Helping public sector managers get value for money from their budgets
A blog about public financial management: the fine art of managing public money to deliver vital services to the public. It involves budgeting, accounting, controlling, auditing, reporting, policy-making and decision-taking.
At rather short notice I have agreed to speak at the upcoming CIPFA Audit Conference in York on 22 May. I'm not a specialist in audit but fortunately my topic is broader than that: the financial and performance challenges facing the public sector. I've some ideas about what I want to say already but the preparation of a 40 minute talk will take me probably ten times that (and I'll do it the Presentation Zen way).
I think the following is a thought-provoking piece from the Guardian's website by John Tizard . Local authorities—and other public sector bodies—do need to think about what it is they want in terms of service and then work out how to get it. Times change and a key aspect of public service is the frequency of politicians, national and local, making changes. In some ways outsourcers can be more flexible than in-house staff and in other ways less flexible.
Perhaps now more than ever flexibility is needed in outsourcing contracts. There are ways of getting such flexibility, but to my mind it gets back to the issue that, despite 30 years of using private sector providers, there is a remarkable lack of commercial skill and knowledge within public sector organisations. Such skills are needed for two reasons. First, to be able to procure an outsourced provider that meets the organisations needs now and in the future and, second, to know when outsourcing is the wrong answer.
Double dip recession, calls for all Whitehall departments to prepare further cuts, the Comprehensive Spending Review brought forward to 2013, demographic growth, government borrowing remaining high – the financial prospects for local authorities are bleak.
Councils may have managed to balance their budgets for 2012-13 and for the remainder of the current spending review period (provided that they are not asked to find more savings), but are they ready for the next phase of austerity?
Given the immediacy of the cuts following the spending review and financial settlement in 2010, I suppose it was not surprising that few local authorities reached for genuinely radical changes over the last two years. They did not rush to outsourcing if they had not already commenced a procurement process before the autumn 2010.
It was a logical and rational position for local authorities to adopt. Traditional outsourcing arrangements take time to weave through complex and protracted procurement processes that cost large sums of money, consume senior officer time and rarely deliver immediate savings. Many of the savings that had been made by some earlier outsourcing of services such as back office or support services were no longer available, as councils themselves had become more efficient.
During a period of uncertainty, it's simply imprudent to lock up significant tranches of a local authority funding within inflexible contracts. The truth is that evidence of the success of outsourcing has been mixed at best.
Over the last few decades, local government has used outsourcing to the business sector for a number of reasons: to secure savings; to gain investment; to offer choice to users; to attract innovation and productivity improvements through competition; to address under-performance; and to transfer difficult management decisions outside the council.
These reasons vary both from authority to authority and also sometimes within the same councils between different servcies. This apparent inconsistency is understandable and appropriate, as outsourcing should only be pursued when and where it will add value.
These actions must be explained to the public. Outsourcing has not always been a success in adding public value, and those lessons need to be learned. Over two decades the scope of outsourcing and the services it involves has changed dramatically. In some ways, there has been a major move on from Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) - but in others, regrettably, there hasn't.
Faced with the stark prospect of having to make even deeper cuts in the future, are we likely to witness a significant expansion of outsourcing to private companies? It is worrying to note that some local authorities are returning to some of the worst elements of CCT, more concerned purely with driving costs down then about quality or the terms and conditions of public servants. This will undoubtedly lead to long-term problems.
Thankfully, others are seeking strategic partnerships to both reduce costs and improve services, help manage demand for services, and to invest in wider social and economic objectives. Of course, these goals are not always compatible – especially when the overriding desire is to reduce spending. But attempting to reach them does require a new approach to partnership and collaboration between local authorities and the outsourcing industry. This requires constructive dialogue and a willingness by all parties to change their behaviours.
Local authorities are right to want greater transparency and accountability from providers. They should always want good terms and conditions for people delivering public services. However, local authorities should also be considering a wider selection of responses to their financial and policy imperatives, other than purely outsourcing. There has to be a role for in house provision, a greater role for the voluntary and community sector, for employee and user co-operatives, for partnerships with other authorities and the wider public sector, and other roles for business including in-sourcing.
The risk of blinkered thinking and lack of planning is that some councils will pursue a default and automatic outsourcing to the business sector believing it to be a panacea for their budget problems, or indeed for ideological reasons. Others will ignore the option for the exact opposite reasons.
Local government has to change, and change dramatically – in what it does and how it secures the results required by local people, communities and businesses. It has to be more open and transparent. It needs to be more fleet of foot. Set against that context, the old model of outsourcing has little to offer to meet these challenges. My prediction is that, over the coming years, the traditional outsourcing model will be left behind – so will be some of the current outsourcers.
Both providers and local authorities need to wake up to the new paradigm. They must reject simplistic options.
John Tizard is an independent strategic advisor and commentator on public policy and a member of the Guardian local government network editorial advisory panel
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I've fallen out of the habit of writing for this blog and have been telling myself for weeks to write a new post. The furore about senior public sector managers being hired through service companies rather than as employees is something I really ought to write about. So I have ... By posting a comment on their blog entry. Here's what I wrote:
I am an accountant and I work as an interim manager through my own limited company. Without getting too technical about it, the potential for reducing my tax bill is not that great, not since the Inland Revenue introduced IR35. Prior to that people working through companies could pay themselves minimal salaries and take the rest of the money as dividends, upon which income tax is paid but not national insurance. Even with that device, you have to pay corporation tax on the profit before you can take the dividends.
There are other possible tax advantages one could implement. Eg the company could employ the interim’s spouse or offspring and thus take advantage of two or more people’s personal tax allowances, reducing the interim’s total tax paid at the higher rates. Dare I say it, this is something MPs have been doing with office allowances for years.
I think I should also mention the reason such companies are attractive to employers, especially for hiring interims: it reduces their liability as an employer. As far as the council or other body is concerned they have a service contract. That means they are not responsible for employment duties such as the working time directive, they don’t have to make national insurance contributions, they don’t have to pay for holidays, they don’t have to apply their equal pay scheme to the position, they can fire the person without having a long winded investigation and disciplinary hearing, and so on. They also don’t have to allow the person to join the pension scheme and thereby they can save themselves the pension contributions.
The downside is VAT is payable on the service contract. Local government and ministries don’t worry about that because they can reclaim it from the treasury. The picture is different in the NHS and I’d be surprised if the witch hunt uncovered the same sort of arrangements in the trusts and PCTs.
To see the full blog post and other comments go to http://welovelocalgovernment.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/interim-judgement/#comments.
My book is published in just two weeks' time. I still haven't received my author copies but they should arrive soon. I'm excited about that. Seeing it all typeset when I was checking the proofs was great but the proofs were in pdf files and my corrections were marked-up digitally. Getting the book in my hands and being able to put it on our bookshelves will be the achievement of a long-held ambition.
I have no idea how many copies it might sell. The publisher, Routledge, must believe that it will sell enough to cover the cost of publishing it. I've had fun over the last few months watching my placing on the best-seller list at Amazon.co.uk. It has languished around 2,700,000th to 3,000,000th but just lately it has moved up and when I last looked it was at something like 140,000th. For all I know this might just be the result of 2 or 3 copies being pre-ordered. For me, I'm simply proud that I have written a book that a respectable publisher thought would be good enough to publish and that some people have been prepared to pay for.
I've been firming up the details of the book launch at Warwick Business School: 6pm on 20 July at the Scarman Road building. Get in touch if you would like to come along.
© Gary Bandy 2024
