Treasury wants reinvention of public sector
This brilliantly feisty article made me laugh out loud. It seems bang on the money about the current malaise facing local government – if you will pardon the pun. We just need to re-invent rural as a spatial concept alongside the current exhortations to reinvent local government. We can all then walk off into the sunset with smiles on our faces! Job done!!! It tells us:
…they (“unprotected” Government Departments) have been instructed by the chancellor to “model” the impact on the services they provide of finding savings of either 25% or 40% by 2019-20 – or £20bn per annum of cuts in aggregate.
This is the stuff of public-service reinvention, not efficiency. Which is not to say that better buying of paper clips won’t still yield something.
But the last Parliament had a massive onslaught on waste, bad buying, duplication of services and under-use of assets.
The low hanging fruit of improved productivity has already been picked.
Now ministers have to be bold and creative in doing more for less, if they are not simply going to kill the provision of some services we take for granted.
The Treasury’s document, published today, talks a fashionable talk about how digital delivery and big data can work cost-saving miracles.
Well, maybe. But the brainy chaps who work for George Osborne are probably a bit like me, in that they understand the theory of all this without having a clue how to put it into practice.