709.html

Painting go faster stripes on the titanic

OCC (Oxfordshire County Council) have introduced e-books with a initial spend of £43,560 and a annual cost of £35,598 while cutting 25% out of the library budget partially by withdrawing up to 50% of staff funding rural libraries (and one city).


They are also spending £150,074 (estimate) putting wifi in every one of the libraries.

70 people have written and asked for e-books, anecdotally they say lots of people have asked verbally too.  70 out of 680,000.

The wifi is pointless because there is already decent private provision of wifi by bt-openzone and others in cities. You can go to most places in cities and pick up a wireless signal these days. In rural libraries its even more pointless, people come into the libraries to use the computers. They are hardly going to use their own laptops in the rural libraries when if they own a laptop its almost certain they have broadband at home. Of course for smart phone users we have 3g anyway and I don't go into my library to sit on my smart phone.

They have also started providing audio books as a download service. I don't have costs for this though. 

The technology for the audio books and ebooks is actually quite good and I think in the future it will be good. The problems are:

1. Ebooks wont work on kindle due to licencing issues.
2. The audio books won't work on any smart phone and some ipods because of the drm in use.
3. The choice isn't great in either ebooks or audiobooks.

I remember chatting to the acting chief librarian about ebooks last year and I told her that it was too early to spend money on this because of the licensing issue and the format wars going on between the major players. Obviously the content has to be protected with some sort of DRM (digital rights management) but this clearly fell on deaf ears.

They are cutting 13.5k from our library staffing but in exchange we get:

1. To run it ourselves by managing the volunteers with all the costs involved. (see previous blogs, it doesn't actually save any money)
2. Ebooks nobody wants or that most cannot currently use
3. Audio books that only people with old fashioned mp3 players can use
4. Wifi that is pointless and unnecessary.
5. Self service machines that we don't need in a small rural library

They would saved lots of money if they had put the ebooks/audio books/wifi on the back burner for a few years until things settle down and all the major parties can get their heads together and agree on proper standards, it can them be available to all rather than to select devices. 

This isn't the public sector way though, evidence of effectiveness, demand or need mean nothing. Its new and shiny therefore we must have it now.

Sigh

link to the foi:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/e_books_and_wifi#incoming-257315 

Volunteers, the unlimited big society resource/The big society tax

This post was prompted by a BBC Gloucestershire article that reports because of the cuts to their funding by councils, charities are warning they are going to rely even more on the voluntary sector:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-17021504

65% of the charities surveyed are cutting staff and a third are planning on increasing their use of volunteers. Considering charities are mostly staffed by volunteers already, the question has to be asked, where are all the extra volunteers going to come from?


In Oxfordshire, 21 of the 43 libraries are having their staffing cut by various percentages. A conservative estimate of the volunteers required to staff these libraries is around 500. They will of course have the "support" of the council who will train them in health and safety, use of the expensive self service machines (pointless in a small rural library) and they will be treat as a member of staff. There is a rather lengthy 11 page job description, which looks exactly like the paid job but without the wages. OCC have refused at every stage to put a estimate on how many volunteers are required, which is either a lie or they really don't know and this means that have no idea how much of the 313k is really a saving. I think the saving will be nothing looking at the work required by them to implement this and the extra staff in the back office they are hiring.


The main point from the survey in Gloucestershire is if the charities are going to require more and more volunteers then something has to give, the voluntary sector isn't a unlimited resource. It will be inevitable that if people are forced into volunteering to save a statutory library service then their time and skills will be sorely missed by a charity desperately in need of volunteers when their funding has also been cut and are forced to rely more heavily on the big society.


Libraries are a statutory service and the service should be comprehensive and efficient for all that want to use it, forcing volunteers to provide this service to themselves, at a time when volunteers are going to be desperately needed elsewhere is wrong. In forcing the volunteers without a choice to subsidise the statutory service with their time and skills, the big society is nothing more than a new tax. I thought Tories were anti tax?


A quote from Cameron on the Big Societytm


"This is not about trying to save money, it is about trying to have a bigger, better society."   


Well in forcing a dwindling pool of volunteers to run libraries and in all likelihood starving cash strapped charities of volunteers you are contributing to a worse society and in Oxfordshire's case, without saving any significant money, if any.


And finally, a volunteer isn't a volunteer if they are given no choice. The OED defines a volunteer as:


"a person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task"

I don't remember freely offering to provide a statutory service to myself that I have already paid for.

Twitter and external comms

Oxfordshire County Council have finally started to use their twitter account for something other than tweeting pointless (mostly to me anyway) press releases. They have been tweeting about if the gritters are out or not and if icy roads are expected. Since I moan about them all the time I thought a "well done" was in order. I hope this is the start of OCC using twitter properly. It is probably the most powerful communications tool available now and there are so many great ways it can be used to get information to people. Other ideas for them could be:

• Live traffic updates
• School closures
• Live tweeting of council meetings
• Twitter debates on a hashtag with councillors and officers answering questions from the public
• Bus delays

These are just off the top of my head at 11:30 at night, there are probably loads of extra things I haven't thought of and will add more if and when they occur to me. The Oxford mail have stolen a march on them by tweeting about schools that have been closed because of the snow. I don't know if they got this information from the schools directly or from the OxfordshireCC, either way the council should have this information before anyone else.

Not only could they separate out these things with hashtags, they could have separate account for them and people who are interested in traffic can follow and have text alerts whenever the account tweets. It has to be used carefully of course, I wouldn't use it like that if it was the endless stream of other things on the account.

Twitter can be a great thing for improving democracy and getting all the huge amounts of information OCC have to the people that need it. I only hope they and the councillors have the wit to use it.

I hate visio but have do a very quick and simple diagram:

We are cutting ours, go use theirs. They are cutting those as well?

Gloucestershire county council have recently released their latest "exciting"* plans for the library service. I say released, re-released is actually a better phrase since they are almost identical to the plans they put out last time. While this has been going on they have been making very savage cuts to the bookstock spend which is now minuscele compared to the other shire authorities.Not only are they cutting libraries that will close unless volunteers come forward as they have in Oxon, they are actively encouraging their library uses to hop across to the libraries in surrounding counties instead of using their own. The first hint they were doing this was when they released a map showing what was happening to their libraries and I noticed our library was it:

They drew a five mile circle around the libraries of all in neighbouring counties. So according to GCC 30% of the library service from Wychwood and Burford covers the residents of Gloucestershire. But wait, we are being cut too! Burford and Wychwood are having the staffing cut by 50% and the volunteers are going to have to cover this and lots of the other duties of the paid staff. We are also no longer statutory so presumably the 1964 act which states provide a service to those who live, work and study doesn't apply.

I am in no way saying that if OCC do force us to volunteer to cover the staffing cuts we would ever turn people away because they were not from Oxfordshire. But personally, if I have to volunteer for something I have already paid for, and I also have to provide for free to another authority then the other authority has to contribute to our library, I will be billing them for my time.

I have FOI'ed the cipfa and the management and support structure data for Glos. I am going to go through and see how much duplication there is in the back office. The 313k savings (only really about 170k, see previous posts) could be made by sharing two or three of the back office staff with Glos. Glos have around 900k to save (I think) and I'm sure that just sharing a building and with us and ditching the Holton head office would easily make that saving.

Both these authorities are tory, they doubtless all know each other from the endless, expensive jaunts to London pointless LGA** meetings. What are they playing at?

Here is the links:

GCC consultation which has the full map and lots of really useless data:
http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=107166

The article on the officer telling a Glos group to use libraries in other counties:
 bit.ly/w4h4Qg

p.s GCC seems to be experts in Orwellian/Humphrey Appleby double speak. They are even worse than OCC!


*Exciting is political double speak for crap
**LGA-Local government association, a lobbying group that taxpayers pay for so councils can lobby parliament. One part of government lobbies another with taxpayers money. They spent 27 million on consultants in 2010:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqdU0yhpP-MUdDVSZFdzMWVTRWhlYmFhS21FYW5fUWc&hl=en_US#gid=3

Scrutiny and democracy

You know the members are not effectively scrutinising a proposal when they are nodding along with what the officers they are supposed to be challenging are saying.

Even the scrutiny committee didn't realise that this wasn't going to be passed by the full body of county councillors. They had to seek advice from the legal officer. The decision was passed by cabinet vote only. For my bit, they spent more time challenging me on my data than actually putting any of my points to the officers.

Only at the end of the consultation process did they start using the phrases "statutory" and "non-statutory" libraries. They made no mention of this to the people being asked to consult on the proposal. People would have been up in arms if they realised that the position of the council was they weren't obliged under their interpretation of the act to provide these rural libraries.

What we are left with a fudge that I don't believe saves any money. I am going to be forced to volunteer my time knowing that the "savings" are not savings at all and the money they have made from cutting the staffing to our library will going into the cost of the self service machines, volunteer coordinator and training the volunteers.

We already have some volunteers in the library, they do the coffee mornings, knitting groups, computer group, chair fitness for the elderly, monthly reading groups for both adults and for children, visits to take books to residential homes and various other things.  It will be very difficult to find extra volunteers to sustain these "big society" value added extras and run a library that OCC doesn't consider to be statutory.


Below is the text verbatim I read out to the scrutiny committee. John Jackson had clearly prepared to answer the questions on my previous blog post on the size of the back office verses the front. The costs of this proposal and the points I raised below were put under no scrutiny at all.

I actually cried when I got a lift from the train station. I am 5.10, 14 1/2 stone and from the North and I cried.  I have my own personal reasons for loving libraries, I might write a post on it one day.

They really have no idea about what libraries are for.



"Oral submission to scrutiny committee by Trevor Craig. 12/12/11.

OCC claim that by making the proposed cuts to the library service it will save £313 thousand per year. In actual fact it won’t. None of the figures stack up.

1. OCC’s back office is larger and more inefficient than other similar sized rural authorities.

A.      For example the service support costs, which include human resources, property recharges, directorate recharges, finance, ICT, Legal etc. are far greater.

Oxfordshire has 43 libraries and spends £2,4 million on service support. Staffordshire spend £712 thousand for 50 libraries. This means the cost per library is 14 thousand for Staffordshire and 56 thousand for Oxfordshire. This equals 67p per head of population for Staffordshire and £3,76 for Oxfordshire. Both Notthinghamshire and Worcestershire have similar spends in this back office area to Staffordshire.

B.       

Since 2004-2005 this back office cost has increased by 24.36%.

C.

If these proposals go through, the non-library’s spend in Holton and County Hall will be £4.5m. With a greater proportion of the library budget going to the back office if this and the modest savings in back office go through.

The library service was asked to save two million. They proposed closing libraries, some of which they now consider to be statutory. This was rejected. They were asked to save 1.7 million. Eight of the libraries that in the first proposal were considered statutory are now non- statutory.  How can the council believe it has it right second time? It said it had it right the first time too. Even now the current plans for the library service mean the savings required are 714k short. Other options that have been ignored should be considered.

OCC will be providing neither a comprehensive nor efficient service for the taxpayer, as it is required to do by law. Alongside this the affected libraries will no longer be statutory a carefully hidden secret until now .

The 313 thousand pounds savings could easily be found in within county hall and Holton’s 4.5 million spend, which would be in line with the government’s policy on finding savings in back office areas.

Other ways to make the 313 thousand savings are:

OCC are looking to share services and make back office savings with other authorities in other areas. They are doing this with Buckinghamshire in trading standards. This should also be pursued with the library services which is very back-office heavy. A regional back office hub would make great savings for the taxpayer across all counties and would save the vital statutory front line provision.

And finally the 313k savings don’t take account of all of the costs associated with these proposals.

OCC have said the cost of first aid and fire marshal training alone will work out at £19.75 per volunteer per year. The actual costs per year on OCC’s site would work out at 82.50 per person per year. If OCC have found new ways of making this training cheaper, should they not be using this method to make savings in their entire training budget? The self-service machines £629.94 per machine per year (31 required).  And the cost of the volunteer coordinator will be 61 thousand a year. On top of this they will pay the costs for the volunteers to travel to the training. We have estimated the savings will be somewhere in the region of £177,629.57 based on 700 volunteers and friends running the libraries. This isn’t all the training.

The same “savings” could be achieved by losing a further 3 of the 60 in management and professional/service support.

3 back office jobs (Assistant county librarians) verses 700 volunteers

OCC have said the volunteers will receive all of the training that is provided to their own staff. They haven’t provided the in house costs for the following which I am sure isn’t anywhere near a complete list:

• Induction
• Ancestry training course (library staff all go on this)
• "Cracking displays course" (how to display books)
• Manual handling
• Risk Assessment
• "Dealing with difficult customers" course
• Cashing up and till management
• Insurance cost per volunteer per year
• Cost to process the HR, CRB, Travel expeneses
• Training in the 11 page volunteer job specification
• 23 Library service byelaws
• 11 Different council policies for volunteers

OCC will also be doing an annual appraisal on each volunteer-adding hugely to the already large admin costs. We believe there is no savings in this proposal, you are forcing rural voters to volunteer and transferring the costs to the back office.

OCC ‘s legacy will be remembered as ‘The Beeching Effect’ devastating the education,   social cohesion and equality to Oxfordshire rural communities for generations." 

The data:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqdU0yhpP-MUdFB3ZFBLbXYya3NCQXdlbERUU0RRalE

Common sense and the people before party

I keep thinking that the blog post I write will be my last. Then I keep looking at the data or hearing a new announcement and my brain starts whirring off again. In Oxfordshire such is the majority the Conservatives have in the county council that if they have decided to vote this through the other parties don't have the numbers to stop them. Since this proposal is from the cabinet a lot of people are assuming it is a forgone conclusion. I actually don't, I still think we have a chance to get the right decision for the people in rural libraries across Oxfordshire. I revisited the CIPFA data again and when looking at in with fresh eyes it is very clear that the savings could easily be made within the service support area of the council. Compared to the other shire authorities on the foi based "What Do They Know" website the OCC back office efficiency is terrible:

This is really, really poor compared to the other three. OCC should be on the phone begging to know from the others where they are going wrong.

The other thing I did was look at areas of savings I have found within the library service itself. To my knowledge none of this has been examined in great detail by OCC and hasn't been presented to the public for discussion as a option to make the savings:

I'm not going to waffle on about the numbers, they again speak for themselves. I don't like to see anyone lose their jobs but I really feel the structural deficit has to be tackled and the library service must take its share. The bit of the library service is the question.

I hope when the scrutiny committee and councillors look at the proposal and the independent response from cipfa they ignore the leading questions that you could only respond to with a yes and instead read the conclusion:

"Many locally-specific points were made; however key issues are relevant
to all group 4 and 5 community libraries. Most notably that: there is
little support for using volunteers for roles currently performed by paid
library staff; there is a genuine feeling that the consultation was biased
against those residing in rural areas; there is a concern that communities
will struggle to recruit the required number of volunteers, and that they
will not be able to retain those volunteers over time; and that the ‘pain’ of
the library cuts should be shared equally across all libraries, both urban
and rural."

Please restore my faith in politics and do the right thing.

"Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction."

Margaret Thatcher


The links:

Cleaning costs are here:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6dU0yhpP-MUNmY5NjQyYjItZWFlNS00OWVkLTkzZDEtMWVhMTMwZGI3ZGYw&hl=en_US

Previous post on the lights:

http://questioneverythingtheytellyou.blogspot.com/2011/11/yet-more-places-to-look-for-savings.html

Hillingdon savings:

http://www.bicesteradvertiser.net/news/8892542.print/


Back office savings (25% of 8m is 2m)

http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press_releases/2011/~/media/Files/pdf/2011/libraries/future-libraries-report.ashx


Cipfa data:

Notts:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/68692/response/184651/attach/html/2/Notts%20CIPFA%20Public%20Library%20Questionnaire%202009%2010.xls.html

Worcestershire:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/52523/response/130419/attach/3/CIPFA%20Public%20Library%20Statistics%20Questionnaire%202009%2010.pdf
Staffordshire:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/68686/response/175672/attach/html/2/CIPFA%20Public%20Library%20Questionnaire%202009%2010%20final%20submission%2015%20jul10.xls.html
Oxon
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqdU0yhpP-MUdFpzNkxacGpmclkwalJEZWF5b0M3WWc