The Herefordshire Council spending spree

[Aylestone Voice]

It seems that money is not a problem for the Council

£54,000. for a room and desk booking system. This will be on top of the costs of the project team attending demonstrations.

Can nobody get a grip of this spending

 

https://councillors.herefordshire.gov.uk/documents/s50099879/Award of contract for room and desk booking solution.pdf

[Frank Smith]

Oh please don't jump onto this negative council bashing reteric like some other crap local websites. Before you start with your £££'s headlines how much do you think these items cost? 

Let's have a full detailed breakdown before you come up with criticism. I am all for saving money but these items you cannot just pick up in Argos! It is easy to sit back and have a pop, maybe you should offer your expert procurement services to see how much you can save. I am sorry but just fed up reading all this negative tripe, if people can do better get off your backsides do something about it.

Quote

Using the G-Cloud 12 procurement framework a long list of suppliers and a short list was created. This resulted in a single supplier being identified who could meet our detailed requirements. An evaluation of the costs of their solution was then carried out and it was determined that the cost was within the originally estimated cost. The use of the G Cloud 12 framework is in accordance with the council's contract procedure rules.

Rant over.

[twowheelsgood]

The grandly titled Director of Assurance and Resources is not very reassuring in this report. £54k for a piece of software is a lot of money. The report is badly written and doesn't justify the spend. There are no other comparative costs mentioned, nor, crucially, does it refer to any ongoing costs - yes, full breakdown should have been in the report, but the decision has been made. This isn't 'negative council bashing' or 'tripe', it's questions being asked about the spending of our money when, all the time, we are given the message that there isn't money for essentials, whilst spending on planters and the like is seemingly out of control.

This forum has a very long history of calling out the Council when needs be - it's not jumping on anything.

[megilleland]

Council spending

If you want to see where the money goes each month you can select all the spreadsheet, AutoFit the column widths  and using the data symbol scan quickly through the items.

The latest figures for December 2021 to March 2022 show the council spent £49,567,912.85 - average £16,522,637.62 each month.

Examples are:

Balfour Beatty £6,082,663.82
Blue Line Taxis £326,962.00
C M D Travel Hereford £204,107.42
Hoople £2,944,853.11
Redacted £2,726,318.80
Whitecross@Stepnell Ltd £762,167.58
Yeomans Travel Ltd £359,446.62

[megilleland]

Title of report: Citizens Climate Assembly Next Steps and Recommendations
Meeting: Cabinet
Meeting date: Thursday 28 April 2022
Report by: Cabinet member environment and economy

Purpose
The purpose of the report is to consider next steps and provide recommendations to Cabinet to allocate funding from the Climate Reserve with respect to the Citizens Climate Assembly recommendations.

The Citizens’ Climate Assembly is a new venture for the council to actively engage a demographically representative group of residents to support the council’s decision making. 

Citizens’ Assemblies incorporate a number of key principles: the provision of information from a range of experts, learning amongst participants, consideration of varied and diverse viewpoints, discussion, weighing up evidence, and making recommendations (followed by a voting process).

Another important element of Citizens’ Assemblies is that members have an equal opportunity to speak and be heard during the meetings (one of the key principles of deliberative democracy) with trained facilitators supporting this process.

Another important principle is the use of randomisation of sampling in recruiting members based on age, gender, ethnicity, urban/rural, socio-economic background, attitude to climate change and disability. 520 people signed up as potential Assembly members who were then asked to share information to ensure representation. In total 41 attended the Assembly meetings.

Council agreed on 11 February 2022 to allocate the £1.33m of New Homes Bonus for 2022/23 to the Climate Reserve. All costs of the projects outlined within the programme as well as the resource required to deliver them will be borne by the Climate Reserve, costs will not exceed the available £1.33m.

An element of the allocation of funding is recommended to be used to provide additional resource for the Council to deliver this work internally as well as enable the Council to procure expert external support and services where required to deliver the programme of works proposed. The revenue implications of the projects will be assessed during the development of their business cases and will be contained within the overall £1.33m budget.

Lot of detail here:

Appendix 1 - Climate Assembly Recommendations

Appendix 2 - Proposed action plan

I applied but didn't get on the shortlist - must be too green.