Spending Challenge: ideas page 2

These examples show some of the main themes and ideas that have been put forward via the public sector Spending Challenge website.

They are not ideas that have been shortlisted for further work or implementation but they will all be considered individually alongside the other 60,000 ideas that have been put forward.

7. Stop printing claims at benefit delivery centres and wait for the copies from the jobcentres. This could produce a huge saving in both time and money, spent on paper, and the time a processor spends printing out these claims which are then stored until the signed copy arrives. In the majority of cases the claims cannot be processed until the signed copies arrive so there is little saving in time for our customers.

8. In terms of spending less - what about migrating the whole of government (the NHS, Education etc) from Microsoft products to Linux and open source software like Openoffice.

9. Set the printers to a default setting of black and white print and only give the option of colour as a prompt. A lot of documents may be printed in colour unnecessarily

10. Get better mobile phone contracts. Our agency are paying £6 a month for the "hire" of the phone but paying for all calls and text on top of that. Ludicrous. There are hundreds of contracts out there that give free minutes etc. Mobile phones are needed so why are we paying so much for them.

11. We work at the British Embassy in the Visa section. …Whilst we feel that the right to appeal [after being refused a visa] is important, I would suggest charging a fee for such a service. The current system allows all applicants who are refused a visa (and who qualify for a right of appeal) to submit an appeal without any extra charge. To put this into perspective, a person who applies for a 6-month family visit visa, and who for example, produces counterfeit or forged documents is then able to exercise a right of appeal, which costs around £10,000 to hear. For reference the initial cost of the visa application was just £68. Even if the applicants appeal is dismissed the cost damage has already been done. The thought of losing a significant amount of money would act as a sufficient deterrent to non-genuine applicants, whilst we could have mechanisms in place to refund any costs to applicants who prove at appeal that the decision to refuse was incorrect. Thanks for the opportunity to have our say.

12. I think you should give people the option to negotiate their contract hours down from the current fixed full-time contract hours. I personally am contracted to 42 hours per week, but I believe that if that was reduced to 40 for example that I could still deliver the same outputs. I believe this to be true of many jobs within the government, and it would save having to make as many redundancies. Also, if people chose to cut their hours down, they wouldn't lose very much money, and if it's optional, then people can negotiate how many hours they want to work.

Return to Spending Challenge index