Open letter to the Child Benefits Agency

[Zak33]

For the record....I'm having grief with Child Tax Credit, not Child Benefit.

[schmunk]

For the record....I'm having grief with Child Tax Credit, not Child Benefit.

Yes, Child Benefit is pretty straight-forward - you have a child, you get cash each week. Bish, bash and quite literally bosh!

[sammyc]

sick pay system is ridiculous, anyone i know who's ever had anything to do with them has had some sort of nightmare. be worse if/when they bring in the new 'dragging-you-to-back-to-work-lets-not-use-the-word-sickness-anywhere-for-god's-sake' benefit, whereafter they will still be trying to retrain you & get you to job interviews when you're brown bread.

[iranu]

Systems Thinking in the Public Sector

along with a snippet about the book This waste of our money is just madness - Telegraph

The sad thing is that it's actually quite simple to set up an administration of whatever flavour to give the public the services that they require and within a reasonable cost, however, the way in which organisations are set up and then administered causes all the problems and hence the waste of your cash and mine. I doubt that a single government minister in the last ten years has a) understood what their department does, b) understands the structure of the department they are at the top of c) has any management experience outside of the (student) union, the Labour Party, the school, or the lawyers practice.

The NHS is a typical example of the maelstrom. For instance, my brother's wife was wanting to get an appointment with a paediatric allergist but had been put in touch with a paediatric dermatologist. Now both of these people work in the same "service" department in the same hospital (and no doubt very close to one another), but there was no way for this woman to contact,let alone give a contact number for my niece's mum. There simply isn't the communication or homegenous structure available for those that are part of the system to interact with one another to provide a proper service and improve the service.

All government departments are like this. Couple that with managers who only look up and not down (and this goes on a lot within the private sector too because it's part of the Peter Principle which is built in with regard to a lot of organisations) along with a target culture that is dictated from the top down without any understanding of what those statistics will achieve (apart from being trotted out in the Commons to make the government look good) and you end up with what we have now.

Good on the OP to stick it too them. My own philosophy is to turn the turmoil to my own advantage. This is being done with regard to the foul up that is my 2004/5 tax return and I'm going to end up with a damn sight more than what I was entitled too.