It seems that every day there is another announcement of a council having to make massive savings either by cutting front line services or reducing the number of staff or both.  The scale of the budget deficits that some authorities are facing are truly eye watering.

In Bucks although the numbers are not so great the challenge remains. However, our approach is something quite different.  Our budget challenges are to find a further £60m worth of savings over the next four years but this comes on top of the £85m worth of savings found over the last four years. 

We are fortunate in that we did a lot of the heavy lifting early on and have made the reductions through such things as reducing our headcount, changing terms and conditions, reducing our property footprint, introducing Contribution Based Pay and driving out efficiencies through contract reviews.  More significantly over this period we protected services, especially those to the most vulnerable and have delivered on over 80% of our performance targets. 

In the process we have developed a range of community-based services, pioneering the transfer to communities of small libraries, universal youth services and two of our day centres for adults with learning difficulties.

It is getting a lot harder to make savings and to make this scale of further savings requires a much more radical approach.  However, our direction of travel is already set; we have already outsourced some services including transport, economic development and children's centres. We have set up new partnership trusts– for school improvement, outdoor education and museums and we have created a new trading company for adult social care services.

We need to drive these and other more radical changes ‘further, faster and cheaper'.  We aim to create a ‘commercially minded' council where everyone is aware of the cost of what they do and is searching for opportunities to generate income. 

This means that our core functions will be those that need to support the role of elected Members discharging their statutory duties with services provided through a variety of business and delivery units.  Core functions range from the policy and priority setting role of the whole council and executive functions of the cabinet to overview and scrutiny of select committees, the various regulatory functions and the community leadership roles that all members carry out.

So what do we mean by a ‘commercially minded' council and how will services be delivered?  Well it is not wholesale outsourcing.  It is about delivering services in different ways.  It is about putting the customer at the centre of our work, understanding the current and future costs and reducing unnecessary costs and streamlining processes. 

But most of all it includes a search for opportunities to generate income.  For us the future of public services is a plurality of methods of delivery.  This will include retained in house services, services which trade externally, more community based services, alliances with other authorities, joint ventures and some further outsourcing where this makes sense in terms of cost, service and quality. 

For services retained in-house it will mean, for example, that our social workers will be even more conscious of the cost of placements whilst making decisions to balance safeguarding against living within the (declining) budget and the people who manage services recognising that extra reporting has a price.

We have based our business model on the very best that the private sector has to offer but retaining a strong public sector ethos with an attention to service standards and quality.  Imagine a company with a small strategic headquarters which has a whole variety of different businesses (like a county council) where there is strong brand recognition and financial control is at its heart. 

Imagine also, a private sector company that is renowned for its service quality, where the customer is king and where value for money is guaranteed. I will leave it to you to try to identify the companies that I have in mind. 

Our ‘Future Shape Programme' is a means of protecting our services and as many jobs as possible while still delivering on our savings.  I am not aware of any other council that is carrying out this sort of radical review as comprehensively and as fast as we are.  It may well indicate the future of public services for all of us.