By Richard Johnstone | 27 January 2014
Finance professionals in public sector bodies must drive efficiency programmes in their organisations to ensure services are protected from ‘really challenging’ funding cuts, the head of a government-backed improvement initiative has said.
Chris Banks, the chair of the Public Chairs’ Forum formed to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of public sector bodies, said there was a need for all agencies to work more efficiently to minimise the impact of spending reductions on users.
The PCF published its Efficiency by design report with the Cabinet Office on January 14, setting out examples of best practice from across the 50 public bodies. This covered five key areas – working differently, partnership working, improving procurement, property, and greater use of information technology and the government’s digital-by-default programme.
Banks said it was important to identify best practice after the coalition government had introduced both its deficit reduction programme and its Public Bodies Reform Programme in 2010.
‘There’s no doubt that it would have been difficult to publish this report two or three years ago. At that time the impending funding challenges had been announced, the review of public bodies had been announced, and there weren’t these examples around,’ he told Public Finance.
‘At that time it was right that we were focusing on other parts of the agenda with government and the public bodies. But our sense was that as soon as we could get on to this more productive area we wanted to, because in the end these bodies will need to be increasingly efficient.’
Now the changes have been introduced, the remaining quangos have a common interest in driving up efficiency, Banks told PF, and the finance profession must play ‘a key role’ in leading reforms.
‘The finance community within public bodies has a massive role in helping – and in many cases leading – the management of the overall cost base, but its also much more than that.
‘The more of a leadership role the finance community can play in helping with these efficiency improvement initiatives – not just managing through the cuts but managing through the efficiency improvements that will yield sustainable long-term benefits – then the stronger the organisations will be.’
Banks called on public bodies to also consider partnerships with other parts of the public sector, including local government.
‘I think we’d love to see it developed in that way,’ he said. ‘A good question bodies should be asking themselves is who might the best partners be, and some of them may be in other departments and other parts of government. Somehow we have to enable and encourage people from different organisations to work in that way.’
Such reforms would begin to allow the public sector to take advantage of its scale, he added. ‘You start to get some of the benefits of being part of a very large organisation, and that’s key – how individual organisations in the public sector can derive real value from being part of the big public sector.’
