Events | 2009.12.08
Cuts could lead to more public sector innovation
Budget pressures mean senior managers may yet be propelled to create true joined-up services
Today, all eyes will be on the chancellor, Alistair Darling, as he announces his pre-budget report and outlines key spending plans for the public sector for the next three years.
Public managers, who for months have been modelling what would happen to the services they run if budgets are cut by 10%, 20% or even 30%, will be keen to get a feel for the real figures. There is apprehension — but there is also a feeling that, once the worst is known, at least managers can work on what they need to do. Senior managers across the public sector have been frustrated for some time by the refusal of politicians in both parties to be more definite about their future spending policies.
The pre-budget report may be the most important event of the week, but it stands amid other announcements that reflect the way public services are changing. Today also sees the first release of results from a new way of monitoring local councils\' performance, while Monday saw the Treasury report on public sector reform, Smarter Government, which outlined plans to reduce the cost of the senior civil service, cut the number of Whitehall quangos, and move tens of thousands of civil servants out of expensive London offices into other locations around the UK.
The new framework for inspecting local services, known as Oneplace and accessible via the government\'s Directgov website, is a bid to get over the well-known problem of previous inspections: councils were capable of meeting the targets, but missing the point. Their internal workings could be four-star, but the services they were actually delivering might fall well short of excellence.
Oneplace assesses not just councils, but also police authorities, primary care trusts and fire and rescue services. The output is not a league table or star system, but a "narrative in plain English" of the priorities that areas have themselves set, and inspection is no longer a matter of inspectors descending on a council, or a fire service, for one or two weeks, and then going away to write a report.
All this fits in with a drive towards greater local partnerships and great interest in the government\'s Total Place pilot schemes, where all public bodies in a specific area add up what they are spending and try to identify unnecessary duplication.
The new monitoring system, which covers 152 areas of England, uses a flag system to signal examples of particularly good or bad practice.
It\'s new for local areas and it\'s new for the six inspectorates involved, led by the local authority watchdog, the Audit Commission. But will it get closer to what the public perceive as good-value local public services? That\'s a harder question to answer. The new system means there is no longer a simple, standardised national measurement of councils.
However, there\'s a strong counterpoint to this. There are two words that make many public managers and politicians shudder: postcode lottery. The very mention of these words is enough to derail many innovative plans for reforming public services, says David Halpern, former government adviser and now director of research at the Institute for Government thinktank.
Halpern\'s book on the policy challenges posed for government in the face of social and economic change, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, also published this week, is in many ways an enlargement on the ideas that underlie the Smarter Government report. It sets out the many paradoxes in our ideas as a society, about prosperity, wellbeing, crime, inequality and fairness — or unfairness.
Real challenge
One of Halpern\'s points is that the government faces a real challenge as it moves towards the idea of greater allocation of public sector funding at local level. For instance, finding the right ways to allocate budgets, so that services can be spent in more innovative ways, has proved elusive.
Will the prospect of major cuts finally propel government services into true joined-up services? No one yet knows. There will be big resistance to some of the government\'s more sweeping proposals – but there is also, among senior managers, more acceptance of innovative ideas and the need to explore the inherent tensions involved in organising public services.
• Jane Dudman is editor of Public, the Guardian\'s website for senior public sector managers. guardianpublic.co.uk
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/d[...]ector-cuts-services-innovation
