Adelaide City Council dumps hundreds of policies to save costs and improve customer service Adelaide City Council is reviewing its policies, dumping hundreds in the process. ADELAIDE City Council will dump hundreds of policies in a bid to save its administration from drowning in bureaucracy, improve customer service and encourage entrepreneurs. An audit has found 321 of the council's 501 policies - more than 64 per cent - were obsolete or in need of review. The outdated or conflicting policies cover everything from parking, busking and smoking to tree planting, volunteering, workplace bullying, complaint handling and crime prevention. How surprised are you at the volume of policies to be discarded? Lord Mayor Stephen Yarwood said a comprehensive policy review had not been done for "many, many years" and was needed to reduce red tape and "change the culture of the organisation." "If you have a culture where you can't be flexible and come up with creative solutions because we've had 20 or 30 years of written rules and regulations, you don't encourage the next generation of entrepreneurs to put their best foot forward," he said. We certainly don't need a thick rule book that doesn't help creative people come up with solutions. Lord Mayor Stephen Yarwood says a comprehensive review hasn't been done for "years." Event management and outdoor dining were two areas that needed simpler policies to make doing business in the city easier, he said. The audit by KPMG covered the council's vast array of policies from high level strategic and corporate plans to action and management plans and hundreds of operating guidelines across every council department. It found 206 policies were obsolete and 115 needed review. A council report says the audit found staff were straining under the weight of "obsolete, superseded, out of date policies and policies with no owner," that there was "no apparent process around rescinding policies" and "no central repository, oversight, (or) monitoring." Should the policy register continue to be out of date there is a risk that policy is not relevant, usable or accurate," the report says. A risk approach has been taken to verify (that) policy documents do not have significance elsewhere in the organisation and therefore rescinding 206 documents provides minimal risk. This clean-up will mitigate any further confusion where documents have been superseded, duplicated or expired. The clear out will also help identify "policy gaps." "This will ultimately better support governance and policy development practices that are flexible and creative," the report says.