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: