At my age one becomes a tad sceptical about academic studies that propose ‘radical' restructuring of the public sector, particularly one that says such reform needs to be the ‘biggest shake-up since the Beveridge Report.'
The last thing the public sector needs is more restructuring even if this knackered government had the appetite for it. Nonetheless here comes another study proposing just that and waxing lyrical about Amazon and Google and how the public sector needs to copy their business models.
Launched at the respected Institute for Government last week the report Better Public Services – A Manifesto (see News Focus p12-13) believes that an internet-based public sector based around shared standardised blocks of online services could release an extra £46bn for the frontline by cutting administrative costs by 40%. For local government the savings could be £5.2bn a year.
It all seems too good to be true and of course it is. Slashing public sector white collar staff by 40% is unlikely to occur without huge redundancy costs and workforce upheaval while the idea that such savings will simply be diverted to the frontline is optimistic when we all know cuts mean cuts. Anyway, councils have been streamlining back offices and merging managements for years with mixed success.
The report also seems to ignore the fact that the public sector does not choose its customers unlike the private sector which then makes a return while councils provide a huge product line which no private sector company would tolerate. Then the question is who funds the upfront investment in cloud-based technology to enable such change to happen?
However, the report does flag up an uncomfortable truth when it says technology as applied in the public sector is used to ‘automate inefficient old processes and current services...rather than to rethink, redesign, modernise, and improve.'
The digital giants have disrupted the music, media, travel, taxi and retail industries to the benefit of the consumer; they have yet to disrupt the public sector with the same result.
