George Osborne’s
announcement in the Autumn Statement that Government spending cuts would
continue at least until 2017/18 on the same trajectory as the Spending Review
came as no surprise; there were
plenty of people who had been predicting an even longer freeze.
The announcement
brings the realisation that, even after budgets have been balanced for 2013/14 (and balancing the budget is not always
the same as delivery) the budgets local authorities are setting right now
probably take us less than half way through the squeeze.
From the start the
problem has been one of increasing productivity. It’s truism that if you want to continue to provide the same
level of service with less resource, then resources need to be more
productive. The trick is to improve the efficiency
of the process - creating the
services that people need – without affecting the efficiency of distribution-
getting the services to the people who need them.
The first few years of
austerity have brought cuts, of course, but probably to a lesser extent than we harbingers of doom would have
predicted back in 2010. To a
surprising degree the job of downsizing in local authorities has been helped on
its way so far by tackling the ‘local governmentitis’ of the Noughties, the extent of which was not clear until we
started turning over stones looking for it.
Everyone has their own
favourite example but the
manifestation of the disease that I am most pleased to see go is the mountain
of 200 page glossy strategies-which-are-not-a-strategies, together with the
armies of people who used to write them. A favourite example is one I discovered on a
park notice board in one of our major cities which said that if anyone wanted
more information on the herbaceous borders they could apply to the Council for
a copy of the ‘Floral Planting Strategy’.
The result is that the majority of local authorities look pretty much the same now as they did in 2010, just a fair bit thinner. For most local
authorities, though, these opportunities have dried up and everyone who is left
appears to be working very hard. So
now for the really hard bit.
The issue that
economists call allocation – which services is it necessary for us to provide-
has a political aspect which is above Chubby Cat’s pay grade, but focusing on
process and distribution there are two areas where there is still a lot of
benefit to be gained.
One is making the core
of the business work as efficiently and effectively as we can, and the second
is redesigning services around better access channels.
A big part of the
answer to the first is process reengineering- making sure that the essential
workings of the organisation, which includes the administration of front-line
services, works using processes which
make best use of automation, avoid duplication and over-engineered controls,
self-monitor quality to avoid rework and minimise hand-offs.
For example, most local
authorities are still heavily departmentalised, and you understand the reason
for that when you look at the scale and scope of what local authorities do.
The trouble is that the size of the back-office team in a typical local
government department can look reasonably small, until you multiply that number
by the number of departments and realise that much of the time those people are
liaising with others in similar jobs in other departments.
It doesn’t come as a
surprise that it is so difficult for local authorities to enter into shared
service agreements with other authorities when some can barely manage to share
processes across their own departments.
The other potential
gain is in the customer interface, and again it requires systems and processed
to be redesigned to accommodate better and well as cheaper access to
services. This has the advantage for
politicians of being what many people actually want. Would anyone who has
experienced internet, banking for example, now go back to queuing, or sending
cheques through the post in preference?
There is enormous
scope for efficiency in this sphere, and again departmentalism can be a
blocker. As a former colleague of
mine points out, why does the parking department need you to prove that you
live at your address when the Council Tax department is satisfied enough on
that point to keep debiting your bank account every month? My friend was particularly amazed that
he needed to take a photocopy of his Council Tax bill to the parking people as
proof of address.
Getting the core of
the organisation right and remodelling the customer experience are two sides of
the same coin. Both involve fundamental review and reform of the way services
work. Many authorities are on this journey, but it isn’t easy.
As well as the skills
and capacity to undertake work on this scale, a practised, independent eye is
also required, which means that the choice of business support partners is
vital. We don’t need
consultants who borrow your watch to tell you what time it is; we need those who can help us take the
watch apart and make it work better.
Local Government’s
Plan A in response to Osborne’s A for Austerity has been to cut waste, with more than a little success, and
then too often to resort to the same old cheese-paring solutions used in the
past. To address ongoing austerity
we need a new sense of realism and new skills.
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