Putting savings in place

The public sector is facing huge pressure to drastically reduce costs, placing public services under immense strain.  Local authorities have been traditionally good at finding efficiency savings, making their pounds stretch further.  While this approach of spreading the pain across the board may sustain small efficiency savings, the current budget shortfall will never be met this way.  The current situation requires something much bigger; a new bold strategic approach needs to be applied to public expenditure and services at a local level.

The CLG recently launched a programme "Total Place" as it is called to be piloted in thirteen areas with the aim of mapping all the public expenditure within each area, who will then use the information to identify efficiency savings through partnerships and cuts. 

This emphasis on place and partnership is long overdue.  Intellectually the argument for partnership working is irrefutable, but on the ground progress has been patchy.  There has long been a need to identify areas of duplication and put an end to silo management.  Each community has DWP, the police, the justice system, the health service and education agencies all working within them.  Activity is often duplicated, with people being seen multiple times, but information is often not shared, resulting in service users known to be at risk not receiving the attention they require. The most extreme recent example of this is in the tragic Baby P case where the tragic little boy's home received 60 visits from social workers, doctors and police over an eight month period.  The problem is that at present far too many services are designed for the organisations themselves and not for the needs of the individual users they serve.

There needs to be area wide responses to the mapping information, based on local strategic partnering in pursuit of service transformation focused on outcomes for the most excluded groups; with greater alignment of budgets, strategies, operations and leadership.  There is huge potential for new forms of partnership and collaboration; including public agencies undertaking joint commissioning and procurement, and far greater pooling and alignment of resources.  Shared back-offices can support the local public sector and offer further efficiency savings.

Yet the development of strategic commissioning and partnership working must focus on achieving results for communities and individual service users.  The need for the service user to be at the fore of any decision made is greater today than at any other time.  We need better services which meet a need being delivered for less; not just services being delivered for less.

Total place has the potential to bridge the void between top down policy and bottom up need.  Through placing more emphasis on local partnership and delivery ideally the  service that is required will be shaped by those most aware of the real needs  preventing further wastage on high profile, but ineffective policy driven initiatives.  It will involve difficult decisions and long term strategies for the public sector to successfully navigate this recession, but it can be done. This is a time for bold management and more innovative solutions to ensure that the public sector is better equipped for the challenges that will be placed on it in the future.