@roaringdragon and @Lougle - I don’t know about the NHS, but I know that LAs historically employed CIPFA accountants, which is a different branch of the profession to us. We don’t know much about them, apart from one of my uni friends qualified as a CIPFA - he told me his LA was a big mess financially, with the accounts dept. not even understanding double entry book-keeping! There may be more crossover now, that trainees in our profession can train in industry, whereas in our day, we could only train in our professional firms. I have known a couple of accountants, who audited LAs, but I have never asked them what they think about them. (I don’t like auditing full stop).
I looked at my LA’s accounts once. I can’t remember, but they probably have income and expenditure accounts, which are used in non-trading entities, instead of profit and loss accounts, and they come down to a surplus of income over expenditure rather than a profit.
In our profession, wages, NI ‘ers, pensions and staff training would all be expense headings under staff costs. They are not add ons, just integral parts. It would be like saying pastry is an add on in an apple pie, when it wouldn’t be an apple pie without it!
As for trying not to fund staff training or whatever in your PBs, that’s just another tactic in their dirty tricks repertoire to save money, in the hope parents don’t know any better.
Say there are two SS teams in my LA, that needed to have regular liaison meetings - the room was booked, and refreshments organised. The catering department charged each SS team, say £2 per head for their tea and biscuits, which would form part of their accounting. I assume, SS would also be charged internally for the room hire? A friend, who worked there offered to buy a box of tea bags and a few pints of milk every week, to save her department £80 per week - so they could spend it on front line services instead.
They sound very bureaucratic and inefficient by our standards, when we have to think about how much our time costs, in units of 6 minutes and apply that to everything we do. For instance, there if a staff member wants to ask their predecessor a question about the job, they can’t go over to their desk and ask them. They have to book a meeting in a meeting room! All that is going to achieve really is hold up your work!
If, they themselves go into that detail in their own accounting; it’s inconceivable that they don’t consider major expenses like NI’ers, pensions and staff training when drawing up their own staffing budgets and they aren’t aware parents incur these costs in a PB?
DD1 sees her on site GP regularly, whenever she has a minor medical problem, and usually within 48 hours. Anyway, the onsite doctors are very good at writing letters for the DWP. The downside is though, that we don’t get clinic summaries after each meeting with the onsite consultant neurologist, so I have to use historic letters from her previous NHS consultants. I always write, that as there is no known cure for brain abnormalities or epilepsy, nothing has changed since then, and submit the annual seizure records (which are getting worse).