The HM Prison Service is joining other public sector organisations in a benchmarking system that helps them reliably check consumption of water.They are joining Watermark, a project led by The Buying Agency, which helps ‘like’ organisations set realistic targets for water use, easing consumption.

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Amid rising concerns that local government will not make its 2005 target for electronic delivery of services, a new report sets out a route map to achievement.It offers Local Direct – a single advertised telephone number – as one possible nationally joined up way in which local councils could successfully make themselves accessible to people who generally have a very poor understanding of which council is responsible for which service.

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Behm A, Bennington L, Cummame JJournal of Management Development, (UK), 2000 Vol 19 No 3

Start page: 162. No of pages: 17

Looks at government policy formation in Australia and the quality of the policy advisory services that assist government ministers to reach policy decisions. Develops a new model of ‘value-creating’ policy services and discusses how this can be used to assess the quality of the policy advisory services. Describes the process used to develop the model – the interviews with policy services customers (government ministers, ex-ministers, key advisers, department secretaries and ex-secretaries), which asked about the aspects of the policy advice that they valued, and sets out what the analysis of this data revealed. Divides the analysis into two parts – the generation of ideas, and the transformation of these into policy – and analyses the value placed on them within the process. Explains how this is used to develop the value-creating model for policy services and discusses how it can be put into practice.

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