Mike Thatcher is right; tinkering with old models is unlikely to get us out of the financial crisis in the public sector (‘The big chill’, Leader, July 10–16).
Salami-slicing cost management is unimaginative, freezing pay politically tricky. Audit Commission chief executive Steve Bundred’s call for the latter is perhaps getting his retaliation in first, for the commission itself ought to be the first stop for cost savings.
At the heart of the current specifications and inspection industry, we should ask whether we get value for money from the commission. While it claims progress with Best Value, Comprehensive Performance Assessments and star ratings, politicians’ surgeries remain full of people complaining that services don’t work.
Despite the lack of evidence, the commission coerces local authorities to build more back offices. The Treasury report accompanying the last Budget claimed the evidence for back-office efficiencies was based on ‘proxies, assumptions and estimates’.
Shouldn’t the commission be investigating why we don’t have better data? Local authorities get ticks for having private-sector partners and for back-office initiatives that have seen rising rather than falling costs.
But these things the commission is unlikely to see, for it behaves as an instrument of the reform regime, ensuring compliance with ideological notions rather than behaving as an independent assessor.
The commission is just part of the wider specifications industry – the army of people in Whitehall who spend their time creating specifications for public sector managers’ compliance.
Getting rid of all of them would create two savings: the money it costs to have these jobs (significant) and the waste caused by complying with their wrong-headed ideas (much larger).
The commission should be reined back to following the money. If auditing performance, inspectors should be limited to asking just one question: ‘What measures are you using to understand and improve performance?’ This would free public sector managers from the considerable burden of preparation for audit, for the measures will be those actually in use. Councils would rid themselves of their ‘performance management’ departments, which feed inspectors rather than improvement.
Most importantly, the choice of measures and method will be with the local service managers, fostering innovation rather than compliance, for innovation requires clarity about who has responsibility.
John Seddon
Vanguard Consulting
