680 words (7 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

Some of the posts on this site really test your patience. There can be just too much idealistic thinking.

Personally, the idea of a Value for Money Statement seems to me to be the latest invention of councils trying to find a new way to pretend they are doing something that they are not. The name says it all. If this is not an example of John Gall’s ‘operational fallacy’, I don’t know what is. Along with Financial Sustainability Strategies, it is a distraction from the serious work councils need to do to fundamentally change what they are doing.

Anyway, it started me thinking about my local council and what they could write about their way of providing me with value for money – assuming they were prepared to be honest. Here is my attempt to describe what I can discern about the principles behind how they actually think they provide value for money:

1. We put our customers first and have standardised our services and service levels to ensure each person in the community is treated the same, and as though they have exactly the same needs and expectations from us.
2. We take the lowest price for every tender to make your money go round and are prepared to say the quality is the same because we think you won’t really know or care about the difference and spending less money is what really matters to you.
3. We have centralised our decision making with the leadership team, particularly if it is a decision that is considered ‘risky’ from a compliance point of view, and they will tell frontline staff what they can and can’t do to make sure they give you what we think you need.
4. We worry more about what the State government thinks about our performance, especially when it comes to complying with their directions and expectations, than we care about what the community thinks of us.
5. We specialise the way we do our work to suit our expertise, skills and professional standards, even though we know it makes if more difficult for the people we serve and they have to deal with several parts of the council to get what they need.
6. We will blame our staff or contractors for the problems you experience in service delivery and say that it would have been alright if only they had done what they are supposed to do.

I know my council participates in statewide community surveys to see whether or not people are satisfied with them, they also have information on the State government’s ‘Know Your Council’ website that supposedly gives me an insight into how well they are doing. They also publish their budget. To be totally honest, if I looked closely at that information and tried to piece together a coherent view of what they are doing with a service as basic as road maintenance, and if I was a resident who could be bothered to write my view of how it actually provides me with value for money, I think it would go something like this…

“I am so pleased to know that we are the lowest spending council on road maintenance, even though I have had to replace a tyre on my car at my expense when I hit a large pothole that appeared after it rained. Even better, I can now see that I am less dissatisfied with my council’s performance in road maintenance than the people living in other similar council areas. To cap it all off, the council still overspent it’s budget on road maintenance, so next year they intend to set the same budget and keep a tighter rein on expenditure.”

The Unnamed Resident, 2024

Imagine running your own life like this – you save money now only to end up spending more later, complain about it only to be told you should be happy because there are others who are more unhappy, and then you are told it is only going to get worse next year.

I wouldn’t call that value for money.