问答题 Beeshire Local Authority (BLA) is a local government body which provides a range of services for the area of Beeshire within the country of Seeland. Beeshire is a wealthy area within the country with many tourist attractions. One of BLA’s tasks is to ensure that waste is collected from the homes and businesses in Beeshire. The goal for BLA’s waste management department is ‘to maintain Beeshire as a safe, clean and environmentally friendly place where people and businesses want to both stay in and return to.’ The need for waste collection is linked to public health concerns, the desire to keep the streets clean and attractive and the desire to increase the amount of rubbish which is recycled. BLA is funded through a single local tax and does not charge its residents or businesses separately for most of its services, including waste collection. There is no public or political appetite for outsourcing services such as waste management. Waste collection is performed by the workforce using a fleet of vehicles. The waste is either taken to recycling plants or else to landfill sites for burying. BLA obtains revenues from all the recycled waste but this only just covers the cost of running the recycling facilities. Against a background estimate that waste will increase by 1% p.a. in the future, the national government has ordered local authorities, such as BLA, to promote the recycling of waste and has set a target of 40% of all waste to be recycled by 2015. In order to discourage the creation of non-recyclable waste, the government has imposed a levy per tonne of waste buried in landfill sites and has stated that this levy will rise over the next five years in order to encourage continuing improvement in the amount of recycled waste. Currently, Seeland is in a long recession and so local authority revenues have fallen as tax revenues reflect the poor state of the economy. Along with other local authorities, BLA has tried to cut costs and so has focused on financial measures of performance. In a recent, private meeting, the chief executive of BLA was heard to say ‘keep costs under control and we will worry about quality of service only when complaint levels build to an unacceptable level.’ As one of the area’s largest employers, cutting staff numbers has been very difficult for BLA due to the impact on the local economy and the reaction of the residents. The current performance indicators used at BLA are drawn from the existing information systems with national figures given for comparison. Those relating to waste collection for the year ending 31 March 2014 are:

问答题 (a) Explain why non-financial indicators are particularly useful for public sector organisations, illustrating your answer with brief examples relevant to BLA.(6 marks)

【正确答案】Public sector organisations have a number of problems which can be at least partially addressed with the use of non-financial performance indicators. –Lack of profit measure BLA’s waste management is not expected to make a profit. This is obvious from the fact that there is no specific charge for the service and so no clear revenue stream associated with it. The danger is that the only financial measure is cost and, in the current state of Seeland, this would mean that positive progress would only be seen in its reduction. This would be to the detriment of service and the three goals for the department (safe, clean, environmentally friendly). –Multiple objectives It is difficult to say which is the single, overriding objective unlike in a profit-making organisation. This requires an approach which takes account of all the perspectives. BLA shows this in its three goals, none of which are financial. –Difficulty in defining a suitable financial measure Many non-profit seeking organisations provide services for which it is difficult to define a cost unit. At BLA, should the cost unit be cost per tonne of waste collected or cost per household or cost per tonne of waste landfilled? Also, the benefits of the service are mainly non-financial such as clean streets. The three goals of BLA’s waste management department could be addressed by looking at health statistics, tourist/resident surveys and tonnage of recycled waste. These are all non-financial in nature.

【答案解析】

问答题 (b) Explain how the value for money provision of waste services by BLA should be assessed by suggesting and calculating justified performance indicators using the information in the scenario.(12 marks)

【正确答案】he standard criteria for analysis of the value-for-money of a service are: – Economy – the optimisation of the resources which the organisation has; ensuring the appropriate quality of input resources are obtained at the lowest cost; – Efficiency – the optimisation of the process by which inputs are turned into outputs; – Effectiveness – how the outputs of the organisation meet its goals. At BLA: Economy could be measured by looking at the cost of buying equipment such as the lorries or fuel or the major cost of staff (44% of the total). The current average staff pay is $31,429. This is above the national average pay of $29,825. However,paying more for each member of staff could result in greater efficiency as staff members have improved skills. Efficiency could be measured by the number of tonnes of waste moved per staff member (629 tonnes/staff member) or the cost of collection of waste per tonne ($114) or the staff cost per tonne collected ($50). Benchmarking these against national averages, the cost of collection of waste per tonne and staff cost per tonne collected are below the national averages of $123 and $51 respectively while the tonnes of waste moved per staff member (583 tonnes/staff member) is higher than the national average. This implies that BLA is showing good efficiency in its use of resources. The balance of capital and staff costs would also indicate how labour intensive the department’s work was, for example, the value of the lorry fleet per tonne collected compared to the staff cost per tonne collected. No figures are given for lorry fleet value, so no quantification of this can be done. Effectiveness has to be measured against the departmental goals: 1. Public health concerns – this is a vague objective and could be measured against many indicators such as level of vermin or levels of diseases related to waste. The lower frequency of collections (17% below national average) may present a public health problem. 2. Clean and attractive streets – this is a subjective goal as discussed above. The level of tourism and return visits may give a rough measure of this goal. The trend in complaints by residents will be a more reliable measure. 3. Increased recycling – the trend in tonnes recycled would be one measure but an imprecise one. If waste collected is generally going up, then this will rise too. A better measure of the effort to increase use of recycling would be the percentage of waste which is recycled compared to the government’s target. (BLA is recycling 43% of its waste which is already ahead of the target of 40% by 2015. It is also ahead of the national average of 41%.)

【答案解析】

问答题 (c) Discuss the difficulties of measuring qualitative factors of performance, suggesting appropriate solutions for BLA.(7 marks)

【正确答案】The major problem in interpreting qualitative data is that it is subjective since it is based on people’s opinions. For example,in assessing quality of service people have different expectations and priorities and so are unlikely to be consistent in their judgements. At BLA, customer complaints will be driven by such opinions. Some customers may wish to see effort focused on recycling, while others may be more concerned about unsightly waste in the streets and others will focus on the frequency of waste collections. Some customers may not understand that improved waste collection is only possible with spending implications which may not be acceptable due to the current recession in Seeland. One way to reduce the effect of subjectivity is to look at trends in performance since the biases in opinion will be present in each individual time period but the trend will show relative changes in quality. The recording and processing of qualitative data can be difficult. Opinions are expressed in language and it can be difficult to tell if a complaint which describes service as ‘awful’ is more or less serious than one which describes service as unacceptable’. The current data for BLA does not contain any such information and this is often the result of these difficulties in collection. The most common way to try to overcome this problem is to turn the data into quantitative data. For example, surveys often use scoring systems to capture data on service. A scoring system will often ask the customer to rank their satisfaction at the service provided on a scale of 1 to 5 with ‘1’ representing ‘completely satisfied’ and ‘5’ representing ‘totally dissatisfied’. However, the problem remains that such scoring systems are still subjective, and it has often been found that there is a tendency to score toward the middle as people tend to feel uncomfortable using the extreme scores of 5 or 1. BLA waste management will suffer from these problems particularly in their goal of keeping the streets attractive as this will clearly require subjective judgement in its assessment.

【答案解析】