Office of the Deputy Prime Minister Part 2
Following the roaring success of the ODPM part 1 post in which nearly a billion pounds of cuts were identified from just a single budget, I am now hoping for big things from the rest of rest of the departmental budgets.
There are two more to look at: Resource Investment and Capital. Now that I've worked out how to get a spreadsheet onto blogger, I've presented all three budgets - the two new ones, and the resource consumption one from the last post - in the image below. If anyone can tell me how to make the image larger that would be helpful. Click on the image to get it up to readable size.
When I started the project, I said that we were looking for annualised savings of £50bn - implying that selling the family silver was therefore not an option. Despite some wonderfully constructive attempts to get me to sell off bits of the national heritage in order to help us reach the target, I'm not budging on this. However, where I am closing down a programme completely, I am going to take the capital budget of the relevant department into acccount when calculating the savings. This assumes of course that the same capital budget is available every year. While this may not be true in every case, hopefully the over- and under-estimates will even themselves out.
Having brought into account the investment and capital budgets for the programmes already identified for closure we now have chalked up a total of £3,049 million. I'm not proposing to close down any of the other programmes which have appeared on examining the new budgets. The only significant area which is new is "ALMOs". This stands for "Arms Length Management Organisation" and seem to be something to do with funding social housing. This falls into the "politically controversial" category and is therefore off limits.
However, we are 6% of the way to our target and we've only been scratching the surface. It may be that this is an easier task than I thought.
There are two more to look at: Resource Investment and Capital. Now that I've worked out how to get a spreadsheet onto blogger, I've presented all three budgets - the two new ones, and the resource consumption one from the last post - in the image below. If anyone can tell me how to make the image larger that would be helpful. Click on the image to get it up to readable size.
When I started the project, I said that we were looking for annualised savings of £50bn - implying that selling the family silver was therefore not an option. Despite some wonderfully constructive attempts to get me to sell off bits of the national heritage in order to help us reach the target, I'm not budging on this. However, where I am closing down a programme completely, I am going to take the capital budget of the relevant department into acccount when calculating the savings. This assumes of course that the same capital budget is available every year. While this may not be true in every case, hopefully the over- and under-estimates will even themselves out.
Having brought into account the investment and capital budgets for the programmes already identified for closure we now have chalked up a total of £3,049 million. I'm not proposing to close down any of the other programmes which have appeared on examining the new budgets. The only significant area which is new is "ALMOs". This stands for "Arms Length Management Organisation" and seem to be something to do with funding social housing. This falls into the "politically controversial" category and is therefore off limits.
However, we are 6% of the way to our target and we've only been scratching the surface. It may be that this is an easier task than I thought.
posted by Bishop Hill at 9:23 PM
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