In this assignment I am going to state how financial information is used to support public services operational objectives and how they publish, report and measure financial performance. I am also going to evaluate how efficiency and effectiveness are measured by organisation, while evaluating good practice methods of managing procurement and contracting of services and also the impact of the political environment on the funding of public service organisations.
Wiltshire Police has a smaller savings requirement than most other forces. Wiltshire police has identified that it needs to save £16.7 million over the four yeas of the spending review between March 2011 and March 2015. It has planned how it will save £16.4 million of the £16.7 million so this shows that they still need to find £0.3 million. It is reducing police officer numbers by limiting recruitment and holding vacancies, in order to enforce this there is going to be 139 fewer police officers. Within the first two years the force successfully made 52% (£8.6 million) of the total savings required by March 2015, plans for years 3-4 the plan in place is to achieve a further £3.3 million in 2013/14 and another £4.5 million in 2014/15. The number of Wiltshire’s police officers in frontline roles is planned to reduce by 7% from 1028 in March 2010 to 961 by March 2015.
Prisons in England and Wales are to see their biggest overhaul in a generation and this was unveiled in a White Paper detailing £1.3 billion investment
In all honesty, I have never put too much thought in the idea of police forces consolidating because I never thought it was as big of an issue as it as. I was very intrigued with what I found on the internet. The first being the number of state and local-enforcement agencies that have already undergone the consolidation transition. Out of 18,000 agencies in the United States, 150 have made the change. It seems that towns and cities across the nation are all for the consolidation. Even though consolidation seems like a good idea at first, I found it to have the same recurring problem, budget inefficiently. With the many different cases I viewed online, I have found that the once estimated cost in the beginning, will double and sometimes triple
Starting in the 1980s private corporations have revolutionized the intentions of certain prisons after they assume control of them from the government. The privatization of prison has been most prevalent in the US, but they have still existed in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, South
Last month, Elizabeth Truss outlined planned reforms to the prison system in a government proposal, ‘Prison Security and Reform’ she labelled ‘the blueprint for the biggest overhaul of our prisons in a generation”. She outlined plans for a governor-led approach, in which prison governors will have the power to opt out of national contracts, and make their own resource allocation decisions. Six ‘reform’ prisons with these features are already being trialled around the country, but it is too early to judge their impact. (Ministry of Justice, 2016). Autonomy is expected to empower staff, improve standards and lead to a reduction in reoffending. The idea came from
In America, prison reform is a significant growing issue. The prison population is expanding at a phenomenal rate, exceeding the capacity of the system to accommodate the inhabitants of the incarcerated. The focus is increasingly on rehabilitation as a mean to reduce recidivism or prisoner relapse to crime. Prison in the United States is utilized more than any other nation, and the economy suffers financially from the extremely high costs. Prisons are expensive to build, maintain, and operate. Although, addressing the issues are also extremely expensive but can be considered an investment for the future safety of the community, creating a healthier, higher
More aspects of the penal system are now privatized, and are set to increase. This includes the privatization of such services as prisons, electronic tags, catering companies, probation work or prison escort services. David Taylor-Smith, head of the world’s biggest security firm, G4S says he expects private companies will be running large parts of the UK’s police service within five years (Taylor and Travis, 2012). Nils Christie’s text (2000) “Crime Control as Industry” draws upon increasing prison populations in the US. However reflecting upon that the prison population in England and
Andrews (2014) pulled together considerable amounts of research about performance management from around the world and came to four conclusions:
The Prison system has been around for hundreds of years, in one capacity or another. I believe that we have come a long way from the early jail cells in Boston, in 1767. Prisoners there were over crowded, for instance 16 prisoners per 12x12 room. I know, personally, my children’s bedroom is 12x12 and it is tough enough for 2 girls to share their room, let alone putting 16 grown adults in that room. There is no wonder that one of the prisoner’s died of suffocation. Since then, prisons have over gone a multitude of changes, from the amount of inmates placed in one cell, the amenities provided in each cell and the activities and jobs that each inmate would partake in.
The UK police service encounters many challenges. One being in 2000 the entire police officer strength was just over 124,000. There was a 3.1% increase in 2001-2002, which was the largest increase for nearly 26 years. There have however been fluctuations in 2006-2007, but these were only minor. On the other hand, due to budget cuts enforced by the Coalition government to address the shortage of money, police numbers have reduced. In the 43 police forces of England and Wales, there were only 139,100 full-time equivalent officers.
Direct costs for the Ruger Clinic of Toledo, Ohio totaled $100,000 in 2007 and represents the total cost pool. The Ruger's uses direct cost allocation of expenses in the cost pool to three revenue-producing patient services. Drivers under consideration for the allocation of costs are patient service revenue (a direct dollar for dollar allocation) and hours of housekeeping services used (a volume-based activity for allocation). Drivers amounted to the following activity in dollars and volume, respectively:
In some countries performance-based budgeting is known as budgeting results and performance funding (OECD, 2007). Young (2003) stated that most experts agree that, “Performance-based budgeting (PBB) is the allocation of funds to achieve programmatic goals and objectives as well as some indication or measurement of work, efficiency, and/or effectiveness”. PBB links directly the expected results and resource requirements (Navin, 2003). It is clearly shown that result is the focus of this budgeting method. Navin (2003) also said that performance measure is important in PBB because it shows whether the activities of the government departments actually make a difference in people’s life. Although performance would not be the only factor in a budget allocation decision, it has a significant contribution in the decision making process because it could give better informed
Each prison needs to ensure that each point in the table is being enforced and the prisoners are healthy, happy and well looked after.
The report addresses the following questions with related to the performance management of Overstrand local municipality:
“Accounting is said to be as old as any organized human activity. Dating back to Babylon and Humaraby’s book of law, over Greece and Rome and further on through history, there has always been a need to record events referring to purchase and sale, payment and collection. Such recording originally generated bookkeeping, which at the level of development of production forces was primarily in function of trade and banking. Its further development was according to changes in organization of business activity (Andrijasevic, n.d.).” According to Novicevic and Antic (1999), “until the 70s enterprises in West countries carried out their business in protected competitive conditions.” However, in today’s global economy, markets have become universal, with organizations viewing the world as a platform for carrying out their diverse trades’. To compete successfully in the global market, organizations/ businesses need to prioritize customer satisfaction parameters during business operations. To achieve this, they must concentrate on key success factors such as; costs efficiency, quality, cycle time, and innovativeness. “Quality has become one of the key competitive variables generating the need for evaluation of spending resources needed for the given level of quality by which the company can expect and achieve competitive advantage on the market (Gajic, 2005).”
As mentioned in an article to explore the use and degree of importance that managers affiliated many types of performance indicators which are in the MBS’s program agreement. It is divided into two main categories which is financial indicators and non-financial indicators. The category under financial indicators includes unit cost of output type (cost per identity card), cost reduction type (to achieve certain percent savings in operational costs), and profitability type (Return on Capital Employed - ROCE). Whereas, category under non-financial indicators includes quality of output type (number of customer complaints and timeliness of services) and quantity of output type (average number of IC per worker each day). The MBS initiative is cost savings thus, cost reduction and profitability type were asked and also to facilitate financial independence amongst Malaysian government with test on overall regime as stated in article.
The following report will justify the use and importance of finance as a decision making tool within organisational contexts. In addition, an application of basic financial techniques will be present in order to analyse the performance of an organisation in 2012 to their performance in 2013.