I've got a couple of ideas to dig us out of this mess:
a. Introduce a budgetary 'TACEVAL team', with a mandate to show up at airbase X and delve about for 2 months or so to spot wastes of money and false economies. We've all seen white elephants being built, sluggish contractors win the deal and take x months to do the job properly and money re-directed from genuine need cases to more higher profile edifices. The main cause of this is the relative inexperience of those with the reigns at unit level; moreover, they move after 2 years or so, so why bother with anything more than plugging the gaps? This leads on to...
b. Employ a 'long term management' team on each base, who can
at least maintain some kind of corporate knowledge in each location. Something like this - where this group stay in one location ad infinitum - will combat the 'tourist philosophy' whereby all of us disappear after 2-3 years.
No matter what the claims,
all public sector organisations waste money - military included. Devolving budgets to relative budgetary amateurs isn't the solution as they're inclined to spend every penny so as not to have their budget reduced the following year. However, if an
independent-ish long-term management team was established on each base, one of their jobs could be to put up a case to carry-over an underspend towards a long-term project the following year. Common sense really; if I want a car I save up rather than spend my money on a new television each year!
And why not TACEVAL other government organisations? Send in 'single mother' to the counter at DWP and see what service she gets. Then she writes a post-TACEVAL report on whether the system works! Biggest problem we have is we generate graphs at senior level, but nobody keeps an eye on the day-to-day stuff.
Going back to the military side of things, we hear about kit shortfalls fairly often, but
maybe, just maybe that's because it's such a big job to monitor how we spend the cash we're given, we don't have enough resources to see that it gets spent properly or re-directed intelligently. Accountability is the key and, who knows, we might just have
loads of cash lying around being spent on nonsense that
could be spent more wisely.
We've tried 'intelligent procurement', why not try 'intelligent budget management'?
