It wasn’t that exciting. Essentially, I just thought it would be a good to find a way to allow one-off purchases to be exempt from the preferred supplier lists that councils use (and can make such purchases more expensive than they should be).
Any way, after clicking to submit my idea I noticed that it disappeared, which surprised me. I guess I’d expected that it would appear somewhere. Then I saw, instead, a screen appear telling me that there’d been 44,000 other ideas submitted! Brilliant. But how many of them are good ideas, I wondered.
Spending Challenge
And how long will it take the (probably overstretched) staff at the Cabinet Office to sift through them? Call me cynical, but I’m guessing a fair few will be along the lines of ‘leave the EU, cos it costs us loads’ and ‘get rid of all asylum seekers’. While these may be heart-felt opinions, they’re non starters for the Cabinet Office, which is looking for good ideas to cut down on waste.
I’ve been in the kinds of jobs where you have to sift through the heart-felt thoughts of the public before (I used to work for a local newspaper), so I’m reasonably aware of what people will send you when you ask for their opinions.
So it surprises me a little that the government hasn’t taken a more open approach to this problem. Rather than simply employing legions of civil servants to consider each idea why not simply publish the suggestions and allow the same great British public who have been prepared to share 44,000 ideas the opportunity to consider these suggestions and rate them?
Submitting my idea
Admittedly a few will be tasteless, others will be down right offensive, but by opening up the process it might help to foster the debate the government says it is so keen to have about public spending and start the job of sifting the wheat from the chaff – saving the government a bit of money in the process. Perhaps most importantly, it will prevent really good ideas from being dropped or missed.
Obviously, I’m going to post this suggestion, but thought it prudent to write about it somewhere first.
Here’s an idea for how the Spending Challenge can save money itself
I just added an idea I’d had for how local authorities might be able to save a bit of cash to the Cabinet Office’s Spending Challenge.
It wasn’t that exciting. Essentially, I just thought it would be a good to find a way to allow one-off purchases to be exempt from the preferred supplier lists that councils use (and can make such purchases more expensive than they should be).
Any way, after clicking to submit my idea I noticed that it disappeared, which surprised me. I guess I’d expected that it would appear somewhere. Then I saw, instead, a screen appear telling me that there’d been 44,000 other ideas submitted! Brilliant. But how many of them are good ideas, I wondered.
Spending Challenge
And how long will it take the (probably overstretched) staff at the Cabinet Office to sift through them? Call me cynical, but I’m guessing a fair few will be along the lines of ‘leave the EU, cos it costs us loads’ and ‘get rid of all asylum seekers’. While these may be heart-felt opinions, they’re non starters for the Cabinet Office, which is looking for good ideas to cut down on waste.
I’ve been in the kinds of jobs where you have to sift through the heart-felt thoughts of the public before (I used to work for a local newspaper), so I’m reasonably aware of what people will send you when you ask for their opinions.
So it surprises me a little that the government hasn’t taken a more open approach to this problem. Rather than simply employing legions of civil servants to consider each idea why not simply publish the suggestions and allow the same great British public who have been prepared to share 44,000 ideas the opportunity to consider these suggestions and rate them?
Submitting my idea
Admittedly a few will be tasteless, others will be down right offensive, but by opening up the process it might help to foster the debate the government says it is so keen to have about public spending and start the job of sifting the wheat from the chaff – saving the government a bit of money in the process. Perhaps most importantly, it will prevent really good ideas from being dropped or missed.
Obviously, I’m going to post this suggestion, but thought it prudent to write about it somewhere first.