26th June 2010
£6.25 billion down – a drop in the ocean, we’re told, compared to the tsunami of cutbacks in public spending arising from the Coalition’s Budget and the expenditure review later in the year.
No-one doubts that the deficit needs reducing. But public servants also know that many existing services could be better designed and more effectively delivered, improving outcomes for clients and bringing substantial savings in train. By presenting the deficit reduction simply as painful but necessary financial cuts, the Coalition is missing the opportunity of making the case for fundamental service reform as an essential element in the spending reviews.
Cutbacks delivered with a ‘slash and burn’ approach must risk being a blunt instrument leading to real damage to the fabric of essential services. On the other hand, making the case for fundamental service redesign within strict financial parameters gives the initiative to service deliverers to make far-reaching improvements.
‘Cheaper but better’ is an aspiration that many staff would sign up to. Staff know where savings can be made, inefficiencies eliminated, outcomes improved. It will therefore be a tragedy if ineffective practices, waste and duplication are not tackled – but instead targets that are easier to identify, what ever their social value, are hit first.
The key will be where and how the decisions about what to stop doing, particularly at the coal face, are made. Will staff be engaged in planning and delivering changes and securing savings – or will a series of central and local dictats lead to panicked, unplanned measures? What are the criteria for services that need protecting and others that could be reduced or eliminated, against which decisions can be made? What are going to be the rules of the game? Or put it another way: what’s the big picture vision of post-deficit public services, so managers and staff alike have something positive to aim for.
With predicted job losses ranging from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands, levels of anxiety among public servants about their jobs and their futures are sky high – yet these are exactly the people who are going to have to carry the plans through.
One of the vital lessons the public sector should make from the recession is the way that – faced in many cases with an equally sheer cliff edge – private companies worked with their staff to minimise the pain, while maintaining and improving product quality or customer service. As the CBI’s recent report states: ‘good communication and engagement with staff has been the key to making the workforce changes needed to safeguard jobs during the recession.’
Engagement to survive is what made this recession different – and that is exactly what the public sector now needs. Engagement means strong strategic leadership, managers with soft as well as process skills, effective employee voice and organisational integrity, putting into practice values such as trust, honestly, transparency and partnership ways of working.
The onus will be on managers to ensure that core and key skills are protected, that priorities for service delivery are arrived at fairly and transparently, that the views and contributions of staff are sought at every opportunity to redesign and re-engineer services. New ways of working, continuous improvement regimes, better sickness absence management, improved performance management, focussed training which up-skills and re-skills staff to deliver new priorities and ways of working will be more vital than ever – as will the crucial role of public sector HR and training professionals as a result. Effective industrial relations will be equally important, given the high level of unionisation in the public sector.
In our recent report on employee engagement, Engaging for Success, David MacLeod and I highlighted a series of case studies across central and local government, and the NHS, where profound changes in service delivery saved very large sums of money – and achieved better outcomes for patients, client groups and staff alike. All of these examples had real and sustained employee engagement at their heart, to design and deliver the changes, however difficult.
My message to the Coalition is simple: rather than casting public sector staff as the victims of change, destined simply for the dole queues, why not empower them as the agents of service improvement, and yes, of the necessary savings too.
Nita Clarke is director of the IPA
