Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Public service oddities: Scottish wolfman edition

As Tim reports on the TaxPayers' Alliance blog some councils spend far too much on formatting and printing their accounts:

"At a cost of £4 per copy, 1500 copies were produced, resulting in a bill to the taxpayer of £6000. As you can see above, it's clearly an expensive, hefty report. My source was sent 3 of these by post, at a cost of roughly £8 postage – odd seeing as the Trust could easily have emailed the report to our activist.

Seeing as the Trust didn’t send any by email, this resulted in a total postage bill for all posted reports of £21.20. That doesn’t sound that bad, but factor in that the Trust only posted 40 sets of accounts."

Others spend too little. These (PDF) were clearly scanned by a monkey with a soldering iron and are a year out of date. Then again, perhaps training a monkey to scan documents with a soldering iron is expensive? It is almost certainly time consuming.

Of course, neither expensive accounts nor monkey-embossed accounts are as frightening as the wolfman discovered by NHS Lothian!

(You've got to look at it right)

Finally, the Crofter's Commission website confuses me. I had no idea what Crofting was. Seeking an explanation I found this:

"What is crofting?


The Commission considers the meaning of ‘crofting’ to encompass the close and interlinked relationships between the land and the economy, agriculture, environment, heritage, culture and distinctive lifetyles of crofting communities."

What?

Wikipedia is more helpful.

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