Cuts in London can affect Wales

The Department for Work and Pensions could fail to achieve its target savings by 2015 without an adequate plan.In the first of a series of reports on how Whitehall departments are implementing cost reductions in 2011-2015, the National Audit Office concludes that the DWP’s efforts to cut spending ‘will not succeed without a good understanding of its expenditure, a clear vision, and a coherent, well-informed plan’.

NAO head Amyas Morse said: ‘There are signs of progress, but the department will have to improve in all three areas if its March 2015 targets are to be realistic.’
By then the DWP must save £16.9bn from benefit and pension payments, and £2.7bn from its running costs.
This year it is due to spend £155.6bn on benefits and pensions and £7.8bn on administration.
Running cost savings were expected to come largely from increased automation and staff reductions, but the NAO warned these should be coherent and not a series of random cuts.
The report, Reducing costs in the Department for Work and Pensions, says: ‘Any deterioration in the accuracy of benefit decision-making or levels of fraud, for example, could increase the risk of overpayments.’‘It is therefore crucial that the department executes reductions in running costs in a structured way so as not to undermine the reforms to the benefit system.’
But it says the DWP lacks a model of how to make such structured cuts, even though its agency, Jobcentre Plus, has ‘developed its model of how it will operate in the future to a greater extent than other parts of the department’.Having such a ‘target operating model’ would mean DWP managers were ‘more likely to be able to prioritise what changes are needed and to explain to staff what their role might be’, the NAO says.
I wonder what the DWP response to the Audit Office report will be - these cuts will have an effect on Wales and its to our  advantage for our Government  here in Wales to ensure that the comments made by the Audit Office are noted and actioned

Thought for a Friday

CHILEAN economist and environmentalist Manfred Max-Neef has said  humankind had reached the point ‘where we know a lot but understand very little’.
As an example,he has said  you could study everything there was to know about love, anthropologically, socially, biochemically, ‘but until you fall in love you’ll never understand it’.
He calls for the world to move away from a fragmented accumulation of knowledge and towards a greater capacity for understanding.
Since the age of seven, Dr Max-Neef said, he had always wondered what made humans different from animals. Was it a soul, intelligence or humour? He dismissed all of these, and said that eventually his father gave him the answer: ‘stupidity’.
‘There are no stupid elephants, no stupid dogs,’ he said, ‘and while no human being is free from stupidity, the more power they have the more stupid they become. They have all the knowledge of what should not be done, and they do it.’