MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP


A sense of place


and more accountable. This is a much better response than simply chopping the whole thing to pieces.”


Whilst this may provide a more palatable solution to drastically salami slicing services and projects, it is still likely that a significant number of public sector jobs will be lost.


Public sector leaders will have some very difficult decisions to make in the coming months and years. Public Sector Executive asked John Atkinson what skills they will need to make the right decisions


A


lthough there has been a lot of rhetoric about how reducing waste


will provide some of the savings required to deal with the deficit, a far more radical approach will have to be adopted by the public sector to deliver the kind of cost savings desired by the government.


“If you are dealing with cuts of up to around ten per cent, then you are probably dealing with an efficiency and if you are dealing with cuts up to twenty per cent, you might have to carry out some re-ordering. If you get above that percentage, which these cuts are, then you are looking at a radical transformation,” says John Atkinson, director of


John Atkinson


the Leadership Centre for Local Government.


“This is a leadership challenge of the highest order and will require leaders who can work and think outside of the existing constraints if they are to achieve the kind of cash savings which are being discussed. Otherwise they are going to end up cutting it all up into bits.”


So when councils are faced with rising demand for their services but are being given less money to deliver those services, where can a public sector leader begin?


“Well, even though the figures weren’t as clear as they are now, we have had a good idea for about a year of the scale of change we were facing.


“Our view is that the most effective way to take a significant sum of money out of the state is not to do it within the existing silos of departments and local delivery organisations but to look across a place and to budget for a place as a whole.


“To that end we are very actively 22 pse


engaged in work with the Treasury and the Department for Communities and Local Government, along with other departments, on what would happen if the government budgeted by place, rather than departmentally.


“This would give local leaders the chance to see the totality of what was going on and the chance to make the most effective choices for where they are.”


This idea of budgeting for entire areas - which is shown to reduce duplication and overlap in public spending - was central to the Total Place programme. Whilst this has not been carried forward in name, similar programmes are being looked into by the current administration.


“By looking at how productive we are across a place, rather than within an individual organisation, we get the chance to not only radically change things for the better, in terms of reducing the amount of money which they cost, but also much simpler, more transparent


“If the government is serious about taking large sums of money out of the state then it is impossible to see how jobs would not be lost. We have already seen councils announcing job losses and the sale of some assets because in the end it is pretty much inescapable.”


Some less than sympathetic commentators have already pointed to the fact that whilst the size of the public sector has grown its productivity has dropped, so could these job losses just represent a return to sector’s natural size?


“I think it depends on which areas you are looking at. For example, one of the Total Place pilots in Leicestershire looked at the various flows of money coming through their area and found that around £85 million just went on administering the whole thing.


“There has to be a better (and cheaper) way to do this and I would agree that there is no point having disproportionate layers of management which aren’t adding anything to process.


“However, the key to it is not to think of it in terms of ‘does my organisation have too many levels?’, but to look across all of the delivery organisations which are operating across an area.”


Nov/Dec 10


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