Download or read book Eleventh report of session 2010 11 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: European Scrutiny Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2010-12-24 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleventh report of Session 2010-11 : Documents considered by the Committee on 8 December 2010, including the following recommendations for debate, European Development Fund (EDF) expenditure; Financial management (two documents); Implementing the EU's Int

Download or read book Second report of session 2010 11 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: European Scrutiny Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2010-09-24 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second report of Session 2010-11 : Documents considered by the Committee on 15 September 2010, including the following recommendation for debate, financial management, report, together with formal Minutes

Download or read book Cost reduction in central government written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report by the National Audit Office on progress by central government departments in reducing costs concludes that departments took effective action in 2010-11, cutting spending in real terms by 2.3 per cent or £7.9 billion, compared with 2009-10. The analysis of departments' accounts supports the Efficiency and Reform Group's estimate that Government spending moratoria and efficiency initiatives, including cuts to back-office and avoidable costs, contributed around half of the figure, some £3.75 billion. However, the report warns that departments are less well-placed to make the long-term changes needed to achieve the further 19 per cent over the four years to 2014-15, as required by the spending review. This is partly because of gaps in their understanding of costs and risks, making it more difficult to identify how to deliver activities and services at a permanently lower cost. Fundamental changes will be needed to achieve sustainable reductions on the scale required. It is unclear how far spending reductions represent year-on-year changes in efficiency, or whether front-line services are affected; and the departments' forward plans examined by the NAO are not based on a strategic view. Departments' financial data on basic spending patterns is sufficient to manage budgets in-year, but information about the consequences of changes in spending is less good. Longer term reform is a Cabinet Office priority and departments will need to look beyond short-term cost cutting measures and make major operational change. Cost reduction plans also need to build in contingency measures to cover unexpected risks.

Download or read book Departmental annual report 2010 11 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Foreign Affairs Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-04-13 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the impressive performance of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in representing the UK's interests across the globe with what is, in Governmental terms, a particularly small budget, the Foreign Affairs Committee believes that the FCO is under-funded. This situation has been exacerbated by the Spending Review 2010 and the lack of detail provided by the FCO and the BBC World Service as to exactly how the spending reductions target will be met is disappointing. There are concerns about the steps taken by the FCO to adjust to its reduced budget: reductions in the deployment of UK-based staff overseas and the optimistic planned programme of property sales will have a detrimental impact on the ability of the UK to protect its interests overseas. The establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAS) will place a further strain on the FCO's resources. The Committee welcomes the appointment of Lord Williams of Baglan to the post of "International Trustee" with responsibility for the BBC World Service, but reiterates its belief that a formal concordat governing the World Service's budget and output should be drawn up setting out the World Service's independence from budgetary pressures elsewhere in the BBC. The budget cuts faced by the British Council will lead to the Council becoming a substantially different organisation by the end of the Spending Review period. The greater emphasis that the British Council will place on commercial activity risks a diminution of the UK's influence and soft power.

Download or read book Financial management report 2011 written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-11-25 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the fact that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has made improvements in its financial management, the NAO cannot yet conclude that the Department is achieving value for money in its financial management activity. This is because the spending watchdog expected faster progress in improving performance since it last reported in 2008 and a higher level of financial maturity, given the resources spent and the focus on financial management. The Department has undertaken a number of projects designed to strengthen its financial management. These have had some positive results, such as revised management reporting and improved forecasting, although the Department has not fully assessed all the benefits of these projects. Despite increasing the number of permanent, qualified finance staff and also offering financial skills training courses for non-financial staff, there are still weaknesses in financial capability. Financial skills could also be better integrated across the Department. The Department should also focus on improving its commercial skills, such as contract management. It should also develop a strategic model for engagement with its arm's-length bodies, to understand the risks that they face and opportunities open to them. Since 2002, Defra has consistently underspent against its Parliamentary estimate. The underspend in 2010-11 was £530 million (10 per cent). The Department has, however, improved its management of expenditure against its departmental expenditure limit, reducing its underspend in 2010-11 to £34 million (one per cent of expenditure).

Download or read book Financial Report of the United States Government written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 1064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Treasury minutes on the third to the thirteenth reports from the Committee of Public Accounts session 2010 11 written by Great Britain. Treasury and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reports published as HC 470 (ISBN 9780215555106); HC 440 (9780215555144); HC 471 (9780215555205); HC 439 (9780215555243); HC 538 (9780215555434); HC 424 (9780215555496); HC 553 (9780215555502); HC 503 (9780215555571); HC 573 (9780215555595); HC 610 (9780215555656); HC 594 (9780215555717), session 2010-11

Download or read book The major projects report 2010 written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-02-22 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report examines the Ministry of Defence's progress in meeting cost, time and performance targets for its 15 top-spending military equipment projects. The Committee has reported before that the defence equipment programme is unaffordable with commitments exceeding forecast budgets over a ten year period by £36 billion. The MoD's short term decisions to keep in year expenditure within voted limits and the need to understand the full cost implications of these decisions have damaging consequences. In this year alone the cost of the major projects rose by £3.3 billion and nearly £5 billion was lost by late cancellations. The scale of problems created by this financial imbalance masks the improved performance of the majority of projects against cost and budget. The Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) offered the Department an opportunity to bring its plans into balance with the expenditure limits set in the Comprehensive Spending Review. Projects such as the Nimrod MRA4 and Sentinel aircraft have been cancelled, accepting greater operational risks in some areas and writing off nearly £5 billion of taxpayer's money. But implementing the SDSR will require further decisions and the renegotiation or cancellation of a significant number of existing contracts to make the programme affordable. The Department has a poor track record in taking such decisions on the well informed basis necessary to optimise value for money. Other projects examined in detail include the Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers and the Typhoon aircraft.

Download or read book The Neglected Role of School District Revenue Instability written by Rekha Balu and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2011 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the school finance literature has focused on the distribution or equality of resources across school districts. Such literature compares levels of spending between school districts or states. But it has ignored the variability and unpredictability of those revenues within school districts over time. Meanwhile, public finance literature has focused on states or counties, and disregarded school districts as a unit of analysis for responses to fiscal stress. This dissertation addresses these gaps. First, drawing from techniques both within and outside of public finance, I contribute a new measure of fiscal stress based on unpredictability of state revenues. Second, I explicitly assess policy and tax mechanisms that may aggravate revenue instability for school districts and to what extent instability changes over time. Finally, I examine school districts response to chronic unpredictability in state revenues. Despite states' increasing reliance on more volatile sales and income taxes to fund public education, I find that unpredictability in state revenues to districts has declined by one-fourth of a standard deviation over time. In states that shifted to the more volatile sales and income tax base while also centralizing school finance as part of efforts to equalize school funding, unpredictability in state revenues to districts declined by a full standard deviation. In effect, centralization and more equal distribution of funding appears to trump the effects of a volatile tax base, as states have a greater ability to buffer against shocks than local education agencies do. Yet districts still face uncertain and unstable revenues from the states, aggravated by economic downturns. With primary and secondary data, I study the case of California where districts face uncertain cuts to their allocations during the year and between years. I use three key fiscal health measures: average revenue instability over time, whether revenues declined in the prior period, and the experience of the budget officer. I find that highly unstable districts are more likely to raise local revenues, but that cost-cutting is more prevalent that revenue-raising. Experienced budget officers use a greater variety of policy instruments to cope with instability, pointing to the under-explored role of management in the fiscal health of a district. These findings as a whole suggest that revenue instability merits further attention in the school finance literature in particular and public management in general. Unpredictability in states revenues is a phenomenon that concerns school districts, one that changes over time, but one to which they may adapt.

Download or read book Memorandum on the 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The government published its Civil Service Reform Plan (the Plan) in June 2012 (www.civilservice.gov.uk/reform). It followed the publication of the 2011 Open Public Services White Paper (Cm.8145, ISBN 9780101814522) which called for a smaller, more strategic civil service that does less centrally, and commissions more from outside. The Plan has many themes in common with previous initiatives that attempted to reform the civil service, and adapt it to the changing needs of governments and public service users, but is arguably the broadest such reform programme since 1968. This Memorandum is intended primarily to inform the Committee's discussions with the leadership of the civil service about the Plan. Given that the Plan is less than a year old, it is not an evaluation of the reforms in the Plan, the progress made against them, or the implementation arrangements in place. It is designed to support the Committee to engage with the breadth of the Plan, so that they can use their influence to help ensure that its implementation improves efficiency, reinforces Parliamentary accountability and protects value for taxpayers and citizens. The Civil Service, in its present form as of 2012, employs 459,000 people across 106 departments and other bodies. The annual spend on Civil Service pay is £16 billion. The projected cost reduction for the Civil Service, between 2010 to 2015 is £80 billion and the projected reduction in the number of full-time equivalent civil servants over the same period is 110,000 representing about 23% of total staff.

Download or read book Telehealth in Rural Hospitals written by CJ Rhoads and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Improving the quality of healthcare, while increasing accessibility and lowering costs, is a complex dilemma facing rural communities around the world. The Center for Rural Pennsylvania believed that telehealth, the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to support long-distance clinical healthcare was a viable solution so it recently provided grants to conduct a thorough investigation into the factors involved. Telehealth in Rural Hospitals: Lessons Learned from Pennsylvania reports the outcome of this year-long investigation. Illustrating telehealth implementations in rural settings, it supplies an overview of telehealth as well as an assessment of its economic impact. The book skillfully intertwines the research and academic aspects of telehealth with helpful insights from the author. One of the most important discoveries made by the author and her team of researchers is that all too often money is wasted by implementing telehealth for services that don't impact many people. This book shares valuable insights on using telehealth for integrative health practices that could improve the health of a greater portion of the population. This book illustrates how telehealth can, indeed, be the healthcare savior that some people believe it will be, but only under the right circumstances. It details exactly what those circumstances are so that everyone, including clinicians, patients, government entities, and vendors, can steer toward the best future path. The author identifies the obstacles preventing wider implementation of telehealth and explains how recent federal legislation will affect telehealth implementation in rural communities. She also points out the folly of developing electronic health records before federal data standards are put into place.

Download or read book Comparative Health Systems written by Johnson and published by Jones & Bartlett Learning. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second Edition of Comparative Health Systems: A Global Perspective offers new perspectives in health administration, public health, and public policy that address evidence-based approaches to health system improvement; systems thinking at the policy level; integrated information management; macro and micro innovation, and systems sustainability. Part I offers introduces foundational concepts including health and disease; and policy and economics. Two new chapters explore innovation and sustainability; and the role and contributions of non-governmental organizations. In Part II, the health systems of 19 countries are each examined in their own chapter, that carefully explores the country’s geography and culture, the history of its health system, followed by a detailed evaluation of cost, quality, access and innovation.

Download or read book State Department of Transportation Fleet Replacement Management Practices written by Paul T. Lauria and published by Transportation Research Board. This book was released on 2014 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This report identifies the current state of the practice regarding fleet replacement management and financing methods by departments of transportation (DOTs). A primary objective of this study is to identify methods currently used to manage asset replacement, including the financing of replacement expenditures. The report also provides a discussion of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of different management and financing methods. Information used in this study was acquired through a review of the literature and a survey of DOT representatives in all states. Paul T. Lauria, Mercury Associates, Inc. and Donald T. Lauria, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, collected and synthesized the information and wrote the report. The members of the topic panel are acknowledged on the preceding page. This synthesis is an immediately useful document that records the practices that were acceptable with the limitations of the knowledge available at the time of its preparation. As progress in research and practice continues, new knowledge will be added to that now at hand."--Preface.

Download or read book National Audit Office NAO Nuclear Decommissioning Authority Assurance of Reported Savings at Sellafield HC 778 written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's systems for recording, scrutinizing and challenging claimed savings at Sellafield, the UK's largest and most hazardous nuclear site, provide moderate assurance of reported overall savings since 2009-10. The original target for site wide savings was £796 million over the initial period of the 'parent body' agreement between Nuclear Management Partners Limited and Sellafield Limited (from 2009 to 2014) at 2012 prices. Based on latest data, the Authority forecasts there will be site-wide savings over the initial period totalling £652 million, compared to the earlier, October 2012, forecast of £825 million. These forecast savings relate to impacts in the initial period and do not include the impacts of savings initiatives on costs in later years. During 2012-13 the Authority removed legacy ponds and silos from the savings target in order to focus these projects on achieving progress on the ground, rather than cost-savings. The Authority tracks savings by comparing the cost of work carried out with the estimated cost of that work in the contract baseline, adjusted to remove savings not attributable to Sellafield Limited's actions. Site-wide measurement and reporting of savings mitigates the risks of efficiency savings being claimed by reallocating costs between cost categories. This report does warn, however, that the exclusion of legacy ponds and silos from the savings target creates new risks to the accuracy of reported savings against that standard. The Authority understands the risks and to mitigate them intends to continue to monitor site-wide savings

Download or read book Human Resource Management written by David G. Collings and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite over three decades of debate around the nature of human resource management (HRM), its intellectual boundaries and its application in practice, the field continues to be dogged by a number of theoretical and practical limitations. Written by an international team of respected scholars, this updated textbook adopts a critical perspective to examine the core management function of HRM in all its complexity – including its darker sides. Human Resource Management: A Critical Approach opens with a critique of the very concept of HRM, tracing its development over time, and then systematically analyses the context of HRM, practice of HRM and international perspectives on HRM. New chapters commissioned for this second edition look at HRM and the issues of diversity, migration, global supply chains and economic crisis. This textbook is essential reading for advanced and inquisitive students of HRM, and for HRM professionals looking to deepen their understanding of the complexities of their field.

Download or read book Cost reduction in central government written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Audit Office report on this topic published as HC 1788, session 2010-12 (ISBN 9780102975376)

Download or read book Progress with VFM savings and lessons for cost reduction programmes written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report discusses how much the Treasury's Value for Money savings programme has improved value for money across government. The programme aims to achieve government-wide annual savings of £35 billion from 2008-09 to 2010-11. Today's report concludes that the Treasury's design addressed some weaknesses in earlier savings programmes, and departments have made some progress in their management of their programmes compared with previous spending periods. Nevertheless, departments' planned programmes did not contain sufficient contingency and it is unlikely that departments will achieve the government-wide target of £35 billion of annual savings, which fully meet the Comprehensive Spending Review criteria, in 2010-11. To date the NAO has reviewed reported savings amounting to some £2.8 billion from five major departments which are to deliver around 40 per cent of the government-wide total. The NAO has concluded that 38 per cent fairly represented sustainable savings (green); 44 per cent may represent savings but with some uncertainty (amber); and 18 per cent do not represent, or significantly overstate, savings (red). Common problems include the use of unsuitable baselines for the calculation of savings, a lack of transparency over arms-length bodies' reporting processes, and difficulties in demonstrating links between savings and performance. This report is accompanied by the NAO's reviews of the value for money savings reported by the Ministry of Defence (HC 292, ISBN 9780102965407); HM Revenue Customs (HC 293, ISBN 9780102965414); and the Department for Education (HC 294, ISBN 9780102965421)