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Henry Bremridge wrote:
Appologies, this is off topic in places, necessary to the bigger picture .....Recently was looking at a recent booklet from the local council on "howwe spend your money in Devon"Whee.... 2005/6 2006/7 Finance and IT 26.2m 26.9m Ok so I presume this includes staff costs in Finance and IT departments but I do wonder how much of this was spent on Microsoft Office / XP / server etc etc, and if they switched to OpenSource how much could be saved? I see the budget process seems to start around Oct / November: it might be a good idea around August to start the process of lobbying to get Devon council to look at migrating to OpenSource software.... Not sure on Cornwall, but presumably the same sort of figures apply Henry
I could tell you a tail or two about whats is spent in Torbay on Finance and IT .... But then I probably wake up in the morning out of a job :-(.
As for the budget process, well local authorities lobby government for grant allocation in Oct / November. The government then issue a "rough" formula for grant calculation and the councils then have to play a guessing game to ensure that they dont get capped. Too high .... get capped, too low .... start falling down on the funding ladder.... its a game and although I work for a local council and can therefore be accused of bias quite fairly.... I think its true to say that its a game where we (local authorities) dont set the rules.
Budgets are set for April new tax year and then the whole cycle starts again. Almost every year the grant formula rules change, so the lessons learnt from setting one years budget have to be thrown away and done a different way the next year. Statistically year on year the central government grant has been cut (so that taxes can be cut where possible), which means we have to find inflation + shortfall + funding for government pet projects like e-gov to stay still).
One could argue that by squeezing councils, this will make them unable to function properly so that the governement can propose regional goverment to the rate payer as an alternative, but that would be to cynical ? However if that ever comes then I guess when I am 70 it will be a quick trip up to Bristol to get my "local" free bus pass.
Rightly or wrongly Central grovernment have set inflation at something between 2 and 3 %. Councils up and down the country are being critisised for setting 4 + %. BUT fuel prices are not part of the governments inflation calculation (I wonder why ?) well maybe something like 22% has something to do with it. Councils need energy to run plant, offices, schools, Social Services etc .. etc.. etc.. but if fuel prices rise we dont get any extra for that. We also cant compete on international markets (for example we couldnt contract out road sweaping to the philippines). I suppose we could contract out all our IT work (@ 17.5 % VAT on cost) or set up a call centre in india. But both have logistical / marketing problems ( hands up all those who like their council tax query routed to india ?).
True we could use more opensource software. But there are problems there too. Like how do you unhook heavily integrated systems on Microsoft platforms and re-allocate onto open source. Which platform ... which distro .... whos going to support us ? Can we find people with the right skills quickly and errr well efficient to the rate payer (cheap in other words).
For example if I left Torbay tommorrow, well that would wipe out 90+% of the opensource / free software support & knowledge base in Torbay Council.... Hardly supprising that Torbay are reluctant to transfer key systems or even desktop tools away from Microsoft.
Duplicate this up and down the country (with some council's having no skills in FLOSS), and you soon see why things dont change much. Its true that there may well be technical people wishing to change in other councils (like myself), I dont know the numbers Im not paid to do that sort of research, but the majority of sucessful transfers to FLOSS / Opensource have so far been lead from the top, and I believe that that is the only way change can be sucessfully negotiated, whithout power from the top, no amount of technical will is going to get the position shifted. Sadly lots of users in councils are resigned to microsoft, know nothing of the alternatives, and are suspicious enough of IT (who would blame them ?) as it is.
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