Ministers' commitment is questioned

Friday, May 15, 2009

A leading member of the Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP) said he does not believe there has been much "ministerial will" towards the efficiency agenda.

Martin Read, who was tasked by the government to look at back-office efficiency for the OEP, a government efficiency review, said ministers will have to show a "very visible" political commitment to the agenda.

In the OEP, Read proposed that out of the present-day government, £15bn of back-office savings could be created. Speaking to the House of Commons' treasury sub-committee he said: "To achieve the kind of radical savings that's talked about in the OEP you need to simplify and standardise processes. Certainly in locally delivered services, you will need the collaboration between different organisations within a particular area across organisational boundaries and that I think requires huge political will.

"Although big savings have been made as a result of the Gershon process, I'm not really sure that this has ever been a matter of very evident, collective ministerial will right at the top of the agenda. And I think for the next tranche of savings to come out of the OEP process, one of the preconditions for that will be sustained, very visible, ministerial political commitment."

Read added that there needs to be a change in the public sector's workings in terms of the data it collects and makes available and how senior managers scrutinise this information.

"We don't collect or review regularly the sorts of data which you would expect if you were running a business to be able to use as the basis for comparing trends, making comparisons, trying to judge where you come against other organisations and actually reviewing the importance of the senior people," he said.

"If there's one thing that will make a difference, coming out of this OEP work, it's changing the culture, the DNA of it, of the way the government works which is that operational efficiency is something that managers are there to do in the way that they are there to do other stuff as well."

Read said if this change was going to happen, the information has to be available on a "regular, consistent, auditable and transparent basis".

"All of this is not about cutting costs, it's about getting the same or better result with less through being smarter. That is something in business that you have to do; it's a way of life as you're being judged on the profit number. The effectiveness of the way public spending is looked at, reviewed, if you could get [this] one big change I would have felt that the year I've put into this would have been worthwhile," he said.