The Taxpayers’ Alliance’s lack of research beggars belief; it couldn’t be that the TPA are just a bunch of ideological zealots?
It was a classic Taxpayers’ Alliance story. The headline “Binmen get iPads to save on paper” ran across this morning’s Metro front page. The article detailed how supposedly-profiligate Bury Council was spending £9,000 on the Apple tablets so bin lorries could log details of collections.
The TPA weighed in:
“It beggars belief that a council making huge savings can find this money to splash out on iPads.
“Residents want bin services that are reliable and efficient, not council staff monitoring what they’re throwing out.”
The Daily Mail even lifted the “beggars belief” line for its own headline, topping off a fine day’s work for the TPA.
What actually beggars belief is the so-called alliance failed to do its research properly before commenting on something it knew very little about.
The initiative will actually save Bury Council money, the iPads just being a new form of efficiency-through-mechanisation. A spokesman for the council told Left Foot Forward the changes have the capacity to save the council more than £150,000 per year.
He added:
“This system should ensure that the number of missed collections is reduced to an absolute minimum, because any problems are reported in immediately to our Customer Contact Centre [rather than afterwards, meaning that houses would need to be revisited]. We collect from 83,000 houses each week.
“In the last financial year, we received 4,228 reports of missed bins – we estimate that it would cost £40 to revisit each house, equivalent to nearly £170,000 a year, so this new system should make hefty savings.
“Bury Council is consistently ranked as one of the country’s most cost-effective and efficient councils, and this initiative has been developed in-house in order to keep down costs.”
Honestly, one might jump to the conclusion that the TPA were not really interested in value for money for taxpayers, but on an ideological adventure to undermine public services and the public sector – in this case Bury Council’s directly-provided bin collection services.
92 Responses to “Crazy Taxpayers’ Alliance attack on council that’s *saving* money”
Guido Fawkes
My favourite bit of this is “the so-called alliance” from the supposedly “forward” blog.
Gary Flood
Brilliant… Taxpayers’ Alliance attack council that invested in technology to save money – http://t.co/hZIw7j1
lee
You can’t criticise the TPA and Mail for saying stuff for the sake of ideology over actual good sense, when your ideological opposition to anything *they* say leads to you doing the same.
Should Bury Council strive for greater efficiency? Yes. Should they feel comfortable investing in new technology where it will achieve that greater efficiency? Yes. Are Ipads merely vanity purchases which are significantly over-specced and over-priced for the task at hand (at leats insofar as you’ve explained it to us) Probably, Yes. Are there cheaper, better tailored, and more durable alternatives available? Definitely Yes.
lee
Oh, and can we also have a look at the £150k+ saving that is hoped to come from this, and ask if it sounds like it might work and, if so, what role the Ipad actualy plays in this?
As far as I can tell, around 4000+ collections are missed each year (which is fine, these things happen) and it costs £40 to revisit a house where the collection has been missed. The ipads are there to save all these £40’s (or, at least, enough of them to pay for the ipads).
How?
Seriously, how does this work?
The explination above says that “This system should ensure that the number of missed collections is reduced to an absolute minimum, because any problems are reported in immediately to our Customer Contact Centre [rather than afterwards, meaning that houses would need to be revisited]”
This makes no sense. Who immediately reports the missed collection to the contact centre? The binman who’s just missed the collection? Obviously not.
All I can think of is that they are using the ipad as a ‘register’.. they (effectively) tick off each collection, that is fed back to the contact centre, and they then get told if they’ve missed one. That would work.. but would be such a staggeringly over-engineered solution to a problem that could be solved with a clipboard and a little bit of diligence i cann’t believe that’s it.
So, please, I am open minded here.. I like innovative solutions to problems like this, and a modest investment to get rid of the cost and inconvenience (to householders) of those 4000 missed collections would be fine with me… but how the hell does this great plan work?
Leon Wolfson
A clipboard? Really? So you want them to print off and carry a list of every house on the street every time? This rapidly adds up. Not to mention the issue with pages getting twisted, mangled or mis-marked. Instead of a series of taps on a protected screen.
The cheaper devices are, so far, buggy and often downright unusable in many situations. There are, on the other hand, far more and cheaper mounts available for iPad’s designed for commercial use, and software development for them is also cheaper than for Android at this time.
By the time you’ve wasted someone’s time for a few months working down the alternatives, you’ve already cost more than it would have done to just go ahead and do something you can price in a few days for the iPad.
@20 – Okay, a secretive private organisation with unknown backers, which should be given no more notice than any bunch of idiots with a website. There, happy?