For the first task I will describe the management principles of target setting and forecasting. I will describe how to arrive at a budget for a given public service scenario and why this budget should be strictly controlled. I will also identify how this budget is audited and who carries out this task.Target Setting The target is the aim that you set out to achieve and setting is how you go about it. Setting is the planning stage.

Target setting is about setting yourself a goal that you set out to achieve. An example of target setting in the police force to tackle crime rates – Reduce crime rate would be the target and the setting would be how to go about reducing crime rates (e.g. recruit more policeman). Example of Target Setting Thames Valley Police have set a set a target (Target Setting) to tackle crime. They have prepared a five year strategy and this includes targets for the reduction of crimes where there has been a particular increase i.e. violent crimes and robberies. Thames Valley Police have come up with this plan because crime rates have been rising in the area for the past year and they hope to reduce crime as a result of this plan.

I have included the Thames Valley Police Crime Reduction Strategy and this can be looked at in appendix 1. Forecasting Forecasting is predicting what is going to happen in the future. These predictions can come from looking at past results/figures and patterns. An example of forecasting would be looking at the budget required for a police station for the upcoming year. To achieve this the budgets given in the past years would need to be looked at and the increasing needs of the police station would also have to be looked into. For example, if more police officers were required for the new year then the wage demands, training costs, recruiting costs etc would need to be taken into account when forecasting the budget.

Another example of forecasting would be looking into how many police officers would need to be employed for the upcoming year. A method of going about this would be to view the crime rates for the past few years and if this was on the increase then it would perhaps be an idea to employ more policemen to deal with this situation. The budget should be strictly controlled because if it wasn’t this could result in over expenditure of unnecessary things. This would be a waste of government and public money.