Examples of waste in public sector?

[Hammy02]

I started a 3 month temp contract and they put me on a 2 day induction course. I didn't need to know the minutae of the organisation for a 3 month contract.
Had to fill out a form to get a book of stamps.
Had to fill out a form to get space in Outlook increased. No-one was EVER turned down for this so what was the point in the form?!

Public sector - NHS - here.

No overtime, limited TOIL.

• Supercheap work mobiles (are essential)
• Blackberry for senior managers only (and they have to be contactable away from the office so fair enough).
• Outside catering only when our volunteers come for meetings - they are mental health service users and on a low income. No cakes, sandwiches and fruit only.
• All coffee, tea and biscuits bought out of own money
• Have stopped ordering pens through NHS procurement as they are expensive and crap, we buy Bics from Tesco out of our own money.
• Awaydays are spent doing work. OK, lunch might be slightly nicer than usual, but days are longer and tougher.

We squeeze every penny until it screams - but it has to be said that our manager has professional financial advice on managing budget and so it gets done well.

Another NHS worker here. I'm paid for 30 hours and work at least 40 (and thats only counting the ones in the office), I use my own car and own phone for work, and never have the bill paid. Often work w/e for no pay at all, let alone overtime or time off in lieu. No catering at meetings - bring our own sandwiches and provide our own tea & coffee. Folders and files are re-used, so there are often 10 titles crossed out on the spine. Use my own laptop, provide my own notepads and pens, have not had training in years because my Trust requires non-clinical staff to pay 50 % of costs and I can't afford it - need I go on? I don't have get pissed off with generic statements about public sector waste!

So you do t think your surgeon should be part of a team?

I can think of few places that a team is more necessary!

In my 'public sector job' I buy my own lunch, tea/coffe. I never get paid travel costs if I have to travel for work. I buy felt tips, food, stickers, certificates, rewards, stuff for experiments, games etc, for my classes. I have to buy my own teaching magazines for my area at work etc. I don't get my own lap top, I work about 45+ hours a week.

I went to hospital recently and felt sorry for the really tired looking nurses leaving work after their night shift. I was seen within 20 minutes of arriving and the nurses were constantly running/walking around really fast the whole time I was in there whilst also dealing with patients. Not one nurse was just stood around. Besides which, even if they were, they probably deserve to, they are human and they do a fantastic job.

My personal bugbear is when national Government agencies schedule important meetings to start at 9 am, meaning that numerous Local Authorities have to pay for overnight accommodation for delegates who cannot get there on the day by public transport.

Yawn....
another public sector bashing then??

"i work in the public sector and we're so cheap it acutally costs money:

no food/snacks/lunch allowed for meetings so all-day meetings impossible as we have to let people out for an hour to feed themselves and then re-convene which always takes longer

must always travel second class even if first class is cheaper/quicker and means we are not allowed to take the sleeper train (scotland to london) and so have to pay for a hotel room on top

must not spend more than £60 on a hotel room even if it means staying so far out of town we need a massive taxi fare to get to the meeting in the morning

so few toilets per person we spend ages waiting, crossing legs, wandering to the other side of the building

no money for admin staff so £30k a year professionals with post-graduate professional qualifications and ten years experience spend literally DAYS photocopying, downloading and printing documents to file"

Fluffles that just about sums it up, especially the last one. Who do they think does that essential "back office" work if there are no admin staff to do it? So many stupid rules brought in to appease Joe Public which actually end up costing time and money. I copied the whole post as it bears repeating, again and again.

I went from private sector to a fairly brief spell in Social Services admin and was just gobsmacked at the waste - three people inputting exactly the same data into three different systems; it hadn't occurred to anyone that there might be a way to join it all up. You just wouldn't have got away with that (in my experience, at least) in the private sector. But I could never say anything - because "get your IT sorted and you can ditch two staff" isn't exactly comfortable.

In our public sector workplace we used to go on 'reasonable' (not outrageous) awaydays once a year max, mainly working but a bit of fun thrown in, and had reasonable refreshments (rarely lunch) for larger meetings and the like.

Nowadays our team 'away'days are held in our office with no refreshments and pay for our own dinner.

Fair enough its taxpayers money and there were (and are) some who still get away with paying too much for things. But we've got a pay freeze for 3 years, with the cost of living going up I won't be paying for my own dinner for much longer!

When I asked for a bigger bin I had to make a call they then sent me a form they then called me to discuss and even though I had the right number of people to have a bigger bin (and the very largest recycling bin that they provided without prompting when I kept having extra recycling - so pretty obvious I am recycling then) they then sent two members of staff on a ten mile round journey to check i had the 'right' sort of rubbish in my rubbish bin.

What actually happened is two girls turned up and knocked on the door they each put a pair of gloves on and opened the top of the bin - looked at the rubbish and said yes that is fine you can have a bigger bin. Bin duly arrived via a lorry...... they then called to ask me how my 'customer experience' had been.

We don't have many admin staff anymore. And our IT filing system has pretty much gone down the pan. So we don't bother filing.

We do waste time ordering stationery, arranging meetings, booking trains though but to be honest I have sympathy for the get rid of admin approach. Most (obviously not all) admin staff took 5 times as long to sort these things out, often badly, so it's probably cheaper to get people on £30k doing it (not a fulfilling job though is it!).

It's the ridiculous extremes that get me. We buy all our own pens, tea, coffee etc. I buy refreshments and resources for training because it's easier than answering all the questions about why we need these things. I take things in from home to try to save the team money.

But... I went searching for the cheapest places to buy a video camera and books we need, only to be told we had to buy from certain suppliers at 3x the cost. When I wanted a specific piece of equipment which is only available direct from the manufacturer we had a battle to get it because we didn't have an account with them.

A locum has been employed for 2 years, she'd love the job and she's great but they haven't advertised it. Then a year ago they said that when it was advertised it would be at a lower pay band, so she got another part time job and kept locuming on less hours. A year later and they're still thinking of advertising the post but on the pay band she's on anyway. Why didn't they just do that 2 years ago, she'd have taken the job and they'd have saved a fortune???

We ran a training course and earned some money for our team, but we have to spend that money in the same financial year or it disappears into the ether. So we've spent it on things which are okay, but not great. If we were allowed to save it we'd be able to afford some really good, useful things... which could earn us some more money, and benefit clients Hugely! We aren't allowed to plan for the future.

An excellent admin lady with a wealth of knowledge leaves because they refused to permanently pay her the extra hours she'd been doing for months to cover a staff member who left. (Total pay was less than the 2 staff anyway.) So for months senior staff end up doing her work as we have no admin support. Then staff redeployments mean we end up with 2 admin staff anyway who are good, but we've lost the knowledge of the original lady.

It's all so frustrating!

I work in public sector. To be honest I wish I didn't as its such a mess of juxtapositions. In my team there are about half of us who work like trojans and don't waste money, on the other side there are staff who 2 or 3 times a year take 2, 3 or 4 weeks off sick, then on holiday. The team I work in is suppposed to complete 6 pieces of work, every 4 months. We have one worker who has not even completed one and when taken through capability and performance HR were uselss and bascially too scared of being sued to fire her ass.

Another one here who buys her own paper, pens, rewards, drinks etc. Having to spend up by year end is a problem though. One year may be light on things you need, and the next might be a heavy year, but you can't carry over anything, and will get less the next year if you have spent less this year, so you are penalised for saving money. DH has to use his car for work, but we have to fund all the cost of buying and running the car.

We spend a lot on casualised labour, lose several working days a year across the whole organisation, because the IT contract was a cheap one and not fit for purpose, fritter away the goodwill of staff by being offhand and uncaring, and work people too hard resulting in high levels of sick leave for pretty nasty illnesses.

In our authority social workers did not have work mobile phones- despite going out usually on their own, frequently young women to extremely dodgy areas, all hours... they had to use their own mobiles.

Funnily enough this was picked up on, so SW offices were all issued with mobile phones (not one each, oh no, just office phones).

Budgets cuts have now meant that they cannot afford to pay the bills for these phones, so they are being cut.

Funnily enough though we can afford a £300 million contract with Capita to 'supply' out IT needs

Yes- we are a failing authority.

Oh, and I'm sure the renewal of the crapita contract has nothing to do with personal relationship between our CEO and a crapita executive either.

I think there is waste in the public sector but the biggest problem with it is that we expect it to do too much. Going back to waste I've done some work with public sector organisations and the worst thing I've encountered is the spending of money on things that employees admit they don't need in order to spend the whole budget.

changing all the signs in all the centres across the entire county because the blue border is no longer acceptible.

That is a collossal waste of money and time and has angered me incredibly...

yes, I was assigned the job of changing the signs in our centre

Now, when I next go into Tesco to buy all the colouring pens, pencils, rulers, glue etc that I need for my classes but can't afford to buy on my tiny department budget (and mine is one of the biggest departments in the school) I shall spit nails. Mind you, I think that when I liik at the flat screen monitor in reception too

TFM it drives my husband mad when I put school stuff into the supermarket trolley. I have just bought a class set of feltips from amazon that were half price which I was rather chuffed with.

Sometimes I add on to my husband's work stationary order, they probably dodge some tax anyway.

fairly mixed reporting here isn't it? Some reported 'wastages' are a bit out of context, and ime public sector expenditures are watched massively.

The curious thing of course is the 'economic system' we all work in i.e. capitalism, which is undoubtedly a massive 'mis-directioner of resources' system you couldn't design better if you tried to!

So the car industry spends more in advertising cars than they spend in actually making them! It sort of puts into a context comments about marginal expenditures in the 'public sector' mentioned on this thread. Or fleets of new cars apparently needed for staff every year when there is nothing wrong with the ones being currently used. Or..wait for it..the bonuses paid to "high -flyers" which end up being charged to the consumer-end.

I am pretty sure a fairly busy thread can be sought out of 'waste in the public sector', but I am pretty sure also it goes on on such a grand scale that oddly we don't notice it.

or indeed a busy thread can be sought out of 'waste in the private sector' as well.