A recent report from the National Audit Office found that many potential savings in the government's back office spending, earmarked by the previous government, were either dubious or detrimental to public services.
These findings reflect the historic difficulty in making significant savings by cutting bureaucracy. How then will councils achieve the unprecedented £1.165bn of spending cuts demanded this year?
A percentage of the savings will come from soft areas such as deleting posts which appear in the budget but have never been filled. However, to get to the numbers demanded, fundamental restructuring will be needed which will involve redundancies on a huge scale. The simple facts are that council officers will never have been through anything like this before and few will have the skills to deal with this kind of dramatic change.
The real squeeze will come in those areas where it is deemed politically impossible to cut service provision yet a share of the savings still have to be delivered. In those areas a 'top-down' approach where real posts are cut without changing the way in which departments operate is likely to lead to chaos.
The obvious solution is for council departments to make significant improvements in staff productivity in order to protect frontline services. But simply expecting the remaining staff to pick up the slack, once the redundancies begin to bite, is wishful thinking.
In our experience, while there is ample scope for better utilisation of staff in local government, it is dependent on improving the way in which staff are managed and ensuring that the right performance information is available to allow decisions and action to be taken promptly. Both of these aspects are too often missing.
Our work includes detailed shadowing and minute-by-minute recording of the activity of managers and other staff in the private and public sectors and, on average, we have found that two thirds of council workers' time is lost or wasted.
We have also found that private sector workers are, on average, a third better utilised than those in local government where the typical manager spends less than 15 minutes a day setting priorities, assigning tasks, monitoring progress and ensuring successful completion. These are essential aspects of effective management which directly affect productivity.
There is also a huge disparity between the amount of time managers think they spend actively managing and the reality, indicating that getting managers to realise they have to change is part of the challenge. Many managers are just not good enough at setting clear expectations, identifying and confronting off-schedule performance and other basic management activities. Often the culture of the council runs against this approach.
Councillors and leaders must also recognise that simple exhortation will not rectify these weaknesses and that management need help to get through this challenge.
The requirement for wholesale change in local government has never been greater. This is not going to be tinkering at the margins, nor will it be incremental change. It will need to be massive and quick but it must also be highly structured and controlled.
Paul Weekes is principal consultant at Knox D'Arcy, a management consultancy
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
